Sandra L. Lippert

CNRS, ASM 5140, Montpellier

The last 15 years or so have seen a marked increase in the publication of handbooks, manuals, lexica and encyclopaedia on various academic disciplines and sub-disciplines. The consequence is that overview articles on ancient Egyptian law have also proliferated. Obviously, the scope and content of such articles and chapters depend on the one hand on the expectations, specifications and word count parameters given by the editors, and on the other on the individual take of the author. With five chapters1Jasnow 2003a–d; Manning 2003.by Richard Jasnow and Joe Manning that add up to almost 240 pages, Egyptian law fully takes its place alongside other Near Eastern legal systems in the chronologically ordered Handbook of Oriental Studies (HdO) double volume edited by Ray Westbrook, and the only reproach that one might find with the quasi-exhaustive handling of the subject is that the citations favour secondary literature over text editions and thus complicate access to the primary sources.

In the Wiley-Blackwell Companion to Ancient Egypt edited by Alan B. Lloyd, “pharaonic” law is treated together with administration by Ben Haring in a 19-page chapter of which law makes up less than a third;2Haring 2010.as Egyptian law of the Ptolemaic period is also briefly mentioned, there is a partial overlap with the following chapter “Law and Administration: Graeco-Roman” by Jane Rowlandson3Rowlandson 2010.– both treatments are necessarily rather succinct. The nine-page chapter on Egyptian law by Schafik Allam, in Toby Wilkinson’s The Egyptian World,4Allam 2007a.on the other hand, does not attempt to give a comprehensive overview of the subject but simply pinpoints a handful of aspects the author was working on anyway.5Religious foundations in the Old and Middle Kingdom (Allam 2007b and 2008a); legal procedure in New Kingdom Deir el-Medine and possible survival of practices in Ptolemaic Egypt (Allam 2006a and 2008b); the “Codex Hermopolis” manuscript (Allam 2006b).

The UCLA Encyclopedia of Egyptology, an open online resource (https://escholarship.org/uc/nelc_uee) which aims at eventually replacing the Lexikon der ?gyptologie,6Helck and Otto 1972–1992.was started in 2010 and is still expanding: it already contains a number of entries concerning Egyptian law, legal practice or subjects that have at least legal aspects,7“Inheritance” (Lippert 2013), “Land Donations” (Moreno Garcia 2013), “Land Tenure (to the End of the Ptolemaic Period)” (Katary 2013), “Law: Definitions and Codification” (Lippert 2012a), “Law Courts” (Lippert 2012b), “Marriage and Divorce” (Toivari-Viitala 2013), “Slavery and Servitude” (Loprieno 2012), “Violence” (Muhlestein 2015).but a list of entries still to come is unfortunately not publicly available.

In their module “Classical Studies,” Oxford Handbooks Online included, somewhat unexpectedly, a 24-page chapter “Egyptian Law: Saite to Roman Periods;”8Lippert 2016.another one, on Egyptian law up to the end of the 3rd Intermediate Period,9Lippert in press b.is about to be released online for the module “Egyptology” and will also be part of a printed version.

Alongside these handbook chapters and encyclopaedia entries, recent overview literature on Egyptian law also comprises manuals specifically on this subject. In his 240-page monograph,10VerSteeg 2002.Russ VerSteeg opted for a primarily thematic order, starting with concepts, organisation and procedure before treating individual legal areas such as property, family etc.; chronological differentiation is not always clear or even present. Demotic sources are almost entirely excluded, but may unexpectedly appear in chapters where, on the contrary, existing earlier evidence is hardly or not at all used, for example in the chapters on leases (pp. 114–115) and marriage (pp. 126–132). As in the HdO chapters mentioned above, original texts are only referred to through secondary literature, and there is no index of primary sources at the end.

In her Einführung in die alt?gyptische Rechtsgeschichte,11Lippert 2008/2012.meant to furnish an update on Erwin Seidl’s introductory volumes,12Seidl 1939/1951, 1956/1968, 1962 and 1973.the present author chose a division into four large chronological sections, each following the same thematic order, as far as the subject matter is attested in that period; a priority lies on the direct reference to original sources that are indexed and provided with a bibliography at the end. After a practically unchanged reprint in 2012, it is currently being updated for an English edition in collaboration with Koen Donker van Heel and Cary Martin.

A number of more pointed studies – focusing either on a specific period, field of law or legal institution – also saw the light in the last 15 years: Wolfgang Boochs’ book on civil law13Boochs 1999.is, however, perhaps too brief and in any case fails to offer an adequate chronological differentiation and is thus hardly of much use. In a hefty 460-page volume, Tycho Q. Mrsich undertakes to give an overview on Egyptian law of the Old and Middle Kingdom14Mrsich 2005.on the basis of commented translations of numerous legal texts. Non-Egyptologists must, however, be warned that the historical and ideological background image which he draws as well as his etymologies of legal terms are often quite speculative and do not necessarily reflect accepted Egyptological opinion. Another monograph by the same author15Id. 2018.came to the attention of the present author too late to be included here.

