How did the Ancient Egyptians maintain control of their state? Dr. Alex Loktionov's new book considers this question from a wide variety of angles and across all periods of Egyptian history, from the Old Kingdom to Coptic times.
Topics include the controlling function of temples and theology, state borders, scribal administration, visual representation, patronage, and the Egyptian language itself. These different strands are tied together by legal pluralism theory, which argues that a single state can rely on multiple – and at times even contradictory – strategies for upholding what it considers just within the bounds of what is nominally a single jurisdiction. This theoretical approach, while increasingly common in modern postcolonial studies and the history of law, is yet to be deployed in Egyptology. This book therefore aims to fill that gap. The chapters are expanded versions of papers originally presented at the 3rd Lady Wallis Budge Egyptology conference, organised by Christ’s College and held online on 27th–28th August 2020.
Dr. Alex Loktionov is an Egyptologist based at Christ’s College and the McDonald Institute for Archaeological Research. His main research interests lie in Ancient Egyptian ideas of justice and how these translated into law and government from the emergence of the Egyptian state to the late New Kingdom (c.3000-1100BCE). He has also published on the uptake of Mesopotamian intellectual culture in Egypt, Egyptian prophesy, and the history of Egyptology. Alex is PI of the AHRC-funded Development of Early Constitutional Thought project, run in conjunction with the Department of Political Economy at KCL, where he serves as a visiting senior research fellow.
For more, see Dr. Alex Loktionov's profile on Christ College's website.
