The Collapse of Centralised Judicial Institutions and the Professionalisation of Legal Officials in the Middle Kingdom

The fundamental change to the organisation of Ancient Egyptian justice from the Old to the Middle Kingdom - at least in the relatively formal sphere that has left written records - is easy to summarise: the centralised judicial institutions of the old administrative core described above apparently ceased to exist, and there is no evidence to suggest that any comparable centralised institutions replaced them.

3.1 A New Judicial Concept: Hp

One significant development was the appearance of a new judicial concept: hp, conventionally translated as â€?law’. This is entirely absent from Old Kingdom inscriptions but becomes increasingly prominent in the Middle Kingdom. In most cases, it does not seem to be a legal term stricto sensu, instead being pre­dominantly associated with wisdom literature and tomb autobiographies where it denotes decorous conduct appropriate for upholding M,^,'.t^[72] Howev­er, hp does also occur in titles of officials connected tojudging, which may point to legal connections in a narrower sense. For instance, the Middle King­dom high official Hty-^cnh, whose connection to justice is brought out in his title imy-r sdm.t wd'.t (â€?Overseer of judicial hearing and dividing’), also had the title or epithet dd hp.w (â€?One who gives Ap-laws’).^{[73] [74] [75] A slightly modified form, dd hpw∙s (â€?One who gives her hp-laws’),3i is also found in the exceptionally long title string of Mntw-htp?2 a Middle Kingdom Vizier with a wide range of titles connected to judging.}

Further evidence pointing to the use of hp in judicial matters is found in a number of autobiographical texts. For instance, hp.w are mentioned in a judi­cial context in the autobiography of S-rnp.wt, the head of the local administra­tion at the town of Elephantine, as part of a long self-laudatory inscription where he claims that his adherence to them allows the people to flourish^{[77] [78] [79]} While it is possible to associate this more with observing customary religious practice and conforming to conventional autobiographic norms rather than the practicalities of law, other mentions of hp.w seem more unequivocal. For instance, the Middle Kingdom stela of the Overseer of the Interior Intf de­scribes him as:

rh nmt.thp.w nw IrLt sb,^,.w m wd' s(n).wy

One who knows the steps and hp-laws of carrying out due process with regards to dividing two men.3≡

In another text, Papyrus Berlin 10033, the following can be read in one highly fragmentary line:

sdm r∙s mt hp

Hearing in accordance with hp-law3⁶

While it is unclear what exactly this refers to, the remainder of the document concerns a dispute over temple revenues and mentions what appears to be a local court. Meanwhile, another legal text, Papyrus Brooklyn 35.1446, mentions hp in the context of punishing escaped unfree labourers held in a place of detention:

w n hnr.t wr. (t) rnpt-311bd-2 smw des Niederlandischen Reichsmu- seums der Altertumer in Leiden: Die Denkmaler der Zeit Zwischen dem Alten undMittleren Re­ich unddesMittlerenReiches.

e Gaston Maspero, �Monuments egyptiens du Musee de Marseille’. Recueil de travaux relatifs a laphilologie et a l’archeologie egyptiennes et assyriennes 13 (1890), 116, 26.

f Hans O. Lange & Heinrich Schafer, �Grab- und Denksteine des Mittleren Reichs im Museum von Kairo’. Catalogue general des antiquites egyptiennes: 20001-20780(1) (1902), 315, 20302.

g E.A. Wallis Budge, Hieroglyphic Texts &c. in the British Museum (London: British Museum Press 1914) Part v, pl. 6.

h Heinrich Schafer, Adolf Erman, Walter Wreszinski, Hermann Ranke & Max Burchardt, Ae- gyptische Inschriften aus den Koniglichen Museen zu Berlin. Inschriften von der Altesten Zeit bis zum Ende derHyksoszeit (Leipzig: J.C. Hinrichs’sche Buchhandlung 1913) Vol. I, 201, 7288.

i Martin, Seals, 15, 120.

j Auguste Mariette, Catalogue general des monuments d’Abydos decouverts pendant les fouilles de cette ville (Paris : Imprimerie Nationale 1880) 321, 905.

k Lange & Schafer, �Grab- und Denksteine’ (1902), 104-05, 20087f

l Lange & Schafer, �Grab- und Denksteine’ (1908), 196-98, 20562/. m Martin, Seals, 87, 1117.

n Francis Ll. Griffith & Percy E. Newberry, ElBersheh (London: Egypt Exploration Fund 1895) Part II, 17-26.

