Legal Regulation of Civil Contracts in Ancient City-States of the Black Sea Northern Coast

The paper pays attention to the fact that in every society an obligation can perform various functions. But their main area is property turnover, as obligations are among the principal legal measures that mediate trade turnover of any market society. The agreement between parties was considered the basis of contacts. Major contracts were concluded in writing, as a rule. Some of them, such as Chersonese contract for the sale and lease of public lands (60-70-ies. III B.C.) were fixed lapidary. It has been noted that the system of contracts in the antique states of the Northern Black Sea was quite simple. The most common contracts were those of sharing (exchange), sale and purchase, donation. Agreements of individual employment, by contract, hire, and loan were often concluded. In the ancient states of the Northern Black Sea coast, as well as in metropolitan, such debt measures as synhrafs and hirohrafs were widely practiced. In ancient states of the Northern Black Sea there were facts about the cancellation of debt, both private and public. This is the so-called sysahfiya (“shaking off the burden”), which was first made by the prominent Athenian lawgiver Solon. In Olbia, this measure was taken during the siege by Alexander Macedonian army – Zopyrion in 331 B.C. Sources indicate that there was a sufficiently developed system of rules of obligatory law that existed in the ancient states of Northern Black Sea. Contract law became the most detailed study, the foundations of which were common to most Hellenic city-states. Similarly to other Hellenic states, legal regulation of contracts in the ancient states of the Northern Black Sea was carried out primarily through discretionary rules, i.e. those applied only in the absence of any other guidance on the given issue in the agreement. Specific character of contracts was only caused specific historical circumstances evolved in a particular region in the period.