The enormous volume of construction work carried out during the two centuries when the kings of Manetho’s 3rd and 4th Dynasties held sway had a profound effect on the country’s economy and society. It would be wrong to underestimate the considerable effort and expertise required in the construction of large brick-built mastaba-tomhs of the Early Dynastic Period, but pyramid construction in stone elevated such enterprises onto a completely different plane. The number of professional builders required must have been large, especially if one takes into account all those involved in the quarrying and transport of stone blocks, the construction of approach ramps needed by the builders, and all the logistics, such as provision of food, water, and other necessities, the maintenance of tools and many other related tasks.
The Egyptian economy was not based on slave labour. Even if one allows for much of the work to have been carried out at the time when the annual inundation made it impossible to work in the fields, a large section of the labour force required for pyramid building had to be diverted from agricultural tasks and food production. This must have exerted considerable pressure on the existing resources and provided powerful stimuli for efforts to increase agricultural production, to improve the administration of the country, to develop an efficient way of collecting taxes, and to look for additional sources of revenue and manpower abroad.
Demands on Egyptian agricultural production changed dramatically with the inauguration of pyramid building because of the need to support those who had been removed from food production. The consumption and expectations of those who joined the managerial elite increased in line with their new status. However, agriodtural techniques remained the same. The state’s main contribution was organizational, including such acts as the prevention of local famines by bringing in surplus resources from elsewhere, the lessening of the effects of major calamities (such as low inundations), the elimination of damaging local conflicts by providing arbitration, and the improvement of security. Irrigation works were the responsibility of local administrators, and the attempts to increase agricultural production focused on expanding cultivated land for which the state was able to provide labour forces and other resources.
This went hand in hand with the need for a better administrative organization of the country and a more efficient way of collecting taxes. The existing major centres of population, often royal estates, now became capitals of administrative districts (nomes), with the strategically placed capital of the country, at the vertex of the Delta, providing the equilibrium between Upper Egypt (ta shemau) in the south, and Lower Egypt (ta mehu) in the north. Old Kingdom cities are, however, overlaid by later settlements and, especially in the Delta, they often lie below the present water-table. These early settlements are therefore archaeologically practically unknown; even the capital of Egypt has not yet been excavated, and towns such as Elephantine, or Ayn Asil in the Dakhla Oasis, are exceptional. The earlier semi-autonomous village communities now lost their independence and privately owned land Practically disappeared, all replaced by royal estates. The earlier rudimentary census was transformed into an all-embracing fiscal system.
Egypt during much of the Old Kingdom was a centrally planned and administered state, headed by a king who was the theoretical owner of all its resources and whose powers were practically absolute. He was able to commandeer people, to impose compulsory labour, to extract taxes, and to lay claim to any resources of the land at will, although in practical terms this was tempered by a number of restrictions. During the 3rd and 4th Dynasties, many of the top officials of state were members of the royal family, in direct continuation of the system of government of the Early Dynastic Period. Their authority derived from their close links with the king. The highest office was that of a vizier (the word conventionally used to translate the Egyptian term tjaty), who was responsible for overseeing the running of all state departments, excluding the religious affairs. It was under the kings of the 4th Dynasty that a whole series of royal princes held the vizierate with spectacular success.
Titles of various officials represent a major source of information on Egyptian administration. Explicit, detailed texts, such as that of the early 4th-Dynasty official Metjen, were exceptional. The intensity of state control over every individual now increased dramatically and the number of officials at all levels of administration grew in a corresponding fashion. A consequence of this was that a bureaucratic career was open to competent literate newcomers not related to the royal family. These officials were remunerated for their services in several different ways, but the most significant was an ex officio lease of state (royal) land, usually estates settled with their cultivators. Such estates produced practically all that their personnel needed—internal trade at this economic level was limited to opportunist bartering—and the ex officio remuneration was their surplus produce. This land reverted, at least in theory, to the king after the official’s term of office expired and so could be assigned as remuneration of another official. In an economic system that did not know money it was a very effective way of paying salaries of officials, but it also represented a significant erosion of the king’s resources.
World History
