Dynastic Egyptian Economic Structure

Introduction

Economic, like religious and political, authority was officially in hands of the king as sole ruler of the Two Lands with responsibility for its care and renewal and the maintenance of ma'at (justice and cosmological balance) in Egypt. However, for practical purposes a complicated network of state administrative agencies, temple establishments and private individuals and groups ran a very diverse economic system, much of it beyond the direct control of the state. Through government officials and bureaucrats, central and local religious foundations, and the royal and religious estates, the central structure dispersed itself throughout Egyptian social structure. Moreover this system bound the most powerful private individuals to it through incorporating them into the central or regional state centers and activities.

Central State Management

1. Following the unification of Egypt the center of government was usually located in the new capital Memphis where the king and his chief advisers had their institutional homes. However, in practice the administration of Egypt comprised a well-integrated combination of governmental institutions with their officials (the royal household and administrators) on one hand, and religious foundations supported by the state and largely responsible to it on the other hand.

2. Under the king’s chief minister - the vizier - a subsidiary hierarchy of bureaucrats wielded the king’s authority, implemented the policies of central government and controlled the central economic institutions throughout the extensive Egyptian territory.

3. Provincial districts of Egypt were ruled by governors or nomarchs. These officials were appointed directly by the central government and resided in their local capitals. They were responsible for seeing that all aspects of provincial government were exercised properly, that the requisite state enterprises were implemented, and that state taxes were collected. They were also responsible for state storage, the redistribution of the agricultural provisions thus accumulated, and all other economic administration.

4. The vast majority of the common populace lived a rural life in state established towns and small farming villages scattered along the Nile Valley, the Delta and Fayum regions. These communities were responsible for providing the surpluses required by the government, either directly to local state officials or to religious temple foundations that were located throughout Egypt and in many ways acted as adjuncts of state government.

5. These state and temple authorities also controlled foreign economic transactions. In the Old and Middle Kingdoms Egyptian long-distance contacts were primarily economic, not political as happened in the New Kingdom. The continuing need for metal, semi-precious stones, timber and aromatics required the existence of a fairly permanent and effective acquisition system.

6. Many of the resources that Egypt needed were within close reach in the Eastern Desert and were usually acquired by expeditions from the large religious foundations, either in conjunction with central government or on their own behest. However, the central Egyptian state authority supervised the mining of copper from Sinai, and acquisition of gold from Nubia and timber from Lebanon as early as the Early Dynastic Period while in the New Kingdom there are reports of expeditions to Arabia and the Horn of Africa (Punt) for frankincense, myrrh and other exotic items.

7. Thus from the beginning of the 1^st dynasty there were probably Egyptian economic posts in Southern Palestine and the Sinai, the latter in the form of mining settlements for turquoise and copper exploitation. Tablets with the symbols of King Narmer have been found in this region. This is a natural development of the later pre-dynastic trade between Egypt and the Levant seen in the archaeology of such sites as Ma’adi.

8. By the 1^st Dynasty there was also southern expansion where early dynastic period rulers eliminated the earlier Nubian A-Group culture that had rivaled the early Upper Egyptian towns in size, elaboration, and probably power. From this time Egypt sought to directly control the trade routes to central Africa rather than having to depend on autonomous middlemen. Thus Middle Kingdom rulers established forts below the cataracts in Lower Nubia to ensure control of trade routes and raw resources. Later in the New Kingdom, this defensive strategy was replaced by more formal settlement with temples and associated towns expanding the Egyptian settlement and economic system deep into Nubia.

Religious Establishments as State Economic Centers

General Summary

1. The state endowed various types of formal religious establishment to maintain the cults of divine rulers, the important divinities of Egypt, and, to a lesser extent, important non-royal personages. Most of these establishments maintained large bodies of administrators and priests (often the same) and their retainers. These labor forces contained both full-time officials, and local laborers who worked part time on their own holdings and intermittently for the temple.

2. Temple establishments were granted land, often separated from the temple by considerable distances, from which they obtained their own subsistence and surpluses that acted as insurance against years of low agricultural yield and for supplemental use by central state officials for its purposes. These estates were scattered throughout Egypt and constituted an "archipelago" of state land and state agricultural workers throughout the land, thus representing an omnipresent state presence.

3. In addition temples traded with each other for needed agricultural resources, labor, and raw resources, conducted their individual or collaborative commercial expeditions to obtain materials (aromatics like frankincense) used in temple rituals and state construction. Temples also conducted economic transactions with private individuals

4. Thus the religious establishments were major centers for economic activity as well as the religious (political) rites connected with the royal divinity and dominant political ideology. Because of their articulation with, and dependence on, the central government they actually served as agents of the state throughout Egypt, supplementing specifically governmental institutions in this respect as well as engaging in a complex of economic interactions on their own behalf.

Mortuary Temple

1. In the Early Dynastic Period the mortuary temple was usually separated from the tombs of the kings buried at Abydos. However, the step-pyramid complex of King Netjerikhet (Djoser) at Saqqara integrated the temple as a physical part of the chief funerary architecture complex, a pattern that lasted through the Pyramid Age. With the New Kingdom kings’ rejection of the pyramid tomb and adoption of rock-cut tombs in the Theban Valley of the Kings, mortuary temples were again separated from the actual burial architecture.

