Surviving legal documents most often record disputes between relatives over inheritance, revolving around two obsessions of propertied classes: material possessions, including land, and rights to labor. Already attested in the earliest copies of documents (mid-third millennium Bc), inheritance removes any chance of material equality for all individuals at birth. Continually, the same property relations that bind relatives, and make family a central concept, undermine family in the bitterness of litigation. Legal cases show where but not how often harmony breaks down and they are neutral on the question as to whether the property system itself was judged iniquitous; a broader social history of resistance is yet to be written from all the archaeological evidence. Fugitives from labor obligations are a recurrent problem for the authorities at different periods. A register from 1800 bc records a legal review, releasing households held in forced labor for an unknown number of years, after the family head had abandoned his national service work obligations; only one case was upheld, a boat captain who lost his name and position because someone escaped on his boat (Hayes 1955; Lorton 1977, 16-17).
The fugitives register papyrus was reused a generation later, to write on the back a separate set of legal documents: two gifts of staff, mainly weavers, listing a total of 95 names, including at least 45 from Syria-Palestine, and the response of an unnamed man, contesting a claim from “my daughter Tihenut” that “my father died, while he had property belonging to me, that my husband had given me; he gave things from it to his wife Senebtysy. Let it be restored to me!” (Hayes 1955). As the man is still alive, either died is a statement of rejection or the plain kinship terms father and daughter refer here, as often, to extended relations such as step-father/daughter and grandfather/daughter. Despite its fragmentary condition, the document demonstrates the self-confidence of the propertied woman and her freedom to sue her father.
The staff lists on this papyrus reveal how disputes among the wealthy assume rights to labor of others as a norm in social organization. Any such rights clearly remove equality between individuals as forcefully as inheritance of material possessions and land rights. It remains difficult to specify the rights in practice, over different periods. Some Egyptologists speak of slavery and slaves in cases where one person holds or transfers rights to labor of others. However, it is not clear where the rights end, even whether they cover the whole year or just a season, as in a national service system of obligations. No legal documents indicate anything as inhuman as ancient Greek or Roman, or more recent European/Euro-American slavery, with torture and killing of the enslaved. Different Egyptian words may denote varying grades of dependency or labor obligation: in documents (1850-1750 Bc), hem, “power/agency,” seems less constrained than bak, “worked/ worker.” In the fugitives register, people in the hem category are punished by having to work until released in review; therefore, that category is not equivalent to permanent servitude. Nor does punishment involve being reduced to bak, which also, therefore, is not equivalent to slave, at least in this period. From the written sources in context, Berlev concluded that rights to labor of hem came from the position a person held in state or temple administration, while rights to labor of bak came from a personal contract, registered by state officials (Berlev 1972). In one such contract, a man gives his brother four foreigners: a woman with Semitic and an Egyptian name, a woman with two Egyptian names, and two children, possibly with Semitic names. The four might be a family of immigrants, with first-generation grandmother renamed, second-generation mother Egyptian named, and her two children recently born inside Egypt. Ethnicity might, like rebellion, form one factor in allowing a society to normalize unequal relations such as the condition of bak.
Teachings and their limits
Kingship
Kingship is the political frame for ancient Egyptian ethical writings, most clearly in the remarkable composition which Assmann has called King as Priest of the Sun, first inscribed in kingship monuments for Hatshepsut (1475 Bc), Amenhotep III (1375 Bc), and Ramses III (1175 Bc). The words accompany morning rebirth of the sun, when the king raises his arms to “adore Ra in the dawn light.” Here (as cited in
Chapter 1), the creator sun-god places the king on earth to make it possible for people to do what is right:
To judge between people and to satisfy the gods, to create what is Right, to annihilate what is Evil
The Egyptian word here rendered to create is sekheper, “to cause to come into being”; only the king can create the possibility for Right to exist. Once the king has performed his task of sekheper ma'at, humans can then ir/djed ma'at, “do/say what is right.” Before describing his function on earth, the composition defines the distinctive quality of kingship as knowledge, of the speech, forms and hometowns of “the eastern foa-souls,” depicted as the baboons noisily acclaiming the creator at dawn. Unwritten knowledge separates kingship from humankind and underwrites the function of the king as provider of justice and peace. Kingly knowledge is marked off even from the social stratum of the wealthiest and the highest officials. Judging from surviving copies, the composition was accessible not to the whole circle of highest officials (such as viziers, generals, high priests of Amun), but only those with special access to sacred writing: selective versions for a head keeper of writings at court (Khay, about 1275 bc) and a Third God's Servant of Amun at Karnak (Tjanefer, about 1150 bc) and a more complete version for a chief lector at court (Padiamenipet, about 675 bc). This knowledge seems a function not of all power, nor even of all deities, but of a sacred force uniting creator-god with his form on earth, the king.