ABSTRACT
The ideas behind the Circle of Justice and the governmental interrelationships it expresses go back much farther than the saying itself. Its main elements came together in the inscriptions of the ancient Mesopotamian empires – the Sumerians, Babylonians, and Assyrians. Excavated and deciphered by modern archaeologists, these inscriptions reveal the development and coalescence of the concepts later encapsulated in the Circle of Justice. The ancient Near Eastern empires also founded administrative and legal institutions through which to put this concept of justice into practice; among the most important were tax surveys, royal courts, and the petition process. Administrative and cultural activities ensured that the ideas of the Circle were known to elites, officials, and common people. Although the common people left no writings of their own to explain their point of view, there is considerable evidence that they used the imperial institutions of justice both to meet their own needs and to protest oppression and injustice up to the highest level.
