* 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).
