The Laws of Ancient Egypt- Part 3- The First Police and Early Court Procedure in the Middle Kingdom.

Part 3, The Beginning of the Middle Kingdom, The First Police, Law Enforcement, and Early Litigation Procedure. This is Part 3 of The Laws of Ancient Egypt, The Middle Kingdom. We last left off with Pharaoh Pepi II, an extremely old pharaoh who was much too frail to do really anything in his later years, ushering in an abrupt but predictable end to the 6th Dynasty of Egypt, and with it, the Old Kingdom. In total, it lasted about a thousand years. The era immediately succeeding the Old Kingdom was called the First Intermediate Period. Egypt was not united, and had several dynasties vying for control of it, along with some sandy interlopers and a lot of bronze swords carried by roving bands, dealing death and stealing the riches of the pyramids. Remember how tomb robbery is a capital crime? Well, there was nobody here to enforce any of the laws or rules of the time anyway, so they stole all of the good stuff. Do you know why exactly they stopped building the pyramids? Because it turned out that hiding a ton of gold and valuables, as well as your body necessary for your resurrection, in a giant, very noticeable and shiny triangle is a really bad idea if you want to keep your things and your body safe. But for our purposes, we need to focus on the divine order. We need to recognize that divine order was disrupted, and with it, justice, truth. And the result is a bunch of these nomarchs, leaders of districts called gnomes, they're essentially governors, gaining more power. As with the initial unification of Egypt, these decentralized states coalesced into northern and southern kingdoms, and they're deemed the 10th and 11th dynasties, respectively. The 10th dynasty was situated in the new capital of Heracleopolis, relocated from Memphis at the end of the Old Kingdom, and the 11th dynasty, starting with a bunch of pharaohs all named Inteph, was situated in Thebes. The 11th dynasty won. When Egypt was reunited under their rule, and under a man named Mentu-Hotep II, whose name literally means Mentu, the god of war, is pleased, these nomarchs maintained some of the independence and autonomy that they had gained over the past 200 years, although Mentu-Hotep and his progeny were still the undisputed gods on earth, and the strongmen responsible for protecting and imposing the divine order. Here's what we know about the status of the law at the time. The pharaoh is still the ultimate legal authority by default. His vizier, sometimes there are two, there's not a permanent north or south vizier, there's only one, was still the chief judge. The provincial courts now are run by the local nomarchs. Like in the Old Kingdom, there are but a few legalistic writings that exist. Most of the writings from the 11th dynasty that reunited Egypt talk about seemingly endless civil war and the reunification of the country. They were too preoccupied to do anything of legislative importance. The first legal-esque document from the Middle Kingdom comes from the reign of Mentu-Hotep IV of the 11th dynasty. Very little is known about his reign other than this inscription from the Wadi Hammamat, a dry riverbed stretching from the Nile Valley to the Red Sea that was very popular for mining and carrying back stone, that notes the vizier as the chief judge and chief of all nobles of judicial office. So now, although we don't know what exactly it is that they entailed or what they did, we have independent judicial offices where the vizier is now the overseer of all of them. Could this have been the case before? Yeah, maybe. But here, now we know it's a fact. Then comes the 12th dynasty, led by Pharaoh Amenemet, a usurper who, one, built the first real standing army in ancient Egypt, and two, reorganized property law. First we're going to talk about his new army, because that new army was the first formal police force in history. In the Old Kingdom, as well as the Intermediate Period, there were mercenaries who acted as police, normally Nubians or others referred to as Medjay if you wanted to look into it more. Naturally, these being mercenaries, they were subject to influence by bribery and really couldn't be relied on. Amenemet's army, which still included the Medjay as an elite policing force, was tasked with patrolling the borders, guarding royal tombs, and protecting the trade routes. They were empowered to arrest people and, if necessary, to bring them to court as bailiffs. It's worth noting that they were not concerned with peacekeeping in neighborhoods as we would imagine it. They wouldn't be in towns chasing down petty thieves or walking the beat. They only covered public areas and areas important to trade. The more local or petty issues were handled by the town leaders, and maybe the nomarch. We're going to get to criminal procedure later. Although we know that these soldiers acted as police, we don't have many examples of actual law enforcement methods during the Middle Kingdom. You could imagine that they, of course, conducted investigations, probably with the use of physical force, and that information was then provided to local governors to prosecute the case or to the judge who would also prosecute the case. We're going to detour a little bit here and do some time jumping. We know from later periods, namely the New Kingdom, that the police had very good training in endurance and interrogation. They employed canine assistants as deterrents and to alert guards of intruders. So you would just have dogs sitting in the Valley of the Kings, for instance, who would start barking if somebody was trespassing. The dogs were also noted to help apprehend evildoers. Much later in the Iron Age, so we're talking like the time of Alexander the Great, maybe after the Persian conquest, it's a period that I'm not covering in this series right now, they used monkeys to beat down thieves. So we obviously have the power to detain people, and in my mind, that means that we also need holding facilities. We need a jail. We know that they had jails. Sometimes they would be ad hoc holding cells, and they would commandeer a house or a temple or something and use that to hold the accused criminal. It seems like the trials proceeded rather quickly, but they didn't have jails in the context of a form of punishment. You wouldn't be sentenced to a prison, for instance, although there is a later reference to a great prison, which we really don't know much about. And also keep in mind