2. The mortuary temple represented the core of the cult of the divine king centered on his statues in the temple shrine. The establishment was endowed and supported by the royal government through the granting of provisions required for the upkeep of the temple, its ritual and personnel. These were derived from agricultural “taxation” or the granting of specific estates along the Nile. Temple personnel were integrally linked with and acted as agents of the state in both religious and political ways.

Provincial Religious Foundation (State and Private)

1. In addition to the chief mortuary temple the Egyptian state established other religious foundations, temples and shrines, to perpetuate the religious cults of earlier kings, local divinities and the high divinities of the Egyptian pantheon.

2. These foundations ranged from the great temples of Thebes (Luxor and Karnak) of the New Kingdom, which functioned as the centers of the state royal/religious cult of Amun to much more modest establishments dedicated to ancient kings and provincial gods scattered along the Nile Valley in provincial towns. They were either subsidiary to the chief cult temples or independent of them, founded by the state. Local foundations were operated by priests and supported by royal endowment and provincial estates and other commercial grants, similar to the pattern of the major mortuary temples. They were usually granted tax immunity in return for support of royal economic and political policy.

3. By contrast to the chief temple establishments, provincial foundations could also contain the reliquaries of multiple deities and individuals within the larger institution. Thus a temple dedicated to the god Ra, and overseen by priests accountable to the central government, might well also contain shrines to an earlier king. The temple might also contain smaller shrines endowed by important local individuals and containing their statues. These individuals would usually have been connected to the temple in some way but were acting in their own interests in establishing their own foundation in the larger temple institution. Moreover, payment through contributions of grain, other agricultural produce and labor for such privileges also entered the state economy.

Bureaucracy

1. Within the state sector a specialized group of professional managers implemented the dictates of the vizier’s office and monitored the flow and storage of state goods. These comprise a body of mainly middle and low level managers and scribes who kept the state accounts, vital for tracking the state economy.

2. Scribes were attached to all institutions of the state - the central and provincial government centers, the various types of religious foundation, rural storage and managerial stations, and in the great construction projects of the state. As such they played crucial roles in allowing Egyptian Dynastic Civilization to exist as a complex and vast territorial entity that economically depended on manipulating the economic resources of Egypt for aggrandizement of the elite, on controlled redistribution of state commodities to all sectors of society as needed, and on monitoring foreign commercial initiatives, all of which are hallmarks of social complexity. They also controlled the knowledge that was inherent in codified information - writing - and the power that went with this and comprised the small literate portion of Egyptian society.

3. Egyptian economic policy, administered through scribes, reached all parts of the society. All workers on major projects (the pyramid construction) were given rations, as were agricultural workers. In addition, because many of these workers only labored for a part of their time for the state, then giving way to other temporary work-groups, state rations reached a significant part of the population, both enhancing its economic connection to the state and to a significant extent asserting the pervasive power of the state at all levels of society. The aim of bureaucracy was not necessarily to account for every specific amount of state goods that circulated but to impose a universal system whose ideal rules were far less important than the fact of its existence in the lives of the populace. Consequently, the concurrent existence of a private economy at other more specific scales of society did not threaten this wider state system, the two complementary economic components possessing entirely different purposes - one to maintain state authority and overall, management, the other to stimulate private well-being.

The Private Sector

1. In spite of the pervasive state economy, conducted ether directly through state officers or indirectly through religious foundations, there was also a thriving private economy that articulated with this through much of Egyptian history.

2. It was always possible for people at all levels of society to better themselves by barter, trade, employment of economic agents, and agricultural or manufacturing success, and to serve their immediate needs in a way that the state could not. Thus, such goals as elaborate burials, seen as necessary for future well-being and family status, good marriage dowries and the status that they brought, better houses and larger farms, could all be attained by private enterprise, often carried out by people who at the same time expended a portion of the efforts working in the state economy.

3. In the illicit economic sector, grave looting and the conversion of the loot into transferable assets through re-working and melting down provided a persisting source of stimulus to the private economy. These valuable materials could be used to attain many of the goals noted above and to raise the social status of the looters, thus ultimately effecting society as a whole.

4. On the level of commodity acquisition, there are records, especially in the New Kingdom, of private expeditions of groups of low class people to mine the Red Sea Hills for raw resources that they could then fashion into elite items for beneficial exchange. Also, it is probable that private expeditions beyond the frontiers of Egypt occurred (to Sudan and the Levant), probably initiated by fairly high status persons acting primarily on their own behalf even if they were primarily working on state business. On an even wider level there was a large class of small-scale traders who worked for all levels of society as commercial agents, acquiring, exchanging and accumulating commodities on behalf of their employers. Clearly individual private enterprise found a place in Egyptian economic structure.

5. Thus Egyptian economy was an amalgam of state control of commodity flow and private enterprise. In times of stress the state, through its vast redistributive resources, lessened detrimental effects. In times of plenty the state could to a large extent control value by using these reserves to “flood the market” and thus control supply and demand. However, beyond these general economic levels, a complex network of private transactions, practitioners and groups comprised much of the daily economic activity of Egypt.