The Laws of Ancient Egypt- Part 9- Sea Peoples and Jealous Wives

Part 9 The Ramessites, Law and Myth, A Bad Wife, and the Fading of Ma'at This is part 9 of my legal history of Ancient Egypt. We last left off with Horemheb who spent most of his 35 year reign rebuilding Egypt's government structures. His successor was Ramses I, an old man in his own right who died only two years after gaining the throne. That marked the His son, Seti I, had a goal to reimpose Egyptian influence in Canaan to combat the growing Hittite Empire. He was successful and recorded his conquest. After campaigning, Seti built himself a mortuary temple in Abydos, the burial site of Norma, the first pharaoh, among others, as well as the cult center of Osiris. He recorded that too. He died before his temple complex was complete though. His son, Ramses II, later called the Great, then took the throne. Upon reaching Abydos, he found the older cemetery buildings in ruins and Seti's temple was unfinished. There was no sign of any of the ritual sacrifices entailed in Seti's endowment to the temple. Stated differently, the state was paying money for upkeep of the tomb and offerings, but they didn't even finish building it. Ramses II summoned his court and the heads of the army, presumably to chastise them. What ensued was essentially an ass-kissing fest, with everyone promising to do what they said they were going to do before Seti died. Ramses recorded all of that. He later recorded his military exploits in Canaan, first against the rebels at Ashkelon and Galilee, and later against the Hittites at the Battle of Kadesh in 1274. That battle resulted in the earliest surviving peace treaty between nations that we have. I'm going to do a separate video on so-called international law for those who think that it actually exists. Once done with all of that, he established his new capital near the old Hyksos capital of Avaris in the Delta, naming it Pir Ramses, the House of Ramses, presumably to keep a close eye on his new conquests. In constructing the city, he employed some of the previously noted social class of Habiru, referred to in Akhenaten's time as being mountain raiders or miscreants, and now noted to be bricklayers. This is the setting of the exodus, if you believe it happened, that is. Let us return to slavery for a moment. The last time we talked about slavery was three videos ago at the beginning of the New Kingdom. There, I drew a distinction between Egyptian slaves, meaning Egyptian citizens who had committed crimes and were sentenced to life or a period of slavery or forced labor, and foreign captives who were property of the state. The inscriptions all agree that the pharaoh could dispose of the captives in one of two ways, by giving or loaning them to private persons, or by using them for state-sponsored labor. The Ramesses, Ramesses II specifically, they were builders, and a number of construction projects they had required a massive amount of resources and a massive workforce. The building of entire cities, in my mind at least, pales in comparison to the pyramids, which were probably built by paid serfs during inundation when farming was impossible and they had nothing else to do. That brings us back to these Habiru. How the Habiru, or sometimes they're called Apiru, got to Egypt, I can't say. In the Bible, Moses was born in Egypt and there was already an established reproducing population of them there. The pharaoh was allegedly trying to wipe them out, or at least thin the population. Maybe others came later as forced laborers or prisoners of war after Ramesses II's conquest of Canaan, but the big question that I have is whether this foreign captive slave status was hereditary as a legal matter. Because in the inscriptions, there's constant talk of capturing new prisoners of war and bringing them back home to work, but nothing noting a self-reproducing dispensable population of foreign captives used as chattel slaves. I couldn't find an answer, and I'm inclined to think that no such a thing existed. For example, the scribe of Thutmose III during the previous dynasty noted that these foreign captives were intermarrying with the native Egyptians, so some of them at some point were obviously freed or had a degree of rights. Militating against that, and to the extent that the Bible could be trusted as a historical source, Moses was said to be the son of a slave woman herself. Also at issue is the fact that these Asiatic slaves, the Canaanites, appear to have been treated a lot differently and much more harshly than their Egyptian or say Libyan Nubian counterparts. It could be, though, that these were not slaves at all, and that they were just serfs who worked the land assigned to them by the pharaoh, as was the traditional case in the time of the New Kingdom, and they were just cranky because they wanted to go worship their god, but on the prescribed worship days, they had to work, so they called themselves slaves. Irrespective of legal status, Moses wanted the pharaoh to let his people go so that they could go worship their one god, and in pleading with the pharaoh, Moses