Compulsion and Control in Ancient Egypt. Proceedings of the Third Lady Wallis Budge Egyptology Symposium

How did the Ancient Egyptians maintain control of their state? This 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. The volume is accompanied by a YouTube video channel, allowing readers to listen to most of the papers in their original form while also providing access to several additional contributions that ultimately did not feature in the volume. It is hoped that the digital experience of the conference will therefore live on through the channel alongside the book, providing a model for similar multimedia initiatives in the future.