The Laws of Ancient Egypt- Part 1- The Mythological Origins of Law & Themes

Part 1 The Mythological Foundations of Justice and Themes As was the case with ancient Mesopotamian jurisprudence, the Egyptian legal system begins with a myth. In Mesopotamia, it was a story of drunken seduction between a father and daughter, Enki, who warned humanity of the great flood, and Inanna, his daughter, the fertility goddess. In Egypt, the myth has similarly disturbing beginnings. Our story begins with Osiris, Isis, and their son Horus. Osiris would become a god of many things, but before that, he was a man. He was King Osiris of Egypt, son of Earth, Geb, and the sky, Nut. He was also the grandson of the sun, Ra. Osiris did what brothers do and kicked his brother Set with his leg. Set, who couldn't take a joke, turned around and killed his brother Osiris. Set then did something out of the first episode of The Sopranos. He took the body of Osiris and chopped it up in satrials and scattered the body parts all over Egypt. Now before dying, Osiris was married to his sister, Isis, which would later render incest as an acceptable practice for the next 3,000 years. Isis went searching for the body parts of her husband Osiris, gathered them up, and then pulled a Humpty Dumpty, putting him back together again with the help of another god named Thoth. That is why Osiris is depicted as being a partial mummy, because he was literally bandaged back together by his wife. Plutarch gives a completely different version of the story, which has Osiris ending up in Lebanon getting eaten by a fish at some point. I prefer the Humpty Dumpty version more. What happened next is unclear. Isis somehow resurrected her husband Osiris and became pregnant in the process. Plutarch says that every part of Osiris was found except for his male reproductive parts, which required the magical fashioning of a functioning phallus. Personally, I think that she had an affair, but regardless of how it happened, we know that Osiris, after being resurrected, died again after fulfilling his biological duty to his wife, and became god of the underworld, and Isis was now pregnant with a son, who is named Horus. After some time, the baby Horus is born, and in his formative years is shielded by his mother from his evil uncle Set, who's presumably looking for the child. This is where the story gets even weirder than the Mesopotamian father-daughter seduction story. Set and Horus get into a battle to establish who was more dominant, Horus being a little bit older by this time. Set battled with force, but Horus battled with wit. The story goes something like this. Set tried to have sex with Horus. Horus caught Set's semen and threw it in the Nile. Horus then took his own semen and spread it on Set's lunch. So, Set is now eating the semen of Horus in a salad or a sandwich or something. When the gods were tasked with establishing who was more dominant, they called forth the semen of Set, which, to his belief, would exit from the body of Horus. Instead, it exited from the river. The gods then called forth the semen of Horus, which then made its presence known in the stomach of Set. Understandably, the two then got into a fistfight. Horus lost an eye in the process, and Set lost a testicle. The two then did what any two other reasonable people would do in such a circumstance. They had a boat race. Horus won the boat race, and Set just appears to have given up and backed off. And in this way, Horus restores his father Osiris's honor and earns his place as the Sky God. Now, you're probably asking yourself at this point, what the hell does any of this have to do with the law? Stay with me, I'm getting there. The chief goddess of justice in ancient Egypt was Ma'at. Ma'at was the daughter of the sun god Ra. She is depicted as having a feather on her head. The feather becomes important later. When you die, you go to the Hall of Ma'at in the Underworld and face Anubis, Thoth, Osiris, and the man administering the test, Horus. Despite it being called the Hall of Ma'at, it doesn't seem like she went there often because she's not pictured as actually being there. But a part of her is. When you get there, the gods examine your heart. The heart in ancient Egypt is the organ that mattered, not the brain. The logic actually makes some sense. When you get excited, your heart beats faster. When you're hurt or sad, your heart would sink. They didn't understand the brain at all, really, because you can't feel your brain, you don't know that it's there. The heart, on the other hand, makes itself known. In a somewhat similar but much tastier way, in ancient Babylon, they thought that the liver was the source of the soul. Maybe one day we'll find out that the colon is the source of all thought and personality and humanity. Who the hell knows? Once you're in the Hall of Ma'at and after some formalities, you would recite all the sins that you did not commit during your life, retaining those that you did commit in your heart. Your heart would then be placed on a scale and weighed against the feather, which we mentioned earlier, of Ma'at. If your heart and the feather were in balance, you would be granted access to the Land of Reeds and relish in eternal paradise. Now, if your heart was laden with sin and it was heavier than the feather of Ma'at, then it would be fed to the crocodile goddess, Ahmet, who would eat it and thereby drive you out of existence. Talk about a bad case of heartburn. Now, there was a third outcome, its reincarnation via one of those pointy reincarnation machines built by the pharaohs, but that's a story