Governance in Egypt, 3000-1500 BC
Juan Carlos Moreno García, The State in Ancient Egypt [Chapter 2]
Juan Carlos Moreno García wrote:
Chapter 2: Integrating Spaces
… Egypt was the playground for different configurations of power and territorial integration, all of which determined its historical dynamics and its variable capacity to capture resources and control land and peoples. In such diversified landscape, the Nile not only played a key role in guaranteeing the subsistence and lifestyles of the populations living on its margins, but also provided an essential means of communication and transport. However, navigating it was far from simple …
… The deserts provided alternative routes along which goods and people could circulate, and opened up the possibility of travellers and traders bypassing the Nile route, and the control imposed by pharaonic authorities, altogether. Nonetheless, as dromedaries [camels] were introduced only relatively late in Egyptian history, donkeys were required to traverse the desert tracks, which limited the ability of desert populations and caravans to escape the control of pharaohs; checkpoints at selected locations monitored the circulation of goods and people, and taxed the riches circulating across these areas. It should be noted, however, that such control was possible only through the collaboration of local people, who were frequently employed as guides and guards or escorts. …
Networking in a fluvial environment
Three aspects marked the articulation and integration of spaces in early Egypt. The first is the complementary use of diverse areas and ecosystems by the populations living in the Nile Valley, the wadis and the surrounding steppes. Seasonal migrations were common between hunting and fishing areas, pasture land, etc., both in the Nile Valley and in the Western Desert and, according to the titles held by some officials, mobile populations crossed into and moved through the Nile Valley. In other cases, nomadic people lived inside Egypt, particularly fishermen, bird hunters and cattle-herders. Settling them into sedentary habitats was a goal pursued by Egyptian authorities but, in other cases, the itinerant peoples preserved their distinctive lifestyles down the centuries, as was the case in the Eastern Delta with the sekhetiu ‘countrymen’ of the early second millennium BC or the Greco-Roman boukoloi.
The circulation of people across extensive tracts of land was a distinctive mark of early Egypt that never disappeared fully afterwards. The second aspect is that a low demographic density, coupled with the persistence of nomadic lifestyles in marshy and bushland areas (particularly in Lower and Middle Egypt), favoured those dispersed habitats and economic activities that were based more on networks than on a landscape of dense urban life with intensive agricultural activities. The third aspect is that the geographical location of the Nile Valley made it a privileged transit area between the Red Sea, northeastern Africa, the Mediterranean and the Levant … The circulation of riches and fluidity of contacts in a loosely occupied territory seem thus to prevail over intensive uses of spaces and resources (agriculture, urbanism, etc.), while pastoralism remained an important economic activity that marked the origins of pharaonic civilization. This may explain why control over mobile wealth (cattle and, secondarily, gold) was crucial in the organization of the early royal taxation system, to the point that the biannual census of cattle became the standard event by which years were dated in the third millennium BC … In turn, cities remained surprisingly modest (judging from the archaeological evidence) and hardly played a major role as transformation and craft production centres that supported market-oriented activities, until the second millennium BC.
… [Distinctive landscape markers] from the Neolithic to the early second millennium BC. I refer here not to huge temples or ‘public’ structures, such as those found in ancient Mesopotamia, but rather to distinctive mound burials (mastabas, later pyramids) erected in places with high symbolic importance [built] in key centres of their kingdom ... Later on, around 2600 BC, kings built small step pyramids in Upper Egypt … They could well have marked the symbolic presence of the monarchy at significant locations within the kingdom and it is even possible that each one of them was the core of an economic unit. Other documents confirm the importance of networks in the early implementation of royal authority in the country … [and] provide invaluable information about the administrative organization of the kingdom and reveal the existence of a network of royal agricultural centres (replete with cattle, extensive fields and workers) scattered all over the country, the ‘big hwt’ being by far the most common of these.
The hwt was a prestigious building, a kind of tower that served as the centre of an agricultural and productive unit which included fields, workers and cattle, and which also played the role of storage facility and even defensive structure. Royal plantations (mostly vineyards, particularly in the Western Delta), specialized workshops or storage facilities (such as the ‘hwt of flax’, the ‘hwt of gold’, and so on), as well as the ‘houses’ of individuals, completed the picture. It seems that the territorial organization of the kingdom was dual, based partly on agricultural and production centres founded by the crown, and partly on ‘houses’ of local potentates whose links with the royal administration are poorly understood (local magnates? Agents of the king?). In any case, the monarchy recognized the authority of these potentates as leaders in their own areas of influence.
