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.
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).