Book Review: Labour Organisation in Middle Kingdom Egypt

A determining element of the ancient Egyptian economy and society was the right of the state, personified in the Pharaoh, to demand the labour of its subjects and to use it for state projects. What this right was based on is not mentioned in the preserved sources. We have good reason to assume it was related to Pharaoh’s godlike position and was established during a historically long process of state formation. People did not fundamentally question it, which does not mean, however, that there had been no attempts to evade the duty of service. We are only very fragmentarily informed about the functioning of the system in detail, i.e. the institutions and officials involved in the recruitment of workers, the connected bureaucratic processes, the specification of the actual persons, the work for which they could be employed, the length of the official duty, the provisions, the state resources for the enforcement of labour obligations, as well as the development of the system over the millennia during which the ancient Egyptian state existed.

It is this area of ancient Egyptian society that M. Di Teodoro examines more closely for the Middle Kingdom under the term ‘Labour Organisation’. This book includes both written sources and archaeological evidence and finally compares the results obtained.

After an introductory chapter on the objectives of the book and the previous research dedicated to labour organisation in Middle Kingdom Egypt, ¹ Chapter 2 is devoted to the analysis of written sources. The author relies primarily on the Lahun papyri – a corpus of accounts and letters found by W. M. F. Petrie and L. Borchardt in the Middle Kingdom settlement associated with the Valley Temple of Sesostris II – which is now largely preserved in the Petrie Museum of Archaeology, University College London (UCL) and the Egyptian Museum Berlin. Her research is based on 34 fragments from Berlin, including 19 still unpublished, and 21 UCL letters and accounts. Other sources, such as the Reisner Papyri, an inscribed plate from the Middle Kingdom settlement of Elephantine, as well as a few other examples of detailed expeditions’ inscriptions are included in the discussion. The criterion for the selection of sources is the occurrence of four key terms related to compulsory labour: hȝw, ỉwȝw, ḥsbw, mnyw. Sources that do not mention these terms, such as the so-called ‘Control Notes’ on building blocks of the pyramids of the Middle Kingdom, were not included in the analysis. It is always legitimate to narrow down one’s own research base, but to regard the ‘Control Notes’ as irrelevant in this context seems not appropriate to me (p. 3). They contained information on the superiors of the workers involved in stone transport, on the origin of the latter, and their institutional assignment to a city, an institution or the household of an official. In this way, they supplement and reflect the image drawn by the workers’ lists on papyrus. ²

After analysing the papyrus sources, the author concludes (pp. 173–5) that the word hȝw ‘denoted the general obligation, covering the entire range of temporary compulsory labour. It was required from a local “middle stratum”, comprising those who could avoid manual labour by sending someone else from the household to meet the duty.’ Those individuals who performed the hȝw obligations were identified by the collective noun ḥsbw – ‘counted men’ once they were enrolled in the task. When the ‘regular’ workers failed to meet the duty, specific substitutes (ỉwȝw), mostly women, had to take over the duty. Thus they can be considered as ‘living guarantees’ or hostages (p. 87). The difference between ḥsbw and mnyw workers remains difficult to grasp. Finally, mnyw are identified as ‘members of a sub-group of the larger body identified with the collective term ḥsbw’ (p. 175). M. Di Teodoro can further substantiate this view, which has already been expressed by W. K. Simpson in his commentary on Papyrus Reisner I, ³ by the analysis of P. Berlin 10080 (pp. 57, 84). Furthermore, she has good reasons to reject the thesis put forward by K. A. Kóthay that mnyw were exclusively or mainly employed in agriculture (p. 84–5).

To the one mention of Old Kingdom evidence for mn(y)w workers (p. 49), ⁴ I would like to add another. Among the papyri from Gebelein there is a list of mn(j)w workers who have been registered for a month’s work for a temple of Snofru. The work was conducted by a ḫrp mn(j)w – ‘leader of the mnjw-workers’, who held ḥmwt – ‘craftsman’ as an additional designation. This could speak in favour of a deployment to support construction work. ⁵ The registered persons were residents of two villages – men as well as women – with a wide range of occupational titles. Beneath the name and the person determinative there is usually a vertical stroke representing the number one. In some cases, however, there are also two, three or even five strokes, so that the listed persons did not necessarily carry out the activity for which they were registered themselves but more likely represent heads of households who sent a certain number of their household members to compulsory work. This seems to be a parallel to the Lahun Papyri P. Berlin 10104, 10004 and 10065, which is interpreted similarly by M. Di Teodoro (p. 22).

