Legal documents speak directly about ideals and flaws in social practice, as men and women deliver their protests and appeals, where cases were urgent enough to bring into writing (Lorton 1977; Theodorides 1971). Mostly, a single document survives from an original mass of paperwork. Moreover, documents tend to give one side of an argument; a judging official would have to assess each plaintiff or accusation. Regardless of the truth in each case, legal writings invoke accepted standards, a powerful guide in reconstructing an ancient shared sphere of ethics, at least in official public view. Disputants may work with implicit rules, or explicitly cite authoritative writings, where kingship is supreme authority. The term decree of the king denotes any kingly pronouncement: administrative, judicial, or in letters. A decree can include a specific regulation (Egyptian hep), which, in turn, might be cited in the way we cite a law (Lorton 1977, 60). Examples for regulating estates to support offerings, from 2450 to 2200 Bc and 1300 to 1200 Bc, provide much of our source material on corporal and capital punishment. Offenders against offering estates may be labeled rebel (Egyptian sebi), enemy of kingship and Right; in its ruler or ruling class, the formal society defines with this word a boundary across which human can be inhumanly treated (Figure 5.2).
Punishments range in severity to extreme cruelty and apply to officials as often as others. One decree inscribed for perpetuity states that intruders building into a sacred procession path, “craftsman or priest,” “shall be branded” (Abdju stela, 1800 BC, Lorton 1977, 18). Later, a decree of Sety I prescribes grimmer sentences: for encroaching on offering-estate fields, cutting off ears and nose and assigning to permanent labor and, for officials failing to prosecute offenders, one hundred lashes, permanent farming labor, and prohibition on burial of the man, his wife, and children (inscription at Nauri, Nubia, 1290 BC, Lorton 1977, 25). In an extraordinary dossier on robberies from royal tombs (1150 Bc), witnesses refer to sentences of being mutilated or impaled, and false witness carries the same sentence as committing the crime (Lorton 1977, 34-35). In writings from the village of artists working on the royal tomb (1300-1100 Bc), oaths repeat threats of a hundred blows and cutting off ears (Lorton 1977, 38-44). Such repetition might read as a rhetorical motif, as if the most severe possible act by kingship against individual became an accepted device for heightening the urgency of a case, and so the prospect of action. This rhetorical interpretation does not mean that the punishments were never inflicted (Lorton 1977, 45, for one instance), but it reminds us not to take written evidence always at face value. Comparative study of legal rhetoric might provide parallels and methods for assessing the ancient Egyptian writing in practice. Depictions in monuments for eternity need to be read in the same spirit, avoiding both the urge to idealize the society under study and the orientalist impulse to brand the barbarism of the other without measuring against our own (Figure 5.3).
Figure 5.2 Authorizing “what is Right" and prescribing punishment for transgressors: limestone stela inscribed with decree of King Neferirkare, addressed to the overseer of god's servants and to the chief local authority, exempting local temple staff from certain obligations of the central administration and specifying penalties against transgressors. From the main temple precinct at Abdju, about 2400 bc. W. Petrie. 1903, AbydosII, Egypt Exploration Fund, London, pl.18.
An earlier decree specifies three drastic consequences for rebels: (1) all acquired and inherited property confiscated, (2) not allowed embalming and burial with blessed dead in the cemetery, and (3) not allowed to be among the living (Lorton 1977, 11, decree of a king with Horus name Demedjibtawy, otherwise
(a)
(b)
Figure 5.3 (a) Limestone stela inscribed with decree of a king, whose name has been
Erased and replaced by that of King Khasekhemra Neferhotep, about 1750 bc. Found at Abdju at edge of town northern cemeteries, on processional route to the tombs of the earliest kings; now in the Egyptian Museum, Cairo. (b) Detail from the decree, where a clause stipulates that any person infringing the sacred space demarcated by the stelae “is to be branded" (the vertical sign at left is the hieroglyph for a torch, used for words involving fire). (a) and (b) Randall-Maciver and A. Mace, Bl Amrah and Abydas, Egypt Exploration Fund, London, 1902.
Figure 5.4 Depiction of King Ramses II poised to smite an enemy from the northeast, in the presence of the creator Atum, presenting him with a curved sword. From Per-Atum (Tell el-Retaba), about 1275 bc. W. Petrie, Hyksos and Israelite Cities, British School of Archaeology in Egypt, London, 1907.
Unidentified, about 2100 bc). Removal from the living might be read literally, as execution, or might denote a symbolic death, ending membership of human society. Among evidence for a symbolic reading, kingship inscriptions apply to war captives a term seqer-ankh, “struck-(but)-alive,” evoking two inscribed visual motifs of kingship, the frozen scene of execution and the curse figurine (Berlev 1989). In the frozen execution scene, a king stands poised to smite a defeated enemy (Figure 5.4); the most famous early example is the ceremonial palette for eye/body paint, inscribed for King Narmer, from the great kingship temple deposit at Nekhen around the time of the first recorded unification (3000 bc) (Davis 1992). Although the most finely sculpted examples preserved are monuments of kings, the motif also occurs outside the immediate circle of kingship, as on votive stelae deposited at temples of deities (Figure 5.5). Curse figurines are schematic clay or stone images of bound men, inscribed with recitations against potential enemies of kingship, under direct rule and abroad. In two series, inscriptions are on bowls rather than figurines, but in each case, the objects are broken and deposited in groups at points requiring defense, for example, a cemetery as sacred ground (Figure 5.6). In Nubia, one deposit of about 1850 bc was excavated close to Mirgissa fortress, border town of Egyptian-controlled territory; nearby, a human skull lay on a pottery bowl, beside flint blade, as if one person had been offered up in
Figure 5.5 Depiction of the king poised to smite an enemy, on a votive stela, Ramesside reign of Thutmes IV about 1400 bc, W. Petrie, Memphis I,
British School of Archaeology in London, London 1908.
Defense of the realm (Vercoutter 1963). Whether the person died in the rite or in fighting beforehand is an unknown and crucial detail for our understanding of ancient Egyptian state ethics. Berlev concluded that struck alive denotes the spared captives, while their leader would be killed; there may have been varying responses over time.
Treatment of prisoners may expose and define the ethics of society and state. A remarkable group of legal documents shows kingship reacting to the extreme case of court conspiracy. Various devices, including language, protect the king from being implicated in spilling blood, even, remarkably, of those who would kill him. To remove the accused from humanity, their names are changed, as from “Ra is the one who creates (mes) him” to “Ra is the one who
Figure 5.6 Rounded limestone flake inscribed on one side with figure of a bound man, a stream of blood emerging from his forehead. Pyramid field cemeteries, at modern Giza. Drawing © Wolfram Grajetzki.
Hates (mesdjed) him.” Those found guilty of leading the plot are forced to take their own lives, and the king is said to be unaware, so innocent: “All that has been done, it is they who have done it; may all they did fall upon their heads, while I am anointed and protected forever” (Juridical Papyrus of Turin, after Lorton 1977, 30).
World History
