A History of Ancient Near Eastern Law

863

EGYPT

ELEPHANTINE

Bezalel Porten

1. S L

Persian period Elephantine merits special treatment because it has

yielded a rich crop of Aramaic papyri and ostraca. An even larger

amount of material has emerged from Saqqarah, but while a

respectable amount of the Elephantine material is intact, virtually all

of the Saqqarah pieces are fragmentary. Aramaic was the lingua

franca of the Persian Empire and while almost all the Elephantine

material stems from a Jewish military colony, that from Saqqarah is

free of Jewish reference. There are no law codes or royal edicts, but

private contracts, court records (Saqqarah only), letters private and

official, fragments of the Bisitun inscription, and the Words of A ̇iqar.

1.1 Private Legal Documents

The best preserved documents were two family archives acquired on

the antiquities market, the Anani archive (EPE B34–46; with the

exception of B34) by Charles Edwin Wilbour in 1893 and the

Mibtahiah archive by Lady William Cecil and Sir Robert Mond

(EPEB23–33) in 1904. These documents deal with sale and bequest,

marriage, manumission, slavery, and litigation. Texts subsequently

discovered in excavation by Otto Rubensohn in 1906–8 added deeds

of obligation (EPEB48, 51; TADB4.1, 3–5) and judicial oaths (EPE

B49, 52; TADB7.1, 4). The average legal contract was a narrative

document, opening in objective style with date and identity of the

parties and concluding similarly with mention of scribe (and some-

times place) and witnesses. The operative part of the document was

a subjective statement made by the party on whom lay the obliga-

tion. This would be the seller who warrants the buyer’s title (EPE

B37, 45), the donor who spells out the beneficiary’s rights (EPEB25,

38, 40, 43–44), the borrower who lays down terms of repayment

(EPEB46, 48), or the defeated litigant who guarantees his opponent’s

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