Alongside this, there was also a significant shift in the terminology used to refer to judicial officials: while in the Old Kingdom the dominant term was wd'- mdw, in the Middle Kingdom it became sdm (table 4).

This raises an interesting question: even if wd'-mdw and sdm are conven­tionally both translated as meaning �to judge’, in what ways do these terms dif­fer? Even more significantly, is there any explanation for why wd'-mdw should have declined so significantly in the Middle Kingdom, after a cycle of fragmen­tation and reunification, while sdm grew in prominence?

table 4 The changing numbers of officials known to have been involved in wd’-mdw and

sdm in the Old and Middle Kingdoms³

a Note that the quoted percentages relate to the sum total of all judicial officials for whom data is available in each respective period, with judicial officials being defined as persons having at least one title associated with one of the key markers of judicial activity: wd’-mdw or sdm.

The most likely answer is that sdm (�hearing’) was initially associated spe­cifically with recording what was heard during proceedings, whereas wd’-mdw (�dividing words’) was associated with the actual act of passing definitive judg­ment. Evidence for this comes in part from the intrinsic semantic meaning of the terms: while the very expression �dividing words’ appears to denote an ac­tive process involving some sort of decision, �hearing’ can conceivably imply a more passive uptake of information, which might perhaps have been mani­fested in that information then being written down. Such an interpretation is supported by a passage from the aforementioned Instructionsfor Kagemni, a Middle Kingdom text which explicitly states that there was a very strong con­ceptual connection between hearing and writing:

Ir ntt nbt m ss hr p,’ sfdw sdm st mi dd∙ist

As for everything in writing upon the scroll, hear it as I say it.^{[87] [88]}

This suggests that the process of sdm could also be seen as the conduit by means of which people accessed recorded information - ss (â€?writing’). In the text above, the writing is said (dd), rather than read, and the individual con­sulting it receives the text aurally (sdm). The greeting nfr sdm∙k (â€?may your hearing be good’), often found at the end of correspondence^⁷ further corroborates the view that writing was heard, as does the fact that the Middle Egyptian verb sdi (â€?to read’) strongly implies reading aloud, simultaneously meaning â€?to recite’.^[89] Thus, if scribes and the written record became more prominent in the Middle Kingdom, following the political fragmentation and changes in wealth distribution associated with the First Intermediate Period, it is entirely logical that sdm would proliferate too.

On the other hand, there is no compelling evidence for wd'-mdw being as­sociated with the written word. Instead, in the Old Kingdom titles including that term usually belonged to very high-ranking officials occupying senior posts in Old Kingdom judicial institutions, which, as shown above, had been disbanded by the Middle Kingdom. By virtue of their high status, it seems like­ly that the wd'-mdw officials of the Old Kingdom would have carried great so­cial authority^^[90] generating respect for the way in which they �divided words’ and arrived at verdicts even if they were not narrowly specialised in the legal field. Furthermore, with hp not yet in existence, at the time there may not have been a definable body of specific �law’ in which one could have been an �expert’ in the narrow sense. When hp emerged, scribalism became more prominent, and judicial officials more specialised, the wd'-mdw appears to have been su­perseded by sdm, which probably now referred to the whole judging process and not just the hearing/recording element of procedure from which it had evolved. Further evidence for this being the fate of the disappearing wd'-mdw comes from the three Middle Kingdom officials who continued to use the title (seefig. 4). All of their title strings appear to be deliberately archaising, appear­ing to suggest that officials at the very top of Middle Kingdom officialdom ac­tively sought continuity with the Old Kingdom tradition.^[91] In other words, even when wd'-mdw was used in Middle Kingdom settings, its purpose was probably to evoke an earlier phase in the development of Egyptianjudicial administration, that of the Old Kingdom, which had now been left behind. This is a curiosity, but it is not out of place in the history of law in the longue duree, inasmuch as the maintenance of at least nominal affinity with time- honoured practices of procedure and office-holding has often been upheld by legal thinkers throughout history. Just why both the personnel and procedural- ism of �law’ are fortifiable through prescription in continuity with the past is precisely the kind of question Maine would have asked of his students of an­cient law, of course, but this cannot be explored further here.

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