The Laws of Ancient Egypt- Part 2- Predynastic to Old Kingdom Egypt.

Part 2. Predynastic and Old Kingdom Egypt. We are now exiting the world of myth and entering into the dimly remembered early days of Ancient Egypt. Most of the actual law, if you want to call it that, that we have comes from the New Kingdom some 2,000 years after this, but we're going to need to work our way up to that with some helpful background information and context. The Old Kingdom of Egypt began with a man named Narmer, also called Menes, who was the first pharaoh of both Upper and Lower Egypt in around 3100 BC. Now we need to talk some geography. Upper Egypt is actually Southern Egypt. Lower Egypt is really Northern Egypt, where the Nile Delta is. Why? Because the Nile flows from south to north, and the Nile is the lifeblood of Egypt. It was, and is, a constant. In these early times, it would overflow its banks annually, depositing minerals into the surrounding soil, making it extremely fertile. The annual inundation was predictable, and the predictability meant stability and safety, that in conjunction with the weather, which was also constant. The desert, on the other hand, was inhospitable and full of death. These early inhabitants also inferred other lands that had to rely on unreliable and unpredictable rains. To those who lived in Kem, what they called Egypt, it was a perfect place of harmony and balance, a harmony and balance represented by the goddess and principles of Maat that I discussed in the last video. These constants constitute a divine order, and it was incumbent upon the future pharaohs to maintain that order. Consequently, Ancient Egypt as a whole, not just the Old Kingdom, was a very conservative and somewhat xenophobic society, and for good reason, because you'll see that in time, when divine order is disrupted or there's major change, Egypt collapses. Now before Norma, there was no Egypt or unified government or order, but there were people, cities, and many small kingdoms. Anything pre-Norma is called the pre-dynastic period. From about 4000 to 3100 BC, several kingdoms and independent states developed a common culture and slowly coalesced into something resembling a people, even if not politically, it was by and large an agrarian society with a bunch of local rulers. In the delta, we have the Maati culture, which resided in Budo and near Cairo. In the south resided some people called the Nakata culture. Now in the time period that we're talking about, the latest iteration of the Nakata progeny started developing hieroglyphs and ultimately displaced the Maati culture and others. Despite the growing cultural uniformity though, the north and south division remains something that you're going to see in Egypt until the time of Cleopatra. There's always a ceremonial capital like Memphis in northern Egypt, that's modern day Cairo, or Thebes in southern Egypt, like a modern day Luxor. Today we know a lot more about upper Egypt than lower Egypt, something that's true for really most of Egyptian history. The reason for that is mainly geography. Upper Egypt, that is southern Egypt, is drier. Lower Egypt, closer to the delta, has a high water table, so a lot of the archaeological evidence and possible records sunk into the mud and got covered up by silt. We don't have that problem in the south. So in 3100 BC or thereabouts, in comes Narmer, who was called the first pharaoh of united Egypt. Narmer was the culmination of the cultural amalgamation and steady imposition of a unified order that took place in the preceding 1000 years. In the immediate 100 or so years prior to his ascension, upper Egypt, that is the south, rapidly unified. The unification then spread northward towards the delta into lower Egypt. Now that's not to say that it was peaceful and that the people naturally united, but when unity was imposed on them, they were able to tolerate one another. Now, do you remember the story of Horus defeating Set? That myth represents the unification of both halves of Egypt in its own way. In the myth, Horus won out, and in reality, his physical manifestation on earth, Horn Narmer, the fierce catfish of Horus, united the two Egypts. In this way, the pharaoh was considered a god on earth. And you see, that is why there are no written laws. You don't need written laws when you have a literal god living amongst you. Every utterance of the pharaoh itself is a divine decree. Later pharaohs would write down their decrees in edicts, but until then, there were no written law codes like there were in Mesopotamia or Hatti. I think that there's another reason for this though, and it's a much more practical one. No pharaoh, who himself was a god on earth, would acknowledge the written laws of a prior king. When you look at it that way, it makes much more sense why nobody ever bothered to write anything down, because nobody was going to abide by it after you're dead. So this then begs the question of how do we know anything about what the laws were or how the legal system functioned? It's simple. Ancillary evidence. And that's why this series took me so long to make, because I had to read all these freaking things to glean exactly how the legal system functioned. So we're beginning here with the first dynasty. Norma is the king of the first dynasty, as I said, and just for your knowledge, dynasties are groups of rulers with a common origin, family ties or otherwise. We have very little in the way of law from the first two dynasties. In fact, the identity of Norma himself is subject to some debate. We do know that the first dynasty lasted 210 years, which is almost as long as America has existed. The second dynasty lasted another 204 years. So we're beginning with 400 years of total legal darkness. We then come to the third and fourth dynasties, which is where we start getting some text that sheds some light on how it is things worked. The third dynasty saw pyramid building in its infancy. There