Cities played apparently no significant role in this administrative pattern … Moreover, recovered administrative seals mention several high-ranking officials whose activities are also known from other locations, extending from Abydos in the north to Elephantine in the south, and who were involved mainly in the management of ploughs and granaries. The geographical scope of their activities, and the nature of their responsibilities, confirm the role played by the crown in the organization of networks of agricultural, storage, processing and supply centres. Finally … the control of gold was a major concern for the monarchy and … many people (both men and women) were involved in trading activities …
… In all, the circulation of wealth across the Nile Valley stimulated an early organization of power based on networks whose nodes were royal foundations involved in production and supply activities for expeditions, officials on the move, etc. In this model cities played a very minor role, to the point that when local elites became more visible in the archaeological record thanks to their temples and decorated tombs, the urban centres (if any) associated with them remain in many cases rather elusive throughout the third millennium BC . Perhaps, in some cases, because their physical traces have been destroyed or not yet discovered. The pharaonic model of the early state differs substantially from that prevailing in the Near East at that time, and probably owes much to its pastoral roots …
From 2600 BC, private officials’ inscriptions as well as the royal annals reveal a substantial change. Former ‘houses’ – which in some cases include entire localities – were replaced by royal centres of the crown as sizeable organizational hubs in the countryside. The territorial organization of the country was systematically reclassified at that point, leading to the formal integration of local potentates in the administrative structure and courtly life of the kingdom. King Snofru encouraged the foundation of many hwt-centres and the inscriptions of some of his officials who were involved in the control of the provinces confirm this pattern. The relevance of this network was such that the decoration of royal funerary temples and private tombs included a new motif, the procession of personifications of royal hwt and localities bringing offerings to the deceased. Sometime later, from around 2500 BC, temples appeared as another major pole of territorial organization, judging from the massive donations of land granted by kings and from their role as providers of manpower and supplies for expeditions. Land donations to provincial temples made kings ‘present’ in the countryside, but they also provided local potentates (who controlled these temples) with increased means to assert their economic and symbolic predominance in their home sphere.
This policy reached a peak in 2350–2180 BC. The hwt network covered all Egypt and these centres were distributed evenly across Upper and Lower Egypt. Temples and hwt were thus the landmarks of a network of economic and production hubs that constituted ‘islands of (royal) authority’ and which imposed order on an extensive, if sparsely populated, territory, where cities remained the exception rather than the rule. Temples and hwt also constituted powerful tools via which the ruling class could penetrate into a rural world dominated by provincial potentates. Similar networks operated in Memphis (the capital) itself: administrative documents show that a network of institutions including the palace, some state departments and other temples in Memphis, supplied the funerary temples of kings with the foodstuff , cattle, textiles, ritual objects and so on used in their everyday activities.
Despite their undoubted importance, temples and hwt were only two of the main components of the Egyptian landscape. Many dual expressions from the third millennium BC evoke hwt and nwt (‘settlements’, ranging in size from hamlets and villages to towns and cities, even agricultural domains) as the main habitats in Egypt, and several nwt formed a district under the authority of a hwt. However, it is striking that – as noted above – cities played a modest role in the articulation of power in this early phase of Egyptian history. Judging both from the epigraphic and archaeological evidence, cities happened to be rather small when compared, for instance, to their contemporary Mesopotamian and Syrian equivalents, thus pointing to a different path of organization of the country in the Nile Valley.
Elusive cities?
The very end of the third millennium BC was a period of significant change in the structure of settlement in the Nile Valley, as the crown’s hwt virtually disappeared, cities emerged for the first time as nodes of territorial organization and social identity and harbour or port areas (dmj) became distinctive poles of economic activity as markets and trading centres, to the point that the word dmj became gradually a synonym of town, ‘city’. Dmj-cities/harbours even became major targets in the military operations undertaken by the regional powers competing for power at that time, as is recorded in the fragmentary biographical inscription from the tomb of Iti-ibi of Asyut. Finally, another word, whyt (‘village’), appeared for the first time in some inscriptions to designate a kind of settlement whose members were bound by kinship ties (in fact, whyt also meant ‘tribe’).
