The following is a guest post by Alexandre Loktionov, PhD candidate in the Department of Archaeology & Anthropology at the University of Cambridge and a 2016 AHRC Fellow at The John W. Kluge Center.
I am an Egyptologist happily working as a fellow at the Kluge Center of the Library of Congress. To some, I recognize that this may sound insane: Ancient Egypt has never been a research specialization of the Library. To others, I recognize that this may sound disappointing: there is no chance to climb pyramids, discover tombs, or engage in any other similarly dramatic activity. However, above all I recognize the huge potential for academic cross-pollination unlocked as a result of my time here.
My doctoral work at the University of Cambridge focuses on Ancient Egyptian justice from the start of the Old Kingdom (c.2700BCE) to the beginning of the New Kingdom (c. 1500BCE). In particular, I am interested in the evolution of court procedure and the move from a predominantly oral-aural legal framework to a more scribal model. One strand of this research involves comparing Ancient Egyptian legal practices with those of its neighbors – notably the highly literate Semitic cultures of the Middle East (ancient Mesopotamia) and the non-literate cultures of Sub-Saharan Africa (ancient Nubia). It is this wide umbrella of interests that first brought me to the Library of Congress.
The Law Library of Congress is the largest legal knowledge resource in the world. At first sight, however, its focus on mostly modern law offers little hope to an Egyptologist – after all, the tight legal structures of modern Egypt bear no resemblance whatsoever to the largely unwritten and less formal world of pharaonic times. Nonetheless, the Library’s expansive holdings on traditional forms of African customary law, which remains oral-aural to this day, have yielded a wealth of useful ethnographic data as well as some unexpected and highly specific discoveries.
African customary law, here exemplified by the Senegalese Wolof peoples, follows a concept of authority derived from the unrecorded and implicit respect of fellow human beings and is