Phanoramic Egyept

Pharaonic Egypt: society, economy and culture

Economy and society

Fields and marshes

The establishment of the Pharaonic state around the year - 3000 and the little-known period that followed undoubtedly corresponded with great economic development. There is no means of knowing whether the need to co-ordinate irrigation was the principal cause of the formation of a unified state, or whether the unification of the country under the Thinite kings, together with the development of writing, made it possible to co-ordinate the regional economies by rationalizing basic construction work and ensuring the organized distribution of food resources. What is clear is that, until the nineteenth century of the Christian era, Egypt’s prosperity and vitality were to be tied to the cultivation of cereals (wheat, barley). A system of flood basins, which controlled and distributed the flood water and silt inside earth embankments, endured until the modern triumph of year-round irrigation: there is evidence that it existed as early as the Middle Kingdom, and in all probability it had taken shape even earlier. Obviously, this system only permitted one crop a year. On the other hand, the shortness of the agricultural cycle made plenty of manpower available for major operations on the construction of religious and royal buildings. The Ancient Egyptians also practised year-round irrigation by raising water from the canals or from pits dug down to the water-table, but for a long time human legs and human shoulders bearing yokes were the only ‘machines’ for raising water known, and watering by means of ditches was used only for vegetables, fruit trees and vineyards.

Bread and beer made from grain were the staple diet, but the Ancient Egyptians’ food was astonishingly varied. One is struck by the types of cakes and bread listed in the texts. As today, gardens provided broad beans, chick peas and other pulses, onions, leeks, lettuces and cucumbers: Orchards furnished dates, figs, sycamore nuts and grapes. Skilful cultivation of the vine, practised mainly in the Delta and in the oases, produced a great variety of wines. Bee-keeping provided honey. Oil was extracted from sesame and nabk, the olive tree introduced during the New Kingdom remaining rare and not very successful.

Pharaonic Egypt did not transform the whole of the Nile Valley into productive land and gardens. The vast marshes and lakes along the northern edges of the Delta and the

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shores of Lake Moeris, and the low-lying land on the edge of the desert and in the meanders of the Nile were exploited differently. In these pehu abundant and varied wildfowl were hunted or trapped. There was fishing with seine-net, eel-pot, line or basket, for the Nile offered a wide variety of fish which had a definite place in the people’s diet. Finally, the marshland gave pasturage for cows and oxen.

The tables of the gods and the great had to be well furnished with beef. The cutting-up of the carcass was a fine art, the animal fats being widely used to make perfumed unguents. We know that the Old Kingdom Egyptians tried to raise a number of species - oryx, antelope, etc., and even cranes and hyenas - but this proved labour-consuming and the results were disappointing. In contrast, they were very successful in raising poultry, notably the Nile goose. The meat of goats, so harmful to the valley’s few trees, and sheep raised on fallow land and the fringes of the desert, as well as pigs (in spi te of some prohibitions), acquired a considerable place in the people’s diet. Two African species domesticated by the Egyptians were particularly successful and are closely linked in our minds with the Pharaonic past: the ass, used as early as the archaic period, not for riding but as a beast of burden, and the domestic cat, which did not appear until the end of the Old and the beginning of the Middle Kingdom.

Mining and industry

The nobility hunted hare and big game in the desert for sport and as a means of varying the ordinary fare, but this could not have had much economic importance. What the desert did offer was a wide range of mineral resources: the green and black dyes of the Arabian desert used to treat and embellish the eyes even in prehistoric times; the beautiful hard stone used by the builders and sculptors (limestone, granite, alabaster, quartzite and semi-precious stones like the Sinai turquoise or Nubian cornelians and amethysts. The manufacture of glazes developed very early, prompting the manufacture of objects with the look of turquoise or lapis lazuli. New Kingdom Egypt improved its glass-making techniques, and became a past master in these processes.

One of the riches derived by the country from the arid wastes surrounding it was gold, which came from the Arabian desert and Nubia, and which was more highly prized than silver, although the latter, an improved metal, was always rarer and, in the Old Kingdom, more precious than gold. The deserts contained a number of copper deposits, but these were of a rather low grade, except in Sinai, and Egypt soon became dependent on copper from Asia.

