Chapter I: The Political Constitution of Egypt (4)

For several days the people occupied mentioned by Herodotus, the religious ceremony was accompanied by a general illumination which lasted all the night; the object of this, probably, was to facilitate the visit which the souls of the dead were supposed to pay at this time to the family residence themselves solely in prayers, sacrifices, and processions, in which the faithful, clad in white, with palms in their hands, chanted hymns as they escorted the priests on their way. “The gods of heaven exclaim ‘Ah! ah! ‘in satisfaction, the inhabitants of the earth are full of gladness, the Hâthors beat their tabors, the great ladies wave their mystic whips, all those who are gathered together in the town are drunk with wine and crowned with flowers; the tradespeople of the place walk joyously about, their heads scented with perfumed oils, all the children rejoice in honour of the goddess, from the rising to the setting of the sun.” *

* The people of Dendera crudely enough called this the
“Feast of Drunkenness.” From what we know of the earlier
epochs, we are justified in making this description a
general one, and in applying it, as I have done here, to the
festivals of other towns besides Dendera.

The nights were as noisy as the days: for a few hours, they made up energetically for long months of torpor and monotonous existence. The god having re-entered the temple and the pilgrims taken their departure, the regular routine was resumed and dragged on its tedious course, interrupted only by the weekly market. At an early hour on that day, the peasant folk came in from the surrounding country in an interminable stream, and installed themselves in some open space, reserved from time immemorial for their use. The sheep, geese, goats, and large-horned cattle were grouped in the centre, awaiting purchasers. Market-gardeners, fishermen, fowlers and gazelle-hunters, potters, and small tradesmen, squatted on the roadsides or against the houses, and offered their wares for the inspection of their customers, heaped up in reed baskets, or piled on low round tables: vegetables and fruits, loaves or cakes baked during the night, meat either raw or cooked in various ways, stuffs, perfumes, ornaments,--all the necessities and luxuries of daily life. It was a good opportunity for the workpeople, as well as for the townsfolk, to lay in a store of provisions at a cheaper rate than from the ordinary shops; and they took advantage of it, each according to his means.

Business was mostly carried on by barter. The purchasers brought with them some product of their toil--a new tool, a pair of shoes, a reed mat, pots of unguents or cordials; often, too, rows of cowries and a small box full of rings, each weighing a “tabnû,” made of copper, silver, or even gold, all destined to be bartered for such things as they needed. When it came to be a question of some large animal or of objects of considerable value, the discussions which arose were keen and stormy: it was necessary to be agreed not only as to the amount, but as to the nature of the payment to be made, and to draw up a sort of invoice, or in fact an inventory, in which beds, sticks, honey, oil, pick-axes, and garments, all figure as equivalents for a bull or a she-ass. Smaller retail bargains did not demand so many or such complicated calculations. Two townsfolk stop for a moment in front of a fellah who offers onions and corn in a basket for sale. The first appears to possess no other circulating medium than two necklaces made of glass beads or many-coloured enamelled terra-cotta; the other flourishes about a circular fan with a wooden handle, and one of those triangular contrivances used by cooks for blowing up the fire. “Here is a fine necklace which will suit you,” cries the former, “it is just what you are wanting;” while the other breaks in with: “Here is a fan and a ventilator.” The fellah, however, does not let himself be disconcerted by this double attack, and proceeding methodically, he takes one of the necklaces to examine it at his leisure: “Give it to me to look at, that I may fix the price.” The one asks too much, the other offers too little; after many concessions, they at last come to an agreement, and settle on the number of onions or the quantity of grain which corresponds exactly with the value of the necklace or the fan. A little further on, a customer wishes to get some perfumes in exchange for a pair of sandals, and conscientiously praises his wares: “Here,” says he, “is a strong pair of shoes.” But the merchant has no wish to be shod just then, and demands a row of cowries for his little pots: “You have merely to take a few drops of this to see how delicious it is,” he urges in a persuasive tone. A seated customer has two jars thrust under his nose by a woman--they probably contain some kind of unguent: “Here is something which smells good enough to tempt you.” Behind this group two men are discussing the relative merits of a bracelet and a bundle of fish-hooks; a woman, with a small box in her hand, is having an argument with a merchant selling necklaces; another woman seeks to obtain a reduction in the price of a fish which is being scraped in front of her. Exchanging commodities for metal necessitated two or three operations not required in ordinary barter. The rings or thin bent strips of metal which formed the “tabnû” and its multiples,* did not always contain the regulation amount of gold or silver, and were often of light weight.

* The rings of gold in the Museum at Leyden, which were used
as a basis of exchange, are made on the Chaldæo-Babylonian
pattern, and belong to the Asiatic system.