While the title of Arlette David’s book The Legal Register of Ramesside Private Law Instruments16David 2010.seems to suggest a study of the official recording of legal documents, her approach is in fact purely linguistic (“register” here meaning the specific type of language used in a given context). Such a study could be useful for pinpointing whether, where and why the Egyptian legal language diverges from other “registers” of Egyptian, but David seems to have missed the fact that the meta-language developed by her discipline has reached a level where communication with non-linguists is practically impossible, or perhaps she simply did not aim at a broader public in the first place. Christopher Eyre’s monograph on The Use of Documents in Pharaonic Egypt17Eyre 2013.is not purely legal either, but much broader: his study covers various types of administrative documents and explores sociological, political and ideological aspects as well.

Renate Müller-Wollermann treats crime and punishment in Egypt18Müller-Wollermann 2004.not only from a legal, but also a sociological, ideological and religious angle; her study gratifyingly replaces an only slightly earlier, but much shorter monograph by Boochs.19Boochs 1993.Her analysis of capital punishment has been criticised by Kerry Muhlestein20Muhlestein 2008, 184.as being too narrow in accepting only source material unambiguously referring to the real world and actually executed death penalties, thus excluding threats and vague allusions, and too broad in her chronological scope, a criticism that is hard to understand. His own publications on the death penalty21Ibid., passim; see also Muhlestein 2005 and 2011 (the published version of his 2003 thesis).are useful in collecting evidence, but sometimes have a tendency to jump to conclusions, for instance, when attempting to prove that drowning was commonly used as death penalty on the basis of texts simply mentioning people (not even necessarily convicted criminals) being brought to the river side,22Id. 2005.or when claiming “very strong evidence” for flaying solely on the base of a fanciful interpretation of a hapax by Donald B. Redford,23Id. 2008, 189; 2011, 37, 44 (citing Redford 1987, 42, 51, n. 68).without mentioning later divergent translations;24Barbotin and Clère 1991, 9, 22, n. 103.the passages introducing the chapters in his thesis in which he retells supposedly historical events in a dime novel style, do nothing to convince the reader of the seriousness and reliability of his research.

Abd el-Mohsen Bakir’s classical, but by now out-dated study on slavery in ancient Egypt25Bakir 1952.was at least partially replaced by the work of Tobias Hofmann, who approached the problem not from a strictly juridical point of view, but in terms of the broader social context,26Hofmann 2005.based on an examination of the changing meanings of two Egyptian terms for servants, ?m and b?k, from the Old Kingdom to the end of the New Kingdom. Necessarily more succinct is Günter Vittmann’s contribution to the Handw?rterbuch der antiken Sklaverei27Vittmann 2006.which is nevertheless extremely rich in sources and broader in its terminological and chronological scope than Hofmann’s monograph.

Alexandra Philip-Stéphan’s monograph on juridical procedure of the Old and Middle Kingdom28Philip-Stéphan 2008.is the published version of her thesis; in view of the scant source material, she opted for the inclusion of literary, religious and even extra-Egyptian text sources to create context and atmosphere which unfortunately (but predictably) resulted in a number of questionable conclusions.29See also my review: Lippert 2011–2012.

The institution of oracle trials,30Not to be confused with ordeals, where the defendant has to prove his innocence by tests like holding a red-hot iron or being thrown into water.present in Egypt from the New Kingdom onwards and common in the 3rd Intermediate Period, had evoked harsh criticism from Erwin Seidl who, evaluating it from his modern juristic point of view and without fully understanding either the practical side, nor the socio-cultural framework, considered it superstitious and a “temporary aberration.”31Seidl 1939/1951, 38.However, a recent study by Joachim F. Quack32Quack 2008.explains the concept of divine judgment in the context of the Egyptian belief system where the gods were seen as guarantors of truth and justice and capable of intervening to punish perjury or to render justice in court cases. He concludes that recourse to oaths before gods and to oracles was taken especially in cases where other means of establishing the truth proved insufficient. In his contribution to the same interdisciplinary conference on law and religion in ancient societies, Schafik Allam33Allam 2008c, 122–130.contradicts this somehow by pointing out the basically identical range of cases presented to oracle trials and trials before a human court; even the set-up, at least of processional oracle trials, where plaintiff and defendant presented their case, if necessary including documentary evidence or witnesses, before a public of local administrators and priests, corresponded quite closely; the only clear difference being that the judgment was not uttered by the tribunal, but by a divinity. Strangely, Allam rests quite vague on the actual mechanics of processional oracles, mentioning neither the fundamental study by Jaroslav ?erny34?erny 1962.nor the more recent treatment by Malte R?mer,35R?mer 1994, 135–301, esp. 159, 164, 287–301. For oracles in general, see now also von Lieven 2016.and thus fails to propose an explication that seems convincing (at least to the present author): while Egyptian sources never question the principle of oracles being a god’s answer (even condemning occasional attempts to tamper with them as criminal), the judgment in an Egyptian processional oracle trial could in practice have been a majority decision by the priests carrying the cult image who expressed their personal judgment after hearing the case in their more or less unconscious movements which resulted in the god “nodding” (in assent), “going backwards” (in dissent), or moving towards one party or the other. Brian Muhs has studied the connected issue of oracular property decrees, that is, title deed guaranteed by an oracle decision.36Muhs 2009.

