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UCLA Encyclopedia of Egyptology

UCLA

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Title:

Economy

Author:

Haring, Ben, Universiteit Leiden

Publication Date:

2009

Series:

UCLA Encyclopedia of Egyptology

Publication Info:

UCLA Encyclopedia of Egyptology, Department of Near Eastern Languages and Cultures, UCLA

Permalink:

http://www.escholarship.org/uc/item/2t01s4qj

Additional Info:

Haring, Ben, 2009, Economy. In Elizabeth Frood and Willeke Wendrich (eds.), UCLA Encyclopediaof Egyptology, Los Angeles. http://escholarship.org/uc/item/2t01s4qj

Keywords:

economy, estate, barter, redistribution, money, temple, state, tax, Archaeological Anthropology,

Economic History, Near Eastern Languages and Societies

Local Identifier:

nelc_uee_7912

Abstract:

The economy of ancient Egypt is a difficult area of study due to the lack of preservation of muchdata (especially quantitative data); it is also a controversial subject on which widely divergentviews have been expressed. It is certain, however, that the principal production and revenues ofEgyptian society as a whole and of its individual members was agrarian, and as such, dependenton the yearly rising and receding of the Nile. Most agricultural producers were probably self-sufficient tenant farmers who worked the fields owned by wealthy individuals or state and templeestates. In addition to these, there were institutional and corve workforces, and slaves, but the

relative importance of these groups for society as a whole is difficult to assess. According totextual evidence, crafts were in the hands of institutional workforces, but indications also existof craftsmen working for private contractors. Trade was essentially barter with reference to fixedunits of textile, grain, copper, silver, and gold as measures of value. Coins were imported and
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produced in the Late Period, but a system close to a monetary economy is attested only from thePtolemaic Period onward. Marketplaces were frequented by private individuals (including women)as well as professional traders, both native and foreign. Imports were secured by conquests andmilitary control in the Levant, from which silver, oil, and wine reached Egypt, and in Nubia, richin its deposits of gold.

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ECONOMYBen Haring

EDITORS

WILLEKEWENDRICHEditor-in-Chief

University of California, Los Angeles

JACCO DIELEMANEditor

University of California, Los Angeles

ELIZABETH FROODEditor

Area Editor Individual and SocietyUniversity of Oxford

JOHN BAINESSenior Editorial Consultant

University of Oxford

Short Citation:Haring, 2009, Economy. UEE.

Full Citation:Haring, Ben, 2009, Economy. In Elizabeth Frood and Willeke Wendrich (eds.), UCLA Encyclopedia of

Egyptology, Los Angeles. http://digital2.library.ucla.edu/viewItem.do?ark=21198/zz001nf64c

1028 Version 1, February 2009http://digital2.library.ucla.edu/viewItem.do?ark=21198/zz001nf64c


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Economy, Haring, UEE 2009 1

ECONOMY

Ben Haring

Wirtschaftconomie

The economy of ancient Egypt is a difficult area of study due to the lack of preservation of muchdata (especially quantitative data); it is also a controversial subject on which widely divergent viewshave been expressed. It is certain, however, that the principal production and revenues of Egyptiansociety as a whole and of its individual members was agrarian, and as such, dependent on theyearly rising and receding of the Nile. Most agricultural producers were probably self-sufficienttenant farmers who worked the fields owned by wealthy individuals or state and temple estates. Inaddition to these, there were institutional and corve workforces, and slaves, but the relativeimportance of these groups for society as a whole is difficult to assess. According to textual evidence,crafts were in the hands of institutional workforces, but indications also exist of craftsmen workingfor private contractors. Trade was essentially barter with reference to fixed units of textile, grain,copper, silver, and gold as measures of value. Coins were imported and produced in the LatePeriod, but a system close to a monetary economy is attested only from the Ptolemaic Periodonward. Marketplaces were frequented by private individuals (including women) as well asprofessional traders, both native and foreign. Imports were secured by conquests and militarycontrol in the Levant, from which silver, oil, and wine reached Egypt, and in Nubia, rich in its

deposits of gold.

