Think Like an Egyptian by Barry Kemp Read Free Book Online Page B

is never stated. Even kings faced the same fate. It was evidently a visceral dread that tells us something very important about the quality of life in ancient Egypt. You never knew when your name would appear on a list, even though you might be one of the elite.
    The figurines, called shabti or ushabti by the Egyptians, were laid in the tomb. Chapter 6 of the Book of the Dead was often written on them, and they are shown with a hoe and a basket for carrying lumps of earth. These symbolized field labor of the most basic kind. The numbers of ushabti- figures multiplied during the later New Kingdom and afterward. The ideal was a ushabti for every day of the year, and a complement of overseer figures (who carry a whip) to look after the ushabti -figures in gangs of 10, making a set of 365 ushabti -figures and 36 overseers—401 in total. A papyrus receipt has survived for just such a set of 401 figures, sold for silver to a priest by the “chief maker of amulets of the temple of Amun.” It is likely that the temple would receive a portion of the payment, if not all, illustrating that organized religion in ancient Egypt relied in large part upon conventional economic transactions.

16.
    SICKLE
     
     
     
     
    Egyptians mainly grew cereal of two kinds: emmer wheat—which does not thresh easily and has tough, spiky heads—and barley. We know from tomb scenes of the harvest that the ears and heads of the cereal were cut quite high, leaving much of the straw standing. The cutting was done by a curved wooden sickle that sported a line of serrated flint blades on the inside edge. Flint was used for perhaps 3,000 years after the introduction of copper and bronze for other kinds of cutting edges and illustrates how, in traditional societies, individual technologies can keep going as an independent tradition if they satisfy the user.
    Once gathered, the ears of emmer wheat and barley were hauled off the fields in large baskets, sometimes slung over the backs of donkeys. Their destination was a piece of hard, dry, and clean ground set aside for threshing and winnowing. Here the cereals were spread out in a layer. Hoofed animals were driven back and forth across them to separate the ears from the heads. The chaff and dust were separated by men repeatedly tossing the trodden grain into the air using a pair of wooden scoops, to allow the breeze to carry away the lighter unwanted elements. The cleaned grain was scooped into containers and heaped onto a prepared mud surface with a raised rim. Scribes, ever disdainful of manual labor, counted the scoops (which had a fixed capacity) and so measured the harvest.

17.
    GRAIN PILE
     
     
     
     
    Full granaries were a source of great satisfaction. It was, however, the heap of measured grain standing on a low mud platform beside the threshing floor that more readily symbolized the successful harvest and gave rise to a hieroglyph. Behind the successful harvest, and in contrast to the simplicity of the technology, lay a complex system of land management. Much of the land seems not to have been in the hands of farmers at all, but owned by temples and members of the governing class (including the royal family). They, in turn, rented out large parts of the grain lands to others, who might then employ lesser people to do the work. Even the extent to which farms existed, in the form of discrete areas of land with one owner, with a farmhouse in the middle, is far from clear. When we do have more detail, estates, especially those belonging to temples, seem to be made up of plots of land in different parts of the country, the accumulated result of centuries of buying and selling, of subdivided inheritance and of gifts and rewards.
    Much depended upon the reliability of agents paid to manage the estates, whose owners would often have been busy, and distant officials. And so Egypt, like other similar ancient societies, developed systems of bureaucratic checking. Egypt was a very controlled society. No one,