The question arises, what in such a tapestry of laws could have been the real practical value of the part of them which was written in Latin? The law historians, with all the one-sidedness of the expert, have hitherto looked at this part alone and therefore have not yet realized that there is a problem here at all. Their texts were “Law” unqualified, the law that descended from Rome to us, and they were concerned only to investigate the history of these texts and not their real significance in the lives of the Eastern peoples. What in reality we have here is the highly civilized law of an aged Culture forced upon the springtime of a young one.[95] It came over as learned literature, and in the train of political developments which were quite other than they would have been had Alexander or Cæsar lived longer or had Antony won at Actium. We must look at Early Arabian law from the standpoint of Ctesiphon and not from that of Rome. The law of the distant West had long before reached inward fulfilment--could it be here more than a mere literature? What part did it play, if any, in the active law-study, law-making, and law-practice of this landscape? And, indeed we must further ask how much of Roman--or for that matter of Classical generally--is contained in this literature itself.[96] The history of this Latin-written law belongs after 160 to the Arabian East, and it says a great deal that it can be traced in exactly parallel courses into the history of Jewish, Christian, and Persian literature.[97] The “Classical” jurists (160-220), Papinian, Ulpian, and Paul, were Aramæans, and Ulpian described himself with pride as a Phœnician from Tyre. They came, therefore, from the same population as the Tannaim who perfected the Mishnah shortly after 200, and most of the Christian Apologists (Tertullian 160-223). Contemporary with them is the fixation of canon and text for the New Testament by Christian, for the Hebrew Old Testament by Jewish,[98] and for the Avesta by Persian, scholars. It is the high Scholasticism of the Arabian Springtime. The digests and commentaries of these jurists stand towards the petrified legal store of the Classical in exactly the same relation as the Mishnah to the Torah of Moses (and as, much later, the Hadith to the Koran)--they are “Halakhoth”[99]--a new customary law grasped in the forms of an authoritative and traditional law-material. The casuistic method is everywhere the same. The Babylonian Jews possessed a well-developed civil law which was taught in the academies of Sura and Pumbeditha. Everywhere a class of law-men formed itself--the _prudentes_ of the Christians, the rabbis of the Jews, later the ulemas (in Persian, mollahs) of the Islamic nation--who enunciated opinions, _responsa_ (Arabic, _Fetwa_). If the Ulema was acknowledged by the State, he was called “Mufti” (Byzantine, _ex auctoritate principis_). Everywhere the forms are exactly the same.