)( . /. . >>corve


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conomy in its broadest sense canbe defined as the system, or thedifferent ways, in which material

goods are produced, distributed, andconsumed. In everyday language, economystands for the efficient use of scarceresources, and for the process of buying andselling that appears to be at the center ofmuch modern economic activity. Such apopular use of the term is likely to neglectaspects of human society that are no lesseconomic, such as taxation (an aspect ofgovernment economic policy), or subsistence(the self-sufficient mode of production andconsumption in traditional agrarian societies).

To put it differently, economy is notnecessarily the same as commerce. In fact,trade seems to be just one aspect of aneconomic system, the relative importance ofwhich is thought to be subject to historicalchange (see Tradebelow). There is actually nosingle aspect of human society that isirrelevant to its economy (geography,demography, and mentality were highlightedas particularly important by Janssen 1975b:132 - 139).

Whereas modes of production and

distribution can be reconstructed on the basisof textual, archaeological, and geologicalresearch, quantification remains the centralproblem in the study of an ancient economy,such as the Egyptian, due to the lack ofpreservation of many sources of information.Moreover, Egyptological discussions tend toconcentrate on textual sources, the social andchronological distribution of which isunbalanced (institutional records of the NewKingdom and Greco-Roman Period beingrelatively well-represented). More integrativeapproaches that include archaeological datamay well add significantly to our present stateof knowledge.

Agrarian Production

There can be no doubt that production inancient Egypt was first and foremost agrarian,the principal food crops being (emmer) wheatand barley, and the principal components of

the Egyptian diet being bread and beer. Manyof these and other crops were produced bytenant farmers, who were largely self-

sufficient as far as the production of theirown food was concerned. They lived in whatanthropologists refer to as a peasant society(or peasant economy): a society mainlyconsisting of self-sufficient agrarian producerswho pay part of their crops as tax to thegovernment, or as rent to the owners of theland they cultivate. A variation of the peasantsociety, more specifically relevant to moderndeveloping countries, is that of farmers whosell cash crops and subsequently are able tobuy food. Such a strategy may occasionally be

reflected in Egyptian sourcesfor example,in the Middle Kingdom Tale of the EloquentPeasant, in which the peasant (sxtj), actuallya hunter/gatherer from the Wadi el-Natrunoasis, intends to exchange his products(minerals, wild plants, animal skins) for grainon the market.

E

There is insufficient data to establish theamount of agrarian production (grain orotherwise) in ancient Egypt. Quantitative dataare scarce and their chronological distributionis uneven. Estimates have been made,

however, of the population and the totalextent of fertile area during the Pharaonic andGreco-Roman periods. The figures usuallyquoted by Egyptologists are those arrived atby Butzer (1976: 81 - 98) on the basis ofgeological surveys, as well as textual andarchaeological data on ancient demographyand agrarian technology. Butzer calculated afertile area of 22,400 sq. km. and a populationof 2.9 million in the early Ramesside Period(about 1250 BCE), and 27,300 sq. km. with apopulation of 4.9 million in the PtolemaicPeriod (about 150 BCE). The underlyingassumption is that 130 persons could livefrom the production of one square kilometerin the former, and 180 in the latter period.Their food would basically include wheat andbarley, vegetables, dates, and fish, and for thewell-to-do the diet would include meat andfruit. The increase in agrarian production persquare kilometer in the Greco-Roman Period


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rather be considered not as the owner butas having been entitled to tax received fromthe land (the percentage specified):apportioning fields were often in the hands of

private individuals, who were the actualowners, and who yearly paid tax to the templeor government institution (Haring 1998). Thissituation is also reflected in Papyrus ValenayI. The people cultivating their own land andpaying their tax to the royal treasury are therecalled nmH(y) (plural: nmHyw), a word originallymeaning orphan, but which in the NewKingdom had acquired the additional meaningfree or private, and referred to peoplewho owned property, but were not among thehigher state and temple officials (sr; plural:srw; for this opposition see Rmer 1994: 412 -451). A similar status has been ascribed byEgyptologists to people called nDs (plural:nDsw), small one, in texts from the FirstIntermediate Period (e.g., Moreno Garca1997: 32 - 39), and to the s n njwt tn man ofthis town of the Middle Kingdom (Quirke1991), but this interpretation has beendisputed (see Andrssy 1998 for s n njwt tn;and see Franke 1998 for nDs). In the Greco-Roman Period, nmH(y) became the equivalentof the Greek eleutheros. The word is seldomused in Papyrus Wilbour, but it is likely that

the individuals listed there as the holders ofapportioning fields and as payers of taxes hadprecisely that status.

