The Laws of Ancient Egypt- Part 10- The Records of Deir El Medina

Part 10. Real life stories and lawsuits from Dear El Medina. This is the tenth and final video in my Laws of Ancient Egypt series. Everything that we've covered in the last nine videos is about to come to life thanks to records from a little worker village called Dear El Medina. For this portion of the series, I rely very heavily on a book, or two books I should say, by Andrea McDowell. She is a law professor and historian. The first book she wrote was on jurisdiction and the law, meaning, you know, different subject areas covered by different judges, who gets to handle what. And the second is on daily life, daily village life for ancient Egyptians. And if you want additional information on how daily life worked, including things like poetry, music, how they did laundry, I highly recommend that you pick up one of her books. So far, we've proceeded chronologically. Currently we're in the New Kingdom in the 20th Dynasty during the reign of Ramses III, who dealt with the infamous Heron Conspiracy, and he also dealt with what's interestingly the first union strike in history, I guess the first labor strike. Here's the story. It's clear that the invasion of the Sea Peoples, combined with a glutton trade, some harvest issues, maybe a famine, and a smattering of other unfortunate events, all of which congealed into a massive tidal wave of civilizational collapse during the reigns of Merneptah and Ramses III, took its toll on the Egyptian economy, and most importantly, the Egyptian people, your everyday person, who we really haven't had a chance to talk about yet in the last 10 or so videos. The days of plenty, by this time, were gone. We have here what looks to be a supply crunch. Yeah, you remember the pyramid builders in the 3rd and 4th Dynasties, and that the Old Kingdom collapsed after the 6th Dynasty, and then you had a few hundred years of chaos? In that chaos, the pyramids were nearly all looted. That's why you don't find mummies in the pyramids, because all the stuff was stolen, not in the 1800s, but way back then. Future pharaohs in the Middle Kingdom, and some even in the New Kingdom, they built smaller pyramids as passion projects, or as to pay homage to the great past, but from the Middle Kingdom onward, pharaohs were buried in tombs, not in pyramids. In the New Kingdom, beginning with the 18th Dynasty, Thutmose I, he started construction on the Valley of the Kings. It's a royal necropolis where most of the pharaohs, including King Tut, were all found. The Valley of the Kings is located inland on the west side of the Nile, opposite Luxor. There are literally hundreds of tombs, and to construct all of those tombs, the pharaohs hired workers who were very skilled, and those workers were given housing. The village is named, like I said before, Dear El Medina. The place is absolutely desolate. It's in a desert, completely devoid of life, and it's kind of a fitting place for a necropolis, a place of the dead. It's these conditions that essentially allowed for the mummification of not only the pharaohs, but the administrative records and personal letters of the worker community who resided in Dear El Medina. There are thousands of documents, most of which are still not translated, shedding light on ancient Egyptian daily life, and luckily for us, how the family functioned, how property was treated, and how local courts operated in connection with the vizier and the pharaoh. When you read the translated records, it's kind of like an ancient Egyptian version of Parks and Recreation. There's plenty of local drama, scheming, and sometimes even attempts to hide legal issues from the eye of the southern vizier. The people who worked there were more than just skilled workers. I mean, they were paid very well, but they were also highly literate. That's why we have so many letters, and they also recorded the events that led up to the first strike in history. In the early reign of Ramses III, the workers in the village, they wrote about incursions of Libyans who surrounded Thebes and the area of the Valley of the Kings. Their work continued, but they were obviously scared. When the foreign threat was eventually lifted, there was economic trouble left in its wake. There were times that the pharaoh and Thebes just couldn't pay them, and at the time their pay consisted of food, drink, fuel, cloth, etc. Again, a pre-coinage society here. In the 29th year of Ramses III, the workers complained of hunger and being short of their rations. This went on well into Ramses' 30th year, at which point the workers had had enough. They started striking with references made to taking up torches at night and occupying temple complexes in a sort of peaceful protest, very Kumbaya. The pharaoh did eventually pay up because, after all, these workers are the ones working on his tomb, and it's a good thing that he relented because then he was killed in the Heron Conspiracy a short time later. However, by the time Ramses IV took over, the intermittent payments had resumed, evidencing a societal decline that would eventually spell the end of Egyptian Bronze Age civilization. That is the story of the first organized labor strike in history. Labor strikes are macro-politics, though, or macro-economics. What I want to look at is the many records of the village itself and how quirky it was, because it was very quirky. I left off in the last video talking about how it seems the larger government structure of Egypt, meaning the vizier, the high level