Early Dynastic Egypt (23 page)

The source material and its limitations

Any investigation into the structure of the Early Dynastic administration depends to a great extent upon the numerous seal-impressions recovered from royal and private tombs of the period. For the First Dynasty, these are supplemented by inscribed labels—of wood, bone or ivory—originally attached to various commodities. Private stelae from First Dynasty graves at Abydos and Saqqara record the occasional official title, or longer

sequences of titles in the case of two stelae from the reign of Qaa. Many of the stone vessels found beneath the Step Pyramid bear incised or painted inscriptions which convey significant information about administrative activities. The majority of the inscribed vessels have been plausibly dated to the Second Dynasty, hence plugging what otherwise would be a serious gap in the evidence for early administration. From the very end of the Third Dynasty, the tomb inscriptions of Metjen, Akhetaa and Pehernefer provide detailed accounts of the careers of three professional administrators.

Although the different categories of source material span most of the Early Dynastic period, they are very uneven and give only partial insights into the administrative apparatus of the first three dynasties (Malek 1986:35). Seal-impressions are an invaluable source of information about early Egypt. Indeed, without an analysis of the inscriptions they provide, no comprehensive history of the Early Dynastic period could be written (Kaplony 1963, I: 3). Nevertheless, they provide only a partial glimpse of government activities. Seal-impressions represent the surviving physical traces of administrative acts involving officials of the central government, so it is not surprising that indications of provincial administration are almost entirely lacking (Martin-Pardey 1976:34). Instead, the seal-impressions from royal and élite tombs are primarily concerned with the provisioning of the tomb in question. Hence, most of the titles preserved on these sealings refer to the administration of royal estates and foundations (Martin-Pardey 1976:35)— which provided the income for maintaining mortuary cults, in the form of agricultural produce—and of the various departments of the royal treasury, which was the central institution responsible for collecting and redistributing such produce. Much can be learned about the development and administration of economic institutions during the course of the first two dynasties; but seal-impressions afford almost no information about other branches of the administration. We are largely ignorant about the early development of the mechanisms of political (as opposed to economic) control (Trigger
et al.
1983:56). In particular, the surviving sources tell us nothing about military control, the specifically coercive face of political authority which was an important aspect of Egyptian government in later periods (cf. O’Connor, in Trigger
et al.
1983:215). As we shall see in Chapter 6, the iconography of early kingship stressed the coercive power of the ruler. Moreover, the message of early royal artefacts such as the Scorpion macehead seems to have been directed as much towards the subject population of Egypt
(rh yt)
as the king’s foreign enemies. We may infer that the authority of the Early Dynastic state was bolstered by a degree of military might, but in the absence of any contemporary evidence this must remain no more than an educated guess.

The source material changes markedly in the Third Dynasty. Very few seal- impressions have survived from tombs constructed after the reign of Netjerikhet. The practice of furnishing burials with large numbers of sealed commodities seems to have died out early in the Third Dynasty. Instead, a tomb was provided with an offering-stela depicting the items considered necessary to sustain the deceased in the afterlife. Tombs of high officials began to be inscribed with biographical texts, several of which, from the end of the Third Dynasty, illuminate both economic and provincial administration. The private stelae of the Early Dynastic period usually bear few titles. Exceptions are two stelae from the reign of Qaa, inscribed for the high officials Sabef and Merka, which preserve a range of titles associated with the court. Taken together with occasional references on seal-impressions, these stelae provide much of our information about the

structure of the royal household. The inscribed stone vessels from beneath the Step Pyramid comprise a rich and varied source of Early Dynastic titles, including religious, administrative and economic offices. Because they date mostly from the Second and Third Dynasties, they cannot be used reliably to illuminate the workings of the administration in earlier periods. This is a general problem with the source material for Early Dynastic administration: although the evidence as a whole covers many branches of government, the chronological spread is very uneven, making general trends in administrative development difficult to deduce. The following picture of the administration over the whole course of the Early Dynastic period therefore relies on a certain amount of extrapolation and informed guesswork, based upon the fragments of information available.

Origins

Some time around 3100 BC, Egyptians found themselves under the control of a single, unified government, presided over by a king claiming divine authority. The various political groupings of the Predynastic period had coalesced during the period of state formation, leaving the ruler of This as king of the Two Lands. Administration was now conducted on a national scale, bringing with it advantages as well as constraints. The burden of taxation imposed by the court may have exceeded that levied by provincial rulers, and
corvée labour
for royal building projects may have made increasing demands on the rural population. But in return, a centralised administration provided a stabilising influence and, critically, a guarantee of emergency relief in times of famine through the maintenance of central stocks of grain (O’Connor 1972:99).

Though the impact of political decisions was now felt country-wide, the existence of a bureaucratic apparatus was by no means a new phenomenon. The invention of writing in the late Predynastic period was undoubtedly a result of the need for detailed accounting and record-keeping (Postgate
et al.
1995), as the courts of Upper Egypt intensified their involvement in specialised craft production and foreign trade. The continuities between late Predynastic and Early Dynastic Egypt in other spheres—such as material culture and kingship ideology—make it likely that at least some of the institutions of the Early Dynastic administration were inherited (Roth 1991:1–2). Indeed, the sealings from Abydos tomb B2 and the accompanying pit B0 which mention the office of
nbỉ
(Kaiser and Dreyer 1982:231 fig. 9; Dreyer
et al.
1996:49)—connected with managing the produce of royal domains—indicate that some of the characteristics of Early Dynastic administration were already in existence towards the end of the Predynastic period.