On a lower level (with which theinstitutional documents were not concerned)were the actual cultivators, who may havebeen institutional workforces, private owners,or lessees. The latter (referred to in theprevious section as tenant farmers) remainundocumented until the late ThirdIntermediate Period. By that time land leaseshad begun to appear as written contracts, a

tradition that was continued in the Greco-Roman Period under the name misthosis.Documents from earlier periods occasionallyrefer to the practice, but the agreementsthemselves may have been oral ones.According to such contracts the lessee paidone fourth to as much as one half of the cropas rent (Donker van Heel 1998; Hughes1952). The contract also mentioned the

harvest tax (Smw), about 10% of the crop, tobe paid by the lessor to a temple or to thegovernment, and it is tempting to regard therevenues from apportioning domains

mentioned in Papyrus Wilbour as this very tax(Eyre 1994: 130; Haring 1998: 85). Since manyof the plots in this document belonged toapportioning domains, and most of these toprivate individuals, there must have been agreat number of wealthy landowners in Egyptwho could act as lessors. Furthermore,although land was remarkably cheap whencompared with other modes of production(such as cattle and slaves), people who werenot wealthy would not be inclined to buy it(Baer 1962). It follows that very many ofEgypts peasants probably leased the land theycultivated.

A special case of shared interests in fields,the incorporation of crown land (khato) in theestates of other institutions, is illustrative ofthe complex interaction between temples andthe government. Khato features prominently inPapyrus Wilbour and other agriculturaldocuments. Plots of khato were included inthe temples apportioning domains, whichmeans that the temples received only minorshares of their revenues; the major part went

to the khato-institution itself and was dulyentered among its non-apportioning revenues.It is possible that the amount ofkhato land farexceeded the temples own non-apportioningdomains, so that it formed a major part oftheir estates in terms of productive area,whereas the amount of grain the templesreceived from it was relatively low. Data fromPapyrus Wilbour also suggest that the statusof khato land could change: khato landincorporated in some other institutionsapportioning domain could, over the courseof time, become autonomous, non-

apportioning domains. These characteristicsof khato help to explain the excessiveproportions of some newly founded templeestates, as well as their reduction in later years.

This example makes clear that the questionof whether temples were economicallyindependent or, rather, integrative parts of thegovernment administration, is pointless


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(Haring 1997:17 - 20; Janssen 1975b: 180 -182). They were clearly separate institutions,but not fully autonomous, and their interestswere closely connected with those of

government departments and the crown.Their economic power was therefore notnecessarily a threat to state interests at anymoment in Pharaonic history. The king wouldhave to consider, however, the interests ofpriests and temple administrators. From theOld Kingdom onwards, it was possible forhim to exempt temple estates from taxation orcompulsory labor (corve) by decree (Goedicke1967 provides several examples). Such decreeswere issued with respect to specificinstitutions and may therefore not represent ageneral policy. Government inspections oftemples and their economic wealth are wellattested for the Middle and New kingdoms;nation-wide temple inspections are knownfrom the reigns of Amenemhat II,Tutankhamen, Merenptah, and Ramesses III(Spalinger 1991).

Apart from the inspections and certain fiscalaspects (such as khato), the temples appear tohave been closed economic units. There areno indications that the temples wealthprovided buffer stock for the population in

times of food scarcity, despite suggestions tothe contrary (e.g., Kemp 2006: 257). Indeedthe marginal contributions paid by thetemples of western Thebes to the nearbycommunity of necropolis workmen in theRamesside Period, and their reluctance toassist when the latters food supply fell short(Haring 1997: 256 - 263, 268 - 273),emphasize that temples did not normally playsuch a role.