So when vizier Rekhmire (who lived around 1450–1400 BC ) had the main units of the fiscal structure of the kingdom portrayed on the walls of his tomb, he chose to feature a procession of eighty offering-bearers who represented cities of Upper Egypt, from Asyut in the north to Elephantine in the south. According to the texts that accompany the bearers, each city delivered taxes in gold, silver, cattle and other goods. The importance of precious metals is corroborated by the bearers themselves, who carry baskets loaded with rings and necklaces of gold and silver.
As had been the case fifteen centuries earlier, gold, precious metals and cattle constituted the basis of the royal tax system. Another innovation related to the emergence of cities as territorial and administrative units was that each city controlled a w or ‘district’, which replaced the hwt as the centre of a group of villages. Finally, titles and biographical records from this period mention ‘governors’ (haty-a) of specific cities. Taken together, these elements reveal that a crucial change had led to the abandonment of the previous state-organized network of institutional centres in favour of a structure of organic settlements.
Cities apparently assumed functions formerly devolved on hwt, specifically their role as collecting and supply centres and the administrative nodes of rural districts. It is also possible that this move towards a decentralization of functions and the increasing autonomy of settlements was accompanied by some form of urban (self?-) government, judging from the title of ‘member of the council (qnbt) of the district (w)’, dating from the early second millennium BC . Nonetheless, the composition of these councils is unknown: perhaps they comprised urban notables, a mix of dignitaries and local potentates? Maybe their functions were similar to the ‘councils’ (djadjat) formed by village chiefs and agents of the crown that administrated the agricultural domains granted by the kings to local temples in the late third millennium BC. About 1550 BC viziers [high official] instructed ‘district councillors’ to report on the state of their districts and, at the same time, some records suggest that city-dwellers acted as a collective body in legal lawsuits, like ‘the people of Elephantine’, owners of serfs, described in Berlin Papyrus 10470 or the witnesses presented collectively as ‘the people of the town (nwt/dmj)’ in British Museum (BM) Papyrus 10335 and Berlin Papyrus 9785.
If the end of the monarchy at around 2160 BC – and its replacement by the emergence of rival regional powers competing for wealth and supremacy – was the outcome of the increase in trade activities across the Nile Valley since 2350 BC , then it is possible that the development of cities (and their harbour facilities) made redundant the hwt network as providers of logistical support and supplies along the Nile. At the same time, this crucial change suggests that the organization of trade was far from being a royal monopoly, as trade continued to flourish after the collapse of the monarchy. It was at exactly this point that, when no unified monarchy ruled over Egypt, city-size increased dramatically: for example, Edfu expanded from eight to fifteen ha; a large residential ‘middle- class’ neighbourhood was built at Dendera; and a new neighbourhood was also erected at Elephantine. ‘Middle-class’ residences, equipped with storage facilities, have also been found at Abydos; the relatively small quantities of seals recovered there, and the lack of repeated seal designs, suggest that they do not represent institutionally connected administrative activities, but rather the administration of lower-level households. Finally, cities thrived in Middle Egypt … linked to the trade route that connected the Mediterranean to Middle Egypt through the western branch of the Nile.
Trade, economic prosperity and the emergence of cities seem to go hand in hand. At the same time, this was a period in which cities became ideologically relevant as source of legitimation and identity, in the absence of a single monarchy. Thus, the approval of an official’s actions by his city became a popular expression in many inscriptions (‘one beloved by his city’). Protecting or enriching one’s town were also popular motifs, and similar epithets remained fashionable in later inscriptions commissioned by the elite, particularly in the provinces. Even ritual texts from the early second millennium BC incorporated the new role of cities in their descriptions of households of the deceased, and expanded to include a person’s relatives and immediate social network as well as nwtjw and dmjw (‘fellow-citizens’ – literally people from the nwt/dmj -city). Urban audiences thus became significant for reasons of ideology and legitimacy in the early second millennium BC. Their rise in importance meant they could pose risks to rulers, which may explain why, in some passages from The Teaching for King Merykara, the incendiary speeches of demagogues and agitators disturbed the peace of cities and swept urban dwellers into rebellion. New terms appeared at this time, such as ‘man-of-the-city’ (citizen?) and ‘living-one-of-the-city’ (officer of the city troops), and point to the growing importance of towns and townsmen as providers of military support to provincial leaders. In fact, it is quite probable that the use of city troops during the upheaval that followed the Old Kingdom implied some kind of recognition towards (and perhaps approval of) urban dwellers, especially in the inscriptions from Hatnub, Asyut, etc.
