“Ordalías”, parentesco y Estado en La contienda entre Horus y Seth

MARCELO CAMPAGNO

Antiguo Oriente

Universidad Católica Argentina

Lugar: Buenos Aires; Año: 2005 vol. 3 p. 89 - 103

1667-9202

Abstract: Ancient Near Eastern societies had a judicial procedure -the ordeal- that implied the subjection of the accused, or both parties in a trial, to diverse physical tests, mainly in the water, whose results were considered as a manifestation of the divine will. The numerous testimonies of this practice in Mesopotamia, however, contrast with its absence among the evidences of ancient Egyptian judicial procedures. In spite of this, some authors have suggested that some type of ordeals by water may have existed in Egypt, at least within the mythical sphere, and the tale of The contendings of Horus and Seth is offered as a proof of that. In this tale, there are two occasions in which the fight between Horus and Seth implies physical tests in an aquatic scenery. From a generic viewpoint, both contests have something of ordalic, but some remarkable differences are also noticeable. Mainly, unlike the Mesopotamian procedures, these Egyptian “ordeals” cannot solve the case. Both episodes seem surprisingly close to those usually referred to by ethnographers as the way of solving conflicts in many non-State societies, organized by the logic of kinship. However, the second one leads to another situation, in which the conflict is finally solved because of the emergence of the logic of the State in the judicial scene. In this sense, the two competitions performed by Horus and Seth provide a good opportunity to think about the two main logics of social organization existing in Ancient Egypt.