If Ancient Egypt had to import metals and timber from its Asian neighbours, its industrial capacity was unsurpassed in two domains. The Pharaohs exported textiles, Egyptian linen being then of an unequalled fineness, and paper. Papyrus, useful in so many ways - for sails, ropes, clothing, footwear - above all made possible the manufacture of a very flexible writing surface, which was the source of the scribe’s power and which was in heavy demand abroad from the moment alphabetic writing spread around the eastern Mediterranean. Intensive cultivation of papyrus probably contributed greatly to the disappearance of the marshes, the haunt of the birds,

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3.1 Rendering the accounts (J. Pirenne, Histoire de la civilisation de l’Egypte Ancienne, vol. 1, Neuchâtel, Paris, 1961. Photo, Fondation egyptologique Reine Elisabeth)

3.2 Fishing (J. Pirenne, Histoire de la civilisation de l’Egypte Ancienne, vol. 1, Neuchâtel, Paris, 1961. Photo, Archives photographiques, Paris)

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crocodiles and hippopotamuses that, as the Ancient Egyptians themselves felt, bright ened the landscape.

The development of transport was one determining factor in the progress of the Pharaonic regime. Oxen were hardly ever harnessed to anything but the plough or the funeral sledge; the ass, hardier and less demanding, was the ideal beast of burden in the fields as on the desert trails (we know that the horse, introduced during the second millennium, remained a luxury for warriors, and that the rich economic potential of the wheel, the principle of which was known as early as the Old Kingdom, was not exploited). Less efficient, certainly, although the technique of using them in teams was known, the ass preceded and supplemented the camel, which only came very slowly into use in the countryside after the Persian era. For bulk transport over long distances Egypt used its river and its canals: small craft and large boats were rapid and reliable. In addition, even at a very early date, sailing boats plied the Red Sea and the Mediterranean. For moving the heavy stone blocks needed for sacred buildings in particular, Pharaonic engineering had invented ingenious methods of an astonishing simplicity, using, for instance, the lubricating properties of wet mud to move simple sledges (without wheels or rollers), profiting from the rise of the Nile to float barges loaded with enormous blocks, or using reed matting for drogues.

The economic and social system A survey of the available material on the economic and social system of Ancient Egypt gives the impression that everything stemmed from the king. He had a religious duty to ensure the cosmic order, the security of Egypt and the happiness of its people in this world and the next, not only by exercising his authority as king, but by maintaining the worship of the gods, with the result that he shared his economic prerogative with the temples. On the other hand, both in officiating in those temples and in managing the nation’s affairs, Pharaoh, theoretically the sole priest, sole warrior, sole judge and sole producer, delegated his power to a whole hierarchy: one way of paying these officials was to assign them land, the revenue of which became theirs.

Certainly, the expeditions to Punt, Byblos, Nubia and the deserts to seek out exotic commodities and stones were normally sent out by the king and led by government officials. The building of the temples was likewise a government function, whilst, during the imperial era, the annexed territory of Kush and the Palestinian and Syrian protectorates were, for instance, directly exploited by the crown. In contrast, the development of the land in Egypt itself did not depend exclusively on the crown. Alongside the royal domain were the lands owned by the gods, who possessed fields, flocks, workshops, etc. Moreover, at least from the Eighteenth Dynasty on, warriors were given hereditary tenure of land. High officials received gifts of land that they managed themselves. We do not know how inherit able private fortunes were made, but it is obvious that there were some and that, apart from the official position that one could only hope to be able to hand on to one’s children, there were ‘household effects’ that could be bequeathed freely. Small holdings are known to have existed, notably in the New Kingdom, when the term

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‘fields of poor men’ in fact designated the lands of small independent farmers who were quite distinct from tenants working the fields of the king or the gods. Relatively few in number, the foreigners deported to Egypt in the era of the great conquests were specialists (Palestinian viticulturists, Libyan drovers) or military settlers; the slaves acquired by private individuals were often only household servants and, although there is evidence that it existed, slave labour is believed to have provided only a limited amount of manpower for agriculture.

In the market towns, royal domains and temples, specialization was carried to a high degree. Guilds, sometimes with an elaborate hierarchy, of bakers, potters, flower-arrangers, founders, sculptors, draughtsmen, goldsmiths, water-carriers, watchmen of all kinds, dog-keepers, shepherds, goat-herds, goose-herds, etc. worked for the king or the temples, skills being handed down from father to son.

