Macintyre extended his search to the Punjab, then on to Kabul, finally to a tiny museum in Chester County, Pa., where he unearthed a box containing Harlan's scrawled autobiography and an ancient contract penned in Persian and "stamped with an intricately beautiful oval seal".
Monarchomach, ( Greek monarchos + -machos, "one who fights against the monarch" ) any member of a group of 16th-century French Calvinist theorists who criticized absolute monarchy and religious persecution while defending various related doctrines of ancient constitutionalism, social contract, and resistance to unjust or tyrannical government, up to and including by means of tyrannicide.
They were used as seals on legal contracts in ancient Babylonia, and have been found embossed on six-thousand-year-old Chinese earthenware and pressed onto walls in the tomb of Tutankhamun.
Ancient Torahs, Jewish marriage contracts, a silver dinner service emblazoned with the Star of David, scale models of synagogues and other objects on display at the San Marcos Cultural Center in Toledo, Spain, examine the history of the country's Sephardic Jews.
The belief in some traditional agricultural societies that "rearing a son for old age is like storing grain for a famine" is probably one of the most ancient forms of generational contract.
Option contracts were known in ancient history but the 1970s saw an explosion in their use.
In portraying Islamic commerce in the eleventh and twelfth centuries, for example, he cites the "Geniza documents," a trove of ancient letters, price lists, and commercial contracts discovered in a Cairo storeroom.
Now, scientists reveal they couldn't have made the call without a series of far more mundane documents, including Ancient Egyptian marriage licenses and property contracts.
On the other hand, in a few societies, as in the ancient Middle East, slaves were allowed to contract with third parties.
Recently her company won the coveted contract for Britain's ancient city of Bath, which boasts more a million visitors annually.
