The Aramaic and Egyptian Legal Traditions at Elephantine: An Egyptological Approach (review)

In this groundbreaking study, Alejandro F. Botta sheds light on the influence of Egyptian law on the Elephantine documents. Heretofore, the emphasis has been on the relationship between the Aramaic law of the Elephantine texts and Mesopotamian law. Botta's profound and perspicacious knowledge of Egyptian texts, both legal and non-legal, has given him the tools to reshape our understanding of the law of the Elephantine documents. Recourse to Egyptian law in understanding the law of the rest of the ancient Near East has been relatively rare, and Botta's research represents an important, if not crucial, corrective. Botta also makes a significant contribution to the philological and legal analysis of the Elephantine legal texts in and of themselves.

In the first chapters of his volume, a revision of his 2001 Hebrew University dissertation, Botta presents the current state of research. Botta then delves into the problematics of Egyptian law. Despite the paucity of legal texts from Egypt, there is every indication that legal codifications were promulgated by the monarchy and that written legislation was familiar to Egyptians. At the same time, there is ample evidence that legal affairs were conducted orally, and, therefore, the written document that registered a legal action is distinct from the legal action as it took place orally.

In the heart of Botta's book, he presents an in-depth study of two Aramaic legal formulae, the clause and the clause. The first has received much attention from earlier scholarship, but the second has not. Botta explores the usage of the clause in the Elephantine texts and the Samaria papyri and demonstrates that it is used with more nuances and less uniformity in the Elephantine texts. He explores the possibility that there was a distinction between possession and ownership because in some documents, the formula is used in place of the clause, but demonstrates that in fact the use of one rather than the other depends on different scribal traditions. In his discussion of the origins of the clause, Botta attempts to surmount the problems of Egyptian law and the scarcity of Egyptian legal texts by recourse to non-legal texts. He finds the equivalent expression in the use of the sḫm formula, a formula widely attested and congruent in meaning with the clause. Here, we might wish for an additional kind of evidence, data that would decisively demonstrate that the Egyptian word would be rendered as in Aramaic, perhaps in a bilingual inscription or an Aramaic translation of an Egyptian text, but such evidence cannot apparently be found. The early and continuing usage of the Egyptian formula supports the claim that the Aramaic clause was patterned after the Egyptian clause, and Botta argues that this is an example of Aramaic being the conduit through which Egyptian legal formulae reached Mesopotamia.

Botta devotes the remainder of his volume to an extended analysis of the clause. He demonstrates that it had a metaphorical meaning in the Elephantine texts rather than indicating a physical act of withdrawal and abandonment of the property and that it indicated a final renunciation of rights to that property or associated legal action. He demonstrates that the clause fits closely with the uses of the Egyptian verb wy and that any link with a cuneiform origin is greatly strained. In his lengthy and insightful analysis of Egyptian texts, he demonstrates the widespread usage of distance as a legal metaphor and as a legal formula in Egypt from earliest times. A number of verbs were used to express this. Furthermore, the proliferation of this clause in non-legal texts in a period from which few legal texts are extant suggests that the formula was widely known. In addition, we have just one attestation of the formula in the same period in Mesopotamia, a period from which we have numerous legal documents, suggests that the formula was not widely known. Moreover, the wide and early...