Trade played a subordinate part in the internal economy of the country. There was, naturally, a great deal of barter between individuals. There were markets where food, especially garden produce, or birds netted in the fields, or fish, were exchanged for tools or sandals or walking-sticks, necklaces, textiles or oils—luxuries or articles which, although issued by the estate office, might not, in quantity or quality, suit everyone. Barter in the market-place allowed a man to adjust his share in various goods to his own particular taste or to dispose of catches or produce obtained on the side. These markets are sometimes depicted in the tombs, and we know that already, in the Old Kingdom, pieces of metal served as standards of value. An important object was said to be worth so and so many rings. In the New Kingdom this system was simplified, and the value of an object was said to be so much weight (deben) of gold, silver, or copper. In the New Kingdom, too, the closer contact with Syria made more imported articles available for the market trade. A tomb-painting shows a Phoenician ship just made fast at the quay of Thebes. Some of the crew have gone ashore and approach booths where sandals, linen, fruits, and vegetables can be exchanged for a jug of Syrian oil or wine. This type of trade remained, however, purely marginal to the economy of Egypt. Neither the home-grown staple products nor the main imports were distributed through the markets. We do not meet the word “merchant” until the second millennium B.C., when it designates the official of a temple privileged to trade abroad.
Raw materials which Egypt lacked were procured through royal expeditions, organized by the Exchequer (which included among its personnel interpreters to assist the commanders in various foreign countries).[167] These expeditions were of two types. In Nubia, the eastern and western desert, and in Sinai, the nomad tribes and poor peasants could not oppose the Egyptians in any way at all. The army came and took what it needed. On quarrying and mining expeditions the military component of the expedition was no more than an armed escort, while the bulk of the “army” (as it was called) consisted of navvies to assist a core of trained stone-cutters or miners.
Another type of expedition was required to obtain wood from the Lebanon and frankincense and myrrh from Punt, the Somali coast. These lands were outside the sphere of Egyptian military influence, and the native rulers could ask for a price. This was offered in the form of royal presents to favourite vassals, and their products were listed as tribute. In reality there was an exchange; some splendid and extremely costly Egyptian jewellery, inscribed with the names of Pharaohs of the Twelfth Dynasty, has been found in tombs of the local princes of Byblos at the foot of the Lebanon. Coniferous roofing beams in the tombs of the First Egyptian Dynasty and a record of a sea expedition of Snefru of the Fourth Dynasty prove the great age of this lumber trade with the Levant. And from a late period we have the following list of objects which an Egyptian envoy—Wenamon—offered in exchange for wood from the Lebanon:
Five gold and five silver vessels; ten garments of royal linen; ten pieces of other linen; five hundred pieces of fine paper; five hundred cattle skins; five hundred ropes; twenty bags of lentils; thirty baskets of fish.
The Phoenician export included, besides wood, oil, wine, resin, and ivory.
It has been said that Pharaoh was the only wholesale merchant in Egypt and that foreign trade was a royal monopoly. But the implication of profit-making and exploitation is inappropriate. It was merely due to the complete consistency with which the Egyptians had organized their community as a centralized monarchy that they supplied themselves with the foreign materials of which they stood in need by means of royal expeditions. It is curious evidence of the practical effectiveness of Pharaonic rule that the absolute monarchy of Egypt did supply essential commodities, whether imported or produced at home, to the people as a whole in sufficient quantities; the distribution took place “from above,” the king making gifts and allotments to his officials who in turn rewarded their retainers and so down the social scale. And in the First Intermediate period, when royal power suffered an eclipse, the texts contain a complaint that there is no wood available for the making of coffins.
Whatever aspect of Egyptian society we have scrutinized, we have found Pharaoh at the centre. Yet nothing would be more misleading than to picture the Egyptians in abject submission to their absolute ruler. Their state can be described as “a self-directed organism held together by a common regard for customary rights and obligations.”[168] Their polity was not imposed but evolved from immemorial predilections, and was adhered to, without protest, for almost three thousand years. Similar predilections have, in fact, maintained the institution of divine kingship among Africans related to the ancient Egyptians down to our own days. It was good, not evil; it gave a sense of security which the Asiatic contemporaries of the ancient Egyptians totally lacked. If a god had consented to guide the nation, society held a pledge that the unaccountable forces of nature would be well disposed and bring prosperity and peace. Nor does the Egyptian view lack ethical content. Truth, justice, were “that by which the gods live,” an essential element in the established order. Hence Pharaoh’s rule was not tyranny, nor his service slavery.
APPENDIX
The Influence of Mesopotamia on Egypt Towards the End of the Fourth Millennium B.C.[169]
The problem to which we turn now has been discussed intermittently for the last fifty years, but in the earlier discussions preconceived ideas played a considerable part. For while it is admitted that intercourse stimulates individuals, it is often believed that granting foreign influence to have affected a people is derogatory. The essential difference between mechanical copying and creative borrowing, between a slavish dependence on foreign examples and a free selection of congenial material, is entirely overlooked. Another circumstance, too, has militated against an unbiased weighing of the evidence. When our knowledge of the ancient Near East was fragmentary, it was habitual to explain changes in terms of conquest and immigration from some hypothetical, as yet unknown, region; but the extensive explorations which took place between the two world wars have discredited this type of explanation, and the supposed homelands of the newcomers proved, in cultural matters, to have been peripheral dependencies of the two great centres in Egypt and Mesopotamia. These, on the other hand, were seen to have been unusually resistant to foreign influence and capable of imposing conformity upon all comers.[170]
Our increased knowledge has thus induced an unwillingness to appeal to foreign influence or migrations as explanations of cultural changes. Now, however, the opposite viewpoint receives exaggerated emphasis, and we find students proudly proclaiming their ignorance of anthropology and emphasizing, without a critical examination of all the facts, the autonomy and self-containedness of the great cultural centres of the Near East.