In this context, economic autonomy and personal initiative became highly prized values, as indicated by the motif of the autonomous individual (nedjes,‘the modest/humble one’), who is able to earn his own living, to build up a personal patrimony by his own actions, and to transfer that to his descendants without any royal intervention. Women also participated in this societal shift. The new title ‘mistress of the house’ designated an adult, independent woman who was able to manage all aspects of a household – with, or without a male owner – or take part in some other business activity. In fact, the analysis of women’s seals found in Middle Egypt reveals traces of wear and usage which show that they were not made exclusively for funerary purposes. Seals and sealing ended up being used routinely in everyday transactions and contracts, such as the purchase of land and houses and the hiring of specialized priests, and the echoes of this practice emerge in contemporary ritual texts … The extent of sealing, and the use of sealed documents, point to a greater scope of transactions and economic initiative in which formal agreement and authentication were required.
In this more decentralized context, a question appears: were hwt the nodes from which at least some cities emerge? ‘The hwt at the crossroad of Khety’ (Khety being a royal name) could be found near to Tell el-Daba, in the Eastern Delta, and it seems plausible that a hwt founded by a king within this important strategic area would ultimately develop into a city that became one of the major trade hubs of the Eastern Mediterranean in the Middle Bronze Age … The names of other Egyptian cities were formed with the element hwt, so it seems plausible that some of them developed from an original royal foundation. In any case, if previous formulaic expressions included the words hwt and nwt, later ‘juridical’ expressions featuring the formula ‘in the city and in the countryside’ served to evoke all the possessions of an individual. Later on, from 1550 onward, formulaic expressions refer to dmj, nwt and whyt-villages as the three main types of settlement in Egypt.
Not surprisingly, as harbours and quays were also market places, terms such as dmj (‘city’) and mryt (‘quay’) became, in some cases, synonymous with markets. Thus Sarenput I, governor of the caravan and port city of Elephantine around 1950 BC , included among his duties control over river trade, ports, markets and foreign commodities arriving into Egypt. He was ‘overseer of all tribute at the entrance of the foreign countries in the form of royal ornaments, to whom the tribute of the Medya-country was brought as contribution of the rulers of the foreign countries’, as well as
one who rejoices over the quay/marketplace, the overseer of the great ships of the Royal Domain, who supplies the Double Treasury, the superior of the ports in the province of Elephantine (so that) what navigates and what moors was under his authority.
A similar claim figures in a brief literary text that celebrates markets in the city of Pi-Ramesses:
Pleasant is the place of distribution/market-place with its money/silver there, mainly the vine tendrils and business/commerce ( t- m-k- r-i- t ). The chiefs of every foreign country come in order to descend with their products.
Several scenes discovered in tombs dating from the third and second millennium BC show busy harbour areas full of people selling and buying, a role in which women excelled. Furthermore, several archives from the second half of the second millennium BC record the deliveries of textiles, wine, fruits, food and so on made by individuals along the river routes to groups of boats dispatched by temples and institutions in search of specialized (mostly perishable) goods. In some cases, such deliveries concerned textiles and cloth, in other cases dates, fruits and vegetables, produced in small plantations by affluent landowners able to afford the costly irrigation devices that made their cultivation possible. Literary texts from this period also celebrate the wealth of the horticultural landscape that surrounded cities … [In] any case cities and their harbour areas emerge as active centres of river-based trade and barter, places that were frequented by traders who also lent to individuals. In fact, inscriptions and papyri from 1500 BC onwards reveal that quays and landing stages were not only fluvial facilities but also sites in which taxes were levied, and on some occasions they were provided with income to fulfil their administrative and economic duties … The commercial role of at least some pharaonic cities is evident in the cases of Elephantine and Tell el-Daba/Avaris. In some cases, their impact on the distribution of power was such that they became the core of emerging polities. The emergence of Heracleopolis Magna in the late third millennium BC seems connected to its role as ‘gateway’ for foreign goods [MGH: there follow numerous other examples …]
… Yet the monarchy retained a considerable capacity for developing infrastructure, as specialized settlements reveal, ranging from the fortresses/trade centres aiming to focalize and control trade [MGH: there follow a variety of cases …]
… But the increasing importance of cities and temples, plus the disappearance of networks of crown centres such as hwt, suggest nevertheless a more decentralized territorial organization. It was indeed around 1600 BC that temples definitively emerged as major administrative and economic agencies; these were also organized in networks and established intricate administrative patterns of mutual responsibilities in order to exploit their assets, which were scattered across the Nile Valley. There were two main consequences of these changes.
