Developing Written Laws

By the time the Greeks had written down their first laws they had a pretty good idea of what they wanted them to say, because they had had an informal mechanism for dispute resolution for a few hundred years. And the first written laws basically took the judgments that keep reappearing, and codified them (codified means to make something a written law). A funny thing is that the Spartans had no written laws. They knew how to write, but didn't think that laws should be written down.

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