government officials, etc. abandoned Mott in a legal sense but not a religious sense after the reign of Akhenaten. I said, perhaps to the ire of some, that the abandonment was either a symptom of a slow collapse or maybe what caused the slow collapse representative of the erosion of ideals that made Egypt what it was. One of the most striking things that I noticed when I was looking at these translations, this small community might have appreciated Mott as a figure of justice just as it was done during the Old and Middle Kingdoms, or it's possible that they were just paying Mott lip service. One of the first writings that we have is something that reads like an introductory ritual to a hearing, mentioning Mott in a sort of Pledge of Allegiance sort of way. It was very formulaic. Does it mean something deeper? I'm not sure. Regardless to the extent to which Mott was considered a legal aspiration or jurisprudential aspiration, the community had a rather unique way of solving problems. The most peculiar method is trial by oracle, the equivalent of a trial by magic eight ball. Used mainly in property disputes, the oracle functioned like this. You have the image of one of the gods carried on a litter, sort of a raised platform with a seat or a table on it. Scribes from the local court, as well as sometimes scribes sent by the vizier, would show up and take notes for official records. Priests, who were really just members of the community, maybe with one or two outsiders, would hoist the oracle into the air. The oracle would then be asked questions like, does Rahotep own this house? If the answer was yes, the oracle would move forward. If the answer was no, the oracle would move backwards. What this really means in practice is that the priests, who were, you know, the party's neighbors and co-workers, were really just operating on their own suspicions and would make the oracle do whatever they really thought was going on after hearing rumors or whatever. A few videos ago, I said that property was really the issue for the vizier, who kept all the records in a great hall for access during trials. You know, they had prescribed trial periods, hearing schedules, etc. Why then here are we relying on a magic eight ball? There's a good answer. It's because the pharaoh owned all the land and houses in Deir el-Medina. It's a worker village sponsored by the pharaoh, so when you got hired to work there, you'd be assigned a house to live in. It all belonged to the pharaoh. You didn't actually own anything. You were essentially leasing it from the governor. It's a benefit of you working in the Valley of the Kings. So whenever a dispute came up regarding property, they just had to see who the most recent appointee to the house was, which is something that the village foreman would have on hand. The most common dispute you would have regarding property is when children wanted their parents' jobs or they wanted their house. Remember that jobs in ancient Egypt were hereditary for the most part. These are skilled laborers, so it's a little different. Sometimes the children of the workers, even if they weren't as skilled, would try to get a job working in the Valley of the Kings just like their parents had, and two, take over the parents' household where they probably grew up. They grew up in the Valley of the Kings. They want to stay there. They want to work there. They want to live in the same house. If the house was assigned to another worker by the government, you would lose. But if the house was one built by your parents, so even though these people were working in the Valley of the Kings, they had a lot of downtime, sometimes they would construct their own houses in the valley. In that case, the worker would own the house and the child might win because it really was their hereditary property, not the pharaoh's. Only the houses that were originally commissioned for the village belonged to the pharaoh. The oracle had other functions though. Sometimes it would be used to identify evildoers or as a sort of preliminary litigation tool. Because this community was so close-knit, you could imagine that pointing fingers and accusing people of things willy-nilly is probably a bad idea. It would most likely come back to bite you in the ass. There were a handful of litigious residents, and we're going to get to them later, but for the most part, you don't want to defecate where you eat. If you did want to accuse somebody of something, but let's say you didn't have the testicular fortitude to take the case to the local court, or maybe you just didn't have enough evidence and only had a mere suspicion, then you would go to the priests who would gather everyone and pose a question to the oracle regarding whether so-and-so is the one who stole your hair clip. It gives the accuser a sort of plausible deniability. You're not actually pointing the finger, the oracle is doing it for you. This oracle wasn't infallible though, and people regularly second-guessed its prognostications because, again, it's really just the priests using the image of a god to express their own personal suspicions. Is that really justice? I don't know. Some people think, including Professor McDowell, that this is a much older custom oracle use. But based on — I disagree, because based on the inscriptions from past judges who seemed to take justice very seriously, I can't imagine them resorting to something so arbitrary as an oracle controlled by men. I think it was either unique to smaller communities, again as a tension-removing system, or