Roman law did not begin with the Twelve Tables. There was law before them — customary, oral, held in the memory of the patrician families who administered it and interpreted it as they saw fit. That was precisely the problem. In 450 BC, a commission of ten men — the decemviri — was appointed to write the law down. The resulting text, inscribed on twelve bronze tablets and displayed in the Roman Forum, was the founding document of the Western legal tradition. The tablets themselves are lost. Their importance is not.