Ten virtues for anyone who buys or sells anything · published in the name of The Merchants Guild · CC BY 4.0
This document is complete. It asks nothing of any legislature, deputizes no enforcer, and carries no penalty. It is a bill of virtues: what a citizenry aims at so that its commerce stays true, fair, earnest, and thoughtful — so that every trade, however small, builds the civilization that hosts it instead of tearing it down.
The hand in the grain
Fourteen centuries ago a man walked through a market and stopped at a heap of grain. It looked sound. He pushed his hand down into the pile and his fingers came up wet — the spoiled grain was underneath, where the dry top made the whole heap look good. He asked the seller one question: why did you not put the wet on top, so the people could see it? And then he said the sentence that every trading people has said in its own words, before him and after him: he who deceives is not one of us.
Hold that scene, because everything in this bill is inside it. The scale and the heap. The top and the bottom. The seller who knows and the buyer who cannot see. The question asked to the face. And the judgment — not a fine, not a prison, but the oldest and heaviest sentence a market can pass: you are not one of us.
Commerce is how strangers become useful to each other. Done honestly, it is one of the gentlest forces civilization has ever found: two people who share no blood, no faith, and no flag, each walking away better off, each with a reason to come back tomorrow. Done dishonestly, it teaches every participant that the other hand is a threat — and a market of threatened people stops trading, stops specializing, stops trusting, and starts guarding. Every high-trust market in history got rich. Every low-trust market stayed poor, however rich its soil. The difference was never the goods. It was the virtues.
Why a bill of virtues and not another law
A people that wants liberty writes a bill of rights. A people that wants a market worth living in needs something older and quieter, because the market’s real rules were never statutes.
A law tells you the least you must do to stay out of trouble, and it is satisfied by the cleverest reading that survives a courtroom. A virtue tells you what to aim at, and it is satisfied only by the thing itself. Confucius drew the line twenty-five centuries ago: lead the people with laws and keep them in line with punishments, and they will evade the law and feel no shame; lead them with virtue, and they will develop shame — and correct themselves. The fairs of medieval Champagne moved the trade of a continent for two hundred years on exactly that engine: the law merchant, custom the merchants themselves kept, judged in courts the merchants themselves staffed, whose only real penalty was the next fair, closed to the man who cheated at this one. The state showed up late, and mostly to collect.
So this bill is not law and will never be law. No one is punished under it. It binds only whoever takes it up, and it binds them only as an aim — which is the strongest binding there is, because a person aiming at something stands differently than a person avoiding something.
One more honesty before the virtues. We did not invent them. They are as old as the first honest scale, written down by every people that kept a market long enough to learn what ruins one — Hebrew law and Roman law, the Qur’an and the Analects, Egyptian wisdom and Indian statecraft, Persian scripture and English fair courts. We gathered them, and only the best were kept. Some of the books they come from sit inside worlds that also held slavery, conquest, and cruelty; we cite the rule, never its world. The sources are listed at the end so you can check every one.
What a scam is
Before the virtues, the word that haunts the whole subject — because the ancients were not vague about it, and we have no excuse to be.
A scam is the gap between what was promised and what was delivered. That is the entire definition, and everything hard about it lives in the word promised. The rabbis of the Mishnah priced the gap with a fraction: ona’ah, overreaching, is a price more than one-sixth away from the fair one, and within one-sixth the sale stands. Rome drew its line from the other side: laesio enormis let a seller undo a sale made for less than half the just price — too good to be true was a legal category with a numerator. Mark what both lines concede: there is a band inside which a hard bargain is just a bargain. One trader’s winning price is not the other’s fraud. A deal can bend a long way before it breaks; press far enough past fair and the law calls it void, yet short of that line the same pressure is only commerce. The ancients did not resolve this with a feeling. They resolved it with a fraction.
And the edges resolve themselves. Where nothing was promised, there is no gap for fraud to live in: a gift knowingly given is a gift, whatever the giver later wishes. A bad deal entered with open eyes and honest terms is tuition, and tuition is not theft. But the hidden defect is fraud at any price — Thomas Aquinas settled it plainly: the seller is bound to declare the crack the buyer’s eye cannot reach. A defect in plain view is the buyer’s to judge. A defect concealed is the seller’s lie, however fair the number on the tag.
Hold those three rulings together — the fraction, the gift, and the hidden defect — and nearly every hard case in commerce, ancient or digital, falls into place. The ten virtues are the falling.