foretells a bunch of plagues, all of which could be explained by natural phenomenon of the delta, like the Nile overflowing its banks, the presence of frogs, hangnails, so on and so forth, except for one, the killing of the firstborn son, the story of Passover. Ramsay's son did, in fact, die in real life, but still, in the biblical narrative, that wasn't enough to make the pharaoh relent, and the Hebrews then decided that they were just going to march out of Egypt through the Sea of Reeds, in the delta region, it's not the Red Sea, Yom Sufis Sea of Reeds, with the pursuing Egyptian army, including the Egyptian chariots, getting stuck in the mud. They then wandered around the desert for 40 years trying to circumvent Egyptian defenses at the infamous Tharu fort on the road of Horus into Canaan. Thus ends our discussion of the Exodus. Ramsay's lived for a long time, into his 80s or 90s. He appears to have outlived his first 12 kids, so it's more than just the first son dying randomly when he was in middle age, because we're on now the 13th kid, Merneptah. Merneptah takes the throne. If you've ever played Total War Pharaoh, his reign is where the game begins, and in looking at history, it's a great time to start a game because if it started during the reign of Ramsay II, it probably would have been really freaking boring. Merneptah's first year was fine, but by his second year, Canaan had revolted, the Hittites were stirring up trouble in Syria, and the Libyans were also acting up. Making things worse, Helen of Sparta, kidnapped by Paris, then showed up in Egypt. Yes, I'm talking about another myth, but only because it seems to jive with New Kingdom court procedure. Herodotus noted that a king Proteus, son of Pharaon, which appears to be a botrandition of the name Pharaoh, was king when Paris abducted Helen and took her back to Troy, except they were blown off course and somehow ended up in Egypt. Once they got there, the hungry and tired Trojan servants deserted Paris and told the local authorities about the The local authorities escalated it to the vizier, who then escalated it to the pharaoh, and who summoned Paris for what almost looks like a sort of criminal hearing. It certainly wasn't a state visit. The pharaoh questioned Paris as to his crime, with the in-royal investigative questioning being well-established since the time of the Old Kingdom, since, you know, the pharaoh and whoever was sitting as judge was also the prosecutor, but the pharaoh concluded that he couldn't punish or kill Paris because he was a foreigner from another land and he knew not the laws of that land. Instead, the pharaoh took Helen and the treasure that Paris stole from Menelaus and held them in a sort of escrow until someone came to claim them. That part is what I find hard to believe, because how the hell is it that they would know that somebody would show up to claim this stuff? In Egypt, no less. Still, we'll continue. In the Odyssey, Menelaus actually shows up in Egypt with Helen already with him. He picked her up from Troy after burning the place to the freaking ground, and they took a detour back home, presumably to do some plundering or maybe a honeymoon in Egypt. In Herodotus' account, when Agamemnon's army reached Troy, the Trojans told him that Helen was in Egypt, Paris having already returned to the city. But the Greeks didn't believe them, thinking that they were being gaslighted by the Trojans, and so they burned the city to the ground, as was the case in the myth, but there was no trace of Helen. It was then, according to Herodotus, that Menelaus went to Egypt to collect his wife. He collected her and his treasure, which was being held by the pharaoh, but then sacrificed two Egyptian children and was hated and pursued by the local populace, chastened to Libya, and eventually back home to Greece. In real life, and in my opinion for what it's worth, Menelaus was a sea person, and the entirety of the Iliad and the Odyssey are dimly remembered of wandering Mycenaeans after their own civilization collapsed. In terms of the historical timeline, and on top of Merneptah's thousand other problems, he also had to deal with these sea peoples. As such, his reign really contains little of legal significance since he spent all of his time fighting off invaders. Now, he did put a lot of his accomplishments on this thing called the Merneptah Stele, which notably says that he kicked the crap out of a not hitherto fore-attested people called Israel, probably those freeing Habiru from his father's time. Forty years had passed since then. But the main thing of legal significance for our purposes is that he compares the defeated Libyans to criminal defendants hauled into court in chains, surely a sad sight to behold. After Pharaoh Merneptah came Seti II, who lived for a short time before totally vanishing from the record. In reviewing the hieroglyph translations, I noticed something interesting. After Rekhmire, the vizier during the early New Kingdom around 1400, Mot looks as if she falls off the map. The 19th Dynasty pharaohs and their officials constantly mention