It has been suggested that the system of government, during the first two dynasties at least, ‘kept many of its Predynastic trappings’ (Hoffman 1980:348). In particular, the composition of the court—the highest officials surrounding the king—is likely to have been based on family ties and bonds of kinship (Hoffman 1980:325), reflecting the social organisation of the late Predynastic period (Roth 1991:216). However, it must be admitted that there is little explicit evidence for the operation of a strongly kinship-based system in ancient Egypt. The mortuary record of the late Predynastic period suggests a society which was already highly structured (though not necessarily along kinship lines), and the evidence for kinship as a major factor in the government of Early Dynastic Egypt is largely architectural: the use of ‘palace facade’ decoration on the tombs of high

officials at North Saqqara. It is generally assumed that in the First Dynasty many, if not all, of the most senior administrators were royal relatives, but this cannot be established beyond doubt.

The reign of Netjerikhet at the beginning of the Third Dynasty appears to have been marked by the establishment of a more structured administration, comprising different departments each with its own bureaucracy. For the first time, all the branches of government may have been brought together in one location, at Memphis (Helck 1954:132). The reforms may have been designed to improve efficiency, not least in the area of levying taxation. An efficient bureaucracy and an uninterrupted flow of income into government coffers would certainly have been pre-requisites for the construction of the king’s Step Pyramid complex which represented an unprecedented mobilisation of manpower and resources. The administrative changes brought about at this time are reflected, above all, in the appearance of the office of vizier. The vizier was in charge of the entire apparatus of government and was personally responsible to the king. To indicate his rank, the vizier adopted old courtly titles such as
ỉrỉ-p t.
Indeed, titles which, in earlier periods, had distinguished the officials in the personal service of the king now became mere ranking titles.

The priorities of Early Dynastic administration

If we follow the modern assumption that all states are motivated, if not by self-interest then at least by an institutional instinct for self-survival, and apply this to the early Egyptian state, the priorities of Early Dynastic administration become clearer. As we have seen in Chapter 2, the very process of state formation seems to have been driven—at least in part – by the desire, on the part of Upper Egypt’s rulers, to gain and then control access to trade routes with lands to the north and south. Prestige commodities from Syria- Palestine—and, to a lesser extent, from Nubia—were not simply coveted by the princelings of Upper Egypt, they were necessary for the conspicuous consumption which proclaimed and maintained the power of the ruling élites. It seems to have been Lower Egypt’s close contacts with the Near East, coupled perhaps with its abundant and fertile agricultural land, that made it the object of Upper Egyptian expansionism during the period of state formation. Once the rulers of the Thinite region had established themselves as sovereigns of the entire country—reigning as kings of the First Dynasty— their priorities need not have changed dramatically. With the trade networks and economic resources of the whole of Egypt now at their command, the opportunities for conspicuous consumption were greater than ever. The central theme of this book is the supreme achievement of Egypt’s early rulers in creating mechanisms of rule which were to survive, virtually unchanged, for the next three thousand years. These mechanisms— economic, political and ideological—enabled the king and his court to go on doing what they had done before the unification of Egypt: exercising authority and commissioning grandiose projects to emphasise that authority. At its most basic level, political power depends upon economic control. A guaranteed income from taxation is also a prerequisite for supporting specialist craftsmen and undertaking major construction projects. The economy, then, emerges as the central concern of the Early Dynastic administration, for without adequate command of Egypt’s economic resources, the state simply could not function. Hence, the annals make frequent reference to surveys of Egypt’s resources,

human, agricultural and mineral. An entry from the reign of Den apparently records a census of Egypt’s population, and a regular occurrence from the early Second Dynasty onwards was the biennial cattle-count
( nwt).
This operation would probably have recorded all the details of Egypt’s agricultural base, including the size and location of herds, the productive capacity of fields, and so forth. A later entry on the Palermo Stone indicates a more general assessment of the country’s wealth, referring as it does to the ‘census of gold and fields’. Government concern for economic matters is reflected in the detailed records that were kept of the height of the annual inundation, a factor which had a direct impact on agricultural yields. From the reign of Djer, nearly every year in the annals records this measurement in cubits, palms and fingers.

The following analysis of Early Dynastic administration is divided into three sections for convenience, although all three spheres of activity are closely interrelated. As the driving force behind all administrative effort, the economy and the mechanisms employed to control it are examined first. The second section considers the activities of the court which were funded by taxation of Egypt’s economic resources. In a way, economic management was simply a means to an end. The end was the ability to mount impressive projects to glorify the king and maintain the status of those around him. Inevitably, close control of the economy on a national scale required a regional approach. The administrative mechanisms introduced by the early state to exploit Egypt’s resources and facilitate efficient taxation led to the development of a system of regional administration. At various periods of Egyptian history, when the power of the central government waned and the influence of the regions increased correspondingly, the administrative divisions imposed upon the country by its early rulers were transformed into political divisions. The Early Dynastic origins of provincial administration are thus of great importance for the later history of Egypt. Moreover, they illustrate how the self- interested ambitions of the court were translated into mechanisms of authority which were to characterise pharaonic civilisation.

Personnel

The word ‘bureaucracy’ has modern connotations of unnecessary complexity and overstaffing. It is not, perhaps, an altogether inappropriate term to describe ancient Egyptian administration, since the indications are that the government apparatus was multi-faceted and employed large numbers of people, even in the Early Dynastic period. The highest office-holders were probably royal kinsmen and members of the ruling élite, the
p t
(Malek 1986:35). The lower ranks would have been open to persons of non-royal birth, though it is to be expected that many of the leading families of the Predynastic period retained some degree of influence in government, even after the unification of Egypt (Kemp, personal communication). The massive Early Dynastic necropolis at Helwan—which served as the burial ground for all but the highest officials of the Memphite court and comprised in excess of 10,000 graves—gives some idea of the size of the early administration (Wilkinson 1996a).