was a guy named Djoser who was the first to build something resembling a pyramid. The fourth dynasty pharaohs, some of whom you might know, named Sneferu, Khufu, and Khafre, perfected the practice. And despite what Joe Rogan says about aliens having built the pyramids, we know that the earliest kings were buried under mastabas. Djoser then stacked a bunch of them on top of each other, creating a step pyramid. And then Sneferu had the bright idea of just filling in the gaps in between the steps and making it into a big pointy triangle. That is the origin of the pyramid, full stop. Religiously, they were, essentially, resurrection machines. So Sneferu, the guy who decided that he was going to fill in the gaps in between the steps and create an actual pyramid, had an administrator of the delta region, Lower Egypt, named Methin. Someone wrote a biography for him. It first says that he became a governor and then was appointed a judge. It doesn't say where. He later became governor of additional provinces as time went on and his career grew. And at the end of his biography is a long list of offices that he held, including field judge. Every time he's mentioned as a judge, he's also mentioned as being the governor of the same province. So it's clear that at least in the third dynasty, there was no dedicated judiciary. Judicial power instead rested in the hands of the local government officials, exercising judicial functions alongside their official duties. We know tangentially that these local governors or judges, whatever you want to call them, were grouped into six great courts, which is a phrase that you're going to often and it's unclear what exactly the great courts entailed. It's more of a ceremonial title when they're used in these sorts of inscriptions. Someone granted judicial powers, including Methin, would also carry the title judge of Nekin or attached to Nekin, a title which remains constant throughout the entirety of ancient Egypt. One such governor, not Methin, another guy, put something on his tomb wall saying that he never judged two brothers in such a way as to deprive his son of his paternal possession. The fourth dynasty, to which Sneferu belonged, is also where we have the first will in recorded history. The will was written by Prince Nekere, son of King Khafre, the pyramid builder. By the time it was written, King Khafre had already reigned for some 24 years, so it's safe to assume that Prince Nekere was also getting up there in age and thought it prudent to create his last will and testament. Luckily for us, the will has survived in its entirety. What's amazing about it is that in the 5,000 years that have passed since then, wills have really changed little, if at all. His will starts by listing out all of the prince's beneficiaries. It notes in its introduction that he makes the following commands whilst living upon his two feet and without ailing in any respect, meaning that he's of a sound body and mind. And he assigned, excuse me, he assigned a town or district, 14 of them, split amongst his six beneficiaries. He gave most of them to his wife, so clearly he was a very rich man. Eventually, Nekere becomes king. Herodotus, calling him King Meiserinus, son of Khefren, Khafre, called him the most just pharaoh in all of Egyptian history, always ensuring justice was done, so much so that even in 500 BC, the Egyptians were worshipping his fairness and mentioning his name. He was said to have heard cases, and in cases where people lost but had good intentions, he would give them rewards out of his own estate, almost as consolation prize. And there's really no reason not to believe Herodotus' report, because how else would he know about this thousands of years after the fact? The fourth dynasty also gives us another post-mortem instruction document. It's drafted during Menkaure's reign by an unnamed official. In addition to having your last will and testament, you also needed to provide for your tomb after you passed away. It wasn't enough just to build a tomb like you would purchase a burial plot in a cemetery today. These days, we generally believe that the body becomes useless upon death and that the spirit, depending on your religious persuasion of course, ascends to some glorious or fiery eternal resting place, the body and the spirit being distinct and divisible entities upon death. In ancient Egypt, you still had the division between the body and the spirit, but the spirit had multiple aspects. The Ba is your personality, for lack of a better term, and the Ka is your body double. It's the essence of life. Your Ba is pictured as having wings, but it has your face, so just imagine yourself as a bird with your human head, and it's mobile. The wings represent mobility, so the Ba is able to glide between the two worlds and generally will return to the body, the mummified body, at night until resurrection. The Ka is attached to the body. What's important for our purposes is that the Ka and the Ba need the preserved or mummified body in order to persist, and as such, they need sustenance. How do you obtain sustenance when you're dead? You endow your tomb with funds to employ tomb keepers, priests, workers, whoever, to supply offerings to your body and, in that way, your spirit. This is a hereditary position, so these tomb workers would pass down the tomb keeping from generation to generation to generation, so long as the endowment persisted, or at least, that was the idea. So what we have here is essentially a contract between the living person at that time and those who he's contracting to upkeep his tomb for the rest of eternity. In this case of this unnamed official, King Menkaure provided an endowment to the official, who he clearly liked in some capacity, to operate the official's tomb, and the endowment consisted of entire towns. The introduction to the document, this contract, whatever you want to call it, sets forth the endowment made by King Menkaure. Then