Revenue from land in ancient Egypt.
Sesostris is said to have obtained his revenue from the holders of κλῆροι in Egypt in proportion to the amount of land in each man's occupation;[311] and Pharaoh, having bought all the land at the time of the famine in Egypt except that which supported the priests, took one-fifth of all the produce, leaving the remainder “for seed of the field,” and for the food of the cultivators, and their households and little ones. “And Joseph made it a law over the land of Egypt unto this day, that Pharaoh should have the fifth part, except the land of the priests only, which became not Pharaoh's.”[312]
In this case Pharaoh became proprietor by purchase of the land in Egypt. But it must not be supposed that by exacting a payment from the occupier, the overlord as a rule had any power over the ownership of the soil. He no doubt had proprietary rights over his own estate, and may or may not have had power to regulate any further distribution of the waste. But the right of receiving dues, or of appointing another to receive them, gave him no power over the actual tillage of the soil.
Grants of land to the prince easily made, in their elastic system of agriculture.
The maintenance of the prince was a first charge apparently upon the property of his subjects; and it is easy to see how the lion's share would always be allotted to him, alike of booty as of acquired territory. As long as the community was pastoral, it is also easy to imagine how the chief both increased his own wealth and admitted favoured companions or resident strangers to a share in the elastic area of [pg 118] the common pasturage. After agriculture had assumed equal importance in the economy of the tribe as the tending of flocks and herds, one is apt to forget that for centuries—perhaps for thousands of years—the system of agriculture that grew up, still possessed much of the elasticity of the old pastoral methods. Under the open field system, such a custom as that described by Tacitus and in the Welsh Laws, viz. of ploughing up out of the pasture or waste sufficient to admit of each tribesman having his due allotment, and letting it lie waste again the next year, admitted of considerable readjustment to meet the exigencies of declining population, as well as providing an easy means whereby any stranger prince, like Bellerophon, who might be admitted to the tribe, could be allotted either a τέμενος apart, or a κλῆρος in the open plain.
Pindar describes this method of cultivation when he says:—
“Fruitful fields in turn now yield to man his yearly bread upon the plains, and now again they pause and gather back their strength.”[313]
Such grants were a special honour, and served to relieve other contributions.
It is noticeable that the Aetolians offered Meleagros a τέμενος in the fattest part of the plain, wherever he might choose, as a gift (δῶρον); and as the τέμενος would certainly be cultivated by slave or hired labour, what they really gave him was the right of receiving the produce from the 50 guai composing the τέμενος. But this gift was meant as a special honour or bribe, and took a special form in being in land as a means of permanent enrichment.
In similar wise Ezekiel suggested the capitalisation, as it were, by a gift of land of the contributions to the princes, which no doubt were felt to be very irksome. In the division of the land, a portion was to be set aside first for the use of the temple and priests, then a portion for the prince.