The First Virtue — Honest Measure
We sell what we say, weighed true, the same for all.
The oldest commercial law on earth is about the scale. Egypt put it in the mouth of the dead: in the Book of the Dead’s declaration of innocence, the soul standing before the great balance swears, among its denials, I have not tampered with the scales. Think about what that civilization chose: eternity itself was weighed on shop equipment, the heart against a feather — so the shop equipment had better be true. Hebrew law said it as a command: just balances, just weights; you shall not have in your bag two kinds of stones, a large one for buying and a small one for selling. Proverbs called the false balance an abomination, and an entire chapter of the Qur’an opens on the same sin: woe to those who take in full when they receive, and give less when they measure out for others. India made it an audit: the Laws of Manu order the king’s officers to examine all weights and measures, duly marked, every six months. Athens salaried a board of inspectors, the metronomoi, whose whole office was the trueness of the measures in the market.
Five civilizations, one instinct: the scale does not care who is standing on the other side of the counter, and the moment it does, the market is already dying.
The virtue breaks the old ways and the new ones alike. The second stone in the bag is the hidden fee discovered at checkout, the price quoted higher to the customer judged desperate, the subscription that costs the loyal more than the new. The wet grain is the product photo that is true of the sample and false of the shipment, the headline spec the product meets only in conditions no customer will ever see. Short measure is theft in installments — small enough to escape notice, steady enough to make a living.
And the virtue has a counterfeit: precision theater. A spec sheet of forty true numbers arranged so the one that matters is missing; the label that is technically accurate and designed to mislead. A measure is honest when it answers the question the buyer is actually asking, not when it survives a lawyer’s reading.
The law of it, in one line: one measure, true, open to inspection, and the same for everyone.
The Second Virtue — Open Terms
The rules are posted before they are applied.
Each year the Roman praetor took office and published, on a whitened board in the forum, the rules he would judge by — before he judged anyone by them. The edict could change with the man; it could not change behind a litigant’s back. Deuteronomy demands the same of law itself: write it upon great stones, very plainly. The market inspector of the medieval Islamic city, the muhtasib, could sanction a merchant only against standards the whole souk already knew by heart; his manuals were public or they were nothing.
The board is the point. A rule that cannot be read until it is enforced is an ambush wearing a rule’s clothes.
The virtue breaks as the term amended in silence and enforced retroactively; the policy that says one thing in public and another inside the enforcement queue; the price revealed in pieces, each installment small enough that the buyer never sees the whole number until he is too committed to leave. And it has a counterfeit: disclosure burial. Forty pages of posted terms in a font nobody can read, linked from a page nobody visits, updated by a notice that says we’ve changed our terms and never says what changed. Posting everything and revealing nothing is the praetor’s board painted black.
The law of it: post the terms before they bind, where they can actually be read, and when they change, say so before the change bites anyone.
The Third Virtue — Nothing in Silence
Nothing is done to a person without telling them what, and why, and leaving them a door to answer.
Three peoples wrote this one down most literally. Hebrew law made the warning the hinge of guilt itself: in the Talmud, no one could be punished for an act unless they had been warned, to their face, before witnesses, before the act — the court asked about the warning before it asked anything else. England made the warning a piece of paper in your hand: the original writ, served by the sheriff, naming the claim, the court, and the day; Magna Carta had already promised that no free man would be taken or dispossessed except by lawful judgment. Rome gave the rule its name — audi alteram partem, hear the other side — and held that a judgment given without hearing the accused was not a harsh judgment; it was not a judgment. The gospel runs the same ladder in a single verse: if your brother wrongs you, go and tell him his fault, between you and him alone, first.
Now carry the rule to the counter. Every people that kept a public house kept the right to refuse a patron: the innkeeper may throw the drunk out. But watch what the honest ejection contains — he walks the man to the door, says why, and stops taking his money. All three motions together are the lawful act. The digital house has discovered a third way no physical house could ever manage: keep the patron inside, keep the bill running, and make him invisible — served by no one, heard by no one, charged on schedule, believing himself a customer. The rabbis already named the sin underneath it: geneivat da’at, theft of the mind — the creation of a false impression is itself a theft, listed first among the seven kinds of thieves, before the stealer of money. Money taken under a contract of service secretly withdrawn is not moderation and not enforcement. It is the wet grain, sold monthly.
The counterfeit of this virtue is notification noise: a thousand alerts that bury the one notice that mattered, consent harvested by fatigue. Telling a person everything at once is a way of telling them nothing.
