Use of Documents in Pharaonic Egypt, by Christopher Eyre
Measure of administration lay in balance between impersonality of rule-based documents and face-to-face administration; administrative writing was concerned with process, not record..
Christopher Eyre wrote:
Chapter 8
Conclusion
Pharaonic Egypt was not a bureaucracy. The concept is itself an anachronism. A scribal culture and the use of writing in government are not in themselves sufficient criteria to define a bureaucracy, nor the simple quantity of writing. Egyptian textual evidence naturally emphasizes the status and authority of writing … Pharaonic education was a highly restricted craft training in literacy, which involved a class-like acculturation, where the pen, palette, and papyrus were themselves symbols of authority. The direct connection between literacy and hierarchy in Egypt was a marker of cultural and social hierarchy and not simply administrative function. At the same time, massive monuments create an impression of organizational efficiency. Both, however, give a very partial picture. Egyptian government was not structurally competent or efficient as a document-managed administrative regime.
The primary test of a bureaucracy lies in the degree of autonomy attributed to written documents, to the completeness with which documents hold information, and the impersonality of their use. Markers for a bureaucracy are found in the requirement to use a particular document for a particular purpose, in a rule-based administration of documents, and in the corresponding ambition of political authority to exercise social and economic control: the ambition of government to penetrate deeply into society, at the level of the individual. There is no activity in pharaonic Egypt for which the use of a document can be shown to be necessary, and the impersonality of government was extremely limited: only expressed occasionally as the ideal of treating the stranger in the same way as an associate. The measure of pharaonic administration then lies in the balance between the impersonality of a rule-based use of documents and the culture of face-to-face administration, mediated explicitly by patronage and patron–client relationships. Bureaucracy and patronage are, of course, not exclusive. A regime in which bureaucratic ideals are mediated by the imperatives of personal relationships and patronage structures is normal where government is either too small to be completely impersonal, or too poorly paid for official culture to operate in a disinterested way.
The historical roots of Egyptian administration lie in extremely limited writing systems, used to label objects with their ownership and origin, and then to make lists. There is a complex relationship between the mobilization of such limited forms of writing and the development of early state systems of government. Early writing was not a decontextualized technology, invented purposefully in a vacuum. Coherent and communicative writing, beyond labelling, required a long and slow development, in specific social contexts which are not themselves clearly understood. Neither writing nor bureaucracy, even in the most limited sense, were technological preconditions to the establishment of state government in Egypt; they were concomitant, and not precursors to the development of systems of government. Extensions in the use of writing in the early dynastic period, and through the Old Kingdom, are more likely to represent reactions to the political needs of expanding government, than to have themselves suggested original ways in which government could expand. The expansion of writing, in all its forms, seems to reflect an increase in government penetration at levels of economic detail: the authority of sealings, labels, and lists as bureaucratic tools depends entirely on the way in which they are used in each individual context. The scale of resource management seen in the great building projects of the early Old Kingdom clearly implies effective processes of accounting, but large-scale mobilization of resources does not require either complex uses of writing or a large literate bureaucracy. The management procedures for the construction of the great pyramid are no better understood than the technical building process; neither is properly documented, and both are the subject of speculative theories based on the evident fact that the monument was constructed.
Listing stands as a primary use of writing. In Egypt, listing then provides the core genre for writing knowledge, both administrative and cultural. The onomastica purport to list everything in heaven and earth, but their use appears to be in literacy training and acculturation. Gods are defined by lists of their names and manifestations, but the use of such lists lay in ritual recitation and hymnic performance. Cultural lists, like those of administra- tion, appear to be defined by their contextual and practical use, in immediate process, and not as sources for reference or higher-level analysis. Knowledge, in the form of lists, is itself a source of power, but there is a massive qualitative difference between the listing seen in the sort of census data or geographical descriptions preserved from pharaonic Egypt, and even that seen in later Ptolemaic and Roman periods. The administrative use of data was extremely contextualized, local, and ad hoc to the particular text and situation. The cultural use of such data was ideological and ritual.