First, the increasing role of cities and temples suggests a more dense occupation of the territory and that agriculture and sedentary activities became dominant from the beginning of the second millennium BC. The impact of this move on royal ideology and the symbolic role of kings should not be underestimated as cities and their local cults (cf. the concept of city-god) became powerful tools in forging identities. Kings made themselves ‘present’ in the local sphere through donations to royal statues cults, the decoration of local temples and a mix of syncretic and new ‘national’ cults able to provide some kind of community sense acceptable for all Egyptians. It is worth noting that royal tombs and funerary complexes alone were unable to fulfil this role.
Second, until quite recently urban Egyptian archaeology focused on ceremonial settlements founded by the monarchy (‘pyramid cities’, royal capitals, specialized settlements like Deir el-Medina, the Nubian fortresses). Their orthogonal and hierarchical layout, and their dependence on royal favour, in all probability shared little with ‘organic’ cities, which would have been subject to cycles of growth and decline more dependent on economic and geopolitical factors (as well as natural ones, like shifts in the course of the Nile). That is why recent findings relating to residential neighbourhoods dating back to the late third millennium BC at Dendera or Abydos, as noted above, and inhabited by a ‘middle class’, confirm emerging social patterns of this period that had been merely hinted at to date from texts and objects. The ‘middle class’ tower-houses discovered in several localities of the Delta, dating from the Saite and subsequent periods, confirm the economic dynamism of Lower Egypt, which until quite recently was visible only through the lens of temple building and donations of land.
Finally, the ambiguous term nwt (‘settlement’, ‘locality’) also referred to villages. While archaeological evidence about ‘organic’ villages still remains scarce, administrative texts provide some glimpses into their organization and structure. It appears that villages were separated by areas of bushland, marsh and pasture, particularly in Middle Egypt, and that the landscape of the Nile Valley was far from being a continuous succession of arable fields. Land was abundant and had the potential to support alternative lifestyles, based on pastoral, fishing and nomadic subsistence patterns. Their importance was arguably larger than that suggested by official sources, which were more focused on sedentary activities and agriculture. Thus, some inscriptions from the very end of the third millennium BC refer to nomadic herders and to the initiatives taken by some provincial governors to settle them in towns/villages. Archaeology has also revealed that, during this period, many settlements along the Eastern branch of the Nile in the Delta were abandoned, a process concomitant with the appearance in this area of people called sekhetiu, ‘countrymen’, who apparently led an autonomous existence and were not thoroughly integrated in the monarchy (they managed to avoid being taxed, in particular). Later on, the Ramesside inscription of Nebre, commander of the fortress/trade centre of Zawiyet Umm el-Rakham, on the Libyan coast, boasted about procuring local indigenous peoples by means of the promise of a dignified lifestyle – ‘he made [the Libyans] possessors of settlements, so that they would plant trees, so that they would work many vineyards and … in the countryside’ – and he describes the fortress as ‘the Town of Ramesses II … which he built for these Libyan people, who had been living on the desert like jackals’. In any case, mobile settlers penetrated and settled in the Nile Valley, leaving their mark in its settlement pattern. It is not by chance that the development of extensive pastoralism in Egypt during the very late third millennium BC ran parallel to the emergence of new terms such as mnmnt, ‘cattle on the move’, and whyt, ‘clanic village, tribe’, particularly in Middle Egypt, a region frequented by Libyan sheep- and cattle-herders. Finally, the area of Fayum was also crossed by foreign populations who, in some cases, preserved their own distinctive enclosure-settlements, such as wnt and sgr …
Royal tombs, temples and ceremonial landscapes
[Monumental] stone temples were a relatively late development in Egyptian history and the story of their social, political, economic and cultural role is inseparable from the transformations of both royal ideology and of the executive power of the king over the millennia. The relation between temples and monarchy was thus a dynamic one that helps us understand how kings built their authority and justified it in reference to society and the wider cosmos.
