The Laws of Ancient Egypt- Part 6- The Beginning of the New Kingdom, Slavery, and Royal Sucession

Part 6. The Early New Kingdom. A New Court System, Slavery, and Succession. In this chapter, I present to you the New Kingdom of Egypt. That is not what the Egyptians called it, they just called it now. This is where our understanding of law, crimes, civil and criminal procedure, matters concerning the family, and matters concerning property really come to life. When most people think of ancient Egypt, they think of Cleopatra, who came some 1500 years after what it is I'm about to talk about. Luckily, you already know a lot about this period, or at least you know the main players, even if you think you don't. This is the time of the famous pharaohs. Queen Hatshepsut, Akhenaten, his wife, Nefertiti, and their son, King Tut, you may have also heard of Ramses the Great. The period is also famous for a certain group of Canaanite bricklayers, people claiming to be the descendants of the Hyksos, now called Habiru, who helped build a new capital at the city of Ramses the Great, but we have to do some work to get there. This portion of the series is going to focus a lot on specific people and their contributions to the Egyptian legal system. Let us start where we left off at the end of the 17th Dynasty. The dynastic and the ethnic chaos of the Second Intermediate Period came to an end thanks to two brothers, Kamos and Amos. Like his father 2nd Inrei, who was killed campaigning against the Hyksos, Kamos also tried to dislodge them and failed. He was unalived in the process. His younger brother Amos, some say his son, deposed the Hyksos around 1500 BC and reunited Egypt again, which ushered in a golden age of civilization. He didn't stop with the reunification though. In what could probably best be classified as a revenge tour, he struck as far north as Syria, exacting revenge for the eight generations of chaos wrought by the Asiatic invader. He then doubled back and attacked Nubia simply because he could. The explosive ascent of Amos, sped along probably by the adaptation of the Hyksos chariot, is considered the start of the glorious 18th Dynasty. It's worth noting here that the Hyksos, the 14th and 15th Dynasties respectively, did not have any written laws. It's possible that they were illiterate, they had no writing at all. From what we could tell, it was either that, or they were so thoroughly erased a la Carthage that their records were consigned to the ashtray of history, never to be seen again. But let's talk about Amos. After reunifying everything, Amos needed to start from scratch. Aside from some loyal nomarchs in a place called El Kab, Egypt had essentially lost its entire ruling class, including judges, scribes, and pretty much the entire upper echelon of society. The result of that is that the entirety of the state now belonged directly to the pharaoh due to the utter decimation of property records, boundary markers, and the land of gentry. Sadly for us, we don't have any government records from Amos. What we do have, though, is the biography of another guy named Amos, noted to be son of Abana, who talks about the reunification war and the campaign of the pharaoh Amos. This is a great time to talk about something that hasn't yet come up in our legal history. Slavery. The movies always show an Egyptian official with a whip hitting slaves, normally Jews, as they build the pyramids. You should know now that that characterization is a complete lie because the pyramids were built 1500 years before people who could even be considered the progenitors of the Jews even existed. It's also wrong because slavery in a modern slave trade sense was not a thing in ancient Egypt at any point in the old, middle, or new kingdoms. What makes this confusing is that the Egyptians didn't have a word for slave, although many translations of the hieroglyphs use the English word slave to denote some kind of indentured servitude or forced laborer status. What we know is that forced labor and loss of status, which is conflated as slavery, could be imposed as a punishment in certain cases as justice required, such as in the Tale of the Eloquent Peasant. There's also well-documented instances of penal colonies around this time. Debt slavery, as it existed in Mesopotamia, was not a thing in Copper or Bronze Age Egypt either, although self-sale and self-sale of daughters to pay a debt appears to have been a thing. The two scant references that we have to traditional debt slavery, meaning kidnapping, that do exist come from the Hellenistic Age. The biography of Amo, son of Abana, makes clear that when he campaigned, he was rewarded for taking hands, that's the cutting off of hands of the people that he killed, in gold by the pharaoh. In the third battle to take the Hyksos capital of Avaris, he took a captive and was given double gold. When Avaris was eventually captured, he participated and he took captive one man and three women, all of whom were gifted to him by the pharaoh. The translation calls them slaves. He gathered no less than four other female slaves on additional campaigns that he went on in the future. The man lived for a ridiculously long time. I think he campaigned under another two or three pharaohs. It was also noted that he was gifted land for his heroism. But with regard to slavery as a legal institution, here's what I was able to gather. Ethnically Egyptian slaves, so to speak, were normally criminals and had done something wrong so as to be forced into involuntary servitude. It seems that upon being sentenced, they were assigned a debt and once their book was balanced, once they worked off the debt, they could be released. So it's essentially a prison