Gortyn Code

The Gortyn Code is a body of civil law inscribed in the first half of the fifth century BCE on the walls of a public building in the agora of Gortyn, in southern Crete. Written in Doric Greek in boustrophedon script across twelve surviving columns of roughly six hundred lines, it is the longest surviving ancient Greek inscription apart from the philosophical inscription of Diogenes of Oenoanda, and the fullest surviving body of Greek law outside Athens. It governed property disputes, sexual offenses, marriage and divorce, inheritance, adoption and slavery, explicitly distinguishing the legal standing of free persons, serfs, slaves and foreigners; a divorced woman, for example, retained any property she had brought to the marriage and half of the joint income derived from her own property.