Early royal tombs consisted of large tumuli that aimed to indicate a landscape of power. The cultural roots of these monuments probably lie in the pastoral lifestyles and neolithic foundations of pharaonic society, when funerary tumuli and necropolises marked the territories frequented and claimed by a social group. Once the monarchy was consolidated, tumuli (mastabas first, pyramids later) still expressed the symbolic role of the king as core of a territory (the kingdom) as well as head of an extended kin group (encompassing the ruling elite) whose tombs surrounded that of its master. Temples, on the other hand, were rather modest constructions (especially provincial ones), and it was not until 2600 BC that this situation changed definitively. However, early Egyptian temples had nothing to do with the massive contemporary Mesopotamian sanctuaries and their extensive productive and administrative activities … [After] a peak characterized by the gigantic tumuli/pyramids … between 2613 and 2532 BC large pyramids were abandoned, royal tombs – while still impressive – decreased in size, and local temples emerge in the epigraphical and monumental record as key cult and economic institutions that helped forge (local) identities. Not only did they receive considerable land donations from the crown, but they also became a powerful tool used by kings to integrate the local elites into the administrative organization of the kingdom.
This change was in line with the attendant expansion of bureaucracy, especially in the provinces, and with the incorporation into the high administration of dignitaries who were not necessarily members of the wider royal family. The titles they bore also reveal the implementation of an increasingly specialized bureaucratic structure. Taken together, all these changes point to a shift in the way the kingdom was organized and the monarchy conceived, with crucial effects on the actual exercise of power and on the executive capacity of pharaohs to implement a personalized centralized authority, based on a reduced group of officials close to them. It seems then that the attempts of the ‘great builder’ pharaohs … to achieve a considerable centralization of power, resources and, particularly, elites, coupled with a thorough territorial reorganization of the kingdom, was a short-lived experience that ultimately failed.
Thereafter, the mobilization of resources and administrative skills was possible only through the combined efforts of local powers and an increase in the size of the administration. This may explain the development of provincial temples (power bases of provincial potentates), the attempts of the monarchy to intervene in their affairs (through donations of land and the building of chapels provided with royal statues), the association of palatial and provincial officials with royal cults in the funerary temple of the king, the emergence of the cult of Osiris (closely associated with the ancestral burial place of the monarchy, at Abydos, and with the royal ideals of order and regeneration) together with the increasing importance of maat (order, justice) in priestly and administrative titles, and the construction of decorated tombs in the provinces for the local elites. Unlike the pyramids dedicated to individual kings at Memphis, the cult of Osiris became a sort of ‘universal’ cult, accessible to non-elite people and focused on ceremonies and pilgrimages that helped create a sense of community. Pilgrimages and important religious feasts probably helped strengthen these links. In other words, kings lost part of their symbolic and executive centrality and recognized the weight and contributions of local powers. So the old ideal of an extended family surrounding the Memphite tumuli of their royal patron lost most of its sense, particularly in regions far from the capital.
