The Law Cut Into Stone
In 1907, on Chios, a block of stone came to light bearing an inscription in archaic Ionic letters, written boustrophedon — the lines running alternately left to right and right to left, turning at the end of each line as an ox turns at the end of a furrow. The stone is broken. The text is incomplete, and in places it is very hard to construe. And it is one of the more important documents in the history of how human beings have governed themselves.
Scholars date it, on the form of the letters, to somewhere between about 575 and 550 BC, though arguments have been made for a date as early as 600 and as late as 525. What survives concerns legal and political procedure. It refers to magistrates — demarchoi, "leaders of the people," and basileis, "kings," which in this period means annual officials rather than monarchs. It provides for appeal against their decisions. It specifies fines and the oaths that officials must swear. And it establishes, or regulates, a body which it calls the βουλὴ δημοσίη — the demosie boule, the popular council, the council of the people — composed of fifty men drawn from each tribe, meeting regularly, empowered to hear appeals and to attend to the business of the people.
To see why this matters, set it beside the standard story. In the conventional narrative of Greek constitutional development, popular political institutions emerge at Athens: haltingly under Solon around 594 BC, decisively under Cleisthenes in 508/7, and in mature form during the fifth century. Athens is the laboratory; everywhere else follows.
The Chian stone is roughly contemporary with Solon, and two generations older than Cleisthenes. And its language is startling for its date: a council explicitly designated as belonging to the people, with a defined composition, a fixed calendar, and appellate jurisdiction over magistrates.
It would be irresponsible to leap from this to "Chios invented democracy," and careful scholars do not. The inscription shows a state in which a popular council operated alongside magistrates and, in all probability, alongside an aristocratic body of some kind — a mixed constitution, of the sort that many archaic Greek states seem to have developed, rather than the sovereign assembly of fifth-century Athens. What it does establish beyond argument is that by the middle of the sixth century BC, on this island, there was written constitutional law, publicly displayed on stone where anyone could see it, which provided formal institutional power to a body defined as the people's.
Aristotle's school compiled the constitutions of a hundred and fifty-eight Greek states. One of them was the constitution of Chios. All but the Athenian one are lost, and there are few losses in classical scholarship one would trade more willingly for its recovery.
What we can see, from coins and inscriptions and the incidental notices of later writers, is a state of substance. Chios was minting silver from perhaps the late seventh century, which places it among the earliest coining communities anywhere; the sphinx-and-amphora type is one of the most recognisable in the archaic Aegean. It maintained a large fleet. It had civic institutions sophisticated enough to be worth recording on stone. And, according to every source that mentions the subject, it was extraordinarily rich.