Accounting and redistribution: The palace and mortuary cult in the Middle Kingdom, ancient Egypt

Accounting Historians Journal, The,  Jun 2002  by Ezzamel, Mahmoud

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Contract IV (see Figure 8) [Breasted, 1906/1988, pp. 263265] specifies that the temple priests (TP) each deposit one loaf of white bread for Hepzefi's statue on the day of the Wag festival, and perform additional services for his cult. The contract also states that Hepzefi gives the TP a sack of fuel (one khar) for a bull or an uhet of fuel for a goat, which the TP usually give to the Workhouse of the nomarch, for which he receives payment from them. This effectively simplifies the transaction to one in which the TP provide white bread and service to Hepzefi's statue for which the latter appears to pay nothing in return. The remainder of the contract states that the temple staff are to hand over to the TP the total amount of beer and the flat bread that they were to give to Hepzefi's statue on the day of the Wag festival. This transaction excludes the 55 loaves of white bread (contract III) which presumably were used at the discretion of the ka priest. Taken together then the two contracts reduce to the following: Hepzefi gives an inheritance of 22 days' revenues in the temple to the temple staff in return for which they owe him a specified quantity of beer and bread which they give to the TP, with the transaction being monitored by Hepzefi's mortuary ka priest.

Contract VIII (see Figure 9) [Breasted, 1906/1988, pp. 267269] focuses on Hepzefi's nomarchal role. It states that each of the Temple Priests provides one loaf of white bread and service duties to Hepzefi's statue in return for: "grain from the first of the harvest of every field of the count's estate".' Given that the nomarchal estate belonged to the office of the nomarch, this is a cost free transaction for Hepzefi since it is the living nomarch who pays the temple. Effectively, this amounts to a tax which Hepzefi levied during his tenure as Priest of the Anubis Temple, a practice which he urges his successor to continue honoring.

The land offered by Hepfezi was part of his paternal inheritance, rather than nomarchal land. Spalinger [1985b] speculates that there is a missing entry in this contract which would have effected a redistribution of the beer and bread among the temple staff, with the chief priest receiving double the share of each of the remaining staff, as in previous contracts. It is also worth noting that, unlike in contract III where payments were made in days of the Wepwawat Temple revenues, the payments in contract IX were made from private land, indicating the possibility that Hepfezi had no inheritance of temple days at Anubis.

Accounting for the Dead: Overall, these transactions are of a very different nature to those examined in the previous section. Redistributive transactions they surely were, with the ka priest being the key figure, playing the same central role as that played by the state in the previous section. Here, the inflow and outflow of goods are mediated through the ka priest. In a sense, he was expected to act as the sole agent for Hepzefi, making transactions and monitoring their execution on his behalf. However, these transactions are akin to the execution of a will in modern times, for the redistributive pattern is established once and for all when each contract is written. Subsequent nomarchs and high priests may have caused some interruption in the redistributive patterns by reneging on some of the contractual terms, particularly those that may have adversely affected their own revenues. But in the main, they would have been considerably constrained by past practices and traditions underpinned by Maat, and by the power of inscribed accounting entries reflected in these contracts. We are therefore in the presence of accounting practices that underpinned the contractual terms of the dead, finalized during their life times. Through the deployment of accounting expertise, each contract specified clearly the debits and credits, both in terms of stipulating the amounts and delineating exchange parties. Once inscribed, these accounting numbers acquired a power of their own; for they served not only as testimony of past practices in their own right, but they also endowed these practices with apparent rationality, legitimacy and authority.