it's the degradation of Egyptian justice manifest. Aside from using oracles when you go to the actual court, their court procedure was also really weird. It was very neighborly and very simple. The local court officials were called magistrates, and the local court itself was called the kenbet. We're just going to refer to it as a court. No need to know that. Because this is a work community, normally the bosses of the workmen were among the chief judges, with scribes and local law enforcement officials sitting in. What this really is, is arbitration. It's not a formal court. The vizier would send scribes to sit on the court if something juicy was going on, or it could have been that the scribes were just in town that day for other official duties. We don't know really anything about how the judges themselves functioned, meaning that we don't know if it was majority rule amongst the judges, if it had to be unanimous, etc. What is clear, though, is that it was very informal, with none of the procedural requirements mentioned in Requimare's tomb, for example, like written petitions, statutes of limitations, prescribed discovery periods, etc. mentioned at all. These guys just flew by the seat of their pants. The investigative functions of the court remained the same as we saw before, with the judges doing the questioning. Because this is such a small community, you don't need an army of scribes to go out and fetch witnesses and evidence. Rather, most things were done orally, with witnesses, presumably neighbors of the accused, coming to the court when asked. After all, there were only a couple of doors down. This informality also impacted enforcement mechanisms. There seems to have been a reluctance to punish people within the community. In fact, more often than not, people were given several chances for doing the same thing, and the same case could be heard an endless number of times. This is very unlike the cases involving the vizier or the pharaoh, which were very efficient, very quick, and very ruthless. The informality or reluctance did not extend to the initial law enforcement phase, though, so I don't want to give the picture that everything was lax. It's really just enforcement. Because while post-judgment enforcement was relaxed, the initial investigation by law enforcement appears to have involved regular beatings, either within the village or down to what they called the place of examination, down by the river. Those are two separate things, the place of examination and down by the river. Remember that the Valley of the Kings and these tombs were guarded by the elite medjay. We covered that in several videos ago when we talked about law enforcement. They're still here, and they don't like to mess around. So the bailiffs are relaxed, the cops not so relaxed. In a few seconds, you're going to see an example of a complaining witness, a victim, an innocent person who was reporting something, getting beaten down by the police for reporting it. If they were beating victims, you know that they were also beating up. As all communities do, this community had its fair share of troublemakers. There is this one guy, Mary Sekhmet, the beloved of Sekhmet, who comes up not once but twice in the court records in two completely different cases. The first case is horrible. It involves a newly engaged couple. Now, we haven't talked about marriage so far. I'll give it to you really short. It was a thing in Egypt, but it was much more informal than it is today, or it was in Mesopotamia at the same time. If you watch my video on how Mesopotamian law operated, they had marriage contracts. Their marriages were recorded. They also had dowries. In Egypt, you essentially moved in with each other as long as your in-laws approved. There's one letter where a father-in-law forces his soon-to-be son-in-law to sign a prenuptial agreement saying that if he divorces her, he would forfeit his right to all common property. It's traditional that even though marriage was informal, divorce was very formal. Men would get two-thirds of the common property, the marital property, and the divorce, and women would get one-third of the common property. Inheritance, like it is today, is separate. It's not considered a part of community property. Now, assuming that your in-laws approved of the tentative marriage, and even if they made you sign an ancient prenuptial agreement like this father-in-law did, your intention to move in with one another was tantamount to an engagement. So here we have a newly engaged couple, two people who would like to move in with one another and eventually get married, so to speak. The groom was said to be of modest means, as was the woman. Our nefarious interloper, Mary Sekhmet, who is a wealthier man in the community, took a liking to the woman and had an affair with her. Now, adultery in Mesopotamia was often a crime, and the woman would normally be put to death or ostracized. In Egypt, it wasn't a crime, but it could serve as grounds for a four-cause divorce, and it would also, interestingly, render the adulterer's share of the common property forfeited. But from most of the records in the village, adultery was used then, as it is today, as a tool to engage in slander. One case talks about how an official, Paneb, slept with a number of women. It wasn't a court case, it was just a letter, but you get the point. In this case of Mary Sekhmet, the poor groom-to-be reports Mary Sekhmet and his cavorting with his future fiancée to the local authorities. The authorities then beat him, believing