The law of it: refuse whom you will — to their face, with the reason; when you stop serving, stop charging, the same hour; and keep a door open for the answer.
The Fourth Virtue — The Plain Deal
We sell nothing we cannot state plainly, and sign nothing we have not understood.
Islamic law made mutual understanding a condition of the sale itself. The hadith forbids bay’ al-gharar, the sale of the uncertain — the fish still in the sea, the bird still in the sky — and the prohibition binds both sides: a contract neither party can state plainly is not a contract either should sign. The same tradition gives the deal breathing room at the counter — the buyer and the seller have the option so long as they have not separated — a built-in moment to step back before the parting makes it final. Rome’s market officials, the curule aediles, wrote the other half into their edict: the seller of beasts at market must declare the defects, and the buyer of an undeclared defect could undo the sale and take his money back. Aquinas carried it into the scholastic age whole: the hidden defect must be declared; the visible one is the buyer’s to judge.
The deal is plain when both sides know the same deal: the thing, the price, the term, and what happens if it goes wrong, all speakable in a breath before the money moves.
It breaks as the mystery-meat contract, the warranty that evaporates in its own subclauses, the subscription whose cancellation is a labyrinth, the defect known in the factory and discovered in the home. And it has a counterfeit: plainness that omits. The one-sentence pitch so simple it hides the mechanism that costs you. Simplicity in the pitch with complexity in the trap is not plainness; it is camouflage.
The law of it: the deal fits in a breath, both sides can say it, and the defect you know about is spoken before the money moves.
The Fifth Virtue — The Kept Word
The deal is the deal, including the one that turned against us.
Psalm fifteen asks who may dwell on the holy hill, and the short list includes this: he that sweareth to his own hurt, and changeth not. The Qur’an opens its fifth chapter with three words — fulfill your contracts. Confucius reached for a cart: a man without trustworthiness is a cart without a linchpin; how can it be made to go? And Persia gave the contract its own divinity: in the hymn to Mithra, lord of covenant, the contract-breaker ruins the whole country — and the contract holds whether made with the faithful or the unfaithful, for it binds both alike. Read that twice: three thousand years ago, scripture said your word to a stranger of another faith binds exactly as your word to your brother. The deal does not check the counterparty’s flag.
The kept word is the linchpin because a market is a very large cart. Every honest trade is two people betting that words bind; every welched deal teaches everyone watching to bet less.
It breaks as the welch — the terms honored only while convenient, the warranty fought instead of honored, the quote that grows after the work is promised. And its counterfeit is the letter kept against the spirit: the promise performed so technically that its purpose dies. There is an old story — told of colonial Delhi, and offered here as the story it is — of a bounty paid per dead cobra that produced cobra farms. The farmers kept the letter perfectly. A word kept that way is a word broken with paperwork.
The law of it: perform the promise’s purpose, not merely its grammar, and perform it especially when it hurts.
The Sixth Virtue — Promptness
What we owe, we pay before the sweat dries. What is asked of us, we answer while the answer still matters.
The ancients did not treat delay as neutral. The wages of a hired worker shall not remain with you overnight, says Leviticus; pay him before the sun sets, says Deuteronomy, for he is poor and sets his heart upon it; give the worker his wages before his sweat dries, says the hadith. And what the old law did for the wage, the old courts did for the grievance. England kept courts of piepowder at every fair — the name is pieds poudrés, dusty feet — bound to judge the traveling trader’s dispute while the fair still stood, because a verdict delivered after the wronged party has gone home is a verdict delivered to an empty room. When Boaz had a claim to settle at the gate of Bethlehem, he seated ten elders in the morning and the matter was finished before the assembly rose.
Delay is not neutral because delay quietly spends other people’s lives. The withheld wage finances the employer with the worker’s dinner. The appeal with no deadline is a mailbox painted like a door. The refund that takes ninety days is a loan the customer never agreed to make.
The counterfeit of promptness is haste — and note whose clock each one binds. Promptness binds the one who owes: pay fast, answer fast. Manufactured urgency binds the one who is owed: offer ends in ten minutes, three other people are looking at this item. The first is a virtue. The second is a thumb on the buyer’s judgment, and the old rules about the plain deal already condemn it.
The law of it: a clock on every debt and every answer, and the clock posted where the one who waits can see it.
The Seventh Virtue — The Witnessed Record
We write it down, both sides keep a copy, and the record made at the time outranks every story told afterward.