Drawn by Faucher-Gudin, after a sketch by Rosellini

They had to be weighed at every fresh transaction in order to estimate their true value, and the interested parties never missed this excellent opportunity for a heated discussion: after having declared for a quarter of an hour that the scales were out of order, that the weighing had been carelessly performed, and that it should be done over again, they at last came to terms, exhausted with wrangling, and then went their way fairly satisfied with one another.* It sometimes happened that a clever and unscrupulous dealer would alloy the rings, and mix with the precious metal as much of a baser sort as would be possible without danger of detection. The honest merchant who thought he was receiving in payment for some article, say eight tabnû of fine gold, and who had handed to him eight tabnû of some alloy resembling gold, but containing one-third of silver, lost in a single transaction, without suspecting it, almost one-third of his goods. The fear of such counterfeits was instrumental in restraining the use of tabnû for a long time among the people, and restricted the buying and selling in the markets to exchange in natural products or manufactured objects.

* The weighing of rings is often represented on the
monuments from the XVIIIth dynasty onwards. I am not
acquainted with any instance of this on the bas-reliefs of
the Ancient Empire. The giving of false weight is alluded to
in the paragraph in the “Negative Confession,” in which the
dead man declares that he has not interfered with the beam
of the scales (cf. vol. i. p. 271) _civili,_ pl. lii. 1. As
to the construction of the Egyptian scales, and the working
of their various parts, see Flinders Petrie’s remarks in _A
Season in Egypt_, P- 42, and the drawings which he has
brought together on pl. xx. of the same work.

We must, perhaps, agree with Fr. Lenormant, in his conclusion that the only kind of national metal of exchange in use in Egypt was a copper wire or plate bent thus [--]. this being the sign invariably used in the hieroglyphics in writing the word _tàbnû_.

The present rural population of Egypt scarcely ever live in isolated and scattered farms; they are almost all concentrated in hamlets and villages of considerable extent, divided into quarters often at some distance from each other. The same state of things existed in ancient times, and those who would realize what a village in the past was like, have only to visit any one of the modern market towns scattered at intervals along the valley of the Nile:--half a dozen fairly built houses, inhabited by the principal people of the place; groups of brick or clay cottages thatched with durra stalks, so low that a man standing upright almost touches the roof with his head; courtyards filled with tall circular mud-built sheds, in which the corn and durra for the household is carefully stored, and wherever we turn, pigeons, ducks, geese, and animals all living higgledly-piggledly with the family. The majority of the peasantry were of the lower class, but they were not everywhere subjected to the same degree of servitude. The slaves, properly so called, came from other countries; they had been bought from foreign merchants, or they had been seized in a raid and had lost their liberty by the fortune of war.* Their master removed them from place to place, sold them, used them as he pleased, pursued them if they succeeded in escaping, and had the right of recapturing them as soon as he received information of their whereabouts. They worked for him under his overseer’s orders, receiving no regular wages, and with no hope of recovering their liberty.**

* The first allusion to prisoners of war brought back to
Egypt, is found in the biography of Uni. The method in which
they were distributed among the officers and soldiers is
indicated in several inscriptions of the New Empire, in that
of Ahmosis Pannekhabît, in that of Ahmosis si-Abîna, where
one of the inscriptions contains a list of slaves, some of
whom are foreigners, in that of Amenemhabi. We may form
some idea of the number of slaves in Egypt from the fact
that in thirty years Ramses III. presented 113,433 of them
to the temples alone. The “Directors of the Royal Slaves,”
at all periods, occupied an important position at the court
of the Pharaohs.

** A scene reproduced by Lepsius shows us, about the time of
the VIth dynasty, the harvest gathered by the “royal slaves”
in concert with the tenants of the dead man. One of the
petty princes defeated by the Ethiopian Piônkhi Miamûn
proclaims himself to be “one of the royal slaves who pay
tribute in kind to the royal treasury.” Amten repeatedly
mentions slaves of this kind, “sûtiû.”

Many chose concubines from their own class, or intermarried with the natives and had families: at the end of two or three generations their descendants became assimilated with the indigenous race, and were neither more nor less than actual serfs attached to the soil, who were made over or exchanged with it.* The landed proprietors, lords, kings, or gods, accommodated this population either in the outbuildings belonging to their residences, or in villages built for the purpose, where everything belonged to them, both houses and people.

* This is the status of serfs, or _mirîtiû,_ as shown in the
texts of every period. They are mentioned along with the
fields or cattle attached to a temple or belonging to a
noble. Ramses II. granted to the temple of Abydos “an
appanage in cultivated lands, in serfs (_mirîtiû_), in
cattle.” The scribe Anna sees in his tomb “stalls of bulls,
of oxen, of calves, of milch cows, as well as serfs, in the
mortmain of Amon.” Ptolemy I. returned to the temple at Bûto
“the domains, the boroughs, the serfs, the tillage, the
water supply, the cattle, the geese, the flocks, all the
things” which Xerxes had taken away from Kabbisha. The
expression passed into the language, as a word used to
express the condition of a subject race: “I cause,” said
Thûtmosis III., “Egypt to be a sovereign (_hirît_) to whom
all the earth is a slave” (_mirîtû_).

