The model of the Egyptian economy is that of a patrimonial household (Lehner 2000). The state was the ‘‘Great House.’’ This is the term Pharaoh, pr - ap, that came to be used for the king personally. It was distinct from the King’s House as the royal palace itself. The temple of a god was similarly his ‘‘House’’ (Haring 1997), while in the Old Kingdom the property organization of the great man was his House of Dt, a term of uncertain etymology: ‘‘House of Personaity’’ or ‘‘House of Eternity.’’
The larger the house, the more economically complex. The tombs of the Old Kingdom show self-sufficient economic units, employing a full range of personnel: craftsmen, herdsmen, fishermen, and fowlers/poultry-men as well as ordinary farmers. Temple endowments include people to carry out all the necessary tasks for a selfsufficient economy, until, at the extreme, the House of Amun in the Twentieth Dynasty was effectively a state itself. In each case the agricultural holdings, and the farmers who worked them, funded the non-farming activities.
At the lowest level the basic unit of consumption was the unit of residence - the nuclear family - although a rather larger family might work as a unit. The Middle Kingdom letters of Hekanakhte show him as authoritative head of a family, including adult married sons. They farmed as a single economic unit, but Hekanakhte assigned separate grain rations to each individual to consume with his family. An extreme example is then seen in an estate granted to the naval officer Neshi in the reign of Ahmose, which was the subject of legal dispute as late as the reign of Ramesses II over the rights of ‘‘the children of Neshi’’ to shares (Gaballa 1977). This land had continued to be worked as a unit under control of a single representative manager, an arrangement that had advantages where the heirs included women or functionaries not working the land personally, but such arrangements naturally broke down over time. Property was normally divided equally among all the children, male and female. The exception was property derived from a funerary or religious endowment which carried a requirement to perform ritual service and passed to the eldest son, ‘‘son to son, heir to heir’’ in perpetuity. The eldest son was the primary heir to the father in all ritual and social respects, including succession to office.
Women worked within a household, where domestic production - particularly weaving - could provide personal as well as joint family income through small-scale markets (Eyre 1998). Matrimonial property was jointly held and divisible at the end of marriage, when women retained rights to their dowries and their income in marriage. There were, however, no significant employment opportunities for women in the wider economy, and for most women there was no real resource beyond the family household. The widow and divorced woman are characteristic objects of charity. Conversely there was no economically practical role for the unmarried man, who could not exist without the domestic provision of the nuclear family household (Eyre 2007).
The model of the economy as a ‘‘house’’ poses problems in respect of the degree of impersonalization in the economy. True wealth lay in people and their productive capacity, while patronage and reciprocity lay at the heart of the practical functioning of the system. The ideology of hierarchy remained personal at all periods; officials expected to be praised publicly for specific tasks and rewarded by ‘‘the gold of praise’’ at the king’s hands. The highest officials of state were in direct contact with the king, and their subordinate officials were few in number. The state granaries dealt primarily in the grain in which land revenues were denominated, although other crops must have been collected. However, the extent and location of state facilities - in provincial centers or the capital - is not documented, and there is no hard evidence for the extent to which the state, or any other institution, built up effective grain reserves to mitigate famine. The Treasury - the ‘‘House of Silver’’ - seems to have dealt with all commodities other than grain. The High Steward seems to have managed palace resources. However the overlap between these administrations is rarely clear, and varied from period to period. The House of Gold and Overseers of Treasure managed the most valuable materials separately - gold, silver, precious stones - for production of luxury objects for palace and temple, and stood outside the core revenue institutions. In practice the state enforced its demands as best it could on local hierarchies and individual communities, not having the size or administrative structures to tax individuals effectively from the center. It is a cliche, but one that needs to be treated seriously, that government in Egypt has never fully controlled economic or social life in the villages.
Delegation, in practice, often meant the assignment of land or protected right to revenue as a source of income, avoiding the direct payment of wages to functionaries. Priests controlled and received direct shares from the income of the cult. Specific priestly functions were endowed with plots of land and rights to the income of specific endowments: so many days of the offerings or particular cuts from each sacrificial animal. When endowing his mortuary cult, the Middle Kingdom nomarch Djefaihap was careful to distinguish the property of his father’s house from that of the house of the nomarch - the property of his office - in setting up the endowment of his mortuary cult. The early Eighteenth Dynasty inscription of Ahmose, son of Abana, records that holdings of 5 arouras in their home towns were assigned to sailors taking part in the wars against the Hyksos, and the endowment of the military and minor function in this way seems normal for the period. In contrast, wage payments were characteristic for expeditionary workforces, paid in daily bread and beer rations, or to workforces separated from the fields and agricultural labor: to craftsmen, or those working in directly in the household of the employer, where direct provision of food was appropriate or necessary.
World History
