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 strong, centralized, regime of the Twelfth Dynasty generated the settled circumstances in which fine work was produced, including handsome sculpture, reliefwork, and hieroglyphic inscriptions. The same circumstances produced a development of bureaucracy accompanied by a great increase in written documents.

Greater scribal activities meant more scribes; the training of more scribes required more scribal schools, and an attention to scribal practices which had not been needed in earlier times.

The Redistributive Roles of State Institutions: The palace developed a number of organizations, including the granary as an important part of the treasury, to help administer the redistributive economy. Granaries were built throughout Egypt, and, as in the case of the town of Kahun, each of the granaries in the eight large houses had a substantial capacity. Thus, it has been estimated that the eight granaries would have stored grain sufficient to support a population ranging between 5,000 and 9,000 (using maximum and minimum rations respectively) for a whole year [Kemp, 1986, p. 133]. It is likely that other individual granaries from the same period were much larger. For example, the granary of the military fort at Askut was estimated to have occupied 22% of the total area of the fort, with a capacity of over 1,632 cubic meters which is sufficient to provide annual rations for a minimum of 3,264 and a maximum of 5,628 people [ibid., pp. 131-133].

Apart from grain, the treasury was concerned with metals, cattle, and other agricultural products such as flax. In addition to the treasury, the labor bureau, the waret, the butler, the state workhouse (or the registering house), the Vizier, and the scribes all played important roles in the functioning of the redistributive system. This would have included organizing the supply side (the inflow of goods) and coordinating the demand side (the outflow of goods). The overall redistributive system was finely tuned to take into account special needs or shortages so that the contribution from each source was revised occasionally, and buffer stocks from state granaries were released to meet shortages in specific locations.

The temples of ancient Egypt drew on regular food offerings many of which derived from productive resources owned by them. These offerings ranged from durable wealth, such as precious metals, to permanent sources of revenue such as cultivatable land. The temples also had their own labor force, many of them renting land at a rate of 30% of the crop. Other offerings included access to mineral resources, animal herds, fishing rights, vegetable beds, vineyards, and beehives. Significantly, Kemp [1989, p. 193] has observed: "The temples offered secure storage and administration and, perhaps even more important, a receipt in the form of texts and scenes displayed in the temple which recorded the gift as a great deed of pious generosity".

In this paper, the temple is treated as a branch of the state [see Kemp, 1989]; indeed, a symbiotic relationship ensued between the two. As Janssen [1979, p. 509] has remarked, the depiction of the Pharaoh in every temple in the land as the real high priest "was not only an expression of a dogmatic theory, but also of the actual economic reality. The temples together with all their property were at the disposal of the Pharaoh". The status of the temples was rooted in the overall ideology of the state; within the economic context they served as state institutions, and were subject to frequent state intervention particularly in terms of their economic endowments. Yet another demonstration of the economic integration between the temples and the state is the bureaucracy that developed within each of these domains. The system of administration was simply a collection of royal decrees which were updated and revised to cope with emerging complaints which were handled through a cycle of decision-petition of complaint-redress [Kemp, 1989]. Further, in many cases temple overseers were laymen attached to other state services, and the necropolis workmen (a state body) were frequently given food provisions by the temples. Some scholars have even suggested that the temples were repositories for the revenues from the empire [Redford, 1976], and that "major temples were the reserve banks of the time" [Kemp, 1989, p. 195], an analogy that has to be treated with caution.