Drawn by Boudier, from a photograph by Beato, taken in 1886.

The condition of the free agricultural labourer was in many respects analogous to that of the modern fellah. Some of them possessed no other property than a mud cabin, just large enough for a man and his wife, and hired themselves out by the day or the year as farm servants. Others were emboldened to lease land from the lord or from a soldier in the neighbourhood. The most fortunate acquired some domain of which they were supposed to receive only the product, the freehold of the property remaining primarily in the hands of the Pharaoh, and secondarily in that of lay or religious feudatories who held it of the sovereign: they could, moreover, bequeath, give, or sell these lands and buy fresh ones without any opposition. They paid, besides the capitation tax, a ground rent proportionate to the extent of their property, and to the kind of land of which it consisted.*

* The capitation tax, the ground rent, and the house duty of
the time of the Ptolemies, already existed under the rule of
the native Pharaohs. Brugsch has shown that these taxes are
mentioned in an inscription of the time of Ameuôthes III.

It was not without reason that all the ancients attributed the invention of geometry to the Egyptians. The perpetual encroachments of the Nile and the displacements it occasioned, the facility with which it effaced the boundaries of the fields, and in one summer modified the whole face of a nome, had forced them from early times to measure with the greatest exactitude the ground to which they owed their sustenance. The territory belonging to each town and nome was subjected to repeated surveys made and co-ordinated by the Royal Administration, thus enabling Pharaoh to know the exact area of his estates. The unit of measurement was the arura; that is to say, a square of a hundred cubits, comprising in round numbers twenty-eight ares.* A considerable staff of scribes and surveyors was continually occupied in verifying the old measurements or in making fresh ones, and in recording in the State registers any changes which might have taken place.** Each estate had its boundaries marked out by a line of stelas which frequently bore the name of the tenant at the time, and the date when the landmarks were last fixed.***

* [One “are” equals 100 square metres.--Tr.]

** We learn from the expressions employed in the great
inscription of Beni-Hasan (11. 13--58, 131-148) that the
cadastral survey had existed from the very earliest times;
there are references in it to previous surveys. We find a
surveying scene on the tomb of Zosirkerîsonbû at Thebes,
under the XVIIIth dynasty. Two persons are measuring a field
of wheat by means of a cord; a third notes down the result
of their work.

*** The great inscription of Beni-Hasan tells us of the
stelæ which bounded the principality of the Gazelle on the
North and South, and of those in the plain which marked the
northern boundary of the nome of the Jackal; we also possess
three other stelo which were used by Amenôthes IV. to
indicate the extreme limits of his new city of Khûtniaton.
In addition to the above stele, we also know of two others
belonging to the XIIth dynasty which marked the boundaries
of a private estate, and which are reproduced, one on plate
106, the other in the text of _Monuments divers_, p. 30;
also the stele of Bûhani under Thûtmosis IV.

Drawn by Faucher-Gudin, from a photograph given by Mariette,
Monuments divers, pl. 47 a. The stele marked the boundary of
the estate given to a priest of the Theban Amon by Pharaoh
Thûtmosis IV. of the XVIIIth dynasty. The original is now in
the Museum at Gizeh.

Once set up, the stele received a name which gave it, as it were, a living and independent personality. It sometimes recorded the nature of the soil, its situation, or some characteristic which made it remarkable--the “Lake of the South,” the “Eastern Meadow,” the “Green Island,” the “Fisher’s Pool,” the “Willow Plot,” the “Vineyard,” the “Vine Arbour,” the “Sycamore;” sometimes also it bore the name of the first master or the Pharaoh under whom it had been erected--the “Nurse-Phtahhotpû,” the “Verdure-Kheops,” the “Meadow-Didifrî,” the “Abundance-Sahûri,” “Khafri-Great-among-the Doubles.” Once given, the name clung to it for centuries, and neither sales, nor redistributions, nor revolutions, nor changes of dynasty, could cause it to be forgotten. The officers of the survey inscribed it in their books, together with the name of the proprietor, those of the owners of adjoining lands, and the area and nature of the ground. They noted down, to within a few cubits, the extent of the sand, marshland, pools, canals, groups of palms, gardens or orchards, vineyards and cornfields,* which it contained.

* See in the great inscription of Beni-Hasan the passage in
which are enumerated at full length, in a legal document,
the constituent parts of the principality of the Gazelle,
“its watercourses, its fields, its trees, its sands, from
the river to the mountain of the West” (11. 46-53).

The cornland in its turn was divided into several classes, according to whether it was regularly inundated, or situated above the highest rise of the water, and consequently dependent on a more or less costly system of artificial irrigation. All this was so much information of which the scribes took advantage in regulating the assessment of the land-tax.