Ray, Atum, Horus, Osiris, Amun, but there's a 200 or so year gap without any mention of Mot in the official inscriptions. Now, I will note that Ramses the Great's throne name was Usurmatre, which is where you get the Greek name Ozymandias. What that translates to is the truth of Ray. Mot in this context is used as the word for truth, but not as a god in her own right as she was used previously in the of the pharaohs and the viziers in describing their accomplishments. Horemheb's Edict II, only 100 years after Rekhmire, does not contain a single reference to Mot or her principles. It's more of a practical, secular imposition of law. The contrast with the Old and Middle Kingdom records is stark. It appears that religion and judicial philosophy have split. Now, before Akhenaten, the temples whose priests were appointed by the pharaoh, the high priest at least, prayed for you. You didn't pray on your own. Akhenaten took that power away from the temples and the priest, making himself the high priest and the only person who could intercede with the Aten on behalf of the people. Breasted compares him to a sort of Jesus Christ. I don't know if I buy that, but Breasted also notes that after Akhenaten, one's relationship with the gods became much more personal. We know as a historical matter that despite the development of private worship, the Amun cult around this time also became ultra-powerful because the pharaoh used to appoint the high priest, but now it became hereditary. This growth is most likely responsible for the primacy of Amun in all of the administrators and the pharaonic texts. From a legal perspective, and what that means for Mot and about 2,000 years of well-established religious judicial philosophy, something is changing, and not in a good way. Mot still exists on tomb inscriptions because she's important for your ticket to the afterlife. But the magic and the mystique, the religious mystique of law through divine order and sort of ancient principles, is gone. These texts don't carry the same ceremonial and religious weight as they used to, and we're going to revisit this change in the next video. That brings us to the 20th dynasty, with the ascension of Ramses III. After Pharaoh Merneptah was Seti II, who, like I said, had only ruled for a few years before totally vanishing. His successor, he had a couple of them, one of whom was Sippeta, did little of legal importance aside from having a picture of Mot in his tomb. Enter Ramses III. Egypt is now strained under the stress of foreign invaders, and the rest of the world is entering what is known as the Bronze Age Collapse. The Sea Peoples? They came back, and this time they came back not only by sea but also by land, and they brought their friends, the Philistines, with them, among others. This wave was much more catastrophic, causing the main Hittite Empire to collapse, leaving only a rump state in Syria and Carchemish, and wiping out a number of prominent city-states in the Mediterranean coast of the Middle East, thereby creating a vacuum in which the Phoenicians, Arameans, and biblical kingdoms began their rise to prominence. Ramses III, through military prowess, is somehow able to right the ship and save the country, and he holds off the invaders, resettling one of the groups, the Philistines, the Peleset, who appear to have been Greeks based on the archaeological record, in a place that later took their name, Palestine. His reign, aside from those of the Thutmoseids and Horemheb, is the most legally significant reign in ancient Egyptian history. Why? Because this is where we get most of the day-to-day court records from. We start with a good old harem conspiracy. The last time we had one of those was 1100 years earlier under Pepe I and his appointed ad hoc judge, Uni. Ramses III had chosen a successor, Ramses IV, the son of him and his great wife. A lesser wife wanted her son by him to accede to the throne, so she gathered a group of military officials, people in the royal household, and others to try to kill the king. Now hear the juries out. Ramses III was initially thought to have survived the assassination attempt since the court documents prosecuting the conspirators were all in his name. But his mummy shows that his throat was cut, so much like the post-mortem letter of Amenemet I, the prosecution was likely carried out by his intended successor, who somehow managed to stop the coup, Ramses IV. The lesser wife's main co-conspirators are named as Pepe Kamen and Mesedere. We mentioned him earlier. These are not their real names. These are nicknames given to them as defendants. Pepe Kamen means the blind servant and Mesedere means God hates him, respectively. So obviously we're off to a good start. Ramses IV established an ad hoc court of 14 judges. He gave them full discretion to deal with the case and instructed them not to tell him a damn thing about the prosecution. He told them to investigate and punish accordingly, as the facts permit. Ramses knows that he is among the just kings, but in doing so, he invokes Amon-Re and Osiris, not Maat. The records then list each defendant and state how