The longest verse in the Qur’an is not about prayer. It is about paperwork: when you contract a debt for a fixed term, write it down, let a scribe write between you justly, call two witnesses, and do not disdain to write it, small or large, with its term. When the prophet Jeremiah bought a field — in a city under siege, as an act of faith that fields would be bought again — he signed the deed before witnesses, weighed the silver on scales, and had both copies, the sealed and the open, stored in a clay jar, that they may last many days. Hammurabi’s code, nearly four thousand years old, made the receipt the whole defense: the agent carrying a merchant’s money takes a sealed receipt, and money handed over without one is not credited to any account. England split a notched stick down the grain and gave each party half — stock and foil — so a forged notch betrayed itself the moment the halves were fitted together. And Hebrew law set the floor for every record of wrong: one witness alone establishes nothing; a matter stands on two or three.
Four civilizations, four thousand years, one instinct: memory argues; receipts settle. The record made at the time, held by both parties, is the only story that survives the parties’ later interests.
It breaks as the handshake deal reconstructed from memory in front of a judge, the terms-page quietly rewritten after the dispute began, the order history that vanishes with the account. And it has a counterfeit: the one-sided record — the house that keeps a file on the patron and hands the patron nothing, record-keeping as surveillance instead of witness. A record is a witness when both sides hold a copy. When one side holds it all, it is a weapon in a drawer.
The law of it: write it when it happens, give both sides the copy, and let the contemporaneous record outrank the convenient memory.
The Eighth Virtue — Remedy Forward
Wrongs are cured by making things right — never by force, and never by quietly taking back what was settled.
The old remedies all move forward. The refund, the replacement, the renegotiated term: a new performance that cures the old failure. Even collection — the rightful claim, owed beyond doubt — was bounded by dignity: Deuteronomy forbids the creditor to enter the debtor’s house to seize the pledge; he stands outside, and the debtor brings it out. The kicked-in door is unlawful even when the debt is real. And the gospel’s grievance ladder runs the same direction: the private word first, witnesses second, the assembly last — each rung a chance to fix it before force.
The rule underneath: finality is final. What was settled is not unwound by one party’s later strength. A market where yesterday’s closed deals can be reopened by whoever grows powerful enough is a market where nothing is ever truly bought; every title is a loan from the strong.
It breaks as the clawback — the sale reversed from one side, the digital purchase deleted from the buyer’s own shelf, the account drained back by the party who happens to hold the keys. It breaks as the house that makes itself judge, jury, and bailiff of its own disputes. And it has a counterfeit: remedy theater — the refund process so procedural it punishes the wronged for being wronged, the apology issued in place of the cure. A remedy that costs the victim more than the loss is a second injury with better manners.
The law of it: cure the wrong with a new performance, keep a real door for grievance, and never reach back into what was settled.
The Ninth Virtue — The Diligent Citizen
Buying is a craft too.
Scripture is not sentimental about buyers. The simple believes every word, says Proverbs, but the prudent looks well to his going. And it catches the buyer mid-performance in a verse that could have been written outside any bazaar on earth: It is naught, it is naught, saith the buyer — but when he is gone his way, then he boasteth. The old law assumed cunning on both sides of the counter and armed each against the other. The rabbis made the fraud rule run both directions: overreaching by the buyer is ona’ah exactly as overreaching by the seller.
Half of honest commerce is the citizen’s own craft, and the ancients kept its disciplines. Read before signing; ask until you understand, and treat a seller who will not answer plainly as a seller who has answered. Bind strangers with earnest, not with everything: the Hebrew pledge — the eravon, which traveled into Greek as arrabon and survives in the word for a deposit to this day — was small on purpose, binding the deal while risking only a token, the balance moving when the goods did. The medieval commenda built whole trade routes on the same discipline: a defined purse, a defined voyage, settled and closed when the ship came home. Nobody staked the house on a stranger’s first promise. Keep your half of the record. And spend the word fraud where it is true: past the fraction, fraud — pursue it; inside the fraction, a hard bargain; the gift knowingly given, a gift; the fair thing fairly described and regretted, tuition. A people that cries fraud at every loss teaches its institutions to ignore the word, and then the real frauds — the second stone, the wet grain, the cloaked bill — sail through unopposed.
The counterfeit of diligence is cynicism: the buyer who treats every seller as a thief, trusts nothing, verifies nothing, and calls the whole market rigged from the couch. That is not craft. Diligence trades — small with the unknown, deep with the proven — and keeps the receipts.