here, prisons are expensive. It's much, much, much easier and much more resource efficient to just kill somebody or enslave them than it is to keep them in a dark room and feed them every day. Because of that, prisons are really a modern development. While it's possible that this happened in the Middle Kingdom, we don't have evidence of it until the New Kingdom, the police also served a judicial enforcement role, exacting punishments as ordered by the court and collecting judgments, although they were noted to be ineffective sometimes because, let's face it, in ancient Egypt, before your cars had chips in it and you had cell phones that were tracking your every move, it was much easier to disappear than it is today. So these police under Amenemhet and later pharaohs fell under the jurisdiction of the vizier, who would appoint a chief of police. Specifically, we know that he appointed the chief of the Medjay. I'm just expanding it a little bit. There are some references to the temple guards being appointed by the priests, but they're still answerable to the vizier, mostly because the vizier is the representative of Mott, everybody wants fairness in law enforcement, in state administration, etc. If you watched the last video, you may remember the story of Uni, who was appointed by Pharaoh Pepe I to investigate a conspiracy led by one of his wives. The pharaoh had appointed Uni to handle the case specifically, sidestepping the vizier, and perhaps it was because he wanted a degree of separation from the prosecution and some plausible deniability, or to avoid the appearance of a conflict of interest. The motivation isn't clear. What is clear is that even in the Middle Kingdom, which is several hundred years later, the judge was the prosecutor and would hear the defendant's defense by questioning him or her very diligently. After conducting the inquiry and reviewing any evidence obtained by the police, which could include statements of culpability or physical evidence, he would render his opinion. One could glean a conflict of interest here, since the vizier or governor was the prosecutor, the judge, the jury, and the executioner, as well as sometimes the torturer. Remember that there's no lawyers, and that the vizier does much of the questioning himself. These defendants, these accused, are all speaking on their own behalf. This kind of sounds like a kangaroo court, but it seems like they took it seriously and it all goes back to judges being prophets of mot and being expected to deal fairly and honestly so as to secure their own entry into the afterlife. The religious demand for honesty also fell on the parties, meaning the accusers, the accused, and anyone who testified on their behalf. This is a time before lie detector tests were a thing, which by the way are generally inadmissible evidence in modern law. Winston Churchill had said in his History of the English-Speaking Peoples that there were three ways that people resolved disputes before England blessed the world with its court system. That is the oath, the duel, and the ordeal. The duel came about later, and the ordeal, although an ancient custom in Mesopotamia, was not a thing in Egypt. That leaves the oath. Witnesses, as they are today, were expected to swear oaths to tell the truth, the whole truth, and nothing but the truth. There were punishments for perjury, although it's unclear what they are. Most scarily for most, though, was the risk of being condemned or deprived of the afterlife by way of being convicted of a lie under oath. Remember that heart-eating crocodile goddess? Yeah, she's a real threat. We know that judges could also compel witnesses, so say that you're either in a civil case or you're a criminal defendant, the judge would sometimes ask you to bring people forward. Let me know who is going to be able to corroborate your story so that I can hear them. It's well settled as a judicial practice from the Old Kingdom onward that judges could require you to come up with witnesses to corroborate your story before allowing the case to proceed. One case that we had says that the judge asked for three witnesses to attest under oath that the plaintiff or the defendant's asserted facts were true. We know how this worked. The oath was written by the court and sent to the witnesses by a messenger. It's essentially a subpoena, and in return, the witnesses would certify the story under oath. If they failed to certify the story or they refused to do so for fear of perjury, the judge would automatically rule in favor of the other party. Assuming that they did answer, upon hearing the witnesses, including the accused, the judge would render his decision, but never before having heard the party's prejudicial instructions issued by the viziers. For bigger crimes, think tomb robbery, murder, etc., if the vizier or pharaoh did not hear the case itself, the criminal proceedings and the sentencing were bifurcated, with the vizier or the pharaoh handing down the sentence since the punishment for the more serious crimes was more severe, mainly death. Appeals do not appear to have been a thing, absent some new evidence or strong indication that the judge had gotten it all wrong. Breasted notes that there is one example of a written brief somewhere in Berlin from the Old Kingdom, which is an appeal to the king in a probate case. I couldn't find it, or at least couldn't find a translation. So to me, there were no extant examples of any sort of appeal, including a criminal appeal. Perhaps during sentencing, maybe, if the pharaoh or the vizier was hearing the sentencing, an accused could have a second bite at the apple if the god king wished it, but that's me speculating because there's no evidence of that ever having happened. One of my favorite anecdotes from much later is what they would do to the names of defendants. Nowadays, if you're charged with a crime, your case, depending on where you live, let's say in the US, is titled State vs. So-and-So or The People vs. So-and-So. The famous New Kingdom harem conspiracy involved a defendant who was nicknamed, this wasn't And that ends my detour for now with law enforcement and early court practice. Things change a lot in the New Kingdom, so don't assume that everything I just said was a constant. It's not. We know much more about New Kingdom court procedure, which I'm going to discuss in a future video. In the next video, we're going to return to the historical timeline, to the Middle Kingdom, and talk about property, taxation, and contracts.