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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The technical expertise of the scribes is paraded in those contracts. For not only do we encounter a mere enumeration and quantification of different objects, but there is also an internal consistency that operates within the system of accounting in use. The senior priest is always differentiated from his subordinates by having rations twice as much as that of each subordinate. A clear statement is made in the contracts as to the amounts to be paid by each named person and also their recompense is stipulated clearly. As in the case of any sound accounting practice, so these contracts show clearly who has to pay what, and how are they to be (over)compensated, for what they pay. In modern terminology, the debits and credits are stated unambiguously. Moreover, we do not only encounter here simple exchange of conventional economic goods, but we also observe the use of temple days, inherited by Hepzefi, as payment precisely defined in terms of their temporal dimension (each being 1/360 of a year) and valued in terms of their economic equivalence. Again, a measure for measure is established, whereby each temple-day is set to equal a precise economic value.

Taken together, these varied roles played by accounting in two separate spheres of the economy, one relating to the state and the other to the private domain, emphasize the centrality and power of accounting practices during the Middle Kingdom era of ancient Egyptian history. The accounting practices examined in this paper do not reveal some crude, and by modern standards 'simplistic', calculative technology. We have encountered an accounting that developed as integral to the social, economic, administrative and political contexts of the Middle Kingdom. The accounting practices were inextricably linked to the institutions in which they operated, the Palace, its dependants, the priesthood and the cult of the dead. That the nature of the entries, their frequency, and the units of measurement used may have varied across the palace accounts and the contracts of the temple suggests that the scribes did not simply and unreflexively apply some static and uniform system of accounting to all settings. Rather, the evidence confirms the increasing recognition that accounting practices both mediate and are mediated by the wider and unique social, political and economic contexts in which they operate. Such ancient accounting practices should therefore be analyzed and understood on their own terms, contrary to the suggestions of some researchers [e.g. Stevelinck, 1985] who either dismiss their relevance or, at best, view them as an impoverished, simplistic, and crude precursor to modern forms of accounting.

1 Ancient Egyptian history is typically divided into the Pre-dynastic and Dynastic eras. The Dynastic era is further divided into the Early Dynastic Period (3300-2700 B.C.), the Old Kingdom (2700-2200 B.C.), the Middle Kingdom (2050-1780 B.C.), the New Kingdom (1552-1080) and the Late Dynastic Period (1080-332 B.C.). The latter four periods were interspersed with Intermediate Periods, each lasting a considerable number of years.