Egypt of the Pharaohs and of the Khedivé

by F. Barham Zincke

From whence, then, did this remote civilization come? Was it indigenous, or was it from abroad? or, if derived from these two sources, in what degree did each contribute? Is there any possibility of recovering any of the early dates, or of at all measuring roughly any of the periods of the early history? I have already said something on these questions, and shall return to them, whenever we shall have reached any point, from which there may appear to be emitted some ray of light which falls upon them.

CHAPTER VII.
LABOUR WAS SQUANDERED ON PYRAMIDS, BECAUSE IT COULD NOT BE BOTTLED UP.

Faute de mieux.

It is essential to the right understanding of any age that we have a general knowledge of its monetary and economical condition. This, which in ordinary histories is passed over with little or no notice, does, in truth, largely affect the character of men’s works and deeds, their manners and customs, and even their thoughts and feelings. It had much influence on the history of the old world: we see it distinctly at work in that of the Roman Empire. And we are now beginning to understand how largely it is influencing the course of events amongst ourselves at the present moment. With respect to the Pyramids, who was to build them, the means by which they were to be built, and that they were to be built at all, depended on the monetary and economical condition of the Egypt of that day. To elucidate this is to advance a step in the reconstruction and revivifying of the period.

Herodotus tells us that he saw inscribed on the Great Pyramid how many talents of silver (1,600 was the number) had been expended in supplying the hands employed on the work with radishes, onions, and garlic. He says he had a distinct recollection of what the interpreter told him on the subject. We believe this, because he was no inventor of fables, but an accurate and veracious recorder of what he saw and heard. The idea of history—that is, of what is properly called history, which is exclusive of intentional deception and misrepresentation—was the uppermost idea in his mind. The internal evidence of his great, varied, and precious work demonstrates this.

There is, however, another reason for our believing this particular piece of information he gives us about the Great Pyramid, which is, that it is in strict accord with what we know of the period to which his statement belongs. Silver was at that time not coined but weighed, and therefore, necessarily, the inscription would speak of such a weight of silver, and not of so many coins of a certain denomination. At that time there were not in existence any coins of any denomination. In the history of Joseph we have frequent mention of money without any qualifying terms; but on the one occasion in the narrative, where it becomes necessary to speak precisely on the subject, Joseph’s brethren do so by saying that their money was in full weight. Money then, we may suppose, as late as the time of the Pentateuch, was silver that was weighed, and not coined. This is in accordance with another statement of Herodotus, that the Lydians, the most mercantile neighbours of the Greeks, were the people who first coined money.

Now that the Egyptians had at this time no coined money, proves that their taxes—as is very much the case at this day with their chief tax, that on land—were paid in kind. In an age when silver was so scarce that the idea of coining it, for the purpose of giving to it easy and general circulation, had not occurred, and it was passing from hand to hand of the few who possessed it by weight, the actual tillers of the soil, always in the East, and not less so in Egypt than elsewhere, a poor and oppressed class, could not have had silver to pay their rents and taxes. The wealth, therefore, of Pharaoh must have consisted mainly of produce.

The next point is, that no profitable investments for what silver, or precious things, a few might have possessed, were known, or possible then. It was not only that there were no Government stocks, and no shares paying dividends, but that there was nothing at all that could be resorted to for such purposes. If a man had invested money in anything he would have stood out before the world as a rich man, and so as a man to be squeezed. Doubtless there was less of this in Egypt than elsewhere in the East, but in those early and arbitrary days there must have been, at times, even in Egypt, somewhat of it. People, therefore, would not, as a general rule, have invested had it been possible. But it was utterly impossible, for the double reason that there was nothing to invest, and nothing to invest in.

What people invest is capital. Capital is bottled-up labour, convertible again, at pleasure, into labour, or the produce of labour. But in those days labour could not be bottled up, except by a very few in the form of silver ingots. In these days every kitchen-maid can bottle up labour in the shape of coin, which is barren bottling-up, and invest it in a saving’s bank account, or in some other way, which is fruitful bottling-up. I ask permission to use these incongruous metaphors, one on the top of the other. Every grown-up person in the kingdom can bottle up labour, and invest it; and, as a matter of fact, there are few who, at one time or other of their lives, do not. Some have succeeded in doing it to such an enormous amount that they might with the accumulated store build a Pyramid greater than that of Cheops. It is, indeed, with the labour that has been bottled up by private individuals that we have constructed all our railways, docks, and gas works, and with which we carry out all our undertakings, great and small, in this country. There is no limit to our capacity for bottling up labour. It is one of our greatest exports; we send it all over the world, to Russia, to America, to India, and to Egypt itself. It is estimated that we store up somewhere about 150,000,000 pounds worth every year.