Everything tends to make us believe that this tax represented one-tenth of the gross produce, but the amount of the latter varied. It depended on the annual rise of the Nile, and it followed the course of it with almost mathematical exactitude: if there were too much or too little water, it was immediately lessened, and might even be reduced to nothing in extreme cases. The king in his capital and the great lords in their fiefs had set up nilo-meters, by means of which, in the critical weeks, the height of the rising or subsiding flood was taken daily. Messengers carried the news of it over the country: the people, kept regularly informed of what was happening, soon knew what kind of season to expect, and they could calculate to within very little what they would have to pay. In theory, the collecting of the tax was based on the actual amount of land covered by the water, and the produce of it was constantly varying. In practice it was regulated by taking the average of preceding years, and deducting from that a fixed sum, which was never departed from except in extraordinary circumstances.*

* We know that this was so, in so far as the Roman period is
concerned, from a passage in the edict of Tiberius
Alexander. The practice was such a natural one, that I have
no hesitation in tracing it back to the time of the Ancient
Empire; repeatedly condemned as a piece of bad
administration, it reappeared continually. At Beni-Hasan,
the nomarch Amoni boasts that, “when there had been abundant
Niles, and the owners of wheat and barley crops had thriven,
he had not increased the rate of the land-tax,” which seems
to indicate that, so far as he was concerned, he had fixed
the tax to pay his dues without difficulty.

Drawn by Faucher-Gudin, from a picture at Beni-Hasan. This
picture and those which follow it represent a census in the
principality of the Gazelle under the XIIth dynasty as well
as the collection of a tax.

The year would have to be a very bad one before the authorities would lower the ordinary rate: the State in ancient times was not more willing to deduct anything from its revenue than the modern State would be.*

* The two decrees of Rosetta and of Canopus, however,
mention reductions granted by the Ptolemies after an
insufficient rise of the Nile.

The payment of taxes was exacted in wheat, durra, beans, and field produce, which were stored in the granaries of the nome. It would seem that the previous deduction of one-tenth of the gross amount of the harvest could not be a heavy burden, and that the wretched fellah ought to have been in a position on land at a permanent figure, based on the average of good and bad harvests.

It was not so, however, and the same writers who have given us such a lamentable picture of the condition of the workmen in the towns, have painted for us in even darker colours the miseries which overwhelmed the country people. “Dost thou not recall the picture of the farmer, when the tenth of his grain is levied? Worms have destroyed half of the wheat, and the hippopotami have eaten the rest; there are swarms of rats in the fields, the grasshoppers alight there, the cattle devour, the little birds pilfer, and if the farmer lose sight for an instant of what remains upon the ground, it is carried off by robbers;* the thongs, moreover, which bind the iron and the hoe are worn out, and the team has died at the plough. It is then that the scribe steps out of the boat at the landing-place to levy the tithe, and there come the keepers of the doors of the granary with cudgels and the negroes with ribs of palm-leaves, who come crying: ‘Come now, corn!’ There is none, and they throw the cultivator full length upon the ground; bound, dragged to the canal, they fling him in head first;** his wife is bound with him, his children are put into chains; the neighbours, in the mean time, leave him and fly to save their grain.”

* This last danger survives even to the present day. During
part of the year the fellahîn spend the night in their
fields; if they did not see to it, their neighbours would
not hesitate to come and cut their wheat before the harvest,
or root up their vegetables while still immature.

** The same kind of torture is mentioned in the decree of
Harmhabi, in which the lawless soldiery are represented as
“running from house to house, dealing blows right and left
with their sticks, ducking the fellahîn head downwards in
the water, and not leaving one of them with a whole skin.”
This treatment was still resorted to in Egypt not long ago,
in order to extract money from those taxpayers whom beatings
had failed to bring to reason.

One might be tempted to declare that the picture is too dark a one to be true, did one not know from other sources of the brutal ways of filling the treasury which Egypt has retained even to the present day. In the same way as in the town, the stick facilitated the operations of the tax-collector in the country: it quickly opened the granaries of the rich, it revealed resources to the poor of which he had been ignorant, and it only failed in the case of those who had really nothing to give. Those who were insolvent were not let off even when they had been more than half killed: they and their families were sent to prison, and they had to work out in forced labour the amount which they had failed to pay in current merchandise.*

* This is evident from a passage in the _Sallier Papyrus n°
I_, quoted above, in which we see the taxpayer in fetters,
dragged out to clean the canals, his whole family, wife and
children, accompanying him in bonds.

Drawn by Faucher-Gudin, from a picture on the tomb of Khîti
at Beni-Hasan (cf. Champollion, _Monuments de l’Egypte_, pl.
cccxc. 4; Rosellini, _Monumenti civili_, pl. cxxiv. b).

