Pharaonic Egypt: society, economy and culture

Economy and society

Fields and marshes

The establishment of the Pharaonic state around the year – 3000 and the little-known period that followed undoubtedly corresponded with great economic development. There is no means of knowing whether the need to co-ordinate irrigation was the principal cause of the formation of a unified state, or whether the unification of the country under the Thinite kings, together with the development of writing, made it possible to co-ordinate the regional economies by rationalizing basic construction work and ensuring the organized distribution of food resources. What is clear is that, until the nineteenth century of the Christian era, Egypt’s prosperity and vitality were to be tied to the cultivation of cereals (wheat, barley). A system of flood basins, which controlled and distributed the flood water and silt inside earth embankments, endured until the modern triumph of year-round irrigation: there is evidence that it existed as early as the Middle Kingdom, and in all probability it had taken shape even earlier. Obviously, this system only permitted one crop a year. On the other hand, the shortness of the agricultural cycle made plenty of manpower available for major operations on the construction of religious and royal buildings. The Ancient Egyptians also practised year-round irrigation by raising water from the canals or from pits dug down to the water-table, but for a long time human legs and human shoulders bearing yokes were the only ‘machines’ for raising water known, and watering by means of ditches was used only for vegetables, fruit trees and vineyards.

Bread and beer made from grain were the staple diet, but the Ancient Egyptians’ food was astonishingly varied. One is struck by the types of cakes and bread listed in the texts. As today, gardens provided broad beans, chick peas and other pulses, onions, leeks, lettuces and cucumbers: Orchards furnished dates, figs, sycamore nuts and grapes. Skilful cultivation of the vine, practised mainly in the Delta and in the oases, produced a great variety of wines. Bee-keeping provided honey. Oil was extracted from sesame and nabk, the olive tree introduced during the New Kingdom remaining rare and not very successful.

Pharaonic Egypt did not transform the whole of the Nile Valley into productive land and gardens. The vast marshes and lakes along the northern edges of the Delta and the

79write a summary of two pages