by Will Durant
For twenty-two years the Queen ruled in wisdom and peace; Thutmose III followed with a reign of many wars. Syria took advantage of Hatshepsut’s death to revolt; it did not seem likely to the Syrians that Thutmose, a lad of twenty-two, would be able to maintain the empire created by his father. But Thutmose set off in the very year of his accession, marched his army through Kantara and Gaza at twenty miles a day, and confronted the rebel forces at Har-Megiddo (i.e., Mt. Megiddo), a little town so strategically placed between the rival Lebanon ranges on the road from Egypt to the Euphrates that it has been the Ar-mageddon of countless wars from that day to General Allenby’s. In the same pass where in 1918 the British defeated the Turks, Thutmose III, 3397 years before, defeated the Syrians and their allies. Then Thutmose marched victorious through western Asia, subduing, taxing and levying tribute, and returned to Thebes in triumph six months after his departure.*42
This was the first of fifteen campaigns in which the irresistible Thutmose made Egypt master of the Mediterranean world. Not only did he conquer, but he organized; everywhere he left doughty garrisons and capable governors. The first man in known history to recognize the importance of sea power, he built a fleet that kept the Near East effectively in leash. The spoils that he seized became the foundation of Egyptian art in the period of the Empire; the tribute that he drained from Syria gave his people an epicurean ease, and created a new class of artists who filled all Egypt with precious things. We may vaguely estimate the wealth of the new imperial government when we learn that on one occasion the treasury was able to measure out nine thousand pounds of gold and silver alloy.43 Trade flourished in Thebes as never before; the temples groaned with offerings; and at Karnak the lordly Promenade and Festival Hall rose to the greater glory of god and king. Then the King retired from the battlefield, designed exquisite vases, and gave himself to internal administration. His vizier or prime minister said of him, as tired secretaries were to say of Napoleon: “Lo, His Majesty was one who knew what happened; there was nothing of which he was ignorant; he was the god of knowledge in everything; there was no matter that he did not carry out.”43a He passed away after a rule of thirty-two (some say fifty-four) years, having made Egyptian leadership in the Mediterranean world complete.
After him another conqueror, Amenhotep II, subdued again certain idolators of liberty in Syria, and returned to Thebes with seven captive kings, still alive, hanging head downward from the prow of the imperial galley; six of them he sacrificed to Amon with his own hand.44 Then another Thutmose, who does not count; and in 1412 Amenhotep III began a long reign in which the accumulated wealth of a century of mastery brought Egypt to the acme of her splendor. A fine bust in the British Museum shows him as a man at once of refinement and of strength, able to hold firmly together the empire bequeathed to him, and yet living in an atmosphere of comfort and elegance that might have been envied by Petronius or the Medici. Only the exhuming of Tutenkhamon’s relics could make us credit the traditions and records of Amenhotep’s riches and luxury. In his reign Thebes was as majestic as any city in history. Her streets crowded with merchants, her markets filled with the goods of the world, her buildings “surpassing in magnificence all those of ancient or modern capitals,”45 her imposing palaces receiving tribute from an endless chain of vassal states, her massive temples “enriched all over with gold”46 and adorned with every art, her spacious villas and costly chateaux, her shaded promenades and artificial lakes providing the scene for sumptuous displays of fashion that anticipated Imperial Rome47—such was Egypt’s capital in the days of her glory, in the reign before her fall.
III. THE CIVILIZATION OF EGYPT
1. Agriculture
Behind these kings and queens were pawns; behind these temples, palaces and pyramids were the workers of the cities and the peasants of the fields.* Herodotus describes them optimistically as he found them about 450 B.C.