the accusation to be incredulous. In other words, the local officials, who thought that Mary Sekhmet was so, you know, rich and handsome and outstanding, couldn't believe that this lowly-born serf was accusing him of a crime, and beat the lowly-born serf instead of investigating the issue. It looks like at some point, either because the poor man kept badgering them, or because they themselves realized that they were wrong, the affair was officially discovered by the authorities. Mary Sekhmet was forced to take an oath saying that he would leave the woman alone. He took the oath, but he continued in his conduct anyway, and the woman became pregnant. So what happened to homewrecker Mary Sekhmet? Well, evidencing the relative impotence of the local court, he was forced to take yet another oath. Justice at its finest. Mary Sekhmet comes back again, this time not because he destroyed somebody's future marriage, but because he's trying to steal somebody's property. A fella named Kenna restored a chapel that had fallen into disrepair. So remember how I said before that the homes and the land used for purpose of housing the villagers and the workers all belonged to the pharaoh? Self-built buildings were privately owned, as stated earlier. Restoring a building, even if it was built by the pharaoh, also appears to have converted the property from state-owned to privately owned. So Kenna, in restoring this chapel, made it his own in a sort of adverse possession sort of scenario, something which was well accepted in the Near East around this time, as seen in many other law codes. Mary Sekhmet had nothing to do with the restoration of the chapel, but he shows up again, this time saying that actually one of the gods promised him a share of the chapel. Mary Sekhmet is the one who initiated the court proceedings. He's our plaintiff this time, before he was the defendant. So out comes the oracle to do its thing. Not surprisingly, the oracle concluded that Mary Sekhmet had made the whole thing up. Now, in reality, the priests and the magistrates who controlled the oracle clearly knew Mary Sekhmet and were sick of his ----. Remember that he came before them at least twice in the past, having violated his oaths. So his word probably did not go very far with the local priests and magistrates. The local issues went beyond just stealing women and claiming that the gods promised you other people's money. Stealing private property, apparently, resulted in an inquiry and then restitution if found guilty. And the restitution owed for theft, per the numerous letters and records that we have, was threefold whatever was stolen. So you steal one thing, you got to pay back three. You also couldn't slander people by reporting clearly fake charges. And that's kind of what happened with Mary Sekhmet. Remember, he's respected, and then this lowly guy comes up and says that Mary Sekhmet slept with my fiancée. The court officials beat him up. There's another case involving someone who was accused of doing witchcraft, targeting the pharaoh Seti II. This is interesting. We know by now, thanks to the conspiracy papyrus, that magic, at least when it was used against the pharaoh in a voodoo sort of way, black magic, so to speak, was a crime punishable by death. One of my friends who likes to watch these videos and comments very helpful things pointed out that magic was very normal, like the Book of the Dead is really magic. So it's only voodoo and black magic against the pharaoh that's bad. So we have this individual accused of doing voodoo magic against Seti II in Deir el-Medina. But curiously, the local court heard it when it should have been heard by the vizier. Why? The best guess is that they didn't want the state officials to hear this case, and they tried to sweep it under the rug. They probably suspected that it was, in fact, slander, meaning that it didn't actually happen. But if the vizier's office got involved, it would draw a lot of unwanted attention to the village. It's notable that they did not interrogate the man who was accused of doing black magic. Instead, they interrogated the accuser and got them to withdraw their accusations. Crisis averted, I guess. Now, the local courts, this kenbet, this little village assembly of magistrates, did not normally deal with crimes. Theft and resulting restitutions were actually considered civil offenses, which is why they heard them. Criminal evidence from the village is very scanty because criminal matters were handled by the vizier. Now, that's not to say that no crimes took place in Deir el-Medina. No, no, no, no, no, quite to the contrary. As with any tight-knit community, there were scuffles. And, you know, after people drank too much or said something that they weren't supposed to, there were actually two references we have for forced punishment as a punishment, I'm sorry, forced labor for punishment for assault. We know that from a few videos ago that, yes, Egyptians could be sentenced to a probationary term of forced labor for doing something. The first instance that we have here in Deir el-Medina involved someone who hit someone else over the head with some sort of implement, causing a grave injury. The second curiously involves a police officer who had done something bad and was sentenced himself to do forced labor because he got caught and he needed to be held accountable for his, I guess, official misconduct. So it seems that here, at least in the village, nobody was really above the law. Now, while theft from a private person was a civil offense or