A study on the police system of the Ptolemaic period by John Bauschatz focuses almost entirely on Greek sources,37Bauschatz 2013.and this would not have been a problem had he clearly restricted himself to conclusions that can be drawn from such a limited material. However, Bauschatz tries to justify the omission of Demotic sources (characterised at one point sarcastically as “scribbled (...) on a scrap of papyrus” and “undecipherable,” p. 331) by pretending they would not have added anything of interest anyway – which conveniently allowed him to depict ancient Egyptians as semi-savages who had to await the Greeks to introduce them to the achievements of law, order and civilisation, and thus to claim a purely Hellenistic origin for the astonishingly efficient Ptolemaic police system, despite existing (Demotic) evidence to this being largely the continuation of a system established at the latest in the 26th Dynasty.38See also my review: Lippert 2014.

James G. Keenan, Joe G. Manning and Uri Yiftach-Firanko edited an anthology of legal sources of Graeco-Roman Egypt in translation with commentaries;39Keenan, Manning and Yiftach-Firanko 2014.as this volume is a collective endeavour, uniting over thirty scholars of different disciplines, the treatment of the different subjects and sources is somehow unequal, and Demotic sources remain unfortunately under-represented.40See also the review by Donker van Heel 2015.

It might be necessary, at this point, to recall that Egyptology, and therefore Egyptian legal history, is still rather a young discipline (compared for example to Classical philology or Roman legal history), and that, as a consequence, the publication of textual sources in this domain is far from complete, not only because on-going excavations continuously add new material, but also because many texts are still lying unpublished in museum magazines and collections all over the world, many of them hardly examined yet, although discovered over a hundred years ago. At the same time, a number of those texts that were published decades ago are also in need of re-examination, respecting modern edition standards; because new fragments or parallels have turned up or because our understanding of the script or language stage in question has advanced significantly since then. The following is a necessarily incomplete glimpse of recent and current editions of new legal sources – and re-editions of important legal texts or text corpora – from Egypt:

A number of clay tablets with incised hieratic inscriptions of the 6th Dynasty (c. 2350–2180 BC) have been found at Balat in the Dakhla oasis; they belonged to a local administrative archive and contain letters, economic, legal and administrative texts. Two tablets concerning testamentary dispositions have been edited by Alexandra Philip-Stéphan.41Philip-Stéphan 2005. See also 2008, 260–261.Other tablets are still being studied by Laure Pantalacci.42See the pre-report in Soukiassian, Wuttmann and Pantalacci 2002, 331–354.The same site has also furnished a new royal decree inscribed on a stela.43Ibid., 314–315.

The Middle Kingdom hieratic papyri from El-Lahun44Ed.princ. by Griffith 1898.contain several texts of legal importance, and in view of the comparatively small number of sources of this type known from this period, they are particularly fundamental for our understanding of property transfer in the Middle Kingdom. Tom Logan45Logan 2000.had already used some of these texts in his article on the ?my.t-pr-document, and shortly thereafter, Andrew H. Ganley republished the transfer deeds from El-Lahun in a two-part article46Ganley 2003a; 2003b.that beat the corresponding volume of Mark Collier’s and Stephen Quirke’s re-edition project by a year.47Collier and Quirke 2004.A digitalisation project of the El-Lahun papyri has been running since 2010, but is not yet online.48See: http://www.ucl.ac.uk/archaeology/research/directory/lahun_quirke (27.02.2018).

The recently inaugurated Louvre Abu Dhabi has turned out to house a hitherto unknown granite stela bearing a long decree of Tutankhamun (c. 1330 BC) protecting temple estates from misappropriation; it will be published by Marc Gabolde49Personal communication.who pointed out to me the similarity of several passages to the later Nauri decree of Seti I (c. 1290–1280 BC).50Ed.princ. Griffith 1927.

In a project running since 2001, Schafik Allam51See: http://gepris.dfg.de/gepris/projekt/5313328 (27.02.2018).is preparing a re-edition of the famous Tomb Robbery Papyri52Ed.princ. Peet 1930.of the 20th Dynasty (c. 1100 BC), which report the criminal investigations, including on-site inspections and questioning of witnesses and suspects (sometimes comprising beatings) following complaints of the desecration of royal and private tombs in the Theban necropolis.

