Pharaonic Egypt had always been divided into districts or provinces. The oldest regional administrative units are called nomes (from nomos, the word used in Greek texts, following Herodotos’s Histories, for Egyptian districts); the Egyptian equivalent is sepat. They may have had places of worship as their centers, the symbols of which became the standard way of writing the names of the nomes (see Helck 1974a). The principal tasks of the nome supervisors seem to have been the control of the regional government resources, the collection of taxes and the recruitment of a workforce for state projects. Nome administration is recorded from the Third Dynasty onwards, but in the Old Kingdom different nome administrators had different titles throughout Egypt indicating that the system was not uniform. The universal title ‘‘Great Head’’ for any nome was introduced only in the Sixth Dynasty. By that time, however, many nomes had become practically autonomous, a development foreshadowing the disintegration of the kingdom in the First Intermediate Period. An attempt was made by the pharaohs of the late Old Kingdom to keep nome administration centralized by appointing a Supervisor of Upper Egypt, who was supposed to control the individual nomarchs in the south, but it was obviously to no avail. An outline sketch can be made of such developments in the south, but hardly anything is known about nome administration or its history for Lower Egypt.
The Middle Kingdom saw new types of provinces, sometimes called ‘‘city districts’’ (Pardey 2001: 18), with towns or urban complexes at their centers. At the head of such a district was the haty-a, a title known from the Old Kingdom, used by some nomarchs but not by all (Martin-Pardey 1976: 117). It is often conventionally translated as ‘‘mayor,’’ even though he was the head of more than a town or a city, being responsible for the whole of the surrounding region as well.
In the Twelfth Dynasty two Upper Egyptian nomes, the Fifteenth and the Sixteenth (the ‘‘Hare’’ and the ‘‘Oryx’’) still retained their former status, possibly in recognition of their support for the Theban kings who had re-unified the kingdom. Elsewhere, however, the nomarchs were replaced by ‘‘mayors’’ whose territories were smaller than the ancient nomes. This system continued in the New Kingdom. The mayors had essentially the same tasks as the nomarchs before them: controlling royal domains and collecting state revenues. According to the Duties of the Vizier (see above), the mayors received their orders directly from the vizier. Thus provincial administration was ultimately his responsibility (for a different view, in which mayors were seen as essentially local administrators with no responsibility to any real provincial government, see van den Boorn 1988: 328).
In the Middle Kingdom the ancient nomes had disappeared as administrative units, but in later periods they are still referred to in a religious context in temple inscriptions. This is a perfectly understandable archaism in view of the fact that originally their centers were places of worship. The standard number of 42 nomes in religious texts (22 for Upper Egypt, 20 for Lower Egypt) may well not correspond to any administrative practice.
There were no ‘‘mayors’’ in smaller towns and villages, so on this very local level an important role must have been played by prominent families, who would often supply local representatives to the state and as temple officials. These could be members of the local council, kenbet in Egyptian. Whether such councils represent regular administration on the local level is doubtful. Two sources suggest that they could be formed ad hoc. In the decree of King Horemheb instituting legal reforms (see below, Law) it is stated that mayors and priests could establish any council they wanted for judicial purposes (Kruchten 1981: 151). And there is also data from Deir el-Medina, the site of the Ramesside community of royal necropolis workmen, showing that in this community legal decisions were made by a council composed of local functionaries, with the occasional involvement of outside authorities, convened specifically to settle occasional difficulties (McDowell 1990: 143-86). The scenario is either provincial (mayors) or institutional (the royal necropolis, and priests - temple councils are attested already for the Middle Kingdom), and in both cases the councils are concerned with judicial rather than administrative matters. It is difficult to answer the question of whether the kenbet was a council or a court, or both. There were also two Kenbet aat, ‘Great Councils/Courts’, in the New Kingdom and Third Intermediate period, normally chaired in the Ramesside period by the viziers of the north and the south (see further below, Section 2, Law).
World History
