ABSTRACT
Arbitration has been characterized as the oldest form of dispute resolution. Its first written evidence comes from ancient Greece, where the process of private adjudication was traditionally endorsed by the recourse to deities and was frequently conducted in the sanctuaries.1 Its intensive development in the area of trade relations was a result of the expansion of maritime commerce in the region of the Mediterranean Sea. Egyptian, Phoenician and Greek trade customs served as an autonomous basis for decisions reached in commercial controversies. In the third century BCE the customs of the sea trade, applied in arbitration, were compiled in the first Maritime Code on the Greek island of Rhodes (re-implemented in medieval Italy in the city of Pisa).2
