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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This section focuses on the inflow of commodities. The next section discusses the outflow of commodities.

Measurement at source: Control of the flow of crops in ancient Egypt was rooted in the good management of the land. Specific officials were charged with responsibility for controlling and maintaining the river-banks and the canals, and overseeing the orderly division of land among peasants [James, 1985]. These responsibilities were formalized and articulated further in the `Duties of the Vizier' [van den Boom, 1988]. We can safely assume that, as the chief minister, the Vizier had to maintain tight control over the land by dispatching mayors, district governors, and scribes to arrange the cultivation of the land during the summer, fix district boundaries, look into cases relating to estate boundaries, and examine water supplies on the first day of every (ten-day) week. The Vizier was also ultimately responsible for exacting the dues of the temples [see Smither, 1941]. Officials were appointed to monitor work on the land throughout the season, and, as was the case in the Old Kingdom [Kanawati, 1980; Strudwick, 1985], the Vizier kept himself informed through regular reports that covered every state of affairs under his control. Among those helping the Vizier maintain control over the land were the scribes who played a prominent role.

Thankfully, some material from the Middle Kingdom on the role of the scribe in these activities has survived in a rather short, but extremely informative document [Smither, 1941; see Figure 1]. The document is a tax-assessor's journal dating back to the end of the Twelfth/beginning of the Thirteenth Dynasty.

Although the document does not contain any tax calculations, it shows the scribal activities leading to the assessment of tax.

Before tax was levied on the harvested crop, the land was surveyed and the standing crop was measured. In performing this task, the scribe assessing the tax burden typically sought to demonstrate to all concerned his fulfillment of the spirit of Maat by ensuring that his assessment was fair. Such a quality was frequently celebrated in the autobiographies of the Middle Kingdom. For example, the scribe Dhwty-nakt-ank stated in his autobiography: "I have done rightness in my conduct, when I probed the heart and assessed a payer by [his] wealth, doing what is praiseworthy for every person, known and unknown without distinction" [Lichtheim, 1992, p. 28]. Although this should not be taken to mean that justice and fairness were always observed in practice, these moral and social expectations are likely to have acted as a strong disincentive for scribes to exploit, falsify and deceive when assessing tax burdens.

The tax scribe was accompanied by other officials; the clerk of land, the envoy of the steward, the stretcher of the cord, and the holder of the cords. The clerk of land was deemed the `custodian of the regulations' relating to land registry. He ensured that land boundaries were observed. The envoy of the steward took 'internal' measures of the land and the crop on behalf of the steward. The stretcher of the cord and the holder of the cords took measures of the standing crop. Hence, all these officials, while not explicitly called scribes, performed scribal-like duties pertaining to the assessment of taxable crop. One may presume that these officials sought to calculate how much tax to assess, given the uncertainties concerning the Nile inundation, as seems to have been the practice in Roman Egypt [Brunt, 1981], thereby pointing to the possibility that accounting was used to underpin government planning in the Middle Kingdom. These officials may have also worked to some previously determined crop ratio as a function of size and quality of cultivated land to derive advance estimates of taxable crop. Similar practices have been observed in the New Kingdom see Ezzamel. 2002a .