The civil service

The organization and distribution of production, the management of public order and the supervision of all activities were the responsibility of civil servants under the authority of either the prince - the Pharaoh or, in periods of schism, the local chiefs - or the temples. These officials were recruited from the scribes, the knowledge of writing being the gateway to all learning and all higher technical skills. Those scribes, trustees of both the religious and lay cultures, reigned over all professional activities. They might be engineers, agronomists, accountants, ritualists or even army officers and many combined several capacities. The greatest of them lived in fine style in this world and expected to do the same in the one to come, and their wealth, not to speak of their influence, gave them powers of patronage.

Pharaonic history seems to have been acted out to the rhythm of the struggle between high officialdom, which tended to set itself up as a hereditary and autono mous power, and the monarchy, clinging to the right to control appointments. Thus the Old Kingdom disappeared when, in the southern provinces, the dynasties of hereditary ‘great chiefs’ or prefects became strong. In the Second Intermediate Period, high office became a personal property that could be bought and sold. The end of the New Kingdom came when the Theban priesthood and the southern military com mand were joined and became the apanage of a dynasty of high priests of Amon.

Political organization

The avowed ideal of Egyptian society was thus a strong monarchy, regarded as the sole means of giving the country the driving force necessary for its well-being. The sovereign was the embodiment of the public service: the term ‘Pharaoh’ comes from per-ao, which the Old Kingdom designate the ‘Great House’ of the prince, including his residence and his ministers, and which in the New Kingdom finally came to designate the person of the king. He was of a different nature from the rest of mankind: the legends about his predestination, the four canonic names and the epithets that he added to his personal name, the protocol surrounding him, the pomp and circumstance accompanying his appearances and decisions, his endlessly repeated likenesses, cartouches and title lists in the sacred buildings, his jubilee celebrations, the

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style of his tomb (Memphis pyramid, Theban rock-cut tomb) all stress this difference. There is some mystery about royal succession. It was certainly customary for son to

succeed father on the throne, in conformity with the mythical model of Osiris and Horus, and in the New Kingdom designation or recognition of the new king by the oracle of Amon was the guarantee of the new monarch’s legitimacy. Thus direct ‘divine right’ outweighed dynastic legitimacy.

Four women became Pharaohs. Strangely enough, the first two (Nitokris and Sebeknefru) mark the end of a dynasty and the other two (Hatshepsut and Tauosre) were treated as usurpers by posterity. Honours were showered on the mothers, wives and daughters of the king. Some princesses of the Middle Kingdom, and more especially later, Teye, first wife of Amenhotep III, and Nefertari, first wife of Ramses II, received exceptional honours. Ahhotep, under Amasis, or Ahmosis-Nefertari, under Amenhotep I, seem to have wielded a determining influence in political and religious matters. The attribution of the ritual function of ‘divine wife of Amon’ to princesses or queens shows the key role of femininity and the female in the worship of the cosmic god.

A study of the title lists of high and low officials and the few legislative and administrative texts that have come down to us gives a more or less accurate notion of government organization: the government of the nomes, the hierarchy of the priesthood and distribution of the religious obligations on the priests, royal or priestly administration of the arable land, flocks, mines, granaries, river transport, justice, and so on.

At the top of the system sat the tjaty or ‘vizier’, to use a traditional Egyptological term. This prime minister, responsible for public order, was before all else the supreme legal authority in the land after Pharaoh and the Minister of Justice. None the less, the tjaty (of whom there were two in the New Kingdom) was not the king’s sole counsellor, or even necessarily the principal one. Many dignitaries boasted of having been consulted by their sovereign behind closed doors or having been selected for special missions and, in the imperial era, the governor of Nubia, an honorary ‘royal son’, was answerable directly to Pharaoh and was almost sovereign in his own territory. Some personalities, Amenhotep, the scribe of recruits and the son of Hapi, an architect gradually elevated to the rank of the gods for his wisdom, or Khamois, the high priest of Ptah and one of Ramses H’s many sons, were no doubt as influential as the viziers of their time.

