The Mayer Papyri are two ancient Egyptian documents from the Twentieth Dynasty that contain records of court proceedings.

Papyrus Mayer A

The best known of the two is Papyrus Mayer A. It deals with court sessions held in the first two years of the Whm Mswt or Renaissance, an era which began in year 19 of king

Ramesses XI Menmaatre Ramesses XI (also written Ramses and Rameses) reigned from 1107 BC to 1078 BC or 1077 BC and was the tenth and final pharaoh of the Twentieth Dynasty of Egypt and as such, was the last king of the New Kingdom period. He ruled Egypt for ...

. A panel consisting of the

vizier A vizier (; ar, وزير, wazīr; fa, وزیر, vazīr), or wazir, is a high-ranking political advisor or minister in the near east. The Abbasid caliphs gave the title ''wazir'' to a minister formerly called '' katib'' (secretary), who was ...

of the South and three high officials cross-examined suspects charged with tomb robbery at

Deir el-Bahri Deir el-Bahari or Dayr al-Bahri ( ar, الدير البحري, al-Dayr al-Baḥrī, the Monastery of the North) is a complex of mortuary temples and tombs located on the west bank of the Nile, opposite the city of Luxor, Egypt. This is a part of ...

(cf. also the Abbott Papyrus and the Amherst Papyrus). The interrogation of both suspects and witnesses was preceded by a bastinado and an oath in the name of the king was administered. The confessions of the six suspects were corroborated by the testimony of the chief of police of the

Theban Necropolis The Theban Necropolis is a necropolis on the west bank of the Nile, opposite Thebes ( Luxor) in Upper Egypt. It was used for ritual burials for much of the Pharaonic period, especially during the New Kingdom. Mortuary temples * Deir el-Bah ...

and other witnesses, among them the son of one of the thieves who had died in the meantime. This witness claims to have been a child at the time of the crime; still, he was beaten when he was being examined, as was a female witness. While the ancient Egyptian judicial system was quite brutal and biased against the accused, a verdict of guilty was not a foregone conclusion: Papyrus Mayer A records the discharge of five men who had been found to be innocent.

Papyrus Mayer B

Papyrus Mayer B is a papyrus fragment, only inscribed on the

recto ' is the "right" or "front" side and ''verso'' is the "left" or "back" side when text is written or printed on a leaf of paper () in a bound item such as a codex, book, broadsheet, or pamphlet. Etymology The terms are shortened from Latin ...

. It consists of 14 preserved horizontal lines of hieratic script, in a form typical of the Twentieth Dynasty. Both its beginning and end are incomplete. It deals with the robbery of the tomb of king

Ramesses VI Ramesses VI Nebmaatre-Meryamun (sometimes written Ramses or Rameses, also known under his princely name of Amenherkhepshef C) was the fifth ruler of the Twentieth Dynasty of Egypt. He reigned for about eight years in the mid-to-late 12th century ...

, which is not alluded to in any of the other tomb-robbery papyri. No names of officials have survived in the extant part of the papyrus. Of the five thieves named, none can be identified with certainty. The coppersmith Pentahetnakht may or may not have been identical to the coppersmith Pentahetnakht, son of Kedakhtef, mentioned in Pap. BM 10054 as a member of a gang which was tried in year 16 of Ramesses IX. It has been suggested that Pap. Mayer B may have been among the papyri summed up in

Pap. Ambras Papyrus Ambras is a papyrus which was formerly in the collection of Ambras Castle near Inssbruck, and is now a part of the collection of the Vienna Museum. The first to draw attention to it was the Egyptologist Heinrich Karl Brugsch, who published ...

, but this remains a mere hypothesis. Cyril Aldred has pointed out that the coffer of the

sarcophagus A sarcophagus (plural sarcophagi or sarcophaguses) is a box-like funeral receptacle for a corpse, most commonly carved in stone, and usually displayed above ground, though it may also be buried. The word ''sarcophagus'' comes from the Gre ...

of Ramesses VI must have been removed relatively soon after the burial, because the sacramental oils had not yet had the time to solidify,Cyril Aldred, More Light on the Ramesside Tomb Robberies, in: J. Ruffle, G.A. Gaballa & K.A.. Kitchen (eds), Glimpses of Ancient Egypt, (Festschrift Fairman), Warminster 1979, 96-98 but whether this was done during the pilfering by the thieves tried in Pap. Mayer B remains uncertain.

References

External links

accessed April 22, 2007
Review of: The Great Tomb Robberies of the Twentieth Egyptian Dynasty, Being a Critical Study, with Translations and Commentaries, of the Papyri in Which These Are Recorded by T. Eric Peet
accessed April 23, 2007 {{coord missing, Egypt 12th-century BC works Theban tombs Twentieth Dynasty of Egypt Papyrus

Papyrus Mayer A

Papyrus Mayer B

See also

References

Further reading

External links