“We expect crimes to be prosecuted by the authorities and punished in a way that shows that not only the victim, but society as a whole have been harmed by the criminal. In ancient Egypt, however, there were no state prosecutions for theft or assault against individuals. The aggrieved party had to act as plaintiff and the sentence was limited to changes for the victim (crime and punishment). Only crimes against the pharaoh and the gods, such as conspiracies or theft from royal tombs or temples, were prosecuted by officials. A special oath of allegiance (anx n sDfA tryt) required them to report and investigate suspicious incidents. Given that cases of manslaughter and murder of individuals are not well documented, how they were handled remains unclear, but there is evidence that local authorities were supposed to solve obscure deaths, whether or not victims` families requested it. Sandra Lippert of the University of Tübingen in Germany wrote: “Looking at `law` in ancient Egypt, it is necessary to distinguish between our modern concepts and ancient aspects of Egyptian law. The word hep is most often translated as “law” and has been used in Egyptian history in the sense of “(only) law”, but also refers to any other type of binding rule. Hepu and in demotic also hep can refer to the totality of laws and thus approach our modern understanding of “law”. Although maat is often translated as “justice,” it encompasses much more than legal justice, making it difficult to identify the Egyptian equivalent of “law” in its broader sense. [Source: Sandra Lippert, University of Tübingen, Germany, UCLA Encyclopedia of Egyptology 2012, escholarship.org ] Unfortunately, legal historians have discouraged Egyptologists from identifying these texts as legal texts, arguing that codified law simply could not exist in ancient Egypt. The main argument in favour of this is the unsubstantiated assertion that a systematic collection of laws was not of interest to the ancient societies of the Near East.
Objectively, the Darian compilation fulfills all the necessary criteria for codification: it was approved by the public authorities (i.e. It was to serve as the basis for future jurisdiction in the Egyptian satrapy. The Aramaic version of the Code of Law quickly became obsolete after the end of Persian rule in Egypt; So far, no manuscripts have been identified. But there is circumstantial evidence of its existence. The similarities in type, style, and wording between some Aramaic legal documents of elephant-like documents and fifth-century demotic documents indicate that the model documents contained in the Darian legal collection were used as prototypes in their Aramaic translation. A common torture technique in ancient Egypt was to strike the soles of the feet with a stick. The method is still widely used today. The Egyptians also smeared disobedient slaves with donkey milk and removed them until they were completely bitten by ants, fleas and other insects.
In general, the ancient Egyptians appear to have been law-abiding citizens for most of cultural history, but there were nonetheless disputes over land and water rights and disputes over ownership of livestock or rights to a particular employment or hereditary title. Bunson notes how: The law in ancient Egypt functioned like any other country today: there was an agreed set of rules formulated by men who were considered experts in the field, a judicial system that weighed evidence of violations of those rules, and police officers who enforced those rules and brought violators to justice. The ancient Egyptians often recorded images of the king on their temples and tombs as he presented the symbol of justice and law, in a clear reference to the cult of the concepts and values of justice and the rule of law in ancient Egyptian civilization. While the first type is mainly used for simple or static situations, the second type develops a hypothetical case, sometimes in a very elaborate way with possibilities branching out in different directions.