Strike, Smite and Terrify: reflections on physical, ritual and psychological violence in Ancient Egypt

Ancient Egypt is commonly regarded, in a simple comparative analysis, as a civilization less violent than its counterparts in neighboring Mesopotamia, for example. Some traces of violence can, obviously, be detected in many behaviors of the ancient Egyptian society, namely the physical punishments to the less committed students and to the peasants who evaded or intended to evade the intricate system of pharaonic tax collection. We can also confirm the practice of violence (verbal, physical and sexual) on women. Violence was therefore practiced in ancient Egypt, both in the domestic and public sphere, even though the Egyptian moral ethics condemn it, including the kind that one that could play on their own servants and/ or subordinates: “I have not caused pain”; “I have not slighted a servant to his master” (Book of the Dead, Chapter 125, Negative Confession). On the other hand, scenes of domination and repression of the defeated enemies were a common theme, often depicted at a large scale on the temples’ pylons, according to the ideology of the winner that each and every pharaoh should be and proclaim, even if just in theory. The ritual scenes of offering of the enemies by the Pharaoh to the main gods of the Egyptian pantheon are, in this sense, an eloquent trait of what we might designate as “ritual violence”, that was greatly appreciated in the country of the Pharaohs. With this paper, we will try to present and characterize the practice of violence in ancient Egypt exactly through some of its real or deliberate expressions and ritual or ceremonial, as a phenomenon with forms and techniques culturally and socially integrated. Finally, we will discuss a type of violence that underlies many of the Egyptian iconographic and textual productions, especially those related to life expectancy in the hereafter: we mean the threat of violence and constraints faced by the ones who do not align their existence by maetic behaviors that, in many situations, acts as a powerful deterrent and regulatory force to the living Egyptians. Inherent to our questioning of the phenomenon of violence in ancient Egypt in its various forms is a concept and generic definition of violence that is not limited to the physical and material aspect, that is, to the level of physical integrity, but also to the level of moral or psychological coercion, that violates individual autonomy and the existential behaviors.