Another knbt was situated outside the gate of the temple of Khonsu at Karnak temple, in what appears to be an open square. These examples may indicate that while these courts were perhaps commonplace they were not housed in purpose-built structures but were instead set up in public squares and easily accessible areas. This also suggests that justice was a public event, which no doubt affected the proceedings, with public opinion being made clear as a trial continued. Any oaths or sentences were read out at the temple gates,10 meaning the general public participated in the enforcement of the sentence.
The knbt was overseen by the vizier, who appealed to Maat the goddess of truth and justice. Maat was central to the functioning of the knbt and the entire justice system as she governed moral behaviour for king and commoner alike. Should the law of Maat not be upheld then the equilibrium of the cosmos would be unbalanced. The vizier’s position here was very powerful as he ultimately decided on the punishment for the crimes brought before him. In the tomb of Rekhmire (TT100) the vizier is seen in his judgment hall with the forty rolls of the law in front of him.11 However, for very serious cases the knbt may be superseded as the king became involved, choosing three or four of the highest officials, including the vizier, to oversee the trial.12
Essentially the vizier held the life and death of everyone who appeared before him in his hands, as well as the lives of the condemned’s family for generations, and they were often caught taking bribes. A criminal and his family were sometimes sentenced to lifelong labour as state-owned slaves, or the criminal would lose his position and this punishment was also extended to the entire family. Losing a high position from the village of Deir el-Medina was not just a loss of a job and status but also the loss of a government-owned home, forcing the whole family to relocate. One individual who suffered this punishment was the seventeenth-dynasty temple official Teti, who was condemned, for an unspecified crime, to lose his office but also to ‘be expelled from the temple of my father Min, and let him be removed from the position in the temple, from son to son, from heir to heir.’13 This punishment not only destroyed him and his immediate family but also any further generations. Such an unfair or potentially corrupt system could not really be called justice. One litigant appealed to the god Amun to save him from the system. ‘Amun-Re, the one who intercedes for the lone man when he is in distress, may he cause the court to be of one voice when they answer concerning the lone man! (So that) the lone man becomes justified and the one who carries gifts is grieved.’14 This man refers to himself as the lone man, meaning he is one without rich benefactors and connections and cannot pay the bribes required for a positive outcome to his trial.
The vizier was ultimately responsible for questioning suspects and witnesses, although this may well have been delegated. There was no premise such as ‘innocent until proven guilty’ and Papyrus Leopold II tells how eight men were arrested and questioned on the basis of a rumour that they had been involved in tomb robbery,15 which was known as ‘leg-stretching’ in reference to the method of entering the tomb shafts by fitting their feet in slots on the opposite wall.16 In the case of thefts it was often the vizier and the chief priest who recovered the stolen property.17
Questioning was referred to as ‘to examine by beating’ or ‘to examine with the stick’. This was continued until the witness or criminal cried, ‘Stop I will tell.’ If the statement that followed was not satisfactory then he may have been beaten again.18 If this was proving unsuccessful then they were questioned with memyny, an unclear word which derives from the Egyptian verb ‘to twist’ and could mean the arms and legs were painfully twisted,19 perhaps until they snapped. There was a ‘place of examination’ where anyone being questioned was taken, and sometimes in the texts it was referred to as being ‘taken to the riverbank’,20 indicating this was where the examination centre was. Both witnesses and defendants were questioned in the same manner, whether they were guilty or not.21 Such methods encouraged false statements. One man, when confronted by someone he had accused, withdrew his accusation, saying, ‘I said it from fear,’ and in another example a man says to a female witness, ‘Confess nothing and I will get off,’22 showing there were flaws in the system.
An alternative to visiting the vizier and the knbt was to seek the advice of the oracle of a god. The workmen of Deir el-Medina appealed specifically to the oracle of Amenhotep I, the deified founder of the village. Like many things which were considered normal in ancient Egypt there are no clear records of how the oracle worked, although using a combination of records of the questions presented to the oracle as well as an image in the Theban tomb of the priest Amenmose (TT19)23 the process can be made clearer.