Labor

An income strategy different from subsistencewas labor, either voluntary or compulsory.Compulsory labor is known from ancientEgypt in two forms: corveand slavery. Corve(bH) is well attested as periodical compulsorylabor (especially in earlier periods), andeveryone but the highest functionaries couldbe subjected to it (Eyre 1987a: 18 - 20). In theOld Kingdom, groups of workers subject to

this practice were called mrt and worked inagricultural domains founded by thegovernment (Moreno Garca 1998). The sameword mrt was used for the personnel of

temple workshops in the New Kingdom;these were often prisoners taken duringmilitary campaigns (Eyre 1987b: 189). In theMiddle Kingdom, temporary compulsorylabor on state fields was controlled by the xnrt(interpreted as "labor camp" by Quirke 1990:135 - 136). Even the nmH(y) of the NewKingdom (see Institutional and Private Interestsabove) could be summoned for service togovernment officials, as becomes clear fromthe decree of King Horemheb (Kruchten1981: 30, 50).

Chattel slavery is attested in Egypt from thelate third millennium BCE onward. Personscould be bought and sold, and inherited, andmay thus be called slaves in the legal sense ofthe word, although Egyptian terminology isvague: Hm (fem. Hmt) and bAk (fem. bAkt) canboth be translated as slave, but also asservant (Hofmann 2005). Not only couldthe slaves themselves be sold, but also theirservices; Ramesside texts refer to this practicewith the expression hrw n bAkday of service(Menu 1998). From the Late Period onward

we know of the practice of individualsentering into slavery by contract as a means topay off heavy debts (for example, papyriRylands III-VII: Cruz-Uribe 1982).

Although it is clear that chattel slavery wascommon, it is more difficult to assess howimportant slavery was to the Egyptianeconomy. Economic anthropology considerstwo criteria for establishing the importance ofslavery to society: 1) great hierarchicaldifferences among social strata, allowing forthe delegation of work to lower ranks; and 2)

the existence of open economic resources(i.e., freely accessible means of livelihood),without which there is no need for slaves as aseparate social category. The extent of openeconomic resources in ancient Egypt is farfrom clear, but Egyptologists assume thatcompulsory labor was chiefly corve, ratherthan slavery.


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(Mller-Wollermann 2007: 1355 - 1356).Coins inspired by the Greek ones but withEgyptian inscriptions date from the 30thDynasty and the Second Persian Period. ThePtolemies conducted their own massiveproduction of coins and the PtolemaicEgyptian economy came to resemble amonetary system (including banks), althoughpayment in kind remained common practice.

F igure 1. Market scenes in the tomb of Niankhkhnum and Khnumhotep, 5th Dynasty, Saqqara.

Figure 2. Levantine merchant ships at an Egyptian local market, Theban Tomb 162, 18th Dynasty.

The value of grain fluctuated in the courseof the agrarian year from low (when theharvests were brought in) to high (in theperiod preceding the harvests). Long-termfluctuations (such as the dramatic rise in grainprices from the reign of Ramesses III onward)may be due to failures in the governmentseconomic policy, or to repeated ecologicalstress (low Nile floods). Loans of grain


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between individuals could take advantage ofshort- and long-term fluctuations, besidesrequiring the payment of considerable interest(often 100% or more). The basic units of

grain were the sack (XAr) and itssubdivisions, the hekat(HoAt) and the oipe(ipt).In the New Kingdom, the sack was a unit ofalmost 80 liters, subdivided into four oipe, eachof which in its turn was made up of fourhekat. A further subdivision, the hin (hnw)(1/10 of the hekat, approximately 1/2 of ater), was used for fluids, but not for grain(Reineke 1963). From the Late Periodonward, grain was measured in artabe (rtb), asmaller unit than the sack, and often ofuncertain capacity (estimates range between32 and 40 liters; see Vleeming 1985).

The ratio of silver to copper was stableduring much of the New Kingdom (1 unit ofsilver against 100 units of copper), butchanged towards the end of the 20th Dynasty(1 unit of silver against 60 of copper). Oneunit of gold equaled two of silver. It isassumed that before the late Middle Kingdomsilver was more valuable than gold, becausewhenever earlier texts mention both metals,silver is mentioned first (it having been thecustom in economic texts to start with the

most expensive commodities). The reductionin the value of silver is explained by its influxfrom the north, which increased throughEgypts domination in the Levant, especiallyafter the conquests of the early NewKingdom (Lucas 1962: 247). Egypt itself hasfew natural deposits of silver, as opposed togold, a major Egyptian mineral resource.