there are some interesting provisions, or at least I think they're interesting. The official says that his beneficiaries of his actual estate are not to touch any piece of the endowment that is intended to fund his tomb. Furthermore, the mortuary priest's interest in the endowment is transferable to others, but is otherwise inalienable, except to allow it to pass to their children, as I noted earlier. If any priest violated any provision of the endowment, the property intended to fund the endowment would be taken from him. There is also a clause, which is kind of difficult to make out, but it appears to say that if a mortuary priest sues another mortuary priest who has failed to comply with the endowment, that the suing priest, the plaintiff, would have the endowment stripped from him and transferred to the defendant priest. What this provision does is it effectively renders a lawsuit over the endowment fruitless, so the endowment is immune from lawsuits in perpetuity. What this tells me is that you clearly have a court system in place and a system for adjudicating these sorts of post-mortem contract disputes. I couldn't imagine that this was a novel when it was written by this official, because today, wills and contracts require magic words and phrases, things that make them operate legally. This document reads as if it's chock full of them, and it contains enough contingencies and foresees enough future issues that the scribes of the time had to have been working off of templates. They must have had examples of other documents. We have another example of such a document from the 5th dynasty, which ended in 2345 BC. It's 800 years after King Narmer, where an official named Nekene described a similar document detailing the transfer of land endowments for his tomb, and it contains many of the same clauses, including the initial endowment, the transfer provisions, the immunity from suit, etc., reinforcing that the contents of these endowment documents and judicial remedies attached thereto were well established very early in ancient Egypt's history. In looking at these, one can't help but wonder what the role of a lawyer would have been in ancient Egypt. To make it easy for you, it doesn't look like they existed at all. Recall the tale of the eloquent peasant, for example. You have this lowly-born individual who fought for justice on his own behalf, and the officials listened to him, as well as his landowner opponent, who was also unrepresented. The judges were able to reach a verdict without the help of legal professionals. Unlike in later England, champions didn't exist. Unlike in Greece and Rome, you didn't have orators. Given the principles of truth and justice to be enforced by a god on earth, i.e. those of Mott, there's really no need to hire a person to persuade a mere immortal of the merits of your case. The gods, or those acting in his name vis-a-vis the pharaoh, were deciding your case. Now, the remaining writings from the 4th and 5th dynasties that we have take the form of tomb inscriptions, which contain some items of legal relevance, save for one which I'll mention after these two examples of texts. We know from these early texts that tomb robbery is a crime against the gods based on the language in the inscriptions saying that those who defile tombs are subject to judgment. I'm reading this as being subject to capital punishment. They also reference titles. When you died, you would typically put a laundry list of all the things you did in your life on your tomb wall. In this case, the vizier, the prime minister of Egypt for lack of a better term, is referred to as chief judge among his many titles in the 5th dynasty, so there were clearly governors. You have nomarchs, who were more local officials. They have judicial power, but you have the vizier, who's the chief judge, who's hearing the big cases. And then, on a level all of its own, you have the pharaoh, who's the god-king on earth and is essentially the boss judge who could hear any cases he pleased. The most important inscription that we have from the 5th dynasty is from a vizier. He's named Pahotep, and his name means Ta is pleased. He is the earliest recorded flesh-and-blood legal philosopher and wrote one of the oldest books, if not the first, in history. The book is one that's a series of maxims. He was a very old man, and his son was going to succeed him to the viziership. So, to help his heir, he devised this 18-page book written in a form not dissimilar to Marcus Aurelius' Meditations, but a series of thoughts on different subjects, and most importantly for our purposes, the role of a judge. He says this, Great is Motte and its foundation is firmly established. It has not been shaken since the time of Osiris, and he who violates the laws must be punished. With respect to acting as a judge If you are a man of authority, be patient when you are listening to the words of a petitioner. Do not dismiss him until he has completely unburdened himself. A man who has been wrong desires to express his frustrations, even more so than the accomplishment of justice for which he came. But concerning him who dismisses petitioners, men say, Why did he ever reject it? Not everything about which he has petitioned will be done, but a sympathetic hearing is a means of calming the heart. Stated differently, the opportunity for someone to have their day in court sometimes means more than actually getting what it is they were seeking from the lawsuit. Now, the lines are full of wisdom, I encourage you to read, there's copies of translations online, but my favorite line from the entire thing has nothing to do with the law, it says, If you desire friendship and enter the house of another, stay away from the women therein, as no good ever comes of such things. He truly was a wise man. So the so-called Old Kingdom lasted another thousand years, it lasted a thousand years in total I should say, until 2100 BC. So far