Egypt has long been characterized as a socialist or supply state with a redistributive, marketless, or ‘‘command’’ economy. While these conceptions remain useful, one must be mindful that our sources in Egypt are highly biased to represent mostly the funerary and palatial material culture of the ruling class. Traders were seen as palace or temple officials, though there is good evidence for foreign merchants residing in Egypt and participating in, if not conducting, much of its foreign trade. Some scholars view merchants as conducting private business, but only in the New Kingdom, where the pictorial evidence from tomb paintings and recorded confessions of tomb-robbers offered rare and incontrovertible proof of private enterprise.
Janssen (1975, 1994) has compiled the most evidence for prices, debt, and credit and laid the foundations of what we know about Egyptian economics. As in Mesopotamia, Egypt had a system of standardized weights for bullion, which constituted its money, though it was not as fully developed a technology as it was in Mesopotamia. The most common measure for weights of metal was the dbn, a word related to words meaning ‘‘ring,’’ which was about 13 grams in the Old Kingdom (2575-2150 bce) and 91 in the New Kingdom (1539-1075 bce).
Though Egypt was rich in precious metals, especially gold, they never took on the same significance as money as in Mesopotamia. Demand for Egyptian gold was keen in the Near East, and in Egypt it was certainly highly valued; the gold:silver:copper equivalence was about 200:100:1. But gold was not used as a standard, and silver was used in prices only rarely, for example at the workmen’s village at Deir el-Medina, where copper was the more common standard.
Whereas barley appears to have been the earliest form of payment in Mesopotamia, in Egypt we have bread and beer being the standard rations given to workers. Ten loaves and a jug or two of beer per day was a common payment. In terms of metal money, 1 copper dbn bought a half liter of grain in Ramesside times (1292-1075 bce), when we have the most evidence for prices.
Although Egypt looked like a supply-state to many observers for much of its history, there are signs of greater economic complexity when Egypt became an empire in the New Kingdom (1539-1075 bce). The role of the trader in this situation is highly debatable. Some temples employed both merchant ships and traders. Traders appeared only as temple agents, and we do not have evidence of them conducting private enterprise on the side.
There was a lot of movement in grain prices in the Ramesside period. Prolonged grain famine appears to have caused this, and food shortages may also have contributed to a diversifying economy. While there was no word for profit as there was in Mesopotamia, the concept was essentially present in the idea of a good price (Kemp 1989: 252). The vivid paintings from tombs of New Kingdom officials displayed some kind of marketplace, but we have no way of knowing whether the exchanges were barter or price based (Kemp 1989: 254-55). It is apparent from tomb paintings and a few texts that Syrians played a vital role in maritime trade with Egypt’s northeastern neighbors. Texts mentioned foreigners living in a harbor community around Memphis during the New Kingdom (Redford 1992: 228).
In contrast to the rich merchants who thrived in Syria and Mesopotamia, it appears the traders had low status in Egypt. They were functionaries or purchasing agents, not free actors, and the foreign traders living in Egypt probably had more wealth than the indigenous traders, if texts from Deir el-Medina are any indication of trader status. According to a school text known as Be a Scribe or the Satire on the Trades from around 1000 bce, the Egyptian merchant’s life was not particularly enviable:
The merchants travel downstream and upstream. They are as busy as can be, carrying goods from one town to another. They supply him who has wants. But the tax collectors carry off the gold, that most precious of metals. The ships’ crews from every house (of commerce), they receive their loads. They depart from Egypt for Syria, and each man’s god is with him. (But) not one of them says: We shall see Egypt again! (Lichtheim 1980: 170)
In interpreting this text the student should take care to consider the author’s perspective as inherently bureaucratic, not sympathetic to any appeal the trader’s life may have held. The text also suggests that Egyptian merchants did indeed travel abroad, an idea supported by the presence of Egyptian names at Ugarit in Syria in the Late Bronze Age (1400-1200 bce).
World History