Gold mining areas were located in theEastern Desert, but it was the incorporationof Nubia into the Egyptian empire that gavethe pharaohs access to vast gold resources. It

is even possible that the value of golddecreased slightly in the middle of the 18thDynasty due to its massive influx. Gold wasespecially important to Egypts foreign policyas a means of financing wars and of gift-giving among the political powers of the time.Copper was abundantly available in Egypt(mainly in the Eastern Desert and Sinai) and

was the prime material for tools before ironbecame common in the first millennium BCE.

The units of weight used for metals were thedeben (dbn: approximately 90 grams in the

Ramesside Period and later; considerably lessin earlier periods; cf. Graefe 1999) and itstenth part, the kite (odt). A special unit forsilver was the seniuor sh(en)ati(Snatj), possibly7.5 grams. Otherwise the kite was the unitpreferred for precious metals, although goldrarely made its appearance in everydayeconomic traffic.

2. Transport and its costs. The foregoingsection makes it clear that there could be tradewithout money. Payment and storage in kindoften necessitated the transport of goods inlarge quantities. Long-distance trade,especially, depended heavily on theinfrastructure available. Given the absence ofpaved roads in ancient Egypt, transport onland (in the Nile Valley and in the desert)entirely depended on manpower and hugenumbers of donkeys (camels did not maketheir appearance in Egypt before the LatePeriod). Most transport of any substantialscale was by ship; administrative recordsmention ships capable of loading forty tons ofgrain or more (Papyrus Amiens and Papyrus

Baldwin: see Janssen 2004: 27 - 30).Navigation on the Nile meant rowingdownstream when heading north, and makinguse of the wind from the Mediterranean Seawhen going south. Traveling from Memphisto Thebes could take two weeks or more.

Ramesside texts specify the costs of graintransport on the Nile as approximately 10%of the cargo (Janssen 1994). Apart from thecosts of transport itself, there were tolls andcustoms to be paid. Tolls had to be paid whenpassing military strongholds in Egypt and

Nubia, although temple ships could beexempted by royal decree. A scene in thetomb of the vizier Rekhmira depicts thecollection of dues from towns and fortressesin southern Egypt; among these we find thefortresses of Biga and Elephantine (fig. 3:second from left in both registers). Customsare associated with international ports oftrade. Possible early references are made in


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two letters (EA 39 - 40: Moran 1992: 112 -113) from Cyprus in which the pharaoh andthe vizier(?) are asked not to permit any claimsbeing made against Cypriotic merchants.

Unambiguous documentation on customs ispresent from the Persian Period, but it mayreflect practice already current in thepreceding 26th Dynasty (Briant and Descat1998). Moreover, Herodotus informs us thatthat dynasty concentrated trade with Greekmerchants in the settlement of Naukratis inthe western Delta, which is a furtherindication of government concern with (andpossibly revenues from) foreign trade. Thisdoes not mean that trade with foreign

Figure 3. Collection of dues from southern Egypt (detail), Theban Tomb 100, 18th Dynasty.

merchants was restricted to governmentinstitutions, since New Kingdom tomb scenesshow Levantine merchants engaging in tradein local markets on the banks of the Nile (fig.2). These merchants were apparentlypermitted to trade in Egypt (to export their oiland wine, as well as the all-important silver for

everyday economic traffic)perhaps after thepayment of customs.

3. Markets and merchants. Private exchangecould probably take place everywhere and atany time. Sales or rentals of expensive items,however, would be effected with witnessespresent, and might involve the taking of anoath on the part of the seller or renter,


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promising that there were no claims by thirdparties on the item transferred. These wereoral conventions (reflected in the uniquetextual documentation from Ramesside Deir

el-Medina) until after the New Kingdom,when they became fixed parts of writtencontracts.

Texts and tomb scenes testify to theexistence of marketplaces where movableschanged hands. The Egyptian word for riverbank (mryt) is often used with the meaningmarketplace, and tomb scenes confirm thatsuch places were indeed located at the river.The booths depicted in the scenesaccommodate men as well as women. Thelatter could engage in local trade, probably as

sellers of surplus produce of the household,especially textiles (Eyre 1998). (Linen) textileswere actually a common means of payment,very much like grain, copper, and silver, andare documented as such in the exchange ofmovables and real estate from the OldKingdom onward (e.g., Posener-Kriger1979).

