Cultural meanings of punishments in Hellenistic Egypt

The article is devoted to examination of administrative punishment in Ptolemaic Egypt, which were mentioned in Ptolemaic civil and fiscal laws in III-I B. C. The article deals with evidences in official documents of Ptolemaic Egypt, such as «Dikaiomata», «The Statute of Tax Collectors» and villagers’ complaints in terms of description of the situations, suggesting offences or required punishment for them if they were committed by free people, officers and slaves. The author studies the facts of offences with reference to males and females, villagers and tsar family. In the article the sets of elements of offences and punishment are analyzed. The author makes the conclusion about the specific features of conceptual construct, used for the characteristic of offences in laws. The author points to the fact, that the definitions «offence» and «crime» do not exist in documents and are replaced by the descriptions of situations, when this or that person should be punished. Also the author examines the nature of fiscal and civil crimes, which are described in laws and complaints made by ordinary people. The complaints are not included into laws, but describeactions, which entail material or physical damage. Also the author makes a conclusion about the responsibility for crime, committed by a slave or a free person. Also the author examines the correlation between the gravity of offence and the punishment, if the offence was committed by an officer, from the perspective of ransom, which is covered by official documents. Particularly, the author examines murders in the tzar family. The author concludes, that such unlawful actions were not considered as a heinous crime and did not entail any punishment for a ruler, but they were one of the ways to strengthen their power ideologically, because they entailed the establishment of eponym priesthood.