General Features of Ancient Egyptian Justice

To understand how the Egyptian administration of justice adapted to the changes outlined above, one must first develop an appreciation of the funda­mental conceptual framework within which it operated.

In addition to this, justice was closely related to the religious concept of Mi'.t - a perceived cosmic order which had to be upheld to prevent the universe from collapsing, which was also personified as a goddess of truth.^{[56] [57] Indeed, fair judgment (wd'-mdw) - presumably based on the principles enumerated in the preceding paragraph - could be seen explicitly as an offering to the goddess, akin to a temple sacrificed4 Thus, any judgment in theory had implications not only for the litigants, but also for the universe. While it is unclear if Egyptian judicial officials genuinely thought that their actions were shaping the fate of the cosmos, there was certainly no clear separation between the concept of justice, a broader sense of conflict resolution, and religion. This last point, which leads to an inability to clearly define Ancient Egyptian justice, has no doubt contributed to the view that the Egyptians had no concrete legal process worthy of study. What follows will illustrate that this is not so, even if it cannot be studied using the methods and terminology most familiar to legal historians today, and that moreover the way Egyptian justice responded to political frag­mentation and (re)unification can be most instructive to studies of law in later empires.}

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