Trade in an institutional context seems tohave been limited to men. The Egyptian wordSwtj means trader, but not necessarilymerchant (Rmer 1992). Bearers of this title

worked for temples and for the households ofwealthy individuals, their task being toexchange the surplus production of thesehouseholds (e.g., textiles) for other items,such as oil and metals. Such trade ventures arerecorded in ships logs from the RamessidePeriod (Janssen 1961). Although attested ininstitutional contexts only, traders may wellhave used their position and skills to engage intransactions for their own profit (Bickel 1998:164 - 166), as did institutional craftsmen (seeLabor, above).

Theories on Ancient Egyptian Economy

The economy of an ancient societyand onethat is culturally very different from ourssuch as Pharaonic Egypt is likely to displaycharacteristics that do not have parallels inmodern economies. Reconstructing such anancient economy should therefore notexclusively proceed from modern economic

observations and theories. Entirely devoid ofpreference for any specific theory is theimportant work by Wolfgang Helck, whoarrived at his conclusions empirically, on the

basis of extensive collections and a superboverview of ancient data (see mainly Helck1960 1969, 1975). Helck argued thateconomic consciousness developed slowly inEgyptian history and that the development ofthis consciousness was hampered by thecentralistic economy of the Old Kingdom;only from the First Intermediate Periodonward would private individuals increasinglywrench themselves free from the all-embracing redistributive state.

Janssen (1975b: 137 - 139) argued that

characteristics of the ancient Egyptianmindset exhibited in religion and art, such asthe (supposed) absence of individualism,would also apply to the economy. He saw theeconomic mind of the Egyptians as realisticrather than abstract, and little concernedwith the motive of making profit. Thecharacter of the Egyptian economy as a wholehe saw as mainly redistributivethat is,dominated by taxation and tributes. Janssenbased his discussion on general characteristicsof peasant economies worldwide. In doing so,

he showed himself a proponent of a broadermovement in economic history that hadbegun in the 1940s and was especiallyinfluential in economic anthropology. Onesource of its inspiration was the emergence ofeconomies (in Eastern Europe and Asia) thatwere different from the capitalist marketeconomies. Another was the anthropologicalinterest in primitive economies (Eichler1993: 2 - 4). An early reflection of thismovement in Egyptology was SiegfriedMorenzs study of conspicuous consumption(1969).

The main inspiration for this substantivistor primitivist movement was the economichistorian Karl Polanyi. He and his followers(mainly anthropologists) argued that economywas not to be seen as an autonomousphenomenon (that is, as a self-regulatingmarket), but as embedded in a political andsocial context (Dalton 1971; Polanyi et al.


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1957). This embeddedness shows itself inthree different ways (also called patterns ofintegration): exchange (in commerce),reciprocity (in social structures, such as

kinship), and redistribution (in politiccentralism). This train of thought becameinfluential in historiography (for example, inthe work of Moses Finley) and in NearEastern studies from the 1970s onwards. InEgyptology it found its clearest expression inRenate Mller-Wollermanns discussion oftrade in the Old Kingdom (1985). Authorsdiscussing the nature of ancient Egyptianeconomy saw redistribution as its key feature(with or without specific reference to Polanyi:Bleiberg 1984, 1988; Janssen 1981). TheAssyriologist and historian Mario Liveraniused Polanyis theory to analyze internationaleconomic traffic as presented in Near Easternsources (including the Egyptian) from theLate Bronze Age (Liverani 1990: 203 - 282).Liverani reached the important conclusionthat the patterns of integration did notdetermine the actual economic processes, butrather their ideological presentation in textsand monumental depictions (ibid.: 22 - 24).

Others have voiced skepticism of, and evensharp protest against, the Polanyi-inspired

view of ancient economics (Silver 1995). Theturning point in Egyptology was late in the1980s, when more modernist views werebrought forward, notably by Barry Kemp

(2006; originally published 1989) and MalteRmer (1989). Kemp assumed (vs. Helck andJanssen) that there was no lack of economicconsciousness in ancient Egypt, given the

political and social competition clearly evidentin the ancient records. He also pointed outthat a redistributionist government wouldnever have been able to meet the demands ofan entire populationmoreover, not eventhose of its own institutions. It follows thatany economy is a compromise between statedominance and self-regulating market, inwhich private demand is an importantstimulus and sets prices. Nonetheless,discussions in the 1990s still very muchfocused on redistribution (e.g., Eichler 1999),state service, and the absence of individualism(Bleiberg 1994).

