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. In particular, this chapter is interested in family, household and kinship, themes that have cropped up throughout this book. It situates the detailed explorations presented in each of the previous chapters alongside an exploration of Anglo-Saxon historical information, with a particular emphasis on contemporary (seventh-century) law codes. After all, the people buried in these sites were alive when the laws were first spoken about and written down, and as a result they were constructed from the same Zeitgeist , the same blood, sweat and attitudes of the
ordered a compilation of earlier Egyptian laws.121 Persian documents relating to this period no longer exist, and it is only from the early Ptolemaic Period that there are extant copies of a Demotic version. Although only a small part of the original Demotic corpus is known to have survived, certain of these law codes are suggested to date back to the Saite Period. These surviving documents indicate that the original corpus would have been fairly comprehensive in its scope, covering such topics as leases, matrimonial property settlements and maintenance obligations
because people’s multi-faceted identities were intertwined with material things, visual experiences, spaces and landscapes (Gosden, 2005 ). Moreover, objects are part of how people define themselves and each other, and are central to how people interact. How a person looks will influence how someone responds to them within a specific cultural setting, because objects are situated intermediately in relationships and act as fulcrums for interpersonal interactions. The aesthetic of relationships reinforces perception – for example, some of the earliest law codes