The first scholar to suggest that the muḥtasib perpetuates a Greco-Roman official seems to have been Gaudefroy-Demombynes. In 1939 he declared himself convinced that the ‘Abbāsid muḥtasib was an Islamised version of the Roman aedile (M. Gaudefroy-Demombynes, ‘Sur les origines de la justice musulmane’, Mélanges syriens offerts à René Dussaud, Paris 1939, vol. II, p. 828), and in 1947 he reaffirmed his conviction in a review of E. Tyan, this time adding the terms agoranomos and sāḥib al-sūq (id., ‘Un magistrat musulman: le mohtasib’, Le Journal des Savants 1947, pp. 36f. On the relationship between the Roman aedile and the Greek agoranomos, see B. R. Foster, ‘Agoranomos and muḥtasib’, Journal of the Economic and Social History of the Orient 1970). It was similarly in a review of E. Tyan that Schacht first identified the ‘Abbāsid muḥtasib as an Islamised version of the Byzantine agoranomos, an idea which he was to repeat several times thereafter without reference to Gaudefroy-Demombynes (Schacht in Orientalia 1948, p. 518; id., ‘The Law’, p. 75; id., ‘Droit byzantin’, p. 207; id., Introduction, p. 25. He was familiar with Gaudefroy-Demombynes' article of 1939, cf. Introduction, p. 224, but possibly not that of 1947, unearthed by Foster, ‘Agoranomos and muḥtasib’, p. 128n).