Legal Records

In Deborah Sweeney’s essay “Law, Rhetoric, and Gender in Ramesside Egypt” she focuses on women’s role in the legal system during the Ramesside Period (ca. 1300-1070 B.C.E.). She analyzed the difference between men and women regarding the rhetorical uses of persuasion and stylistic choices. However, I thought that one of the most interesting issues she brought up was the accuracy of the written records and the possibility of “the inadequacy of our own sources, rather than a genuine gender difference” (106). Sweeney is honest about the fact that this research can be flawed because of all the variables within the records.

Some of the important issues with the legal records that I am going to look at are:

1. Who wrote the legal records?

2. What were the records written on?

Both of these questions are important when examining the historical context. For example, Sweeney says that men were typically scribes and “written records tend to summarize the dialogue… they do not necessarily represent the exact words uttered” (100). Sweeney’s goal is to rhetorically study the role of women’s voices in courts but these records are a questionable way to get a true account because through a male scribe summary the voices of both men and women in the court are altered. This alteration leads to a discrepancy in how men and women’s language differed because the scribe’s male voice would be summarizing the proceeding. Therefore, it would be hard to accurately depict women using a rhetorical device such as persuasion or stylistic choices because the scribe could have added his own style when writing the record.

Another issue is what the written records were on. Sweeney mentions two forms of that were used in Deir el-Medina—papyri and “ostraca (potsherds or small pieces of stone)” (100). The papyri paper came from an aquatic plant native to the Nile and was used to write longer descriptions, whereas the writing on ostraca tended to be “briefer and more summary in style” (100). I think that Sweeney does a good job mentioning the multiple forms of recording and how that can affect an interpretation. It is important for historical rhetoricians to understand which ancient courts used ostraca to record the information and that it will typically be summarized because that can affect what they study from that record.

With Sweeney’s examination of persuasion and style choices, I think that it is hard to really get a sense of the gender difference due to the fact that many of the recordings are not written by the women or even recorded verbatim. She does look at legal texts and explains how persuasion and style were reflected, but I think that a lot of that has to do with the scribes (who were typically male) and the way they chose to depict situations in the records.