Tortured, Banished, Forgotten (and Frequently Ripped Off)? Experience of Ancient Egyptian Criminal Judgment and its Consequences through the 2nd Millennium BCE

Abstract

Many aspects of Ancient Egyptian life are invisible enough to us today even without any particular effort to generate invisibility by the Egyptians. This therefore does not bode well for the one area where the Egyptians did actively seek to destroy, or at least alter, the evidence. That one area is criminal punishment. Criminals could not expect elaborate burial, leaving no identifiable bodies for bioarchaeological investigation and no tomb inscriptions for text analysis. Indeed, steps were sometimes taken to change the recorded identities of those convicted, with original names replaced by pseudonyms with negative connotations. However, despite these challenges, this paper will argue that all this is no reason to give up hope of uncovering more about the lives of these people, presenting a summary of the current state of the evidence and ultimately moving towards a more holistic interpretation of what it was like to face justice and its consequences in Ancient Egypt.