They gather in the fruits of the earth with less labor than any other people, . . . for they have not the toil of breaking up the furrow with the plough, nor of hoeing, nor of any other work which all other men must labor at to obtain a crop of corn; but when the river has come of its own accord and irrigated their fields, and having irrigated them has subsided, then each man sows his own land and turns his swine into it; and when the seed has been trodden into it by the swine he waits for harvest time; then . . . he gathers it in.49
As the swine trod in the seed, so apes were tamed and taught to pluck fruit from the trees.50 And the same Nile that irrigated the fields deposited upon them, in its inundation, thousands of fish in shallow pools; even the same net with which the peasant fished during the day was used around his head at night as a double protection against mosquitoes.51 Nevertheless it was not he who profited by the bounty of the river. Every acre of the soil belonged to the Pharaoh, and other men could use it only by his kind indulgence; every tiller of the earth had to pay him an annual tax of ten52 or twenty53 per cent in kind. Large tracts were owned by the feudal barons or other wealthy men; the size of some of these estates may be judged from the circumstance that one of them had fifteen hundred cows.54 Cereals, fish and meat were the chief items of diet. One fragment tells the school-boy what he is permitted to eat; it includes thirty-three forms of flesh, forty-eight baked meats, and twenty-four varieties of drink.55 The rich washed down their meals with wine, the poor with barley beer.56
The lot of the peasant was hard. The “free” farmer was subject only to the middleman and the tax-collector, who dealt with him on the most time-honored of economic principles, taking “all that the traffic would bear” out of the produce of the land. Here is how a complacent contemporary scribe conceived the life of the men who fed ancient Egypt:
Dost thou not recall the picture of the farmer when the tenth of his grain is levied? Worms have destroyed half the wheat, and the hippopotami have eaten the rest; there are swarms of rats in the fields, the grasshoppers alight there, the cattle devour, the little birds pilfer; and if the farmer loses sight for an instant of what remains on the ground, it is carried off by robbers; moreover, the thongs which bind the iron and the hoe are worn out, and the team has died at the plough. It is then that the scribe steps out of the boat at the landing-place to levy the tithe, and there come the Keepers of the Doors of the (King’s) Granary with cudgels, and Negroes with ribs of palm-leaves, crying, “Come now, come!” There is none, and they throw the cultivator full length upon the ground, bind him, drag him to the canal, and fling him in head first; his wife is bound with him, his children are put into chains. The neighbors in the meantime leave him and fly to save their grain.57
It is a characteristic bit of literary exaggeration; but the author might have added that the peasant was subject at any time to the corvée, doing forced labor for the King, dredging the canals, building roads, tilling the royal lands, or dragging great stones and obelisks for pyramids, temples and palaces. Probably a majority of the laborers in the field were moderately content, accepting their poverty patiently. Many of them were slaves, captured in the wars or bonded for debt; sometimes slave-raids were organized, and women and children from abroad were sold to the highest bidder at home. An old relief in the Leyden Museum pictures a long procession of Asiatic captives passing gloomily into the land of bondage: one sees them still alive on that vivid stone, their hands tied behind their backs or their heads, or thrust through rude handcuffs of wood; their faces empty with the apathy that has known the last despair.
2. Industry
Miners—Manufactures—Workers—Engineers—Transport—Postal service—Commerce and finance—Scribes
Slowly, as the peasants toiled, an economic surplus grew, and food was laid aside for workers in industry and trade. Having no minerals, Egypt sought them in Arabia and Nubia. The great distances offered no temptation to private initiative, and for many centuries mining was a government monopoly.58 Copper was mined in small quantities,59 iron was imported from the Hittites, gold mines were found along the eastern coast, in Nubia, and i
n every vassal treasury. Diodorus Siculus (56 B.C.) describes Egyptian miners following with lamp and pick the veins of gold in the earth, children carrying up the heavy ore, stone mortars pounding it to bits, old men and women washing the dirt away. We cannot tell to what extent nationalistic exaggeration distorts the famous passage:
The kings of Egypt collect condemned prisoners, prisoners of war and others who, beset by false accusations, have been in a fit of anger thrown into prison. These—sometimes alone, sometimes with their entire family—they send to the gold mines, partly to exact a just vengeance for crimes committed by the condemned, partly to secure for themselves a big revenue through their toil. . . . As these workers can take no care’ of their bodies, and have not even a garment to hide their nakedness, there is no one who, seeing these luckless people, would not pity them because of the excess of their misery, for there is no forgiveness or relaxation at all for the sick, or the maimed, or the old, or for woman’s weakness; but all with blows are compelled to stick to their labor until, worn out, they die in their servitude. Thus the poor wretches even account the future more dreadful than the present because of the excess of their punishment, and look to death as more desirable than life.60
In its earliest dynasties Egypt learned the art of fusing copper with tin to make bronze: first, bronze weapons—swords, helmets and shields; then bronze tools—wheels, rollers, levers, pulleys, windlasses, wedges, lathes, screws, drills that bored the toughest diorite stone, saws that cut the massive slabs of the sarcophagi. Egyptian workers made brick, cement and plaster of Paris; they glazed pottery, blew glass, and glorified both with color. They were masters in the carving of wood; they made everything from boats and carriages, chairs and beds, to handsome coffins that almost invited men to die. Out of animal skins they made clothing, quivers, shields and seats; all the arts of the tanner are pictured on the walls of the tombs; and the curved knives represented there in the tanner’s hand are used by cobblers to this day.61 From the papyrus plant Egyptian artisans made ropes, mats, sandals and paper. Other workmen developed the arts of enameling and varnishing, and applied chemistry to industry. Still others wove tissues of the subtlest weave in the history of the textile art; specimens of linen woven four thousand years ago show today, despite time’s corrosion, “a weave so fine that it requires a magnifying glass to distinguish it from silk; the best work of the modern machine-loom is coarse in comparison with this fabric of the ancient Egyptian hand-loom.”62 “If,” says Peschel, “we compare the technical inventory of the Egyptians with our own, it is evident that before the invention of the steam-engine we scarcely excelled them in anything.”63
The workers were mostly freemen, partly slaves. In general every trade was a caste, as in modern India, and sons were expected to follow and take over the occupations of their fathers.64* The great wars brought in thousands of captives, making possible the large estates and the triumphs of engineering. Rameses III presented 113,000 slaves to the temples during the course of his reign.66 The free artisans were usually organized for the specific undertaking by a “chief workman” or overseer, who sold their labor as a group and paid them individually. A chalk tablet in the British Museum contains a chief workman’s record of forty-three workers, listing their absences and their causes—“ill,” or “sacrificing to the god,” or just plain “lazy.” Strikes were frequent. Once, their pay being long overdue, the workmen besieged the overseer and threatened him. “We have been driven here by hunger and thirst,” they told him; “we have no clothes, we have no oil, we have no food. Write to our lord the Pharaoh on the subject, and write to the governor” (of the nome) “who is over us, that they may give us something for our sustenance.”67 A Greek tradition reports a great revolt in Egypt, in which the slaves captured a province, and held it so long that time, which sanctions everything, gave them legal ownership of it; but of this revolt there is no record in Egyptian inscriptions.68 It is surprising that a civilization so ruthless in its exploitation of labor should have known—or recorded—so few revolutions.
Egyptian engineering was superior to anything known to the Greeks or Romans, or to Europe before the Industrial Revolution; only our time has excelled it, and we may be mistaken. Senusret III, for example, built† a wall twenty-seven miles long to gather into Lake Moeris the waters of the Fayum basin, thereby reclaiming 25,000 acres of marsh land for cultivation, and providing a vast reservoir for irrigation.69 Great canals were constructed, some from the Nile to the Red Sea; the caisson was used for digging,70 and obelisks weighing a thousand tons were transported over great distances. If we may credit Herodotus, or judge from later undertakings of the same kind represented in the reliefs of the Eighteenth Dynasty, these immense stones were drawn on greased beams by thousands of slaves, and raised to the desired level on inclined approaches beginning far away.71 Machinery was rare because muscle was cheap. See, in one relief, eight hundred rowers in twenty-seven boats drawing a barge laden with two obelisks;72 this is the Eden to which our romantic machine-wreckers would return. Ships a hundred feet long by half a hundred feet wide plied the Nile and the Red Sea, and finally sailed the Mediterranean. On land goods were transported by human muscle, later by donkeys, later by the horse, which probably the Hyksos brought to Egypt; the camel did not appear till Ptolemaic days.73 The poor man walked, or paddled his simple boat; the rich man rode in sedan-chairs carried by slaves, or later in chariots clumsily made with the weight placed entirely in front of the axle.74
