Results and discussion 1 Microextraction of PAH4

Although central to the Egyptian system, a pharaoh could not manage the country without a substantial, professional government.

Something in the Egyptian character found governance congenial, almost as though taking orders and enjoying tedious record keep-ing were national traits. No society ever employed such a high per-centage of civil servants, and no society so often and so publicly praised its government officials, rather than complaining about them. Egypt’s successes, especially as demonstrated in its massive construction projects, indicates that the country generally enjoyed an efficient, effective government.

Evidence from early times, such as the Fourth Dynasty, shows son after son of a reigning monarch bearing titles of high government positions. Generally, for example, a prince was designated as the overseer of works, the chief engineer of the pharaoh’s pyramid and mortuary temple. This suggests that Egypt’s government originally consisted of the family of the pharaoh, although this changed as its population and power grew. By the end of the Old Kingdom and through the remainder of Egyptian history, nonroyals, nominated by the pharaoh, invariably bore the titles of government officers.

From then on, royal children who did not inherit the throne gener-ally became high priests and priestesses rather than officials in the civil government.

The evolved government consisted of four major branches. One managed the royal court and pharaoh’s estates; another, the armed forces (discussed in Chapter 10); another, the religious hierarchy;

and the remaining branch, managed the civil government. Each consisted of a pyramidal hierarchy (or, in the case of civil govern-ment, of two pyramids) that established a chain of authority and com-mand and provided a structure by which a pharaoh could impose his wishes on all the citizens of his sprawling country. Government’s overriding principle was that an Egyptian citizen should receive his distant pharaoh’s orders from a local person whom he knew and respected. This neat structure could become confused when mul-tiple titles were awarded to the same individual, effectively placing him in more than one branch of the government at once.

Civil Government

Civil government was headed by a tchety, conventionally trans-lated “vizier,” the highest civil official after the pharaoh. Two viziers, one for the north and another for the south, split the job and presided over separate central bureaucracies and governors of their respective sections of the country. The godly pharaoh stood far above practical details of management, so viziers bragged about

Government organization at the time of the New Kingdom.

Government and Society 73

how the least important citizen could approach them with his prob-lems, and how they oversaw the construction of magnificent tem-ples and pyramids. Such boasts were exaggerations. The vizier did not serve as a sole judge to adjudicate complaints—a complex legal system took care of such matters. Nor did most viziers possess the necessary architectural and construction skills to personally super-vise the construction of large buildings. The truth behind the boasts is that the tchety held ultimate responsibility for the justice system and for securing the talents required to build whatever a pharaoh commanded. The vizier was responsible for all civil business, which he conducted through ministers, most importantly treasury, tax col-lection, judicial appeal and regional governors, who, in turn, man-aged numerous functionaries.

Headed by an official whose title translates as “overseer of the house of gold,” the treasury collected crops and animals as payment-in-kind for taxes and handled their accounting and management.

Beneath this minister, an overseer of granaries and an overseer of cattle supervised numerous bureaucrats who managed facilities for provisioning the army, feeding workers on national projects and maintaining surpluses against lean years.

Taxes were levied and collected by another department whose many members roamed the country assigning an individual obliga-tion to every citizen. Levies were not based on how much an acre had produced that year, which would have encouraged farmers to hide part of the crop to lower their tax. Instead, a careful record was kept of how high the Nile rose during its annual inundation using “nilometers,” stone markers set along the river’s course.

The height of that year’s flood determined what, compared with the previous year, each farm should have produced regardless of what it did produce, and set a tax rate which generally hovered at about 10 percent⁶—not an onerous amount by modern standards.

Those who did not hand over their levied amounts were beaten or imprisoned.

The treasury and tax departments were considered so important that their heads reported directly to the pharaoh, like the vizier.

Both departments employed thousands of scribes to compute and record every transaction.

Regional government consisted of forty-two areas of the country called nomes, corresponding to our states, presided over by a local governor called a nomarch. Nomarchs maintained order in each ter-ritory and ensured that its assigned portion for national projects was supplied, whether in the form of taxes or labor. As the local

official with ties closest to the national government, nomarchs exer-cised great authority in their territory, sometimes acting almost as local kings. Below each nomarch stood town mayors, village chiefs, constabularies and district councils, or kenbets.

Kenbets,⁷ appointed by the area nomarch from the most respected citizens in each community, functioned as Egypt’s legal system, deciding most disputes, which generally concerned property. Most criminal cases and inheritance controversies also fell within their scope. Since the government did not operate through laws (no leg-islative body existed), kenbets functioned less as judges of a codi-fied legal system than as investigative committees to uncover the truthfulness of allegations. They took depositions from those who knew the character of a person bringing suit, searched voluminous archives for old records that might bear on the case, then rendered a decision.

If the decision did not satisfy both parties, the suit could be resub-mitted, but an unusual device was employed to end perennial liti-gation. The kenbet could relay the evidence to the statue of a god who would render a verdict, either by communicating to a priest or, more often, while carried on priests’ shoulders by stopping in front of one of the litigants to indicate the god’s favor. Usually the

“divine” authority of such a verdict ended the dispute.

Kenbets used several remedies to rectify wrongs. They could order property seized and transferred to the injured party. They could inflict physical punishment such as beatings (usually a hun-dred blows with a stick) or mutilation (cutting off an ear or nose).

Although no prisons existed in Egypt, the kenbet could sentence offenders to fixed periods of heavy labor in mines or quarries and could also exile serious criminals.

Since Egypt functioned with two capital cities, Memphis and Thebes, each maintained a Great Kenbet which served as a higher court for the lesser kenbets of the respective northern and southern territories. Each vizier held a seat on the Great Kenbet of his area, along with the top officials of the state, church and army. Capital offenses were assigned to the Great Kenbets alone, but, since these councils consisted of busy men of great responsibility, capital cases could not have been as frequent as in our day.