Capital punishment at Hatra: Gods, magistrates and laws in the Roman-Parthian period

This paper deals with gods, magistrates and laws. It centres on one example from the Roman-Parthian period. Its title derives from five Hatrean Aramaic inscriptions which record legal statements on capital punishment at Hatra, a city in the steppe of northern Mesopotamia that came to flourish suddenly (and briefly) in the second and early third century AD. I will argue that the information in these inscriptions about the divine world, institutional aspects and legislation can contribute to our understanding of the interaction of various cultural spheres of influence at Hatra. As such, this information may throw some light on the modes in which one can study the civilization of a Near Eastern city in the Roman-Parthian period, and it may help us to understand the gap left by the archaeological record. The paper aims to locate the inscriptions in the framework of the divine world of Hatra, and it will also make suggestions as to their contribution to our understanding of processes of urbanization in the “Classical” Near East. A detailed look at this material can help us to comprehend more fully the history of the Levantine lands in the period during which the Roman imperial armies spread over the eastern provinces. In the words of Fergus Millar, it is necessary to look beyond the range of sources generally used to define the field of Classical studies, “to discern the material development of human life and settlement in the whole vast range of different areas which at one time or another came within the orbit of Graeco-Roman civilisation”.Hatra was of course brought within the power of the Roman empire only late, a few years before the Sasanian conquest in AD 240. By then — so we are told by Cassius Dio (LXVIII 31, 1–4; LXXVI 10–12) and Herodian (III 1, 2–3; 5, 1; 9, 1–7) — the city had already won renown for withstanding attacks by Trajan and (probably twice) Septimius Severus, and also by the Sasanian king Ardashir. The second Sasanian attempt, however, ended its existence as an inhabited city. When the historian Ammianus Marcellinus passed by its ruins in AD 363, on the way back from the emperor Julian's disastrous Persian campaign, he saw “an old city situated in an uninhabited area and deserted for a long time past” (25.8.5).