term or a probation term. By contrast, foreign captives noted by Amo son of Abana and in other inscriptions, aka prisoners of war, were property of the state. The pharaoh himself could dole out the prisoners for use in people's households as gifts or even on loan. That's one option. The other option is they could be used in state-sponsored building projects, something that we're going to come back to in three videos. Whether the status of a foreign captive was hereditary, I can't say. That's all I have on slavery, at least for now. This new Egypt born out of the centuries of war was a military state. There's no question about it. It was not the Egypt of old. We have several other biographies around this time noting long campaigns and military accomplishments. Where the prior nobles were more concerned with justice and their good deeds, these early new kingdom gentry only cared for their military valor and the government functioned accordingly. To the extent that the god-king didn't have enough power already, all power, including legal, was cemented in the wearer of the two crowns. He needed help though. So far, the vizier, the chief judge, head of police, etc. was a single office manned by a single person with a few exceptions. I noted earlier that, you know, sometimes you would have two viziers, but 90% of the time there was one. The task of rebuilding Egypt was so great that the 18th dynasty saw the permanent imposition of a double viziership. You have one in the north and you have one in the south. The southern appears to have been superior to the north, but I'm not going to get into that right now. In addition to the need to re-establish law and order, there was also a need to re-establish religion. You have a bunch of temples, each worshiping a specific god and in turn performing specific activities. What you have are doctors or really priests of the house of life, for example, were newly reorganized under either one of the So now we have the vizier as the head of the church. Tax collection resumed via traditional methods, the nihilometer, and property, thoroughly disrupted by generations of war and death, was doled out to nobles and towns by the pharaoh for further local divisions. Property ownership, as it was in the Middle Kingdom, we were talking about private property ownership, people having pride in their land, even if they were serfs, now turned more officially into a serfdom. There is really much less of a question of who really owned the land. That brings us to trying to jumpstart the justice system. During the civil wars in the intermediate period, each king dealt with the problems of his own limited territory, like Nebkhefre-Intef and his sentencing of the traitor Teti. These two new viziers were the ultimate judicial officials, because the land is much greater. It's worth noting that the six great courts and a body called the Southern Tens, which were judicial bodies referenced in the Old and Middle Kingdoms, almost as ceremonial titles, completely ceased to exist. Instead, what you have are the pharaoh and his two viziers rebuilding the political class from scratch. The documents that appoint these people to the positions of nomarch, etc., contain the principles of motte, so you still have the judges that are styled as priests of motte, attached to neck, and member of the six great courts of the Southern Tens, even though they didn't exist, the title was still there. But the institutional knowledge of the Middle Kingdom, the practical legal knowledge, was lost. To put it differently, these new kingdom courts wore the same clothing as those in the Middle Kingdom, but aside from outward appearances and titles, they bore no true resemblance to the Middle Kingdom institutions of the same name. And the degree of change between the two broadens as time goes on, as we're going to see. Right now, at least, during the reign of Amos, these new developments, the new judiciary, the new priesthood, the new government officials, it was all in its infancy. When we return to them in a few generations, they will have fully matured, complete with intricate court procedures and rules. So now we return to the historical timeline. Amos's heir was his son, Amenhotep I. His reign is just as poorly attested as his father's. From what we know, he kept things together, which is something, but there's really nothing juicy there. His heir was Thutmose I, who was a major military man who spent much of his reign attacking Nubia and Canaan. He had a daughter, the famous queen Hatshepsut. Now let's talk about succession, because that's a somewhat legal thing. Much like their laws, for some reason, the Egyptians never recorded how succession worked. It's not like in England, where you could wipe out a thousand members of the royal family and still you would know exactly who the If you wanted to be pharaoh, you had to marry the daughter of the current pharaoh or somebody in the royal bloodline. If you were the crown prince, born into the male line of the pharaoh, you would often be married to your sister to give you legitimacy. That's why the pharaohs had sibling marriages. It wasn't because they wanted to keep the bloodline pure, although, you know, that may have been a justification later on. It's because in order for you to become king, you need a wife of royal descent. It was for this reason that Egyptian princesses were forbidden to marry rulers of other nations, because under Egyptian inheritance law, a foreigner could claim the pharaonic house. See Amenhotep III for a good example. The example is one of a letter that he sent to another king saying, no, I'm not giving you my daughter to marry. As a result of this, women, especially in the New