The collection of the taxes was usually terminated by a rapid revision of the survey. The scribe once more recorded the dimensions and character of the domain lands in order to determine afresh the amount of the tax which should be imposed upon them. It often happened, indeed, that, owing to some freak of the Nile, a tract of ground which had been fertile enough the preceding year would be buried under a gravel bed, or transformed into a marsh. The owners who thus suffered were allowed an equivalent deduction; as for the farmers, no deductions of the burden were permitted in their case, but a tract equalling in value that of the part they had lost was granted to them out of the royal or seignorial domain, and their property was thus made up to its original worth.

Drawn by Faucher-Gudin, from a picture on the tomb of Khîti
at Beni-Hasan.

What the collection of the taxes had begun was almost always brought to a climax by the _corvées_. However numerous the royal and seignorial slaves might have been, they were insufficient for the cultivation of all the lands of the domains, and a part of Egypt must always have lain fallow, had not the number of workers been augmented by the addition of those who were in the position of freemen.

This excess of cultivable land was subdivided into portions of equal dimensions, which were distributed among the inhabitants of neighbouring villages by the officers of a “regent” nominated for that purpose. Those dispensed from agricultural service were--the destitute, soldiers on service and their families, certain _employés_ of the public works, and servitors of the temple;* all other country-folk without exception had to submit to it, and one or more portions were allotted to each, according to his capabilities.** Orders issued at fixed periods called them together, themselves, their servants and their beasts of burden, to dig, sow, keep watch in the fields while the harvest was proceeding, to cut and carry the crops, the whole work being done at their own expense and to the detriment of their own interests.***

* That the scribes, i.e. the employés of the royal or
princely government, were exempt from enforced labour, is
manifest from the contrast drawn by the letter-writers of
the Sallier and Anastasi Papyri between themselves and the
peasants, or persons belonging to other professions who were
liable to it. The circular of Dorion defines the classes of
soldiers who were either temporarily or permanently exempt
under the Greek kings.

** Several fragments of the Turin papyri contain memoranda
of enforced labour performed on behalf of the temples, and
of lists of persons liable to be called on for such labour.

*** All these details are set forth in the Ptolemaic period,
in the letter to Dorion which refers to a royal edict. As
Signor Lumbroso has well remarked, the Ptolemies merely
copied exactly the misdeeds of the old native governments.
Indeed, we come across frequent allusions to the enforced
labour of men and beasts in inscriptions of the Middle
Empire at Beni-Hasan or at Siût; many of the pictures on the
Memphite tombs show bands of such labourers at work in the
fields of the great landowners or of the king.

As a sort of indemnity, a few allotments were left uncultivated for their benefit; to these they sent their flocks after the subsidence of the inundation, for the pasturage on them was so rich that the sheep were doubly productive in wool and offspring. This was a mere apology for a wage: the forced labour for the irrigation brought them no compensation. The dykes which separate the basins, and the network of canals for distributing the water and irrigating the land, demand continual attention: every year some need strengthening, others re-excavating or cleaning out. The men employed in this work pass whole days standing in the water, scraping up the mud with both hands in order to fill the baskets of platted leaves, which boys and girls lift on to their heads and carry to the top of the bank: the semi-liquid contents ooze through the basket, trickle over their faces and soon coat their bodies with a black shining mess, disgusting even to look at. Sheikhs preside over the work, and urge it on with abuse and blows. When the gangs of workmen had toiled all day, with only an interval of two hours about noon for a siesta and a meagre pittance of food, the poor wretches slept on the spot, in the open air, huddled one against another and but ill protected by their rags from the chilly nights. The task was so hard a one, that malefactors, bankrupts, and prisoners of war were condemned to it; it wore out so many hands that the free peasantry were scarcely ever exempt. Having returned to their homes, they were not called until the next year to any established or periodic _corvée_, but many an irregular one came and surprised them in the midst of their work, and forced them to abandon all else to attend to the affairs of king or lord. Was a new chamber to be added to some neighbouring temple, were materials wanted to strengthen or rebuild some piece of wall which had been undermined by the inundation, orders were issued to the engineers to go and fetch a stated quantity of limestone or sandstone, and the peasants were commanded to assemble at the nearest quarry to cut the blocks from it, and if needful to ship and convey them to their destination. Or perhaps the sovereign had caused a gigantic statue of himself to be carved, and a few hundred men were requisitioned to haul it to the place where he wished it to be set up. The undertaking ended in a gala, and doubtless in a distribution of food and drink: the unfortunate creatures who had been got together to execute the work could not always have felt fitly compensated for the precious time they had lost, by one day of drunkenness and rejoicing.