they are alleged to be involved in this harem conspiracy. Remember that the court procedure for criminal cases hasn't really changed much since the time of Rekhmire. Whoever was assigned to be a criminal judge, be it the vizier, the pharaoh, or any ad hoc committee, was both prosecutor, jury, and executioner. They would question the defendants and, when necessary, summon witnesses to corroborate or dispute their statements. No prosecuting attorney, no defense attorney. Clearly, the questioning of the first tranche of defendants was hefty because it led to two more prosecutions. So as these people were investigated, other names came up, and you have two more series of prosecutions. In the end, most of those found guilty died by suicide. Now, suicide wasn't illegal by any sense in ancient Egypt, but there's this understanding that suicide would deprive you of the afterlife. See the story of a conversation between a man and his ba, which is a fictional tale about a suicidal man whose ba threatens to desert him if he commits suicide for more information. So perhaps the punishment or the self-imposed suicide—I guess all suicide is self-imposed—was more damning than a mere execution. Notably, there were two charges brought against the main body of defendants for acts of magic and witchcraft, something that I haven't seen in any of the records preceding this. Specifically, some of the conspirators were charged with making wax figurines—essentially voodoo dolls—of guards of the harem so that the conspiracy wouldn't be discovered. It's also possible that they had made a voodoo doll of the pharaoh himself to try to weaken his composition. This black magic is referred to as a great crime of death and a great abomination of the land, which is a capital offense. I think this is interesting because we really have no instances of the death penalty except in instances of tomb robbery, judicial bribery, and most notably, murder and regicide. My main question here is, was the use of magic illegal in itself, or was it only illegal in the context of trying to kill the pharaoh? The Middle Assyrian Law Code, in effect around this time, also made practicing sorcery illegal and punishable by debt, but unfortunately, in the case of ancient Egypt, I don't think we're going to find the answer. Now, interestingly, there was a fourth tranche of prosecutions, but not against the defendants of the harem conspiracy. Rather, the defendants were three of the judges who Ramses had appointed to oversee the case, as well as two scribes. The judges and the scribes—Pebbes, Mai, Hori, Tekanat, and Oniri—chose to ignore the clearly inculpatory testimony of the harem women involved in the coup, and they may have taken up a romantic interest in them. The actual charge was carousing in their quarters, meaning they took these harem women back to their houses and did naughty things with them. Two of the judges and two of the scribes—judged by the remaining ten judges who did not sleep with the skanky women—were sentenced to having their noses cut off, as well as their ears in a very harem-heb-like fashion. The only one who walked away unscathed and was found not guilty was Hori, but the details of his specific testimony aren't included. Again, there is no mention of mock justice, truth, any of those things anywhere in these records. Now, some might say that the pharaoh wanted nothing to do with the prosecution because he wanted to be impartial, and he did not want to render judgment based on emotion, which is what Pebbe I had done, you know, some thousands of years earlier. But remember, this is done in the name of Ramses III. Ramses III is dead. We know that, at least by the middle of the trial, he was dead. There's no question about it. He couldn't have handled the trial. His heir did. Now, the motivation for the heir's conduct, I question. I honestly think it was for a practical political purpose, because he just gained the throne, and I don't think that he wanted to be seen as a tyrant, so he decided that he was going to distance himself, and in doing so, he was able to pay lip service to the ways of the past under Pebbe I. I don't believe that this was a genuine desire to distance himself, because he actually believed in the very ancient principles that had slowly been eroding since the time of Akhenaten. Now, there's going to be one more video of this series of Bronze Age Egyptian laws. It pertains to the late 20th Dynasty and the war community at Deir el-Babri, a place that gives us the best look we have into how local courts functioned in ancient Egypt. It's also a place where we get most of our records pertaining to life as a whole for normal people, including family structure, inheritance, and other more personal issues, you know, assault battery, little fist couples, fist fights, so on and so forth. We will pick up again with those people, their strange use of oracles, a case involving a tomb robbery handled by the pharaoh himself, and what I think is a pattern of a much diminished mott as we proceed to the end of Egyptian Bronze Age civilization as we know it. Thank you for watching.