There was a regular postal service; an ancient papyrus says, “Write to me by the letter-carrier.”75 Communication, however, was difficult; roads were few and bad, except for the military highway through Gaza to the Euphrates;76 and the serpentine form of the Nile, which was the main highroad of Egypt, doubled the distance from town to town. Trade was comparatively primitive; most of it was by barter in village bazaars. Foreign commerce grew slowly, restricted severely by the most up-to-date tariff walls; the various kingdoms of the Near East believed strongly in the “protective principle,” for customs dues were a mainstay of their royal treasuries. Nevertheless Egypt grew rich by importing raw materials and exporting finished products; Syrian, Cretan and Cypriote merchants crowded the markets of Egypt, and Phoenician galleys sailed up the Nile to the busy wharves of Thebes.77
Coinage had not yet developed; payments, even of the highest salaries, were made in goods—corn, bread, yeast, beer, etc. Taxes were collected in kind, and the Pharaoh’s treasuries were not a mint of money, but storehouses of a thousand products from the fields and shops. After the influx of precious metals that followed the conquests of Thutmose III, merchants began to pay for goods with rings or ingots of gold, measured by weight at every transaction; but no coins of definite value guaranteed by the state arose to facilitate exchange. Credit, however, was highly developed; written transfers frequently took the place of barter or payment; scribes were busy everywhere accelerating business with legal documents of exchange, accounting and finance.
Every visitor to the Louvre has seen the statue of the Egyptian scribe, squatting on his haunches, almost completely nude, dressed with a pen behind the ear as reserve for the one he holds in his hand. He keeps record of work done and goods paid, of prices and costs, of profits and loss; he counts the cattle as they move to the slaughter, or corn as it is measured out in sale; he draws up contracts and wills, and makes out his master’s income-tax; verily there is nothing new under the sun. He is sedulously attentive and mechanically industrious; he has just enough intelligence not to be dangerous. His life is monotonous, but he consoles himself by writing essays on the hardships of the manual worker’s existence, and the princely dignity of those whose food is paper and whose blood is ink.
3. Government
The bureaucrats—Law—The vizier—The pharaoh
With these scribes as a clerical bureaucracy the Pharaoh and the provincial nobles maintained law and order in the state. Ancient slabs show such clerks taking the census, and examining income-tax returns. Throug
h Nilometers that measured the rise of the river, the scribe-officials forecast the size of the harvest, and estimated the government’s future revenue; they allotted appropriations in advance to governmental departments, supervised industry and trade, and in some measure achieved, almost at the outset of history, a planned economy regulated by the state.78
Civil and criminal legislation were highly developed, and already in the Fifth Dynasty the law of private property and bequest was intricate and precise.79 As in our own days, there was absolute equality before the law—whenever the contesting parties had equal resources and influence. The oldest legal document in the world is a brief, in the British Museum, presenting to the court a complex case in inheritance. Judges required cases to be pled and answered, reargued and rebutted, not in oratory but in writing—which compares favorably with our windy litigation. Perjury was punished with death.80 There were regular courts, rising from local judgment-seats in the nomes to supreme courts at Memphis, Thebes, or Heliopolis.81 Torture was used occasionally as a midwife to truth;82 beating with a rod was a frequent punishment, mutilation by cutting off nose or ears, hand or tongue, was sometimes resorted to,83 or exile to the mines, or death by strangling, empaling, beheading, or burning at the stake; the extreme penalty was to be embalmed alive, to be eaten slowly by an inescapable coating of corrosive natron.84 Criminals of high rank were saved the shame of public execution by being permitted to kill themselves, as in samurai Japan.85 We find no signs of any system of police; even the standing army—always small because of Egypt’s protected isolation between deserts and seas—was seldom used for internal discipline. Security of life and property, and the continuity of law and government, rested almost entirely on the prestige of the Pharaoh, maintained by the schools and the church. No other nation except China has ever dared to depend so largely upon psychological discipline.