a tort, as it's called, and it would be heard by the local court, the main thing to remember is that the vizier and the pharaoh handled cases that touched the church or the state, not the private person, which is why the local courts handled local thefts, local assaults, etc. But when the theft or the assault involved the gods or the pharaoh, and remember, this village is essentially all state property, the local court would then conduct the initial investigation with the scribes of the vizier present. But then, after the initial hearing, where the facts are all brought out, the case would get kicked up to the vizier, and the vizier takes over the case, presumably for trial and then for sentencing. We have two cases of theft that involve state property. They both come from the complaining witness, so this means that now it's going to go to the vizier's office, it's a big deal, you can't just brush it under the rug or give it back or pay threefold, whatever it is that you stole, you're in big trouble now. The complaining witness in both cases was named Neb Knepper. He accused one person of stealing a copper chisel. We have the abridged version of the prosecution from the village, focusing mainly on the end stage of the village-level litigation. The accused, a woman, took an oath denying the theft, but the investigators found the chisel buried beneath her house. Because she had lied under oath, she was called a great false one worthy of death. The religious perjury being the most important thing, not the theft itself. If it was just stealing, she would have to give back three chisels and then probably would have received a beating, but now she's invoked and insulted the gods. So now she's in big trouble, her case is going up to the vizier. In the second example, we have a good look into the initial litigation process, the thing that we're missing from the case involving the woman. Neb Knepper too had to submit an oath in this case, saying that the accusation of theft of three copper chisels committed by a man was true and that he could supply witnesses to corroborate it under threat of perjury himself. So it looks like they have punishments again, because this is essentially slander. You can't be slandering people, so you better be able to back it up, otherwise you're going to be in trouble. Neb Knepper took the oath, then the burden shifted to the accused. The accused took an oath saying he did not do it. The court left off by saying that if it turns out he did do it, like the woman, he would be subject to some great punishment. The case was then kicked up to the vizier's office for further handling. So as you can see, even the court in its normal posture is very relaxed when it's dealing with members of its own community. But when the vizier's scribes were in town, things got much more formal. You have oaths being taken by both parties during the initial proceedings, the air is heavier, it's more serious, and just, you know, contrast that with the arbitrary beatings conducted by the local officials when purely local matters were at issue. That brings us to the last legal hurrah of the new kingdom, the great tomb robberies. The reason that it's here, even though there's wide no case, it's because it happened in Deir al-Medina. That's where we get it from. We're now in the reign of Ramses IX, and the situation at Deir al-Medina had been deteriorating for decades. So during the reign of Ramses VI, about half of the village was laid off, they were fired and dispersed. You still have Libyan tribes coming in surrounding the area, surrounding the Valley of the Kings, and they interrupt work, they force workers to run out of the village and seek protection in nearby Thebes or Luxor. Those who continued to work there despite the layoffs and despite the interruptions by invaders, they were often not paid on time or adequately. The result is that those who were tasked with building the tombs resorted to theft. Now, not everybody participated, this didn't become a pirate community or anything, but enough of them did, and enough of them were caught so as to generate a corpus of transcripts detailing their prosecutions. In total, they're called the great tomb robberies. During the reign of Ramses IX, the mayor of Thebes believed that several royal tombs had been looted by the Deir al-Medina workers, something that had again been going on for years, but on a small scale. You know, you steal one thing, you don't crack the tomb open and steal all the gold, it's too noticeable. And it makes sense, because these are the people who built the tombs. They know the layout of the valley the best because they built it, they know where the stairs are hidden, they know where the entrance is. This is the same thing that I was talking about before that happened with the pyramids. The workers who built them eventually waited, you know, they waited for the guards to look the other way or waited for Egyptian society to collapse, and then they would show back up and steal everything. So the mayor has a hunch that these Deir al-Medina workers have been stealing things out of the Valley of the Queens, not the Valley of the Kings, this is the Valley of the Queens. When he shows up to inspect the tombs, they all turn out to be sealed and intact. The Deir al-Medina workers now, vindicated, walked to the mayor's house across the river in Thebes and threw a party outside of it to rub his defeat in his face. Less than a year later though, maybe six months, the Deir al-Medina workers had attacked the very same tombs in