Koen Donker van Heel, who had already worked on abnormal hieratic legal documents in his PhD-thesis,53Donker van Heel 1995/1996.has continued editing new material, for example two receipts of the 25th Dynasty (early 7th century BC)54Id. 2004a.and a land donation of the early 26th Dynasty (c. 600 BC),55Id. 2014.and more is still to come.56Cf. eund. 2004b, 129.

Textual sources for indigenous Egyptian law have survived in much larger numbers – and more varied form – for the Late period (26th to 30th Dynasty), the Ptolemaic and early Roman periods, and practically all of them are written in Demotic. Before we take a closer look at new (or newly edited) material from this period, we need to address a major controversy that principally concerns this era, namely that of the existence of codified law in ancient Egypt.

Manning57Manning 2012, 111–112.traces the unwillingness of modern legal historians to acknowledge any contribution to modern Western legal systems by ancient Near Eastern civilisations back to the Greek political philosophers Plato and Aristotle who had postulated a strict opposition between oriental “despotic” and occidental “democratic” states; this binary model was perpetuated by Charles de Montesquieu, who categorically denied the very existence of fundamental law in these despotic states. Manning also shows that a different view had already been held by Herodotus, who had pointed out that written law and public justice in fact did exist in monarchic systems, but that this has found little resonance with later political thinkers and legal historians. While Manning had not explicitly addressed the problem of how this has influenced the discussion about legal codification, it is obvious that a similar ideological bias also plays a role in the debate which developed in the course of the second half of the 20th century: by the 1990’s, many legal historians were in accordance that not only all nonoccidental, but even pre-18th century occidental societies lacked the sociopolitical maturity to have achieved it. This is put in a nutshell in the Neue Pauly entry “Kodifizierung / Kodifikation,” claiming that codification proper is necessarily the fruit of a humanistic mindset and derived from the jurisprudential discourse of the Enlightenment58D?lemeyer 2000, 1003: “Demgegenüber ist der Gedanke der ?Kodifikation‘ im mod., technischen Sinn aus der human. Kritik am geltenden ius commune und aus der Gesetzgebungslehre der Aufkl?rung hervorgegangen.”– which reminds one of the statement that reaching a new continent only counts as “discovery” when it is done by people wearing decent trousers.59Satirised by Terry Pratchett, e.g. Pratchett and Briggs 1995, 5–6.

Jan Assmann’s assertion that there were written laws, but no codified law in ancient Egypt, which he explained by a supposed conflict with royal ideology,60Assmann 1994, 61, 66–68; 2000, 178–182.is clearly based on the afore-mentioned categorical claims more than actual examination of sources. It has, nevertheless, been accepted as valid for all periods,61E.g. Hengstl and Witthuhn 2003, 166–167; Hengstl 2001.partly because he himself does not specify clearly enough that he is talking only about the period before the end of the New Kingdom.62Even for this period, his idea of the king as “l(fā)iving law” is debatable, cf. Lippert 2004a, 170–171.However, for the later periods there do exist sources that at least need to be evaluated as possible evidence for codification, at any rate according to the basic definition of a collection of laws that emanates from an authority, is considered comprehensive and destined to be the basis of future jurisdiction.63Cf. ibid., 170.This evaluation is, however, still hampered by terminological misunderstandings: as in other Near Eastern legal systems, the laws in these sources were predominantly phrased as hypothetical cases with a conditional protasis and an injunctive or vetitive apodosis. This form is referred to as “casuistic” by Assyriologists and Biblical scholars, but the use of this term prompted historians of Roman Law to reject the identification of these legal regulations as laws because in their terminology, “casuistic” refers to the phrasing of jurisprudential commentaries like the Digest in which real, but anonymised cases are discussed. Finally, scholars (including Egyptologists) accustomed to an Anglo-Saxon legal system, understood “casuistic” as meaning “referring to case law” (i.e., based on earlier court decisions)64E.g. Johnson 1996, 177, repeated by VerSteeg 2002, 9.and again concluded that the Egyptian texts in question could not represent true (or even codified) law, but only collections of sample cases to be used as precedents.