We may ask if all these corvées were equally legal? Even if some of them were illegal, the peasant on whom they fell could not have found the means to escape from them, nor could he have demanded legal reparation for the injury which they caused him. Justice, in Egypt and in the whole Oriental world, necessarily emanates from political authority, and is only one branch of the administration amongst others, in the hands of the lord and his representatives. Professional magistrates were unknown--men brought up to the study of law, whose duty it was to ensure the observance of it, apart from any other calling--but the same men who commanded armies, offered sacrifices, and assessed or received taxes, investigated the disputes of ordinary citizens, or settled the differences which arose between them and the representatives of the lords or of the Pharaoh. In every town and village, those who held by birth or favour the position of governor were ex-officio invested with the right of administering justice. For a certain number of days in the month, they sat at the gate of the town or of the building which served as their residence, and all those in the town or neighbourhood possessed of any title, position, or property, the superior priesthood of the temples, scribes who had advanced or grown old in office, those in command of the militia or the police, the heads of divisions or corporations, the “qonbîtiû,” the “people of the angle,” might if they thought fit take their place beside them, and help them to decide ordinary lawsuits. The police were mostly recruited from foreigners and negroes, or Bedouin belonging to the Nubian tribe of the Mâzaiû. The litigants appeared at the tribunal, and waited under the superintendence of the police until their turn came to speak: the majority of the questions were decided in a few minutes by a judgment by which there was no appeal; only the more serious cases necessitated a cross-examination and prolonged discussion. All else was carried on before this patriarchal jury as in our own courts of justice, except that the inevitable stick too often elucidated the truth and cut short discussions: the depositions of the witnesses, the speeches on both sides, the examination of the documents, could not proceed without the frequent taking of oaths “by the life of the king” or “by the favour of the gods,” in which the truth often suffered severely. Penalties were varied somewhat--the bastinado, imprisonment, additional days of work for the corvée, and, for grave offences, forced labour in the Ethiopian mines, the loss of nose and ears, and finally, death by strangulation, by beheading,* by empalement, and at the stake.

* The only known instance of an execution by hanging is that
of Pharaoh’s chief baker, in Gen. xl. 19, 22, xli. 13; but
in a tomb at Thebes we see two human victims executed by
strangulation. The Egyptian hell contains men who have been
decapitated, and the block on which the damned were beheaded
is frequently mentioned in the texts.

Criminals of high rank obtained permission to carry out on themselves the sentence passed upon them, and thus avoided by suicide the shame of public execution. Before tribunals thus constituted, the fellah who came to appeal against the exactions of which he was the victim had little chance of obtaining a hearing: had not the scribe who had overtaxed him, or who had imposed a fresh corvée upon him, the right to appear among the Judges to whom he addressed himself? Nothing, indeed, prevented him from appealing from the latter to his feudal lord, and from him to Pharaoh, but such an appeal would be for him a mere delusion. When he had left his village and presented his petition, he had many delays to encounter before a solution could be arrived at; and if the adverse party were at all in favour at court, or could command any influence, the sovereign decision would confirm, even if it did not aggravate, the sentence of the previous judges. In the mean while the peasants’ land remained uncultivated, his wife and children bewailed their wretchedness, and the last resources of the family were consumed in proceedings and delays: it would have been better for him at the outset to have made up his mind to submit without resistance to a fate from which he could not escape.

In spite of taxes, requisitions, and forced labour, the fellahîn came off fairly well, when the chief to whom they belonged proved a kind master, and did not add the exactions of his own personal caprice to those of the State. The inscriptions which princes caused to be devoted to their own glorification, are so many enthusiastic panegyrics dealing only with their uprightness and kindness towards the poor and lowly. Every one of them represents himself as faultless: “the staff of support to the aged, the foster father of the children, the counsellor of the unfortunate, the refuge in which those who suffer from the cold in Thebes may warm themselves, the bread of the afflicted which never failed in the city of the South.” Their solicitude embraced everybody and everything: “I have caused no child of tender age to mourn; I have despoiled no widow; I have driven away no tiller of the soil; I have taken no workmen away from their foreman for the public works; none have been unfortunate about me, nor starving in my time. When years of scarcity arose, as I had cultivated all the lands of the nome of the Gazelle to its northern and southern boundaries, causing its inhabitants to live, and creating provisions, none who were hungry were found there, for I gave to the widow as well as to the woman who had a husband, and I made no distinction between high and low in all that I gave. If, on the contrary, there were high Niles, the possessors of lands became rich in all things, for I did not raise the rate of the tax upon the fields.” The canals engrossed all the prince’s attention; he cleaned them out, enlarged them, and dug fresh ones, which were the means of bringing fertility and plenty into the most remote corners of his property. His serfs had a constant supply of clean water at their door, and were no longer content with such food as durra; they ate wheaten bread daily. His vigilance and severity were such that the brigands dared no longer appear within reach of his arm, and his soldiers kept strict discipline: “When night fell, whoever slept by the roadside blessed me, and was [in safety] as a man in his own house; the fear of my police protected him, the cattle remained in the fields as in the stable; the thief was as the abomination of the god, and he no more fell upon the vassal, so that the latter no more complained, but paid exactly the dues of his domain, for love” of the master who had procured for him this freedom from care. This theme might be pursued at length, for the composers of epitaphs varied it with remarkable cleverness and versatility of imagination. The very zeal which they display in describing the lord’s virtues betrays how precarious was the condition of his subjects. There was nothing to hinder the unjust prince or the prevaricating officer from ruining and ill-treating as he chose the people who were under his authority. He had only to give an order, and the corvée fell upon the proprietors of a village, carried off their slaves and obliged them to leave their lands uncultivated; should they declare that they were incapable of paying the contributions laid on them, the prison opened for them and their families. If a dyke were cut, or the course of a channel altered, the nome was deprived of water: prompt and inevitable ruin came upon the unfortunate inhabitants, and their property, confiscated by the treasury in payment of the tax, passed for a small consideration into the hands of the scribe or of the dishonest administrator. Two or three years of neglect were almost enough to destroy a system of irrigation: the canals became filled with mud, the banks crumbled, the inundation either failed to reach the ground, or spread over it too quickly and lay upon it too long. Famine soon followed with its attendant sicknesses: men and animals died by the hundred, and it was the work of nearly a whole generation to restore prosperity to the district.