Military organization The king was responsible for national security. In theory, all credit for victories and conquests was his. Ramses II made great propaganda capital, in words and images, from having stood alone with his bodyguard at Kadesh, reaffirming the primacy of the king, sole saviour by divine grace, over an army from which his dynasty had in fact emerged. As early as the time of the pyramids, the country had had a specialized high command, simultaneously military and naval, commanding troops already accustomed to manoeuvring and parading in disciplined ranks. In the third millennium, however, the peoples of the neighbouring countries posed no very great threat. Raiding parties easily thinned out the population of Nubia to Egypt’s

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3.3 Filling the granaries (A. Badawy, A History of Egyptian architecture, Los Angeles, 1966)

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advantage; triumphal campaigns for which the rural population was levied ett masse were enough to intimidate and plunder the sedentary peoples on the Libyan and Asian borders, while ‘desert scouts’ supervised the movements of the hungry Bedouins. What we know best about the Memphis troops relates to their participation in operations of economic interest and in the great building operations. The ‘teams of elite young recruits’ serving as the king’s bodyguard supervised the transport of stone for pyramids and some major expeditions to the Sinai mines or the eastern quarries. A specialized paramilitary corps, the sementi, prospected and exploited the gold mines of Nubia and the desert. With the First Intermediate Period, the division of the kingdom into rival principalities modified military organization: the prince’s personal retinue and the contingents from the nomes were joined by auxiliary troops.

The New Kingdom, a time of great international conflicts, was to see an unpre cedented expansion of the professional army, divided into two arms of service, chariots and infantry, and subdivided into large army corps. The soldiers received small grants of land, and under the Ramses rpany captives - Nubians, Syrians, Libyans, the pirate Sea Peoples - were enlisted and also given such grants. In spite of their relatively rapid assimilation the Libyans set themselves up as an autonomous force and ended by making their chieftain Pharaoh. In the new class of empires the Saite kings were to rely on new military settlers recruited from the Ionians, Carians, Phoenicians and Judaeans, whilst in the final wars against the Persian empire the last native Pharaohs, like their opponents, hired Greek mercenaries recruited by cosmo politan adventures.

Religious and moral conceptions

Myths Certainly one of the great achievements of Pharaonic civilization, and perhaps one of its weaknesses, was its splendid image of the world and the forces ruling it, a coherent image manifesting itself in its myths, rituals, art, language and works of wisdom. To apprehend the forces of nature and natural phenomena, mythology accepted all the images and legends handed down by tradition. There may be several ‘sole’ deities; the sky is a liquid ceiling, the belly of a cow, the body of woman, a sow, etc. Thus there existed several conceptions of the origins of the universe, which were combined in various ways into the great syntheses elaborated on a local ba sis through the ages, each of which could be re-enacted in all its purity through performance of a given ritual act, on which it conferred a cosmic dimension.

A divine dynasty ruled this world. In those days Seth killed Osiris; revived by the attentions of Isis and Anubis, the embalmer, Osiris became the paragon of all dead kings a nd, by extension, of all the dead. He is also the image of the sun that dies every evening, and the lymph that flowed from his body is taken to be the water that rises each year.

Corresponding to the divine order there are not only the structure and rhythms of the physical world, but a moral order - Ma’at - the norm of truth and justice which declares itself when Ra triumphs over his enemy and which, for the happiness of

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mankind, should reign in the functioning of institutions and in individual behaviour. ‘Ra lives by Ma’at.’ Thoth, the god of scholars, Ra’s accountant, the judge of the gods, is ‘happy by Ma’at’.

The gods

The doctrines and images we have just mentioned are accepted in all temples. The hymns singing the cosmic attributes and the wondrous providence of the god-creator take up the same themes, whether it be a primordial goddess like Neith, or an earth-god like Ptah. The great myths such as the passion of Osiris - as well as the basic ritual practices - are common to all centres of population; but different gods, each with his own name, traditional image, animal manifestation and associated gods, are the ‘masters’ of the various towns: Khnum at Elephantine, Isna and elsewhere, Min at Coptos and Akhmim, Mont at Hermonthis, Amon at Thebes, Sebek at Fayyum and elsewhere, Ptah-Sfker at Memphis, Ra-Harakhte-Atum at Heliopolis, Neith at Sais, Bast at Bubastis, Uadjit at Buto, Nekhbet at El Kah; and there were many local gods called by the name of Horus, many goddesses who are fearsome Sekhmets or kindly Hathors. It seems that this religion tended, through the identifica tion of certain gods with others, to reduce that plurality to a few types: a supreme deity, generally a sun-god and often explicitly identified with Ra (Amon-Ra, Haroeris-Ra, etc.); a consort goddess (Mut = Bast = Sekhmet - Hathor, etc.); the warrior god-son of the Horus-Anhur type; a dead god of the Osiris type (Seker, Seph, etc.). The maze of theoretical problems presented by a multiform pantheon gave rise to much theological and even philosophical speculation. The attitude of the celebrated Akhenaton, who would recognize only the visible disc of the sun as the sole true god, still lay in the main stream of Egyptian thought, but was heretical in the manner in which it upset tradition, which, allowing for the mysterious, accepted and reconciled all forms of piety and thought.