The symbolic shift between royal tombs and temples increased in the second millennium BC . From 1500 BC, royal tombs remained hidden in isolated desert areas (the Valley of the Kings) while temples became colossal constructions as well as the most important economic and managerial institutions of the country. However, they were neither independent institutions nor rivals of the crown. The cult of Amun (the god of Thebes, the province that reunified Egypt in 2150 and 1550 BC ) was the most important of them and its endowment made it the wealthiest institution in Egypt, but kings monitored carefully the appointment of High Priests of Amun. How and why temples reached such a prominent position seems related to the relative weakness of kingship. Reunification meant negotiation with local powers, the integration of local authorities with their own agendas and interests, and arbitrations between factions of the palace and of the elite. So, behind the facade of a monolithic authority, the power of kingship becomes more fragile and dependent on negotiation and politics. Episodes such as co-regencies in the early second millennium BC , the rise of military men to kingship (Horemheb, Ramesses I, etc.), the development of solar ‘imperial’ cults (like that promoted by Akhenaten), and conflict between potential heirs to the throne, not to mention conspiracies and regicide, point to a monarchy whose roots lay in politics and shifting alliances, rather than autocracy. In a theocratic world where legitimacy depended on divine support rather than on modern concepts such as sovereignty or nationhood, temples provided institutional security: their assets were supposed to be eternal and, as the property of gods, any attack on them was deemed impious and questioned the authority of the aggressor. They were also crucial institutions in the articulation of the territory, as local nobles, potentates, rural elites, chiefs of villages and people of status (scribes, military personnel, etc.) became priests and thus integrated into the monarchy, as temples were privileged points of contact between the crown and provincial society. Finally, temples managed substantial wealth, principally agricultural land which, in the case of the most important sanctuaries, was spread over vast distances. Their managerial capacity meant that they also administered the landed assets of other institutions (the crown, other temples) located within their vicinity, in a kind of indirect management that cut costs for the owner institution. This gave rise to an intricate administrative structure and to complex patterns in which ‘divine households’ had interests in several provinces and incorporated people from different social backgrounds and geographical areas. The success of such an indirect administrative structure depended partly on the mobilization of fleets and scribes in order to monitor and collect wealth scattered across long distances, and partly on the participation of ‘rural entrepreneurs’ who exploited land and other goods in the name of the owner sanctuary.
However, cults remained fiercely local and attempts to create a ‘national’ religion foundered, and were reduced to the emergence of syncretic cults between local deities and ‘universal’ gods. The failure of the cult promoted by Akhenaten to achieve this goal, or the overly abstract nature of ‘solar’ cults points to the difficulty in creating a national religion. Temples continued to mark the landscape and to forge local identities. The final shift of the core of the country from the Theban area to the Eastern Delta, far from the Domain of Amun, was followed by the foundation or expansion of temples in the Delta. In the fragmented political landscape of the Delta, temples became repositories of cultural tradition and poles of agricultural expansion, and validated the quality of silver in circulation. Temples also provided institutional security: land donations to them, and guaranteeing the quality of silver used in economic transaction in a society that cultivated new values based on money and business, meant that they procured security …
The increasingly subsidiary ideological role of kings is also evident in the relatively ephemeral nature of their palaces, to the point that, with some notable exceptions, little is known about them. They were mostly built from fragile materials (brick) and, as was the case with late royal tombs, they convey a sense of frailty in the face of the ‘eternal’ nature of temples and tombs, which were constructed in the main from durable materials. Temples’ massive enclosures also conveyed a sense of majesty, of overwhelming authority, restricted access and a distancing from common people. In fact, most Egyptians had no access to temples. More than potentially defensive buildings, temples convey a sense of power reserved for an elite, in which popular participation in public ceremonies (both religious and ‘civil’) was rarely a priority. It seems that massive ceremonial gatherings may have taken place only very occasionally (feasts, perhaps parades). Such a restricted concept of authority, in which ‘civil’ counterpowers had no voice or place, plus the absence of powerful civic organizations, may also explain why plazas and large spaces intended for social gatherings were largely absent in Egyptian cities. It might thus be posited that the increasingly oligarchical nature of power after 1550 BC was expressed in the construction of massive temples managed by an elite who earned income from them. This also means that some of the social trends that emerged around 2150 BC , based on a ‘middle class’ and on autonomous producers, came to an end when royal power was reorganized again around 1550 BC. Temples assimilated local elites and associated them closely to a monarchy that itself was being rebuilt. Such social sectors obtained riches and prestige from the opportunities offered by the new kings (imperial tribute, positions in the army, priesthoods, royal administration). But they paid a price – they lost their potential to influence and act as a social force. Their aspirations and ambitions were now mediated through royal institutions, not their own, which often resulted in factional fighting inside the apparatuses of the state, not outside them. Temple monumentality in the Late Bronze Age probably marks a significant change, namely the closing-up of the possibilities that had opened up when the monarchy collapsed in 2160 BC.
The Source:
Juan Carlos Moreno García, The State in Ancient Egypt: Power, Challenges and Dynamics, Bloomsbury Academic, 2020 [most of Chapter 2]
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