Ancient Crime and Police Why is it shows about crime are so popular? The phenomenon has been going on for hundreds and maybe thousands of years when books were first published about crimes and before that word of mouth facts of crimes. If we look at the twenty-five most popular shows, we find many are crime dramas. Crime has been around as long as there were people. Did you know there were what we would call detectives today, in ancient Egypt? Men existed who could be hired to solve crimes. How do we know about this? It is lucky for us the ancient Egyptians kept meticulous records and this is how we know. The ancients did something we do today. They had a sort of police force which was made up of guards and they were scattered about important places to protect them. Today we sometimes use dogs to catch criminals, the Egyptians used mainly attack monkeys. Can you imagine trying to commit a crime back then and an attack monkey jumped on your face biting the heck out of you and probably disfiguring you for the rest of your life. Monkeys were not the only animals used by the Egyptians; they did also use dogs. There is some talk they also used other animals and I have to wonder what they might have been. Did they use large cats or maybe not if they didn’t want to kill the criminals on the spot. If a witness didn’t tell the truth they broke the law. They were required by law to state what they saw even if they had to tell on a family member. Crime investigators in ancient Egypt would do what we do today. They would round up witnesses and perform an investigation going so far as to even reenact the crime. When a person was convicted of a crime his criminal record would follow him much as it does today. In ancient Greece we only know about their police from the 5th century B.C. on. In Athens the police force was composed of slaves owned by the government. The one thing the slave police did not do was investigate crimes. This was accomplished by the citizens themselves. The police would act as guards, do crowd control, handle prisoners and make arrests. The police were also charged with protecting morals, I wonder how that worked. Sparta had a sort of police force controlled by the Ephors, a body which was elected every year. The police were charged with keeping order and there was a separate unit for supervising children and women which also would take on agricultural issues. It has been said in ancient times being a policeman was not a very honorable profession. In the beginning of the Roman Empire the citizens of Rome kept law and order. Three officials were charged with the safety of Rome at night. Police existed in the republic of Rome, but not in the empire of Rome. If you had a runaway slave it was not the police who chased him but the firemen, known as Vigiles. When the empire was formed the emperor had paramilitary units known as urban cohorts which were used for riot control, but they did not fight crimes. In Rome anyone regardless of status could accuse anyone else of a crime, but there was a problem. It was up to the accuser to gather all the proof without help. It has been said the punishment for those of high status found guilty of a crime would be a lesser punishment than those of a lower status. For thousands of years China had a system of policing. Prefects were the police and were appointed by the local magistrate who in turn was appointed by the head of state at the time. The prefects reported to the magistrates. Law enforcement was carried out by subprefects who were under the prefect. This sounds like sheriffs and deputies. If one did a good job arresting criminals, he might get a promotion for his trouble. Unfortunately, this system was sometimes abused to get ahead. Under Ming law the Chinese police had only 30 days to arrest someone for committing a crime or a deadline assigned by the magistrate. Supposedly this system resulted in one out of four cases being subjected to corruption. There was a policing unit in ancient Babylon. A notation in an ancient record was found where a citizen said, “Nabû-u?uršu and Remut, sons of Mušezib-Marduk are wronging me, they did not deliver barley. The lord shall arrange a written order and a messenger from either Barzenna or the sukkallu, and send before Guz?na, the paqudu -official and Iddin-Nergal, the umarzanapata.” Basically, this person was reporting a crime to the police because he never received the barley he paid for. While some sort of police did exist as far back as several thousand years ago in some places, many others relied on the punishment being metered out by the offended. If a man stole your chicken you went over to his land and took care of the problem. The rich and powerful usually had their own force such as guards or even soldiers to protect what they owned and in ancient times they were not very worried about your chicken, if you get what I mean. The force was not an investigative one, but geared more to enforcement. If it was suspected you were the guilty party, many times you might be tortured until you admitted this. Torture was used quite regularly in some places. Some believe this practice reached a peak in feudalistic times when rich and powerful nobles would think nothing about the rights of serfs which they abused regularly. It got so bad in the middle ages some nobles would have sex with women who were about to be brides and say it was for good luck under a system known as right of the first night or primae noctis. You certainly would not have wanted to be a serf. The slaves of Rome had more rights than the serfs of a thousand years later. I still haven’t answered the question of why we like criminal stories, but I think I know why. I believe it is because they are puzzles and everyone likes to try and solve a mystery. We want to be able to prove who killed that nice lady. Was it the butler, or some spurned lover, or could it have been a relative who wanted an inheritance? I think this is also one of the reasons crossword puzzles are so popular. Humans like to solve things, but the problems have to be simple enough for most of us to understand.
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