A key text for the discussion of a possible legal codification in the Late period is a report about the collection of Egyptian laws ordered by Darius I, written in Demotic on pBibl. nat. 215 verso, col. c, l. 6–16.65First signalled and translated by Revillout 1880, 59–61; first edition with transliteration: Spiegelberg 1914, 30–32.This has recently been reedited three times in a relatively short period: first by Damien Agut-Labordère in an article about Darius’ Egyptian policy for a collective volume on elites and power,66Agut-Labordère 2009/2010.then by Quack in the context of an article establishing the 44th year of Amasis as his last regnal year (and thus the year in which Cambyses started his invasion),67Quack 2011.and finally by the present author in a contribution to the proceedings of a conference on the textualisation and codification of laws in antiquity held in 2011;68Lippert 2017.this last article refuted Udo Rütersw?rden’s claim69Rütersw?rden 1995.that this report is not based on historic reality and should be seen as a Ptolemaic period invention, a claim which Rütersw?rden makes in order to discredit the idea of an Egyptian law collection as a possible parallel to the disputed imperial authorisation of the Torah, which is of course in line with the above-mentioned rejection of preenlightenment codification, from which some scholars wanted to exclude the Torah.70See, for example, Hengstl 2001.

Additional fragments of the manuscript known as the Zivilproze?ordnung, of which the first parts, preserved at Berlin71Ed. princ. Spiegelberg 1929. Corrections by Sethe and Spiegelberg 1929. See also Mrsich 1984.and Cairo,72Ed. princ. Sethe and Spiegelberg 1929.were edited by Wilhelm Spiegelberg and Kurt Sethe in 1929, were known to exist in the university library at Giessen,73Described by Seidl 1963, who mentioned a planned publication by Erichsen; Kaplony-Heckel 1986 supplied only low quality photographs and no transliteration or translation.but were not edited until 2003 in an article by the present author who also republished the Berlin and Cairo fragments.74Lippert 2003a. The verso, a geographical list of priestly offices with the amounts of the corresponding accession fees described by Seidl 1963, is still unpublished.The importance of this text is still largely ignored by many legal historians. Structurally very similar to the Codex Hermopolis manuscript (see below), it contains legal regulations dealing with trial proceedings (hence its vernacular name Zivilproze?ordnung), but also regulations concerning priests (transactions of service days, restrictions for passing on the priestly office to sons, regulations in case of illness) that resemble those found in an excerpt on pBibl.nat. 215 verso col. b l. 1 – col. c l. 5.75Spiegelberg 1914, 29. Also translated by Devauchelle 1995, 74.The inclusion of what one might well call “temple law” into a manuscript also covering purely secular legal regulations corresponds well to the passage in the above-mentioned report on the compilation of Egyptian laws (ordered by Darius) that this collection was also to include the “l(fā)aws of the temples.” While Ludwig Koenen had understood a passage of the procedural regulations in the Zivilproze?ordnung as a reference to a philanthropa decree of 186 BC76Koenen 1960.(principally followed by Mrsich, although he dated it to 145/144 BC77Mrsich 1984, 272–280.), the re-edition reveals that this concerns not a fixed date (“year 20”), but a 20-year prescription period.78Lippert 2003a, 108.Allam79Allam 1993, 17.had formerly used the supposed mention of a philanthropa decree as a terminus post quem for the manuscript and thus proposed a mid to late 2nd century BC date, which is unlikely from a palaeographic point of view. Close inspection of the sign shapes has re-established and slightly refined the mid-Ptolemaic dating already proposed by Spiegelberg:80Spiegelberg 1929, 3.it is thus unlikely that the manuscript is much younger than the beginning of the 2nd century BC.81Lippert 2003a, 94.Another consequence of this correction is that there is no longer any evidence for a Ptolemaic period reshaping of the underlying text, and the only pharaoh explicitly mentioned is king Amasis of the 26th Dynasty.

The first edition of pBerlin P 23757 recto, dating probably to the second half of the 3rd century BC and coming from the region of Akhm?m, was the subject of the present author’s doctoral thesis82Ead. 2004a. A larger fragment of this manuscript had been described by Zauzich 1994.and the point of departure for a larger study on the typology and character of the demotic texts hitherto grouped under the single label “l(fā)egal manuals.” The text turned out to belong to the same type, and most likely represents even a copy of the same model, as the socalled Tebtunis Legal Manual, a badly preserved late Ptolemaic/early Roman manuscript of which over 70 smallish fragments, now conserved at Florence, have been published by Edda Bresciani,83Bresciani 1981.while 28 somewhat larger fragments now at Copenhagen were edited by Michel Chauveau.84Chauveau 1991.While Bresciani had remarked some similarities with the text of the Codex Hermopolis manuscript (see below), she already recognised that the character of the Tebtunis Legal Manual was more didactic in nature because it contained numerous interrogative pronouns. This became even clearer with the publication of the slightly better preserved Copenhagen fragments, although Chauveau could still not exclude that the text had originally consisted in a part that resembled in structure the Codex Hermopolis text (he even proposed identifying at least one direct textual parallel, p. 118) and another containing questions (p. 120). The edition of pBerlin P 23757 recto cleared up these doubts: the text underlying the Tebtunis Legal Manual and pBerlin P 23757 recto is in fact that of a didactic manual, consisting of an alternation of questions and model answers, the latter generally introduced by the words “its explanation;” the questions switch from one subject matter to another, only occasionally is there a follow-up question on the same topic; the passages that are close to the Codex Hermopolis text in style and content are quotes of laws occurring either in questions asking for their legal motivations or for pertinent cases of application, or in the model answers. In conclusion, the present author (Lippert 2004a, pp. 167–175) proposed to see in the Codex Hermopolis and Zivilproze?ordnung manuscripts, as well as at least two other less well preserved ones (see below), fragmentary copies of the – presumably very long – collection of Egyptian laws ordered by Darius I which in turn had been sanctioned as the basis for the jurisdiction of the indigenous judges (laokritai) of the Ptolemaic period under the Greek label ν?μοι τ?? χ?ρα?; the Tebtunis Legal Manual and pBerlin P 23757 recto would then be fragmentary copies of a (probably single) didactic manual that cites from and comments on this law collection for the purpose of training legal personnel. While it remains unclear when this didactic manual was redacted, the fact that its questions still include titles of functionaries that no longer existed in the Ptolemaic period makes it highly likely that it is of pre-Ptolemaic or at the latest very early Ptolemaic origin.