the Valley of the Queens. Is it possible that the mayor acted prematurely and had merely gotten insider information about their intent to rob the Valley of the Queens? Maybe he was just too early, maybe he misheard it. That's what it looks like to me. Or maybe the Deir al-Medina workers thought that the mayor was discredited and that nobody would ever believe him after his prior embarrassment. Whatever the case though, this time the Royal Queens tombs were found smashed and open upon inspection by the government authorities. The workers responsible were interrogated and at least one of them, this is always how it works, you know, even RICO prosecutions to this day, low-level gang prosecutions on like a county level, one of them squealed like a pig and exposed the entire planning process and everybody else involved. So time goes on, those people got prosecuted, they got in trouble, probably got killed, but the economic problems still aren't letting up. Egypt is still declining, policing is becoming more lax, you still have foreign invaders. The workers at Deir al-Medina become absolutely freaking brazen and transform petty looting into a full-on criminal enterprise. Now they start attacking the Valley of the Kings, not just the Valley of the Queens, and in one instance looted the tomb of Ramses VI in a sort of poetic retribution for laying off half of their predecessors. To cover their tracks, they snuffed out the weakest co-conspirator, a child, to stop him from telling on them. We found that out later. So these people who robbed Ramses VI's tomb got caught, again one of them probably squealed like a pig, and once the other people were interrogated, they said, yes, you know, we had a little kid with us, we were afraid that he was going to tell on us, and so we killed him. After those robberies, the Ramesses essentially lose control over the necropolis, looting is rampant, several of the tombs are noted to have graffiti in them by the time of Ramses IX, it's just a mess. And again, if the looters were caught, they would be punished one by one, but those who did not participate or who didn't get caught were tasked, likely under military supervision, to rebury the pharaohs into these massive caches, these tombs containing tens of sarcophagi, to hide them from future looters. So when you read the history books and you hear that there's, you know, 15 pharaohs in one tomb, and you're wondering how that is, who did that? It was the Deir el-Medina workers to hide them from other Deir el-Medina workers. Some of these caches were very successful because most of the mummies that we have today from the Valley of the Kings were reburied by these workers. So that was the time of Ramses IX, you go on to Ramses X and Ramses XI, Bronze Age Egypt at this point is essentially doing a death rattle, there's not much left, it's collapsing. So let's talk about now where we've and how we ended up here. I submit to you that from a religious jurisprudential perspective, the Egyptian legal system lost what made it great after the time of Akhenaten. The Trebonian of Egypt, Rekhmire, was the last great legal mind in the country. His vision, which was the product of some 2,000 years of divinely inspired jurisprudence centered on Ma'at, was cut short by the heretic pharaoh's abandonment of the old religion. Horemheb, a benevolent dictator trying desperately to salvage old Egyptian ways through a powerful cult of personality and with some military swagger, resorted to pragmatic legislation as a necessity in the place of religious legal principles. The re-ascendant hereditary priesthood of Amun never allowed the religious legal philosophy to return to its original state and instead supplanted the worship of Ma'at with its own for purely political reasons. Subsequent pharaohs, who were plagued with invasions, famine, and other issues, simply had no time to dedicate to judicial philosophy, only to prosecuting the most grievous crimes and maintaining some severance of law and order. The result? I think it's Deir el-Medina. You have laxity, legal reluctance, impotence, the use of oracles, and really a total collapse of law and order. For all we know, the judges and the magistrates who were controlling the oracle deciding the By this point, the magic of law is dead, and with it died Bronze Age Egypt. I don't think the descent is all that dark though, because in the absence of strong laws, you have the rise of a very intriguing set of non-legal writings. So in the place of law and order, people began to write about idealism and self-policing, how a person should act in a world where wrong will be done to them inevitably and when the future, in the midst of a total global collapse, is uncertain. And these new writings sound like this. Do not be afraid of tomorrow, because today is in the hands of God. Do not disrespect your mother. Do not boast of property which is not yours. Do not ignore your neighbors when they are in need. Do not be boastful. Do not straighten what is crooked. There are plenty more similar examples and I encourage you to read them because I believe that this emerging personal Egyptian philosophy, one of internal justice and internal salvation, is the sort of writing that carried the Egyptian people from the Bronze Age into the Iron Age, and perhaps some of those very same phrases served as inspiration for another people situated on the geographic fringe of a decaying Egyptian empire. Is this the origin of the Ten Commandments and a new order of religious law? I think so. Thank you for watching.