Opätovne k súdnemu zákonníku pre ľud (Zakon sudnyj ljudem): K možnostiam rekonštrukcie archaického práva na Veľkej Morave

When researching law in Great Moravia, one can move in two directions - to study archaic law from before the arrival of the Byzantine missionaries Constantine and Methodius, and on the other hand, the law that we find in the extant sources as written down by the Constantine, Methodius and their disciples. So far, the research of the written sources prevailed in the sense of analysing contents of the extant written sources. However, it is questionable to what extent these texts do reflect the law actually applicable in Great Moravia, and what is the relationship of these standards to the previously existing archaic law. Should one wish to compensate for the lack of research on the original, archaic law applicable before the arrival of the Byzantine missionaries, there are two ways to do so. The first way is the one which, although also primarily focused on the extant written sources, tries to analyse the differences between the extant texts and their Byzantine models from which the missionaries drew. By identifing differences, the reasons for these differences, the aims pursued and the tools used by the Byzantine missionaries one may be able to uncover the archaic legal norms of behaviour that the missionaries tried to tackle in their written texts. The second way how one may get closer to knowing the archaic law applicable before the Byzantine influence became dominant, is also connected to the extant written sources. However, this time it is their linguistic analysis rather than content analysis that can help us further. It is namely highly probable that the missionaries did not replace completely the archaic legal terminology by new legal notions; quite the opposite, one may expect they used the original terminology in their translations of Byzantine laws into Slavic language. The extant sources can hence enshrine important archaic legal terminology to be uncovered, being a carrier of potential archaic legal meaning hidden in the words that we are still using up until nowadays.