of any title, position, or property, the superior priesthood of the temples, scribes who had advanced or grown old in office, those in command of the militia or the police, the heads of divisions or corporations, the “qonbitiu,” the “people of the angle,” might if they thought fit take their place beside them, and help them to decide ordinary lawsuits.  The police were mostly recruited from foreigners and negroes, or Bedouin belonging to the Nubian tribe of the Mazaiu.  The litigants appeared at the tribunal, and waited under the superintendence of the police until their turn came to speak:  the majority of the questions were decided in a few minutes by a judgment by which there was no appeal; only the more serious cases necessitated a cross-examination and prolonged discussion.  All else was carried on before this patriarchal jury as in our own courts of justice, except that the inevitable stick too often elucidated the truth and cut short discussions:  the depositions of the witnesses, the speeches on both sides, the examination of the documents, could not proceed without the frequent taking of oaths “by the life of the king” or “by the favour of the gods,” in which the truth often suffered severely.  Penalties were varied somewhat—­the bastinado, imprisonment, additional days of work for the corvee, and, for grave offences, forced labour in the Ethiopian mines, the loss of nose and ears, and finally, death by strangulation, by beheading,* by empalement, and at the stake.

* The only known instance of an execution by hanging is that of Pharaoh’s chief baker, in Gen. xl. 19, 22, xli. 13; but in a tomb at Thebes we see two human victims executed by strangulation.  The Egyptian hell contains men who have been decapitated, and the block on which the damned were beheaded is frequently mentioned in the texts.

Criminals of high rank obtained permission to carry out on themselves the sentence passed upon them, and thus avoided by suicide the shame of public execution.  Before tribunals thus constituted, the fellah who came to appeal against the exactions of which he was the victim had little chance of obtaining a hearing:  had not the scribe who had overtaxed him, or who had imposed a fresh corvee upon him, the right to appear among the Judges to whom he addressed himself?  Nothing, indeed, prevented him from appealing from the latter to his feudal lord, and from him to Pharaoh, but such an appeal would be for him a mere delusion.  When he had left his village and presented his petition, he had many delays to encounter before a solution could be arrived at; and if the adverse party were at all in favour at court, or could command any influence, the sovereign decision would confirm, even if it did not aggravate, the sentence of the previous judges.  In the mean while the peasants’ land remained uncultivated, his wife and children bewailed their wretchedness, and the last resources of the family were consumed in proceedings and delays:  it would have been better for him at the outset to have made up his mind to submit without resistance to a fate from which he could not escape.