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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Another significant difference between these contracts and the transactions discussed in the previous section is their voluntary nature (they were not enforceable by law). In a classic redistributive economy, the monarch or the state is ultimately responsible for the administration of the economy and the distribution of provisions to all sectors of the population (this, of course, says nothing about whether or not these provisions were determined fairly from a social welfare perspective). With this centrality of the monarch or the state comes the power to direct, control, administer, and dominate; all are bureaucratic manifestations in which accounting is heavily implicated. And although the ka priest may have been empowered to control and monitor the transactions on behalf of Hepzefi, the scope of the control apparatus does not appear to be nearly as extensive as that observed at the level of the state. In the transactions contained in the contracts examined in this section, the role of accounting may have been intended to focus primarily upon providing an authoritative inscription of a pattern of redistribution that had to be observed once the person who bequeathed the will had died. Compliance with such contracts was compelled more by social norms than by the power of the law, and by the incentives built into the contracts to motivate temple staff and priesthood to promote the cult of the dead person for perpetuity. In this sense, accounting practices enshrined in the contracts literally bound individuals (including the dead) across time in an interlocking web of dependency relations.

The diversity of accounting measures contained in these contracts is also of significance. Here we encounter beer, two types of bread loaves, barley, meat, land, and even temple-days, with each being construed as an economic good with precisely denominated values assigned to them via this early accounting.

The other interesting point is the apparent importance of the multiplier of 11. For just as we observed in the case of the tax liability measured in Set-duck (Figure 3), the figure 11 appears to be a common denominator in these contracts. It is quite likely that this is due to an organization of work practices into teams of nine subordinates and one overseer (who receives twice as much payments as each subordinate), thereby giving the equivalent of 11 persons of equal shares [see Mueller, 1975; Roth, 1991; Ezzamel, 2002e].

CONCLUSIONS AND IMPLICATIONS

The main aim of this paper has been to examine the role of accounting practices in two specific, but predominantly, redistributive patterns from the Middle Kingdom in ancient Egypt.

The first example involved provisioning for members of the palace and their dependants while on a royal journey. The second was concerned with several contracts written by a man during his life to ensure the flow of specific provisions to promote his own cult in the temple after his death. In order to contextualize appropriately these accounting practices, the paper began with a brief discussion of the Middle Kingdom where there were two clear historical and social discontinuities which had important implications for accounting practices.