Professional Documents
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Ancient Egyptian Administration: Juan Carlos Moreno García
Ancient Egyptian Administration: Juan Carlos Moreno García
Edited by
Juan Carlos Moreno García
LEIDEN • BOSTON
2013
Coping with the Army: The Military and the State in the
New Kingdom ................................................................................ 639
Andrea M. Gnirs
about his king-making abilities: “he who put the king [on] the throne
of his father”.
Such a balanced approach can prove to be quite valuable in the
analysis of governmental reforms, especially with the realization that
they constitute invaluable evidence concerning the interests, goals,
structure, and balance of power within Egyptian society at a given
moment and, especially, among the ruling elite (or, at least, its domi-
nant sectors, i.e., those which are best documented). The impact of
such reforms is obvious in aspects like the allocation of resources and
the structure of the elite itself (it may be useful to consider such fac-
ets as the resistance encountered by other actors in social and politi-
cal life, the co-opting of emerging and formerly neglected sectors of
the elite, the search for new allies, deeper intervention in areas previ-
ously ignored, etc.). Such measures had the potential to alter the global
hierarchy and organization of bureaucracy significantly at any given
moment, depending on the needs of the state, the limits of its author-
ity, and the current balance of power. The language in which they were
couched in the limited documentary record available (depending on
the dominant cultural traditions and values at a given time) can be a
significant source of trouble for modern researchers, especially if polit-
ical conflict was expressed in, say, religious terms. For example, should
the Amarna episode be interpreted as an exclusively religious reform
and as proof of a particular royal initiative? Or, rather, should it be
seen as a genuine and rare sign of deep-seated change in the interests
and the balance of power between competing sectors within the ruling
elite, and even between regions, expressed in new and original terms,
from which only the artistic and religious results have survived? Gov-
ernmental reforms thus provide a further argument against the view
that ancient Egyptian administration was a monolithic, essentially
unchanging structure over the centuries. Rather, a social, political,
historical, and diachronic perspective is indispensable in any analysis,
even within individual, well-defined historical periods like, say, the
Old or the New Kingdom.
Another limit to the efficiency of the bureaucracy was that the accu-
mulation of reforms, the creation of new divisions, the incorporation
of new sectors of the elite into the governmental apparatus, and the
expansion of the court and its factions could lead to a gradual paralysis
in decision-making and to the emergence of autonomous institutions
and spheres of influence more concerned with their own immediate
interests than with the effectiveness and the smooth working capacity
But titles and officials are only one aspect of Egyptian adminis-
tration, and it would be a mistake to ignore the fact that power and
administrative capacities were also held by informal authorities, whose
collaboration with the administration was essential for the operation of
the system. Local potentates, governors of villages, ‘patrons’, ‘big men’,
chiefs, and men of influence were necessary intermediaries on behalf
of the crown and its agents when dealing with local affairs, like imple-
menting orders emanating from the court to evaluate local resources,
to mobilize manpower, or to quell protests or forestall potential resis-
tance. The organization of teams of workers in Old and Middle King-
dom times reveals that, in many cases, the manpower came from the
domains and districts controlled by such powerful men. In other cases,
they provided the means necessary to cultivate the crown or temple
fields in a given area. However, the fact that they were not members
of the administration, and that in many cases they probably lacked any
formal scribal training, made it difficult for them to produce written
evidence or to have access to the prestige monuments and goods which
symbolized the fact of being part of the ruling elite. A related problem
is that the sophisticated cultural values dominant among officials and
members of the court were also alien to them, especially in the local
environment where they lived, worked, and exerted their influence.
Thus it is quite difficult to find any trace of them in the archaeological
record, as they were not buried in the cemeteries of the high elite and
they did not usually own statues, decorated tombs, inscribed objects,
or the kind of precious items produced by royal or highly special-
ized workshops and proudly displayed by dignitaries, courtiers, and
high officials. But they nevertheless constituted an ‘invisible’ sub-elite,
only marginally evoked in texts and, in some occasions, visible thanks
to the exceptional possession of monuments usually reserved for the
elite. They represented the ‘other’ administration and any study of the
Egyptian administration would be incomplete without referring to
them.
This leads to another common assumption about ancient Phara-
onic administration, the widespread use of writing and documents,
as well as the existence of some kind of ‘administrative rationality’
comparable to our own. So, for instance, it has been posited that a
true justice system was operative in ancient Egypt, a system which
included specific divisions, appointed judges, adhered to formal proce-
dures, and produced juridical documents. In fact nothing proves that
it was the case, and what some Egyptologists call somewhat abusively
1
Unfortunately, the planned chapter on the administration of the Third Interme-
diate Period and the organizational, scribal and executive changes occurred then was
never delivered by the author who had accepted to produce it.