The lot of the fellah of old was, as we have seen, as hard as that of the fellah of to-day. He himself felt the bitterness of it, and complained at times, or rather the scribes complained for him, when with selfish complacency they contrasted their calling with his. He had to toil the whole year round,--digging, sowing, working the shadouf from morning to night for weeks, hastening at the first requisition to the corvée, paying a heavy and cruel tax,--all without even the certainty of enjoying what remained to him in peace, or of seeing his wife and children profit by it. So great, however, was the elasticity of his temperament that his misery was not sufficient to depress him: those monuments upon which his life is portrayed in all its minutias, represent him as animated with inexhaustible cheerfulness. The summer months ended, the ground again becomes visible, the river retires into its bed, the time of sowing is at hand: the peasant takes his team and his implements with him and goes off to the fields. In many places, the soil, softened by the water, offers no resistance, and the hoe easily turns it up; elsewhere it is hard, and only yields to the plough. While one of the farm-servants, almost bent double, leans his whole weight on the handles to force the ploughshare deep into the soil, his comrade drives the oxen and encourages them by his songs: these are only two or three short sentences, set to an unvarying chant, and with the time beaten on the back of the nearest animal. Now and again he turns round towards his comrade and encourages him: “Lean hard!”--“Hold fast!”

Drawn by Faucher-Gudin, from a photograph.

The sower follows behind and throws handfuls of grain into the furrow: a flock of sheep or goats brings up the rear, and as they walk, they tread the seed into the ground. The herdsmen crack their whips and sing some country song at the top of their voices,--based on the complaint of some fellah seized by the corvée to clean out a canal. “The digger is in the water with the fish,--he talks to the silurus, and exchanges greetings with the oxyrrhynchus:--West! your digger is a digger from the West!”*

* The silurus is the electrical fish of the Nile. The text
ironically hints that the digger, up to his waist in water,
engaged in dredging the dykes or repairing a bank swept away
by an inundation, is liable at any moment to salute, i.e. to
meet with a silurus or an oxyrrhynchus ready to attack him;
he is doomed to death, and this fact the couplet expresses
by the words, “West! your digger is a digger from the West.”
The West was the region of the tombs; and the digger, owing
to the dangers of his calling, was on his way thither.

All this takes place under the vigilant eye of the master: as soon as his attention is relaxed, the work slackens, quarrels arise, and the spirit of idleness and theft gains the ascendency. Two men have unharnessed their team. One of them quickly milks one of the cows, the other holds the animal and impatiently awaits his turn: “Be quick, while the farmer is not there.” They run the risk of a beating for a potful of milk. The weeks pass, the corn has ripened, the harvest begins. The fellahîn, armed with a short sickle, cut or rather saw the stalks, a handful at a time. As they advance in line, a flute-player plays them captivating tunes, a man joins in with his voice marking the rhythm by clapping his hands, the foreman throwing in now and then a few words of exhortation: “What lad among you, when the season is over, can say: ‘It is I who say it, to thee and to my comrades, you are all of you but idlers!’--Who among you can say: ‘An active lad for the job am I!’” A servant moves among the gang with a tall jar of beer, offering it to those who wish for it. “Is it not good!” says he; and the one who drinks answers politely: “‘Tis true, the master’s beer is better than a cake of durra!” The sheaves once bound, are carried to the singing of fresh songs addressed to the donkeys who bear them: “Those who quit the ranks will be tied, those who roll on the ground will be beaten,--Geeho! then.” And thus threatened, the ass trots forward. Even when a tragic element enters the scene, and the bastinado is represented, the sculptor, catching the bantering spirit of the people among whom he lives, manages to insinuate a vein of comedy. A peasant, summarily condemned for some misdeed, lies flat upon the ground with bared back: two friends take hold of his arms, and two others his legs, to keep him in the proper position. His wife or his son intercedes for him to the man with the stick: “For mercy’s sake strike on the ground!” And as a fact, the bastinado was commonly rather a mere form of chastisement than an actual punishment: the blows, dealt with apparent ferocity, missed their aim and fell upon the earth; the culprit howled loudly, but was let off with only a few bruises.