for a little bit later. According to the Egyptians, Ma'at is the first judge in history, by way of this feather that she used. All Egyptian judges were referred to as priests of Ma'at, and you see this often with other professions such as doctors. They were really all just priests associating their professions with their respective gods. Ma'at's scale came to represent more than just the trials and tribulations one must endure to gain access to the afterlife. The scale came to represent the natural order and equilibrium in all things. So when the scales were out of balance, bad things happened, like hyksos, sea peoples, randomized flooding, amphibians, food coloring in the Nile, you name it. This scale idea was adopted by the Greeks and transformed into the scales of justice. You may be familiar with the depiction of a certain Greek goddess called Themis who was seen holding scales of justice, and Herodotus famously said that all Greek religion came from the Egyptians. See the stories of Deneus and Aegyptus, Io, the Iliad and the Odyssey for additional Greek-Egyptian connections. As far as our story is concerned, the spirit of Ma'at is one of balance, and the Egyptians saw justice as a balancing act. In the next nine or so videos, you're going to see what happens when the principles of Ma'at become diluted over time. That is the end of our weird mythology for now. There are a few themes going forward that you should pay attention to, though, and they are nicely articulated in something called The Tale of the Eloquent Peasant, a story that actually dates from the Middle Kingdom but has applicability for all of Egyptian history. The story is about a peasant who is traveling to a market with supplies loaded on a caravan of pack animals. A rather well-off landowner sees the peasant in his peasant caravan and connives to steal the goods and pack animals by way of trickery. The wealthy man derailed the caravan by forcing it onto his land by way of a roadblock. You see, what you have here is, picture you have a road going through the middle, you have a river on one side, and you have the landowner's field on another side. What the landowner did is that he placed a piece of expensive cloth over the roadway. So, the peasant had essentially a bimodal choice. Either he could shrodden the expensive linen of this landowner and have to pay him damages for damaging his personal property, or he could take the risk of driving his pack animals through the landowner's field of barley. The peasant decided to drive his caravan through the landowner's barley field. And what happens when you introduce pack animals to barley? They eat it! And that's exactly what happened here, very predictably. The landowner now asserted that the peasant owed him damages for damaging his crops, and as punishment for the trespass, took ownership of the caravan, the pack animals, and all of its contents. Obviously, this is a very unfair punishment because the peasant was trapped. When the peasant pleaded this injustice to the landowner, it fell on deaf ears, so the peasant escalated his case to the high steward. The high steward then sent the case to the magistrate judges, or so we're told. These magistrate judges were likely just a local assembly of knowable persons or what have you that would hear cases. When they reviewed the case of this peasant, they said that he had no redress. They dismissed his case outright, he had no argument, his animals ate the rich man's barley, and the poor man, although he had the right to complain, did not have any sort of legal remedy. The peasant, though, continued to bemoan this injustice, and in very simple and eloquent terms, appealed again to the high steward. This time, the high steward went to the pharaoh. Now, the high steward seems to have been impressed by the peasant's eloquent speech, and so the pharaoh instructed the high steward to pretty much ignore everything that the peasant was saying so that his scribes could record his speeches. In the succeeding nine days, the poor man made plea after plea after plea for justice. The peasant implored the high steward not to use the fact that the peasant was a peasant against him, and asked him not to be tempted by the bribes of the rich landowner. The peasant begged the high steward to be impartial, and to rule based on truth. He wasn't arguing law here, he was arguing for fairness and justice, and what those words in comportance with the principles of Mott really meant. He was a peasant who was scammed out of his means of making a living, and he, although poor, deserved the matter to be righted without regard to his social class. This goes on and on, and the high steward keeps ignoring the peasant because of the pharaoh's instructions. In his last letter, the peasant becomes impatient, and he starts yelling at the high steward for doing nothing all this time, and ended up getting beaten by the high steward and his officials, and sent away. But the high steward had a change of heart. He relented, and sent some of his messengers or officials to chase after this newly beaten peasant, to bring him back and render his final judgment. In rendering his judgment, the high steward not only gave the peasant his property back, but also gave him all of the rich man's property, as well as the rich man himself, as a slave. Truth, fairness, justice, and balance. These are the themes not only underlying the law, but ancient Egyptian governance itself. In the next installation, we're going to be talking about the legal system and developments of pre-dynastic and old kingdom Egypt. Thank you for watching.