UCL Department of Science and Technology Studies

University of California, Berkeley

Where were the Laws of Nature Before there was Nature?

Abstract
In the historical discourse about nature, especially about nature's relationship to gods, or God, the invocation of law as a way to describe perceived order and regularity in the world of physical phenomena shows nearly continuously from Greek and Greco-Roman antiquity down to the 17th century.  Asking the question Where the Laws of Nature were before Nature is meant to dislodge the discussion of the
'laws of nature from the mostly Greco-Roman period and later Greek and Latin sources that speak explicitly in those terms, and to bring within the framework and history of this concept cuneiform evidence from the 2nd and 1st millennia B.C.E. that does not speak of nature at all, indeed has no terminology equivalent to ³nature² in its vocabulary.  Whereas the cuneiform corpus altogether lacks a lexical counterpart to the word or the conception 'nature,' and thus, strictly speaking, belongs prior to and outside the bounds of the western discourse about nature, that is to say, it is literally 'before nature,' a juridical terminology, including the word "law," for describing the relation between the divine and the world is attested in ancient Mesopotamia.