The verso of P. Gebelein I shows another interesting phenomenon, namely the marking of people in the workers’ list by the sign km. ⁶ This brief note is certainly comparable with a passage in letter P. Berlin 10023 A1 (p. 32), in which the ‘temple overseer’ turns to the ‘temple scribe’ to follow up a complaint by the ‘temple doorkeeper’. He was apparently sent to work as substitute for his son because of a ‘deficit of state labour’. The reason of the complaint is indicated by mk pȝy.f sȝ km, which M. Di Teodoro translates as: ‘Look, his son has completed (his assignment?)’. ⁷ ‘Km’ has been part of accounting terminology since the Old Kingdom. H. Vymazalová writes in her research on the papyrus archive of Raneferef, ‘km … just provides the affirmation that the recorded transaction was completed, paid-in-full’. ⁸ ‘Km’ in connection with work obligations should therefore in any case have signified that the compulsory service has already been completed in full. The fact that compulsory labour could in principle be labelled as ‘completely performed’ suggests that – at least in theory – compulsory state labour could not be demanded indefinitely and completely arbitrarily. Unfortunately, we are not being informed of the underlying rules. Interesting in this context is, however, account UC 32186. It seems to suggest that a household was compensated by a certain amount of arable land for each deputed ḥsb worker, which could then be cultivated over several years, at least until the stipulated number of ḥsbw was finally called up for state labour. After the date and heading, the document refers to the ‘calculation of fields’ (ḥsb ȝḥwt) of a named wỉb-priest and phyle-leader in ‘year 26’. Then a group of five ḥsbw is named (rḫt ḥsbw) who should leave the household list and thus the household (prj wpt) in ‘year 33’. A certain area of fields with different qualities was assigned to them. That this is not about assigning a small quantity of ḥsbw to the work in the fields, as M. Di Teodoro suspects (p. 57), is made clear by the following line: ỉn.n.f m ȝḥt ḥknw ḫft aroura 1 n ḥsb 1 – ‘provided for him (obviously the wỉb-priest) from the field of praise(?) (probably temple fields) 1 auroura per ḥsb’. After a summation of the areas a statement follows: kmt.n.f ḫntj rḫt pn – ‘completed for him according to this list’, then the specification of the plots of land follows by the description of their location.

After the analysis of the papyrus documents, M. Di Teodoro turns under the heading ‘Labour management’ to the institutions ḫnrt/ḫnrt wr and the office ḫȝ n dd rmṯ – ‘bureau of issuing people’. She spends a great deal of effort on checking, particularly by means of stelae, which other groups of officials the bearers of ḫnrt/ḫnrt wr titles were related to. The result is ‘a complex web of correlations among offices with responsibilities for labour organisation at different levels’ (p. 174).

Chapter 3 is dedicated to archaeological sources. Here she examines which information on the organisation of labour can be obtained from the analysis of work camps. First, parallels from the Old Kingdom (the Gallery Complex of Heit el-Gurab) and the New Kingdom (the Workmen’s Village of Amarna) are examined. These are afterwards compared with two planned settlements of the Middle Kingdom: the late Twelfth Dynasty complex of Qasr es-Sagha in the western Faiyum area and the early Twelfth Dynasty settlement of Tell el-Dab’a (phase e/3) in the Eastern Delta. Finally, a comparison is made with ‘industrial sites’ which contained workshop areas for specialised craftsmen: Abu Ghalib and Ezbet Rushdi from the Middle Kingdom, Al Shaykh Said from the Old Kingdom, and the New Kingdom ‘Stone Village’ of Amarna. From the faunal remains the author tries to derive not only references to the social status of the inhabitants, but also to a temporary use of the state-controlled settlements.

As for Qasr es-Sagha M. Di Teodoro doubts, with good reason, that the foundation of the settlement was related to works in the nearby basalt quarries. The absence of sickle blades among the archaeological remains argues, on the other hand, also against the idea that here workers were concentrated for the land reclamation in the Faiyum region (p. 119), a function that is very likely for the settlement of Tell el-Dab’a (phase e/3) in the Eastern Nile Delta. Due to the lack of an alternative reason for the existence of Qasr es-Sagha, the author, however, finally sticks to the hypothesis ‘quarry site’ as the currently most plausible. The existence of the relatively small but – to judge from the quality of the preserved decorated basalt fragment (fig. 100) – by no means informal temple is, in my opinion, an indication that we do not yet have an adequate picture of this region on the edge of Lake Qarun with its fluctuating water levels.

Chapter 4 is a plea for the integrative use of written and archaeological sources to answer our research questions. M. Di Teodoro uses the material she has previously examined to investigate which types of evidence contribute in which way to answer what kind of inquiry. The attempt to integrate written and archaeological sources is welcome, but caution is required if written sources are not found in the same archaeological context. Therefore, an identification of the inhabitants of the planned settlement of Qasr es-Sagha with the ḥsbw ỉtḥw ỉnrw (‘counted stone haulers’) of the papyrus texts must remain speculation (p. 150).

In the concluding chapter M. di Teodoro again stresses that the general obligation hȝw, ‘covering the entire range of temporary compulsory labour … was required from a local “middle stratum”, comprising those who could avoid manual labour by sending someone else from the household to meet the duty’ (p. 174). However, to limit the liability to hAw obligations to a local ‘middle class’ would, in my opinion, not reflect social reality adequately. The papyri shed some light on the bureaucratic processes associated with the recruitment of workers for state projects. It was firstly the city as regional centre to which the central administration addressed the call for labour. After that, it was the city administration that specified the demands based on the household lists kept there, i.e. addressed them to specific households. The social position of the heads of households determined whether a household (pr) was considered independent or not. An independent household (local upper and middle classes) was addressed directly. Representatives of families subordinated to households of higher-ranking persons had to perform compulsory work as ‘Man of Person X’. ⁹

The book is completed by an appendix, a bibliography and some colour plates. The appendix comprises a complete list of dated textual sources mentioning workers, sources with attestations of the word ḫnrt or ḫnrt wr, as well as a list of officials named in the documents from Lahun who were involved in the management of temporary workers. Many illustrations in the text make it easier to follow the argumentation. An index would have further enhanced the user-friendliness of the book. The bibliographical references in the text and in the bibliography would have benefited from an additional check. However, these are only minor remarks, not meant to diminish the value of the book. It represents a valuable contribution to the ongoing debate on public labour obligations and the character of the Middle Kingdom State, so reading it is warmly recommended.

Petra Andrássy Humboldt-Universität zu Berlin, Germany