Approaching the oracle was often carried out via written messages presented to the divine statue of the god, or by facing the statue, asking the question and casting lots with straws or twigs for the answer. During festivals with processions through the streets anyone could approach the bier with the statue and ask a ‘yes’ or ‘no’ question. However, the answer was not considered infallible and in one instance the god answered ‘no’ to a petitioner, who then simply rephrased the question so the only answer could be ‘yes’; this was the judgement he accepted.24 The god answered by encouraging the priests [holding the bier] to move the statue from side to side or up and down.25 The questions were generally short and straightforward: ‘My good lord! Shall we be given rations?’, ‘As to the cattle that the woman is claiming, does she have a share in them?’, ‘As to the dreams which one sees, are they good?’26 One document records how Mery-Re the carpenter made two statues for Ruty. On seeing the statues, Ruty realised they were worth less than he paid. As Ruty and Mery-Re were unable to agree on a solution they went to the oracle to solve the problem. The oracle sided with Ruty and Mery-Re was asked to reimburse him the difference in value.27
An ostracon from Deir el-Medina concerns a woman who approached the oracle regarding an inheritance dispute. She approached the god on behalf of herself and her husband. Before he died her father had promised to give her husband a certain amount of grain over six years, but this had not been received in full and she wanted to know how to acquire the remainder of what was owed to them.28 Whether this was part of a dowry is unclear, as was the response from the god, but it shows that women could also approach the oracle on behalf of men, and this is not the only example of women working on behalf of their husbands.29 Women were able to approach the oracle and address the god directly without using a male intermediary, although of all the known examples of oracle requests only 5.4 per cent were from women.30
Other than the oracle of Amenhotep I at Deir el-Medina, as an ordinary person could not address the statue directly they asked their question to a priest who acted as an intermediary. In New Kingdom, temple-based oracles it was popular to have the voice of the god echo out from the sanctuary, and there was no doubt a priest listening to all the requests from a hidden place and answering on behalf of the god.
It was not only the ordinary people who approached the oracle with questions, and from the Middle Kingdom onwards kings received divine counsel in this way. For example, Hatshepsut consulted the oracle of Amun in order to legitimise her right to rule: ‘Very great oracle in the presence of the good god proclaiming for me the kingship of the Two Lands.’31 The oracle could therefore be approached regarding any problem or question, not just regarding legal matters.
There was no limit to the number of times someone could appeal to the god about the same subject, and in one case the accused ignored the judgment of the oracle of three different gods on no less than five occasions. In the reign of Ramses III, during the annual Opet Festivals, Amenwia, a villager from Deir el-Medina, appealed to the oracle of Amun to find out who had stolen clothes from him. When he read out the names of the villagers, the god nodded when one name was reached: Petjauemdiamun. Petjauemdiamun declared, ‘It is false, it is not I who has stolen them.’ He then went to two other oracles and was distressed when they answered in the affirmative as to h
is guilt. He rigorously denied it but eventually he confessed when he was beaten by his long-suffering colleagues.32 He swore he would return the clothes and should he rescind on this then he would be ‘thrown to a crocodile’.33
Even sentences passed in a knbt could be ignored and there are cases where defendants ignored their verdicts and their punishments, even after being called back to the court multiple times to justify their actions.34
Although both the oracle and the knbt justice system were open to corruption and misuse, to lie in front of the vizier or the oracle carried a harsh punishment. For example, if a person saw a tomb being robbed and did not report it, they were considered as guilty as the robbers themselves.35 Perjury was also often considered more serious than the crime. Diodorus (first century BCE) recorded,
The penalty for perjury was death: the reasoning being that the perjurer was guilty of the two greatest sins, being impious towards the gods and breaking the most important pledge known to man. Again if a man walking along the road should happen to see a person being attacked or killed and did not come to his aid, he had to die. If he was genuinely prevented from helping the person he was required to lodge information against the assailants and to testify against their crime; if he failed to do this as the law required, he would be beaten with a fixed number of blows and be deprived of food for three days. Those who brought false accusations against others had to suffer the punishment that would have meted out to the accused had they been found guilty.36
In one court case, the foreman Hay, from Deir el-Medina, stood in court accused of ‘speaking against the king.’ He was accused by four workmen who were severely below his rank in the village and in the court itself. However, he needed to defend himself and stated that when he was supposed to have said the contentious things he was sleeping. The four men quickly retracted their stories and when questioned again they stated they had heard nothing. They were warned, ‘If you hide today, only to speak of it tomorrow then may your noses and ears be cut off.’37 Amputation of ears and noses was a common form of punishment for state crimes. As noses and ears were mostly cartilage, the victim was unlikely to bleed to death38 and once healed they were able to continue working, probably in the mines or quarries. Although this is often recorded as a punishment, no mummy or skeleton discovered from ancient Egypt has shown evidence of such amputations.
The crime of making false accusations was an important one as it constitutes lying to the gods and to the king and the punishment was harsh. In the New Kingdom one woman and three men were given 100 blows each for making false accusations. Truth and honesty were therefore considered essential and once a criminal was found guilty the vizier was sometimes satisfied with the defendant swearing an oath that they would not commit such a crime again. Sometimes these oaths were acquired under torture, but all follow a similar format.
He said: as Amun endures and as the Ruler endures, if it be found that there was any man with whose name I have concealed, let his punishment be done to me.
If it be found that I had anything to do with the thieves may I be put on the stake.39
If ever in the future I go back upon my statement let me be sent to Kush.40
Once this oath was made the case was generally considered completed, although there is at least one incident where the oath was not taken at face value. A woman Herya was asked to swear under oath than she had not stolen a copper chisel from the workman Nebnefer. After she swore the oath they continued to question her, and then went to her home where they discovered the copper chisel and a number of other copper objects from a local cult. This elevated the level of the crime from a civil dispute dealt with by the knbt to a state crime and the scribe suggests she should be ‘taken to the riverbank’.41 It seems a further trial followed, leading to a harsher punishment. These oaths were considered to be made directly to the gods and the king and therefore should the criminal break them, not carry out any works or pay any fines promised, then they were severely punished.