Two more fragmentary manuscripts of legal manuals were edited by the present author in the Festschrift for Karl-Theodor Zauzich.85Lippert 2004b.The better preserved, pBerlin P 23860 a–b, d–g recto, is late Ptolemaic in date and is probably from the Fayum. The continuity of the text which, over several paragraphs and all six fragments, treats legal regulations on money loans, paired with the complete lack of interrogative clauses, ranges this manuscript with the law collection manuscripts.

In her monumental study of pCairo JdE 89127–89130 + 89137–89143 (“pMattha”),86Discovered 1938 (Mattha 1940–1941).Birgit Jordan87Jordan 2015.gives re-editions of the texts on the recto (i.e. the manuscript also known as Codex Hermopolis)88The posthumous ed.princ. Mattha 1975 was edited by George R. Hughes.as well as the verso (a mathematical text),89Ed.princ. Parker 1972, 13–53.but unfortunately without a philological commentary which would clearly show where, and explain why, she departs from earlier editions. The analysis chapters switch back and forth between the recto and verso texts, focusing on palaeography, external and internal text form and structure, the significance of tiny strokes above various words, grammatical features of the legal and mathematical texts, etc. The closest we get to an actual juridical analysis of the content of pMattha recto is her résumé of the different opinions on its character and purpose (pp. 51–67), culminating in the ostensibly neutral statement that none of the hitherto proposed interpretations – as codification, laws (of unspecified origin) or something else – can really be proved or disproved and that these have merely the character of opinions.90Jordan 2015, 63: “?u?erungen zur Frage ‘Kodifikation, Gesetz oder nichts dergleichen’ geben keine testbaren Erkenntnisse wieder, sondern haben Meinungscharakter.”The fallacy of this statement is, of course, that in science (including humanities) not just the mere possibility, but also the probability of a theory has to be taken into account – all opinions are not on a par. There is no comparison with the other known demotic manuscripts of a similar content and structure (Zivilproze?ordnung, pCarlsberg 236,91Tait 1991.pBerlin P 23860), although they are briefly mentioned in a footnote.92Jordan 2015, 51, n. 155.The relationship between the text conserved on the Codex Hermopolis manuscript and the didactic manual(s), for example pBerlin P 23757 recto and the Tebtunis Legal Manual, is not addressed either. Despite her professed neutrality, Jordan herself clearly favours the interpretation of a privately (or at least unofficially) drawn up commentary-like compilation of material partially as old as the 26th Dynasty, but also including much younger additions, which did not necessarily have any legally binding character, something she calls a “secondary legal text.” Her own arguments for preferring this interpretation over the others are, however, easily contested and in most cases had already been refuted before the publication of her thesis: she claims, for example (p. 317), that the section on s?n?-documents in the legal text shows that it is a patchwork, also drawing from sources only slightly older than the preserved manuscript itself, because the oldest known s?n?-document dates to 365/364 BC; the fact that s?n?-documents are already mentioned in the early Persian sales document pCairo CG 50059 as existing early in the reign of Amasis, as pointed out in the present author’s Einführung,93Lippert 2008/2012, 168.is dismissed as irrelevant because mere terminological isomorphy should not be used to deduce identity of legal concepts without further external evidence.94Jordan 2015, 317, n. 937: “Aus terminologischer Isomorphie sollte nur mit guten und unabh?ngigen Gründen auf die Gleichheit der zugrunde liegenden Rechtskonzepte geschlossen werden.”That sounds reasonable, but the information given in pCairo CG 50059 leaves very little doubt that the s?n?-documents there correspond exactly to the s?n?-documents of the Codex Hermopolis text, and even better than the Ptolemaic period versions which are predominantly made out to the woman,95Ibid., 316.as shown in an article by Janet Johnson96Johnson 1994, and in part already Pestman 1961, 47–48. The archive to which this papyrus belongs is currently being re-edited by Jannik Korte (Heidelberg) in his doctoral thesis.which Jordan even cites. This discrepancy between the model s?n?-document in the Codex Hermopolis text and Ptolemaic period s?n?-documents is, moreover, used as an argument in Jordan’s claim that the Codex Hermopolis text regulates only special cases97So already Seidl 1979, 24.and not the norm (and thus represents not true laws, but is “secondary”).98Jordan 2015, 316.Again, this claim was already refuted by Johnson 1994 who showed that in the Late period, the constellation of endowment documents being drawn up by a man for another man, but for the benefit of a woman, was in fact the norm. This is therefore not proof of the Codex Hermopolis text being a commentary dealing only with special and rare cases, but rather an indication that this section, as could be shown for other passages, goes back to the Late period.99Lippert 2004a, 156–157.Another case where evidence conflicting with Jordan’s views is simply passed over in silence is her assertion that there is no trace of a redaction in the Persian period within the text (p. 52), without even mentioning the presence of a most likely Old Persian loan word (which is known from a number of Aramaic legal documents of the Persian period, but a hapax in Demotic100Azzoni and Lippert 2000.) in a section subtitle (col. 2, l. 2). While the word and the relevant article are cited later (pp. 63, 314 and in the glossary, p. 497) and the translation proposed therein accepted, Jordan mis-characterised it as Aramaic and draws no conclusion whatsoever from its presence in the legal text of pMattha.