Such listing never became classificatory, and it did not involve any sort of statistical thinking: the sort of thinking that lay behind the vast enumerating enterprise that characterized and drove the expansion of the state in nineteenth-century Europe, as the basis for a rationalization of government and as the core mechanism of societal control idealized as bureaucracy. The land registers of the pharaonic period were documents from the practice of revenue collection, and not documents intended to inform the detailed administrative policy of an intrusive government, nor documents which classified land ownership. In this they stand in stark contrast to the great nineteenth-century colonial enterprise of the Survey of Egypt. This was not the neutral exercise of creating a map, but a project of standardization, that would standardize land tenure and normalize control of local officials in a way that was deeply foreign to local sensitivities, and which deeply distorted existing patterns of tenure and social relationships. To attribute a post- nineteenth-century vision of the purpose of census and land register to the documents of the pharaonic period is in a sense a colonization of ancient Egypt: to impose a colonizing myth of ancient bureaucratic efficiency –– a myth of origins and the image of a golden age –– that seriously distorts the internal evidence of the surviving data. It imposes a style of classificatory thinking and legal technology foreign to the native evidence.
The context, or consequence, of the colonial land survey was a deliberate commoditization of land and an ordering of social structures by social category, with deep consequences for local social relations. Such commoditization –– of land, people, and every form of property –– was not charac- teristic of the processes seen in documents of the pharaonic period. Legal processes did not invoke forms of legal technicality. Nor was government process ordered according to clear departmental structures or line management. Discussions of the nature of land-holding in pharaonic Egypt are themselves complicated by the modern assumption that private property of land is a social and legal universal, and that its origins and history can be sought–– repeatedly –– in the indigenous evolution of social history, in different times and places. Like the Weberian concept of bureaucracy, such forms of order are closely related to the use of documents by ambitious government more than by private individuals.
Superficially the differences between Egyptian writing and modern writing and printing might seem to depend merely on technology of the script and the form of the papyrus roll, but the real differences go much deeper into attitudes about the function of writing; about what writing is for, and so how one might wish to use it. The physical form of a book evidently places restrictions of a kind on how it can be used, but equally the way in which a book is used and the purposes behind writing a text strongly influence the actual form of the book. It seems unprofitable to approach these issues from a quasi-deterministic standpoint: to discuss whether Egyptian literacy was in some way limited, in that scribal technology somehow prevented the development of techniques and habits of reference. It is only illuminating to try to understand how an Egyptian conceived of a book or a document on the basis of what he did with it or wanted from it.
The primary issue is the expectation of an Egyptian, who picked up a papyrus roll to read or write. There is a modern assumption that if administrative data –– accounts, transactions, deeds –– are recorded on paper and then stored, then this data will be available and is intended for reference. How- ever, the practicalities of documentary usage are by no means so simple. By and large a document or register that was no longer current, no longer being worked on, would be virtually as inconvenient to find, consult, and draw references from as any literary text. The distinction between an ‘archive’ and a ‘library’ is not always easy to draw. Before the Late Period in Egypt there is no clear distinction between the users of administrative texts, belonging to an archive, and the users of learned texts, belonging to a library. There were not distinct classes of person, but simply more or less learned members of the same literate class of office holders, whose greater personal learning might reflect their access to more prestigious and profitable offices. Distinctions between the writing and storing of documents and the writing and storing of ritual and technical learning are real, but they belong to a common cultural milieu, as the overlapping activities of a single, culturally homogenous group of scribes.
The motivation of the writer is important. In contrast to the modern world, the writing of a book does not necessarily aim at its dissemination. The writing of a text can be an end in itself. Inscribing a book on the wall of a tomb or temple is more a way of bringing its contents to life than making it available for consultation by the dead or by the priest performing the ritual. It is not a matter of course that the deposit of a book in an archive or library means that it was available for reading or reference in a way familiar to the user of a modern library. The Book House of a temple, or a House of Life, must have stored books in regular use: the rituals performed more or less regularly, the text-books of ordinary or more specialized learning passed on from the wise-men of one generation to another. In an old institution there will also have been a store of the texts of rituals fallen out of use, works needed (and even composed) for an occasion that was not regularly repeated, or conceivably texts reflecting a class of specialist learning that had fallen out of currency during a period of economic decline for the temple. The literary motif that things were found in old writing assumes explicitly that from the time of the creation, when the god Thoth wrote down knowledge, texts were naturally just deposited and forgotten about. It also implies that, by and large, nobody knew what was stored in libraries.
