A new article by Dr Alex Loktionov and Dr Ekaterina Alexandrova of HSE University (Moscow) is the first published collaboration between British and Russian scholars in the 200-year history of the field of Egyptology.
Dr Loktionov said:
“This publication brings people together through research at a time when geopolitical forces are creating so many challenges.”
They present a new theory for understanding the interplay of Ancient Egyptian justice and religion. The article argues that going to court was regarded as a religious act and that winning a judicial case was a form of divine vindication.
Legal evidence was not only about convincing judges about a plaintiff’s right conduct on earth, but also a way of illustrating righteousness to the gods who determined successful admission to the afterlife.
A case study looks at the tomb chapel of Mose in Memphis, discovered in 1898, which contains scenes and descriptions of justice in both this world and the parallel world inhabited by the deceased and the divine.
Mose was a temple treasury scribe of the creator god Ptah serving under Ramesses II in the 13th century BCE who was engaged in a long-running land dispute with relatives who had allegedly falsified a property register to try to disinherit him.
Reconstruction of the heavily damaged tomb’s layout and hieroglyphic texts and decoration prompts Dr Loktionov and Dr Alexandrova to argue that the ritual texts, which would have originated as oral testimony in court, were reimagined in the tomb’s surroundings.
They write:
“… the legal text becomes incorporated in a series of inscriptions and images that culminates in the successful negotiation of the afterlife judgment by the deceased.
It should thus come as no surprise that the place of final physical transformation from living to dead - the necropolis - was known as the 'place of justice'.”
The article, part of ongoing wider research into how Egyptian divinities were believed to interact with daily life contexts, is published in Open Access by the Journal of the Economic and Social History of the Orient.