In his on-going doctoral project Das “Gesetz der Tempel.” Untersuchungen zu Pap. Florenz PSI inv. D 102 directed by Quack, Fabian Wespi (Heidelberg) is preparing the edition of a Roman period Demotic manuscript of priestly regulations from Tebtunis101See the pre-report by Wespi 2016.which Edda Bresciani had already mentioned in several pre-reports. It contains rules on the selection and appointment of priests and temple officials, including obstacles, rules on ritual purity, regulations about the correct copying of religious texts by the temple scribes and the handling of misdemeanours committed by priests in a style corresponding to the phrasing of Egyptian laws in manuscripts like the Codex Hermopolis and the Zivilproze?ordnung. The manuscript also contains a parallel to the Cambyses decree on temple income preserved on the verso of pBibl. nat. 215 col. d that Bresciani had already partially translated in a pre-report.102Bresciani 1996, 106–107. See also the translation and new interpretation by Agut-Labordère 2005a/b.Wespi deems it likely that this manuscript is a fragmentary copy of the section on temple law of the legal collection ordered by Darius I.103Wespi 2016, 186–187.In his pre-report, he furthermore mentions an unpublished Greek manuscript that might contain a translation of similar temple laws; the status of a hieratic manuscript with comparable content, to be published by Quack, is still uncertain.104Ibid., 192–193.

Another important text type for our understanding of the judicial system is that of process protocols. Unfortunately, we still lack sources for the early Demotic period (Dynasties 26 to 30), and only very few protocols of the Ptolemaic period are hitherto published. The longest and most complete text of this type known to us is preserved on pBM EA 10591 recto (170 BC) from Siut which contains the full text of the parties’ writs of complaint and defence, the copies of documents used as evidence, the record of the judges’ interrogation of the parties and of the judgment including the laws quoted to justify the decision. It was first published by Herbert Thompson105Thompson 1934.and is currently being re-edited, together with the rest of the papyri of this archive, by Bahar Landsberger (Heidelberg) in her doctoral thesis Der Prozess. Ein ptolem?erzeitliches Archiv aus Assiut in demotischer Schrift under the direction of Quack.106Personal communication.The texts of a correspondence between a strategos and an Egyptian priest concerning legal advice on the verso of pBM EA 10591 have recently been re-edited by Mark Depauw and Gerd Baetens.107Baetens and Depauw 2015.Another Demotic process protocol, drawn up by the laocritai of Thebes in 114 BC (pCologne dem. inv. 7676), which had been presented by Heinz J. Thissen in a paper at the 5th International Conference for Demotists at Pisa in 1993108Thissen 1994.but never fully published, is going to be edited by the present author in a volume of the Papyrologica Coloniensia series. With just two columns, this almost perfectly preserved protocol is much shorter and less detailed than the earlier one from Siut mentioned above, although it also cites laws in the conclusion. Otherwise, it resembles the even more concise pMallawi 602/10,109Published by El-Aguizi 1988.which is only four years younger and thus the last unambiguous attestation for the activity of the laokritai. Other Demotic trial protocols are less well preserved and have only been described yet.110Thissen 1994, 287–288; Kitchen and Beltr?o 1990, 241, no. 181; Monnet Saleh 1970, 164, no. 882.