An Arab writer of the Middle Ages remarks, not without irony, that the Egyptians were perhaps the only people in the world who never kept any stores of provisions by them, but each one went daily to the market to buy the pittance for his family. The improvidence which he laments over in his contemporaries had been handed down from their most remote ancestors. Workmen, fellahîn, _employés_, small townsfolk, all lived from hand to mouth in the Egypt of the Pharaohs. Pay-days were almost everywhere days of rejoicing and extra eating: no one spared either the grain, oil, or beer of the treasury, and copious feasting continued unsparingly, as long as anything was left of their wages. As their resources were almost always exhausted before the day of distribution once more came round, beggary succeeded to fulness of living, and a part of the population was literally starving for several days. This almost constant alternation of abundance and dearth had a reactionary influence on daily work: there were scarcely any seignorial workshops or undertakings which did not come to a standstill every month on account of the exhaustion of the workmen, and help had to be provided for the starving in order to avoid popular seditions. Their improvidence, like their cheerfulness, was perhaps an innate trait in the national character: it was certainly fostered and developed by the system of government adopted by Egypt from the earliest times. What incentive was there for a man of the people to calculate his resources and to lay up for the future, when he knew that his wife, his children, his cattle, his goods, all that belonged to him, and himself to boot, might be carried off at any moment, without his having the right or the power to resent it? He was born, he lived, and he died in the possession of a master.

Drawn by Faucher-Gudin, from a photograph by Émil Brugsch-
Bey. The picture is taken from the tomb of Ti.

The lands or houses which his father had left him, were his merely on sufferance, and he enjoyed them only by permission of his lord. Those which he acquired by his own labour went to swell his master’s domain. If he married and had sons, they were but servants for the master from the moment they were brought into the world. Whatever he might enjoy to-day, would his master allow him possession of it to-morrow? Even life in the world beyond did not offer him much more security or liberty: he only entered it in his master’s service and to do his bidding; he existed in it on tolerance, as he had lived upon this earth, and he found there no rest or freedom unless he provided himself abundantly with “respondents” and charmed statuettes. He therefore concentrated his mind and energies on the present moment, to make the most of it as of almost the only thing which belonged to him: he left to his master the task of anticipating and providing for the future. In truth, his masters were often changed; now the lord of one town, now that of another; now a Pharaoh of the Memphite or Theban dynasties, now a stranger installed by chance upon the throne of Horns. The condition of the people never changed; the burden which crushed them was never lightened, and whatever hand happened to hold the stick, it never fell the less heavily upon their backs.

Volume II., Part B.

_THE MEMPHITE EMPIRE_

_THE ROYAL PYRAMID BUILDERS: KHEOPS, KHEPHREN, MYKERINOS--MEMPHITE LITERATURE AND ART--EXTENSION OF EGYPT TOWARDS THE SOUTH, AND THE CONQUEST OP NUBIA BY THE PHARAOHS._

_Snofrûi--The desert which separates Africa from Asia: its physical configuration, its inhabitants, their incursions into Egypt, and their relations with the Egyptians--The peninsula of Sinai: the turquoise and copper mines, the mining works of the Pharaohs--The two tombs of Snofrûi: the pyramid and the mastabas of Mêdûm, the statues of Bahotpû and his wife Nofrît._

_Kheops, Ehephren, and Myherinos--The Great Pyramid: its construction and internal arrangements--The pyramids of Khephren and Myherinos; the rifling of them--Legend about the royal pyramid builders: the impiety of Kheops and Khephren, the piety of Myherinos; the brick pyramid of Asychis--The materials employed in building, and the quarries of Turah; the plans, the worship of the royal “double;” the Arab legends about the guardian genii of the pyramids._

_The kings of the fifth dynasty: Ùsirkaf, Sahûri, Kalciû, and the romance about their advent--The relations of the Delta to the peoples of the North: the shipping and maritime commerce of the Egyptians--Nubia and its tribes: the Ûaûaiû and the Mazaiû, Pûanît, the dwarfs and the Danga--Egyptian literature: the Proverbs of Phtahhotpû--The arts: architecture, statuary and its chief examples, bas-reliefs, painting, industrial art._

_The development of Egyptian feudalism, and the advent of the sixth dynasty: Ati, Imhotpâ, Teti--Papi I. and his minister Uni: the affair of Queen Amitsi; the wars against the Hirû-Shâîtû and the country of Tiba--Metesûphis I. and the second Papi: progress of the Egyptian power in Nubia--the lords of Elephantine; Hirkhûf, Papinakhîti: the way for conquest prepared by their explorations, the occupation of the Oases--The pyramids of Saqqâra: Metesûphis the Second--Nitokris and the legend concerning her--Preponderance of the feudal lords, and fall of the Memphite dynasty._