we're in the 2300s BC, down from 3100 BC. The Old Kingdom came to an end in 2100 BC with the Sixth Dynasty. If you look at a legal history of the United States for instance, just for example, say from 1920 to 1950, a meek 30 years, you could fill several hundred volumes of books and make videos for ages. Here we have a thousand years where we really don't have much of anything. What I've discussed so far is the extent of what we currently know that took place in that thousand years. We know little else about how judges or litigation procedure worked other than their mere existence. It's not a total loss though, we have a very valuable inscription from the Sixth Dynasty right before the Old Kingdom collapsed. The inscription was by a man named Uni. He served as an official under three kings, King Teti, King Pepi I, and King Menere. The inscription walks us through his entire career, and it begins as follows. I was a child who fastened on the girdle under the majesty of Teti. My office is that of supervisor, and I filled the office of inferior custodian of the pharaoh. Pepi I then came to power and promoted Uni to be a judge of the Nekin court. Now Uni wasn't a vizier. This is the first reference we have to a dedicated judge and a dedicated court. Now for context, Nekin is also called Hierakonopolis in the records, which is just south of a modern-day Luxor. In his new role as judge, Uni heard cases with the vizier in the name of and a bunch of other bodies that really aren't important to us. What's important is that we know that Uni is now the third highest judge in Egypt, with the pharaoh coming in first, the vizier second, and Uni third. Early in his employ as a judge, the pharaoh assigned him a very sensitive task to prosecute one of his wives, one of the queens. He was instructed to lead the prosecution of the queen alone, without the help of the vizier, the prince, or any other member of the royal house, including the pharaoh. He notes in his tomb inscription that he, with the help of another inferior judge of Nekin, dealt with this case. Sadly, he doesn't tell us what the outcome of the case was, and that makes me kind of sad because the prosecution of a harem conspiracy would have made for some great reading. His tomb inscription goes on to say that after hearing the harem conspiracy case, he was loved by the pharaoh. He was appointed as a general, attacked Nubi, and southern Canaan. By the way, the Israel and Palestine debate is totally irrelevant here because neither of those names or people existed yet, so it's going to be Canaan. But what we know is that Uni continued to be a military man and a governor, up to the next pharaoh, Menerae. The last king of the old kingdom was Pepi II, Menerae's successor. I don't have any good legal-esque text from Pepi II's reign, but there is a funny story about midgets, and I'm going to include it here because it's entertaining. Pepi II ruled for a long time, as long as 90 years, so he necessarily came to power as a child. One of the officials attached to the household of his father was named Harkouf. Harkouf made several journeys south to Nubia in a land called Punt, under the rule of Menerae, and earned the early days of Pepi II's rule. At some point, baby pharaoh Pepi II heard about a dancing dwarf in Punt and instructed Harkouf to bring it back to him in the following letter. We have a copy of the letter. Come northward to the court immediately. Thou shalt bring this dwarf with thee, which thou bringest living, prosperous, and healthy from the land of spirits, for the dances of the god to rejoice and gladden the heart of the king of upper and lower Egypt, who lives forever. When he goes down with thee into the vessel, appoint excellent people who shall be beside him on each side of the vessel, lest he fall into the water. When he sleeps at night, appoint excellent people who shall sleep beside him in his tent and inspect it ten times a night. My majesty desires to see this dwarf more than any the fits of Sinai and Punt. If thou arrivest at the court, this dwarf being alive with thee, prosperous and healthy, my majesty will do for thee a great thing according to the harsh desire of my majesty to see this dwarf. As it turns out, Harkouf did bring the dwarf, and the baby king was so happy that Harkouf, probably in the same way that a parent keeps his child's kindergarten letters and notes, had the story inscribed on his tomb wall. Now we return to the historical timeline. As I said earlier, Pepe II lived and ruled for what some say to have been for 90 years, others say 64, but it's still a lot of years. Let us now engage in a thought exercise. If you take a look at the American ruling political class, tell me if you see any of them leading anybody into battle. Mitch? Chuck? You're not inspired? Neither were the Egyptians under Pepe II. In a cascade of events that surprises absolutely nobody in hindsight, Egypt's military might atrophied and the old kingdom collapsed a short time later, ushering in the First Intermediate Period. Do you remember all the nonsense about divine order and mod I was talking about earlier? This is the undoing of all of that. The chaos of the First Intermediate Period, which is attested to by later writings lamenting the presence of Asiatics and Bedouin in major cities, the moving of the capital from Memphis to Heracleopolis, the supplanting of Horus by Ra, the sun god, the looting of the pyramids, and a mess of kings and warlords, was the exact opposite of divine order. Pepe II was either too old or too impotent to continue to impose divine order. Change, the enemy of a conservative people, upended the social, political, and religious orders. The result was a 200-year dark age which was not conducive to anything other than subsistence-level survival in civil wars. When we pick up again, we will discuss the rebuilding of Egypt during the 11th dynasty and the new legal institutions of the Middle Kingdom.