The largest group of new Demotic legal sources are, of course, transaction documents, be they sales, loans, leases, divisions, marriage and endowment documents etc. drawn up by professional notaries or informal holograph documents, such as receipts and certificates of debt. For the sake of brevity, the following overview will concentrate on editions of corpora and those texts most likely to offer new insights.

Original notary documents are usually written on papyrus, but in the isolated environment of the Libyan desert, where papyrus seemed to have been quite rare, potsherds could also be used for this purpose, as witnessed by numerous legal documents on ostraca, dating from the late 26th to the early 30th Dynasty, found at ?Ayn Manawir in the oasis of Kharga and recently published together with other, mainly administrative ostraca from this site in an online edition by Agut and Chauveau.111Agut-Labordère and Chauveau 2015.Substantial quantities of abnormal hieratic and early demotic ostraca are also being discovered in the on-going excavations at Mut al-Kharab in the oasis of Dakhla, but there are, up to now, only a few legal documents among them; the publication of this material has been entrusted to Günter Vittmann.112Cf. Vittmann 2012; Vittmann in press.

A fragment of a papyrus containing templates for Demotic legal documents, compiled in the late 2nd century BC for the notary of Tebtunis, is being edited by Cary Martin and Kim Ryholt;113Cf. Ryholt 2018, 144.it joins two fragments recently published by Martin.114Martin 2009; 2015.The exact purpose of these templates is still to be determined – comparable (although more basic) model documents appear among legal regulations (best preserved on the Codex Hermopolis manuscript), presumably to provide guidelines for the drawing up and correct phrasing of such documents, while isolated cases, some of them on ostraca, have been interpreted as teaching material for, or exercises produced by, apprentice scribes. In the present case, however, the templates are already very specific, for example a lease for a precisely located field or an endowment document with exact amounts for the endowment and maintenance, with only the date and the parties being left unspecified.

Among the papyri from mummy cartonnage excavated at Tebtunis in 1899/1900 by Bernard P. Grenfell and Arthur S. Hunt there were also numerous Demotic papyri which, having been separated from the Greek material early on, reached the Center for the Tebtunis Papyri at the Bancroft Library, Berkeley only long after the (by then already partially edited) Greek papyri from the site. The study of this vast material is still only beginning. A corpus of over forty 2nd century BC demotic documents probably from the notary office of Oxyrhyncha, principally leases of fields and gardens, will be edited by Carolin Arlt and the present author in the P.Tebt. series.115See the pre-report in Lippert 2008. More papyri belonging to this dossier have turned up since.This will significantly increase the hitherto quite small number of published Demotic land leases from the Fayum. Among the more surprising discoveries are, on the one hand, bilateral Demotic lease documents, as Demotic legal documents are usually strictly unilateral; on the other hand, several examples show Greek katoikoi as lessors, which might surprise those who thought that Greeks had strong reservations against using Egyptian legal documents.

While large numbers of Demotic legal documents are known from the 3rd and 2nd centuries BC, there are still comparably few published documents of the late Ptolemaic and Roman periods, probably because from the 1st century BC onward, Demotic writing developed very divergent styles from one region to another, which makes it more difficult to decipher. The notary tradition of Soknopaiou Nesos (Dime), a village on the northern shore of the Fayum Lake and one of the last to produce considerable quantities of Demotic texts, can now be followed from the 2nd century BC to the 3rd quarter of the 1st century AD: for the late Ptolemaic period, Maren Schentuleit and Günter Vittmann116Schentuleit and Vittmann 2009.published nine demotic legal documents, comprising four texts outwardly framed as sales of parts of a small sanctuary, but which have been shown in reality to concern “temple days,” that is, fractions of the yearly income from the religious activities of a temple; the others are sales of houses and endowment documents for women. The third volume of the Demotische Dokumente aus Dime series picked up where the aforementioned publication left off by adding 41 mostly bilingual (Demotic and Greek) legal documents from the Roman period.117Lippert and Schentuleit 2010.Most of these are sales concerning houses or parts of houses, and among these are several that are actually securities for a loan of money, documented as a Greek daneion deed on the right side of the papyrus;118For the practical aspects of this layout, see Lippert in press a.other documents are divisions of real estate among co-heirs and marriage documents. The edition of these two complementary corpora permitted a detailed analysis of the phraseology of what are among the last demotic legal documents, as well as proposing reasons for their disappearance at the end of the 1st century AD.119See also Muhs 2005.

To sum up, Egyptian legal history is still very much in its explorative and descriptive phase. This does not mean that we should completely abstain from broader analyses; however, we – and our colleagues from neighbouring disciplines – need to be aware of the very real possibility that what looks like a plausible conclusion on the basis of current knowledge can at any moment be upset by new evidence. But that is the challenge of cutting edge science!

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