Ancien Culture and Languages

Ancien Culture and Languages

Elements of restorative justice in legal text :mādayān ī hazār dādestān

Document Type : Original Article

Author
Ph.D. in Ancient Culture and Languages of Iran, researcher of Institute for Humanities and Cultural Studies, Tehran, Iran
Abstract
The mādayān ī hazār dādestān or the Book of Thousand Judgments is a text in the Pahlavi script and language belonging to the late Sassanian era. The content of this text is exclusively legal without referring to religious issues. The laws in this text are more civic and rarely refer to criminal law. Issues such as partnership, marriage, divorce, debt payment, guarantee, inheritance, rent, adoption, etc. are raised in this text. Restorative justice tries to establish reconciliation between groups and ultimately in the society by emphasizing on repairing and compensating the victims and making the criminal responsible for the crime he committed. In order to achieve this, elements such as Voluntary action, expression of truth, encounter, agreement, support and non-publicity are discussed and investigated. The purpose of this article is to examine the restorative elements in the text of Mādayān ī Hazār Dādestān and tries to answer the question whether the mentioned restorative elements can be seen in this legal text and can it be examined? Investigations prove evidence of the existence of these elements; For example, in the element of voluntariness, a person who commited a sin deserving of death, whenever he surrendered himself voluntarily, this act of his would cause the death penalty to be removed from him. In exression of truth, whenever a person was inclined to tell the truth from contradiction, he was not condemned because the investigation was on its right path, which was to remove the damage. In encounter, the use of the pronouns "I" and "you" in the text shows that the two sides were facing each other and talking to each other. And ....
Keywords

Volume 2, Issue 2 - Serial Number 3
February 2022
Pages 199-218

  • Receive Date 08 June 2022
  • Revise Date 08 September 2022
  • Accept Date 06 October 2022