The relative importance of government andmarket and the ways in which these wereinterrelated seems to dominate the presentdiscussion of ancient Egyptian economy (seealso Kemp 2006: 302 - 335). DavidWarburton, partly inspired by the theories ofJohn Maynard Keynes, concentrates ongovernment concern with production andemployment (Warburton 1991, 1997, 1998).An economist recently characterized the role

of the state in the economy of ancient Egyptas a risk consolidating institution (Wilke2000).

Bibliographic NotesJanssen (1975b), despite its date and the restriction of its scope to the New Kingdom, is still anexcellent introduction to the economy of ancient Egypt. Helck (1960 1969) provides a wealth ofdata for the economy of the New Kingdom. For more modern views of the economy of the sameperiod, see Kemp (2006: 302 - 335) and Warburton (1997: 71 - 130). The demographic figures byButzer (1976) are, despite the inevitable degree of speculation, well-argued and usually adhered toin Egyptology. The figures are supported by observations of the nutritional value of grain cropsby Miller (1991). For land leases from the Late and Ptolemaic periods see Donker van Heel(1998), Verhoogt (1998), and Hughes (1952); for the Roman Period see Rowlandson (1999). Aclassic discussion of the sale and prices of land is Baer (1962). On the subject of labor, see thebasic overviews by Eyre (1987a, 1987b). For trade in the Old Kingdom see Mller-Wollermann(1985). The basic discussion of the system of payment in Ramesside Egypt remains Janssen(1975a), which is based on the rich data from the necropolis-workmens settlement at Deir el-


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Medina and thus enables comparisons of prices with the rations of the buyers and sellers, whowere institutional workmen. Egypts subsequent development toward a monetary economy issketched by Mller-Wollermann (2007). Trade and transport are the subjects of two importantcongress volumes that appeared simultaneously: Altenmller and Kloth (1998) and Grimal and

Menu (1998). Extensive discussion on the same subjects is presented by Castle (1992). Liverani(1990) deals with international trade and its presentation in textual sources of the ancient NearEast. On the use of economic theories by Egyptologists see Eichler (1993: 1 - 26). Recentdiscussions of theories and data are Warburton (1997, 1998) and Rmer (2007)

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1998 berlegungen zur Bezeichnungs niwt tn "Mann dieser Stadt" und zur Sozialstruktur des MittlerenReiches. In Proceedings of the Seventh International Congress of Egyptologists, Cambridge, 3 - 9 September1995, Orientalia Lovaniensia Analecta 82, ed. Christopher Eyre, pp. 48 - 58. Leuven: Peeters.

Baer, Klaus1962 The low price of land in ancient Egypt.Journal of the American Research Center in Egypt1, pp. 25 - 45.

Bickel, Susanne1998 Commerants et bateliers au Nouvel Empire: Mode de vie et statut d'un groupe social. In Le

commerce en gypte ancienne, Bibliothque d'tude 121, ed. Nicolas Grimal, and Bernadette Menu, pp.157 - 172. Cairo: Institut franais d'archologie orientale.

Bleiberg, Edward1984 The king's privy purse during the New Kingdom: An examination of INW.Journal of the American

Research Center in Egypt21, pp. 155 - 167.

1988 The redistributive economy in New Kingdom Egypt: An examination ofbAkw(t).Journal of theAmerican Research Center in Egypt25, pp. 157 - 168.1994 "Economic Man" and the "Truly Silent One": Cultural conditioning and the economy in ancient

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Image CreditsFigure 1 Market scenes in the tomb of Niankhkhnum and Khnumhotep, 5th Dynasty, Saqqara. (Moussa

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Figure 2 Levantine merchant ships at an Egyptian local market, Theban Tomb 162, 18th Dynasty. (Daviesand Faulkner 1947: pl. VIII).

Figure 3 Collection of dues from southern Egypt (detail), Theban Tomb 100, 18th Dynasty. (Davies 1943:pl. XXIX).