The law of it: read, ask, stage, record, and call fraud by its true measure.
The Tenth Virtue — A Ledger of Things, Never of Persons
We judge the deal in front of us, not a secret file on the person across the counter. And some trades we do not keep at any price.
Two rooms in one virtue, and they share a wall.
The first room: no hidden mark. Ezekiel laid the cornerstone twenty-six centuries ago — the child does not bear the guilt of the parent; each answers for their own conduct. No inherited mark, no transferred mark, no mark at all that the marked cannot see. The secret file on a patron is the seed of every cloak: whoever is silently scored will one day be silently served less, silently charged more, or silently shown a painted door — and will never know why, because the whole point of the secret ledger is that there is nothing to answer. Keep ledgers of deals: what was promised, what was delivered, what was paid. What a house remembers about a person, the person may read. A reputation earned in the open, answerable and appealable, is the market working. A score compiled in the dark is the market becoming a court with no docket, no defense, and no exit.
The second room: the trades not kept. Every tradition that wrote trade law also kept a short list no margin could justify, and the lists agree at the center. No trade in persons — Exodus puts the man-stealer under its heaviest sentence, and the Buddhist canon lists trade in living beings first among the five livelihoods a lay follower does not take up. No preying on incapacity — Leviticus forbids the stumbling block before the blind, and the rabbis read blindness as every incapacity a seller can see: the drunk, the child, the desperate, the one who cannot understand what is being signed. And no business built on the customer’s ruin — rob not the poor because he is poor, says Proverbs, because a house whose profit requires the patron’s harm has left commerce for predation, whatever its license says.
The counterfeit here is transparency turned inside out: publishing the person instead of the deal — doxxing dressed as openness, the public blacklist that calls itself accountability. The cure for the secret ledger of persons is the open ledger of deals, never a louder ledger of persons.
The law of it: grade the deal, never the man; keep no file the filed cannot read; and keep no trade whose profit is a person’s ruin.
The Table
Every virtue has a way it breaks and a mask it gets stolen by. Name all three and the whole bill fits on one card.
VIRTUE BREAKS AS COUNTERFEITED BY
───────────────────── ────────────────────────── ─────────────────────────
I Honest Measure the second stone; wet grain precision theater
II Open Terms the silent amendment disclosure burial
III Nothing in Silence the cloaked patron, billed notification noise
IV The Plain Deal the sale of the uncertain plainness that omits
V The Kept Word the welch the letter against the spirit
VI Promptness the withheld wage; no clock manufactured urgency
VII The Witnessed Record the vanishing history the one-sided file
VIII Remedy Forward the clawback; no door remedy theater
IX The Diligent Citizen the unread signature cynicism
X Ledger of Things the secret score the public pillory
The counterfeit column matters as much as the breakage column. A market frightened only of the breakages will build the counterfeits and call them reform — bury the terms and call it disclosure, spam the notices and call it transparency, pillory the person and call it accountability. The virtue is always the narrow path between its failure and its fake.
The Final Test
A law is tested in court. A virtue is tested by what it leaves behind. Here is the whole bill as four questions, and any citizen can score any trade with them:
After the trade, does each side know what actually happened? (Measure, terms, plainness, the record.)
After the trade, would each side trade with the other again — and could they walk away freely if not? (The kept word, nothing in silence, the open door out.)
If it went wrong, is there a door and a clock — a way to be heard and a day by which the answer comes? (Remedy, promptness.)
And after a thousand such trades, are the people of this market more able to trust a stranger, or less? (Everything.)
That last question is the one the whole bill exists for. A market is a machine that turns strangers into counterparties and counterparties into neighbors — or it is a machine that turns neighbors into marks. Every trade feeds one machine or the other. There is no third machine.
The Close
None of this can be legislated into a people, and that is the point. A market can be policed into mere compliance, but it can only be raised into virtue — by houses that keep these aims in the open where their patrons can watch, by citizens who trade as if their grandchildren will inherit the reputation, by parents who teach the rules of fair engagement at the same table where they teach everything else. A child raised on these ten will know how to participate in a market before they know the word for one. They will recognize the second stone when the checkout page reveals it, the cloak when a silent house keeps billing, the cobra farm when a promise is kept by its letter against its purpose — and they will know their own duties too: read, ask, stage, record, and spend the word fraud only where it is true. A people raised on these builds entrepreneurs the way a river builds valleys: slowly, certainly, and without anyone’s permission.