Kingdom period, have a lot of power and influence. While we're on the topic of women, we might as well talk about marriage for a little while. I'm going to do a separate video on family and marriage, and we're going to keep this brief. But marriage wasn't as concrete as it was today. Pharaohs, as alluded to by the existence of a harem conspiracy, had multiple wives. They had the harem. You'll see during the Amarna period that some of these marriages, they were diplomatic. But the pharaoh was noted to have a great wife, who was essentially the queen, but they didn't have a word for queen. She was the great wife. She was the primary wife. But what happens when the great wife doesn't bear a son, but a lesser wife does? That's what happened with Hatshepsut. She was the daughter of the pharaoh, Thutmose I, and his great wife. But Thutmose did have a son with a concubine or a lesser wife. His name was Thutmose II. The way that they worked it out is that Hatshepsut was married to her half-brother, Thutmose II, to give him legitimacy as pharaoh. What's weird though, is that the whole thing happened again. Hatshepsut and Thutmose II had a daughter, no sons, but Thutmose II had a son with a lesser wife, Thutmose III. Thutmose II died young, around age 30, and Thutmose III, his son by the lesser wife, was only two years old. Now what do you do? Officially, Thutmose III became pharaoh, but under the regency of his aunt and stepmother, Hatshepsut. The arrangement lasted for some 22 years before Thutmose III in his own right. And the suspicion is, although there's nothing confirming this, is that Hatshepsut had a daughter of her own, and that what they did is they married Thutmose III to Hatshepsut's daughter to provide legitimacy for the pharaonic house. What's important to note here though, and what's interesting, is that during those 22 years of Hatshepsut styled herself as king. A female king, but a king nonetheless. She didn't make herself a queen. She said, no, I am the king. I'm just a woman. There are very few legal implications of her reign that we have, except for her ascension as a female pharaoh and the concept of matrilineal inheritance. As for her reign itself, she was mainly a builder, and she sent some famous expeditions down to Punt, etc. Her stepson, Thutmose III, is of major legal importance. When he takes the throne, he invades up to Syria every year for 18 years. In one of those instances, he fought at a place called Megiddo against Canaanite rebels. You're probably familiar with the name and the location of this battle because it's biblical Armageddon. The consequence of all of his campaigning means that he wasn't in Egypt a lot. His vizier was a man named Rekhmire, probably the southern vizier. On his tomb wall, he set forth his role as the chief judge and procedures in painstaking detail. Remember how I said earlier that we would revisit the judicial system in a few generations and we'll have fully matured? Here we are. Everything we know about law and procedure in ancient Egypt during the 18th dynasty comes from his tomb inscription. The introduction consists of a set of promises that the vizier has to make, kind of like an oath. He's exhorted to be legal, just, and impartial, and the readable portion of the introduction goes as follows. The petitioner of the south, the north, and the whole land shall come. Mayest thou see to it for thyself to do everything after that which is in accordance with the law. It is an abomination for God to show partiality. This is the teaching. Do not avoid a petitioner, nor nod thy head when he speaks. He who speaks a lie shall go forth according to his docket. Lo, thou shalt do thy office, and thou doest justice. It then goes on to describe those present in the court and the court itself, the daily operations of the court. The scribe of the vizier, a scribe of justice, one shall say of him. Now as for the hall wherein thou holdest hearings, there shall be a broad hall therein. He who dispenses justice before all the people, he is the vizier. Unfortunately, this part is fragmentary, but there are other instructions regarding how petitioners and accused criminals ought to be treated. It's just that we can't really make any sense of them. His tomb inscription continues setting forth the duties of the vizier and how court procedure in the great hall actually worked. Nowadays, we have judges who sit up front, and when the judge walks in, the bailiff says, all rise, and everybody stands up. Back then, the vizier is instructed to sit upon a chair with a rug on the floor and a dais upon it with a cushion under his back and another cushion under his feet. Instead of a gavel like our judges have, he carried a baton. When the petitioners entered, a group called the Magnates of the South, I'm not sure what that is, would stand. His scribe would stand on either side of him, and then the petitioners would have their cases heard one by one. This obviously requires the petitioners to come to the audience hall. Now, if they couldn't come, they could submit written petitions, but it's interesting to know that even those who came in person were required to submit their petitions in writing, the way that this work is attested to in the inscription. It appears that there were an army of scribes, because really only like 10 or 15 percent of ancient Egypt was literate, maybe 20 percent at best. These scribes, once everybody assembled to have an audience with the vizier, would work the crowd, filling out the petitions, and once they completed the petitions and forms, the police, that we mentioned earlier, better termed the bailiffs in this context, would have them form a line. The priority of hearing civil cases, at