The temple

Each god created his town, each looked after his own domain and, beyond that domain, all Egypt. The king concerned himself with all the gods simultaneously. To achieve this, sacred science employed the magic of word and gesture, of writing and images and of architectural forms, all processes also used to ensure the after-life of the dead. The ceremonies conducted by the initiate priests a ccompanied the ritual acts with verbal formulas reinforcing their power of compulsion by means of spells recalling mythical precedents. The depiction of these rites and the writing of these texts on the walls of the temples perpetuated their action. The architect made the temple a scale model of the universe, thus giving it permanence: the pylon is the mountain of the rising sun, the dark sanctuary is the place where the sun sleeps, the columns represent the primordial swamp out of which creation arose and the base of its walls are the soil of Egypt. A high brick perimeter wall isolates it and its gardens and service buildings from the impurities that might pollute the divine; the officiating priests and those privileged persons admitted to the temenos are required to perform ritual purifications and observe prohibitions relating to food, clothing and sexual activity. In order to

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show that it is actually Pharaoh performing the ritual, scenes carved into the walls depict him carrying out the various rites and presenting in long processions the nomes of Egypt, the phases of the flood and the minor gods that preside over the various economic activities of life. Throughout the day the idol, in other words the shape through which one may communicate with the god, is purified, censed, clothed, fed and invoked at length in hymns which exhort the god to awake, reaffirm his divine power and entreat his benevolent activity. During the great festivals, the god emerges in procession to recharge himself with divine energy from the rays of the sun, to visit the tombs of dead kings and past gods, and to re-enact the mythical events through which the world took shape.

Law Religion and ethics in Ancient Egypt stress the maintenance of strict discipline, which benefits the whole community of subjects and the exclusive activity of the royal person in government ritual. It is thus all the more striking that Pharaonic law remained resolutely individualistic. In relation to royal decisions and to legal pro cedure and penalties, men and women of all classes seem to have been equals before the law. The family was limited to father, mother and their young children, and women enjoyed equal rights of property ownership and judicial relief. In general, responsibility was strictly personal. The extended family had no legal substance and the status of a man was not defined in relation to his lineage. In the domain of law, Pharaonic Egypt was distinctly different from traditional Africa and curiously antici pates the modern societies of Europe.

Funerary beliefs and practices

The same individualism reigned in regard to beliefs and practices concerning life after death. Each, according to his means, provided for his own after-life, that of his spouse and that of his children, in the event of their premature death. The son should participate in his father’s funeral rites and, if the need should arise, ensure his burial. The human (or divine) being includes, in addition to the mortal flesh, several ingredients - the Ka, the Ba, and other lesser-known entities - whose nature remains difficult to define and whose interrelationships are obscure. Funerary practices are intended to ensure the survival of these ‘souls’, but a well-known feature of Egyptian religion is the linking of that survival to the preservation of the body itself by means of mummification, and the making of elaborate arrangements to enable the dead to enjoy an after-life at least as active and happy as life in this world. An Ancient Egyptian tomb was composed of a superstructure open to the surviving relatives and a vault where the deceased lay, accompanied by magical or domestic objects. Persons of wealth paid a regular stipend under contract to processional priests, who from father to son would be responsible for bringing offerings of food; and, as a final precaution, the compelling power of the spoken and written word and the magic of carved and painted images were employed. In the chapel - mastaba or hypogeum - the effective rituals of internment and offering are made eternal; other scenes recreate the work and

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pleasures of an ideal world; statues and statuettes create a multitude of substitute bodies. On the planks of the coffin, on the stones of the vault, on a ‘Book of the Dead’ given into the mummy’s keeping, are copied the formulae recited at the time of burial and spells enabling the deceased to enjoy all his faculties, escape the dangers of the Other World and fulfil his divine destiny.