The deposit of unopened, unread Books of the Dead in the tomb provides an archetype for such book storage. A number of spells in this and other compilations of funerary texts are explicitly glossed with statements of their efficacy for the person who knows them. The efficacy of texts that originate more or less in oral rituals is expressed in terms of rote knowledge, which is itself symbolized by the possession of the book. The extent to which these texts were used during life, for initiation rituals, is a matter of controversy, and not entirely relevant to their written form. Notoriously the scribes of Books of the Dead were not greatly concerned with the accuracy of the copy but with its appearance, on the presumption that the manuscript would never actually be read. Normally the text was produced commercially, and in many cases the role of the owner, literate though he may have been, will have run to no more than filling his name and titles into the gaps left at the relevant places by the ‘professional’ copyist. The book here is clearly an object, that reifies the ritual and its text, providing necessary knowledge in a concrete and powerfully symbolic form. In contrast, carelessness in copying is the ultimate scribal vice, and a text for ritual performance needs to be accurate and recitable. If a book is intended for dissemination, a reader should be able to follow the text. In practice, in Egypt, literary and ritual texts were characteristically written up by their owner, so that the normal user of each book should know its contents, and normally will have copied it out as part of the process of learning. There is no reason to believe that books for reading in the native scripts were ever produced in commercial scriptoria, although such book production and book selling of Greek literature evidently took place in the Hellenistic period. Wherever a colophon at the end of a text reveals the name of the copyist, there is every reason to suspect that he is the actual user of the text, and not a professional commercial copyist.
Rubrics in the New Kingdom mortuary literature repeatedly stress the secrecy of the knowledge they transmit. The value of written text lay explicitly in the role it played in preserving knowledge, but in practice the medium of writing was key to extended memorizing, and the knowledge it represented was the key to oral communication and social hierarchy, and not the publication or dissemination of knowledge through reference. This seems to be as true a reflection of the culture of documents as of cultural texts in the pharaonic period. On a mundane level, the status and pride in pure recording in Egypt is partly reflected by occasional examples where a scribe seems to have taken his most prized sets of accounts to the grave with him, emphasizing his self-identity through possession of the knowledge that characterized his function during life, as well as possession of the documents he wrote. The writing of administrative records, memoranda, and accounts can be a self-justifying activity. It is not always meaningful to ask what precise use is envisaged for a finished document, or how and by whom it was intended to be consulted. Other records cease to have any validity once the immediate purpose, or even process, of their composition passes. One can hardly doubt that the majority of administrative records, once completed, were never again opened. One may compare Clanchy’s comments on the impracticability of the surveys and listings of Edward I’s ambitious governmental regime: ‘Making lists was in danger of becoming a substitute for action.’
The data from pharaonic Egypt provides a narrative for a history of the documents in both government and private life. It does not illustrate a society governed through documents, but rather a slowly growing exploitation of the potential for document use, that seems natural in retrospect but was very slow in a society that was explicitly suspicious of innovation.
Administrative writing was concerned with process, not record, focused on the immediate exercise of authority. Private legal documents are essentially copies of oral process and oral declaration: a procès-verbal or aide-memoire, capable of functioning as witness but not as instrument. Their use was restricted to the level of society familiar with administrative uses of writing. The nature of documents changes significantly in post-Ramesside Egypt, with the develop- ment of formulae that make more explicit the expectations of individuals that they will be able to use their documents as autonomous proof in disputes. It changes again in the Ptolemaic and Roman periods, with the use of new styles of census and tax receipts, held at all levels of society, as the colonial government attempted to impose a rational management of the country. This involved an expansion in need for (paid) scribal services, by a level of society that had not needed such services at earlier periods. This is not to suggest that Roman government of Egypt was ever large enough or competent enough to achieve a bureaucratic fairness. It is rather to argue that the documentary record from Egypt belongs to, and is evidence of, its own social and political structures, which cannot be explained by post-nineteenth-century, post-colonial models of rationalizing efficiency.
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The Source:
Christopher Eyre, The Use of Documents in Pharaonic Egypt, Oxford University Press, 2013
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