least, appears to be first come, first served. Now, it makes sense why you would have to go to the hall of the vizier to make your petition or write to the vizier. Remember how property deeds, contracts, and wills were all recorded by the vizier for taxation purposes in the Middle Kingdom? That practice resumed. The records were all in the Great Hall, in the vizier's archives, and they were readily available for review there by him. The vizier, as previously noted, also had the power to summon petitioners and summon other witnesses to his hall. So, let's say you submit a written petition, the vizier could review it and summon you saying, okay, it's time to hear your case, let's do this thing. Now, the vizier also set up lower local courts. Again, there's no career judges, really, in this time. It's all local governors and administrators. These local councils, made up of respected community members or priests, existed to handle easier cases, maybe petty theft, stupid things, you know, somebody threw a clay pot at their neighbor or something. They were recognized as having authority to hear cases by the vizier and their verdicts were given legal effect. We know that the vizier and the local courts sat simultaneously in the same cities because there were records of both the vizier's Great Hall and the local courts in Thebes and Memphis, the southern and northern capitals where the vizier sat, respectively. The jurisdictional split, how exactly the cases were divided between the courts, is unclear about this time. Andrea McDowell, as far as I could tell, an Egyptologist who's legally trained, wrote a great book about jurisdiction in Deir el-Medina, which was a work community. I'm going to get to that much later because that doesn't happen until the 20th Dynasty. For now, though, we don't know how the jurisdictional split worked. I would be apt to think that the matters involving documentary evidence, like, you know, the wills, the deeds, so on and so forth, would be heard by the vizier, whereas the other matters involving the more petty offenses, as I said, were handled by the local administrators. I think that's the case because Rekhmire's tomb inscription specifically provides for property cases, specifically property case procedure. When a more remote property case came before him, meaning one that isn't within the general vicinity of where he was sitting, the vizier would send a messenger to the land overseer of the local council in that territory and all property disputes, as a consequence, were automatically stayed, which is really interesting. That is, they were paused to maintain the status quo. So let's say your neighbor starts building a grain storage facility on what you claim is your land. You write a petition to the vizier, and the vizier would send a messenger who would, one, investigate, and two, would put a stay in place saying, okay, well, you neighbor need to stop building this grain facility until we have time to investigate this matter. This appears to have taken some time because the stay period that's in the inscription is two months. If the land at issue was close to the Great Hall and the petitioners could appear in person, the stay was much shorter. It was only three days, meaning that they wanted to get to the bottom of this quickly. You didn't have to rely on messengers to go back and forth with instructions. Criminal matters were handled differently with a set schedule. The vizier appears to have dealt with criminal cases throughout his province, north or south, and not just cases local to the capital. The police, who again were acting as bailiffs, would bring the jailed suspects in for their hearings. The vizier recorded every aspect of the criminal hearing via scribe. The vizier would then question the accused. If the accused could disprove the accusation, say by alibi, then he would be let go and his charge would not be recorded. If he failed to disprove it, or let's say there's witnesses that say, actually, no, we saw him do this, then the charge would be entered into the criminal docket, which means that it would then be set down for sentencing. If for some reason the criminal case was listed to be heard that day, but the accused was held in a place referred to as the Great Prison, I mentioned this earlier, we don't know what that is, but if he was there and he was unavailable to come to court, the case would be re-docketed for hearing at a later date. Now, these are the principles of Mott Manifest. It's essentially due process. We're not going to charge or sentence this guy until we have a chance to hear him. Now, in cases involving the pharaonic households, the vizier is instructed in Rekhmire's inscription to create an ad hoc court. It doesn't say why, but this appears to have been a constant throughout Egyptian history whenever the king's household was at concern. Uni, back under the Pharaoh Pepi I, who I discussed in my third video, was appointed as a special judge by the pharaoh to handle the harem conspiracy. My inclination is to believe that this was to preserve the appearance of impartiality. This text is a treasure because it shows plainly, and with pictures no less, how appealing to the courts of justice worked for petitioners on a day to day basis. We're coming up on 25 minutes and people don't seem to like when my videos get too long, so I'm going to cut this short for now, but when we pick up again, we're going to discuss the lead up to the heretic pharaoh, the resulting religious and social collapse, the erasure of both the heretic pharaoh and King Tut from history, and the beginning of written Egyptian law imposed by yet another military man seeking to save Egypt from ruling. Thank you for watching.