The phrasing of the oaths also introduced some of the most drastic punishments available, which included being impaled on a stake. The Nauri Decree, from the reign of Sety I (1291–1278 BCE), describes the punishment as being ‘caused to fall, he being placed on top of the wood’. If the stake pierced the heart or a major blood vessel the death was quick, but if they aimed to miss the major organs then death was slow and painful. There are no images of executions, although there is a hieroglyphic determinative of a man with a sharp spike through his chest on the Amada stela of Merenptah (1212–1202 BCE). Such an execution may well have been a public event and the Nauri Decree records that temple thieves were ‘placed upon the top of the wood next to the temple from which he shall have stolen’.42 It cannot be known for sure. If this was a public spectacle, nor if it was how popular they were; the absentee records at Deir el-Medina do not mention time off for public executions, which indicates that it was perhaps not a spectator sport.
Another form of execution was burning; in the Middle Kingdom Papyrus Westcar an adulterous woman suffers death at the command of the king who ‘placed fire on her’ and her ashes were thrown in the river. The man she was adulterous with was given to a magical crocodile and dragged to the bottom of the lake. Both of them were denied a burial, and therefore an afterlife, which was essentially the main punishment. It is possible that those who were burnt had already been killed by some other means and the punishment was the destruction of the body, denying them an afterlife and ensuring punishment continued after death.
The Middle Kingdom stela of Neferhotep describes that the punishment for misuse of the temple at Abydos was being destroyed by fire, and the Tod inscription of Senusret I explains that someone who vandalises a temple was executed by means of being ‘placed on the brazier’. Even general theft could result in being ‘thrown into the fire’, as one man discovered when he was sentenced for stealing three state-owned chisels. Furthermore, by the end of the dynastic age it was an accepted although not the sole punishment for treason and rebellion.
The Middle Kingdom stele of Sehetepibre warns, ‘there will be no tomb for he who rebels against His Majesty, and his body shall be thrown in the river’,43 which denied them a proper burial and afterlife in the same manner as burning. The New Kingdom Ostracon Nash 144 describes how, after discovering temple objects in her house, the court accused the woman Herya (mentioned above) of being ‘Great False one, worthy of death’ and she was ‘taken to the riverbank’, possibly for execution45 in this case rather than questioning. She certainly disappeared from the records after this. The vizier wanted to make an example of her so ‘there shall be no other woman like her, again to do likewise’.
While it appears that execution was a standard punishment for some crimes, and the vizier was working on behalf of the king in these matters, the king himself was surprisingly coy about the practice. In the Harem Conspiracy Papyri, Ramses III claims that although he was aware of the death penalty he delegated the sentencing;
I spoke to them strictly saying; ‘Take care, in case you should allow an innocent man to be punished by an official who is not his superior’. This I said to them repeatedly. As for all this that has been done, it is they who have done it. May the blame fall on their heads while I am safeguarded, exempted forever, for I am amongst the just kings before Amun-Re.46
The Harem Conspiracy was essentially a plan devised by a secondary wife, Tiye, who wanted her son, Pentewere, on the throne in place of Ramses III. She involved a lot of people in the plan, which is perhaps why they were caught; there were six wives of the harem, gateway guards, thirteen courtiers, eleven harem officials, five military men and two priests. Some of the trial judges were then also charged for gross misconduct with some women from the harem. As the people here were charged with conspiracy to kill the king the penalty was death, although the king did not want his soul tarnished by administering the punishment himself.
A less severe, although not necessarily better, punishment was being sent to Kush to work i
n the mines or quarries. Nebnefer was given three punishments for an unspecified crime: 100 blows, 10 brands and hard labour in the quarries. Normally this sentence was until death, although Nebnefer was sentenced until the vizier decided he had done enough. Those people sentenced to the quarries often died on the journey to Kush before starting their period of enforced hard labour.
Now one of these days it happened that His Majesty [Ramses II] was thinking about the desert lands where gold could be got, and thinking of plans for digging wells along the routes made difficult because of their lack of water, in accord with a report made as follows: there is much gold in the desert of Akuyati, but the road to it is extremely difficult because of the water shortage. Whenever the gold prospectors went there it was only ever half of them that arrived, for they died of thirst on the way, along with their donkeys.47
Hard labour was not always in Kush and included ‘stone-cutting in the Theban necropolis, the Place of Truth’ and was a sentence for a violent crime: ‘Year 6, third month of summer, day 16. Setting A’o-nakhte to hammering (stone) in the Place of Truth (for?) striking the head of Djaydjay, Pa-idehu and Montu-pa-hapy.’48 This was not just a punishment given to those living at Deir el-Medina, as there is a fragment of a letter which tells of a policeman from another village, called Nakhte-Seti, who was sentenced to forced labour for hitting someone with a stick.
Lost Voices of the Nile: Everyday Life in Ancient Egypt Page 18