The Merchants Guild holds these virtues earnestly and openly, for all to see, and hopes that by witnessing a better way of performing trade, a citizenry comes to take them on — each in their own accord, each in their own peace. Not because a law demanded it. Because true, fair, earnest, and thoughtful commerce is how a civilization gets built, one honest trade at a time — and every other kind is how one comes down.
Put your hand in the grain.
The Compact Canon
For the wall, the till, and the kitchen table:
I. Sell what you say, weighed true, the same for all.
II. Post the rules before they bind.
III. Do nothing to a person in silence.
IV. Make the deal plain enough to say in a breath.
V. Keep the word, especially when it hurts.
VI. Pay before the sweat dries; answer while it matters.
VII. Write it down; both keep a copy.
VIII. Cure wrongs forward; never claw back what was settled.
IX. Read, ask, stage, record; call fraud by its true measure.
X. Grade the deal, never the man; keep no secret file; keep no trade built on ruin.
About this work
This bill is published in the name of The Merchants Guild. The Guild does not exist yet: it is a nonprofit being completed and brought to life, an Iowa institution whose purpose is developing, testing, and publishing useful knowledge as a public commons. This bill practices the model the Guild will live by: the commons publishes the aim, openly and to everyone on identical terms, and holds itself to it first.
The text is released under Creative Commons Attribution 4.0. Copy it, post it, print it, teach it, translate it, adapt it; name The Merchants Guild as its source and it is yours. If you take these virtues on, you owe us nothing.
The virtues are yours now. They always were.
Sources
Cited at their narrowest honest locus. Several sit inside legal worlds this bill refuses whole — Hammurabi’s code ranks persons by class and punishes by mutilation; the fairs excluded most of humanity from the merchant class; the Egyptian text speaks royal theology — and in every case the rule alone is claimed, never its world. Stories offered as stories are labeled so in the text.
- Hebrew Bible: Leviticus 19:13–14, 19:35–36, 25:14; Exodus 21:16, 22:25–27; Deuteronomy 19:15, 24:10–15, 25:13–15, 27:8; Proverbs 11:1, 14:15, 20:10, 20:14, 22:22; Psalm 15:4; Ezekiel 18:19–20; Jeremiah 32:9–14; Ruth 4:1–12; Genesis 38:17–18 (the eravon).
- Rabbinic: Mishnah Bava Metzia 4:3 and 4:10 (ona’ah, of money and of words); Babylonian Talmud Sanhedrin 8b and 40b (the warning before the act); Chullin 94a and Tosefta Bava Kamma 7:8 (geneivat da’at, theft of the mind).
- Christian and scholastic: Matthew 18:15–17; 2 Corinthians 1:22 (the arrabon); Thomas Aquinas, Summa Theologiae II-II q.77 a.3 (the hidden defect).
- Islamic: Qur’an 2:282, 5:1, 83:1–3; Sahih Muslim 102 (the hand in the grain) and 1513 (the sale of the uncertain); Sahih al-Bukhari 2079 (the option until the parties part); Sunan Ibn Majah 2443 (the wage before the sweat dries); the hisbah manuals of the muhtasib, e.g. Ibn al-Ukhuwwa, Ma’alim al-Qurba (14th c.).
- Roman and Greek: the praetor’s edict, posted on the album; Codex Justinianus 4.44.2 (laesio enormis); Digest 21.1 (the aediles’ edict on declared defects); Aristotle, Athenian Constitution 51 (the agoranomoi and metronomoi); Magna Carta (1215), clause 39; audi alteram partem as received in the common law.
- Mesopotamian: Laws of Hammurabi §7, §§104–105, §§122–126 (c. 1750 BCE).
- Egyptian: Book of the Dead, Spell 125, the declarations of innocence (New Kingdom recensions vary; the balance clause is attested among them).
- Indian and Buddhist: Manusmriti 8.203 and 8.403; Anguttara Nikaya 5.177 (the five trades not taken up).
- Chinese: Analects 2.3 (virtue and shame) and 2.22 (the cart and the linchpin).
- Zoroastrian: Mihr Yasht (Yasht 10), Mithra as lord of contract; 10.2, the contract binding with faithful and unfaithful alike.
- Medieval and English: the law merchant and the fairs of Champagne (12th–13th c.; the counts guaranteed the roads, the merchants kept the law, enforcement by exclusion from the next fair); the courts of piepowder; the English Exchequer split tally (12th c.–1826); the original writ of Chancery.
Leave a Reply