The Impact of Empire

Building an empire had a significant impact on Egypt, both in terms of costs, alloca­tion of resources, and expected returns. Egyptological scholarship is usually vague about the reasons underlying the Egyptian expansion abroad and vacillates be­tween security and economic motivation, the latter being reduced to the capture of booty and tribute and, consequently, to an exercise in “bringing wealth” into Egypt.

Traders figure frequently in New Kingdom sources as working for both institutions (for instance, for royal palace and temples) and for themselves (though not always officially), trading between cities along the Nile, selling and lending to private individuals and, in general, transforming commodities into precious metals and vice versa. The papyri that record the robbery of temples and royal tombs in the Late New Kingdom show, for instance, that traders were able to “launder” huge amounts of stolen gold and silver, thus confirming that both metals circulated widely in Egyptian society. Nevertheless, Egyptian traders were also very active in the Levant, and their activities are recorded in texts like the Amarna Letters,^[90] in the archaeological record,^[91] and even in literary texts, where exchange with the Syro- Levantine region is prominent among the business of wealthy individuals, who sold agricultural goods there.^[92] In fact, the circulation of caravans and traders in the Near East was at that time subject to careful regulations among states in order to facilitate their activities. Silver fueled these exchanges. The recent discovery of three small silver hoards at the Levantine-Egyptian garrison town of Beth-Shean, together with stone weights using the Egyptian deben as the basic unit (as well as fish from the Nile), is illustrative not only of the use of “money” in transactions, but also of the existence of a trade system that included commodities like dried fish.^[93] The export of Egyptian cereal was also a source of income, and shipments of grain to the Hittite Empire under Ramesses II, Merenptah, and Sethi II (1279-1194 bce) have been linked to the contemporary debasement of silver in Egypt, probably because it arrived in huge quantities as payment for the grain.

Of course, this does not mean that tribute imposed on foreign territories played a minor role, but its conspicuous, symbolic role as a source of exotic goods, as proof of foreign submission, and as an indicator of the extent of the king's authority have caused its role to be overvalued. In fact, what was in many instances unilat­erally presented as tribute, on grounds of ideology and prestige, should be better described as commercial transactions and exchanges of gifts.^[95] Nevertheless, the conquest of foreign territories was accompanied by the imposition of tribute in the form of taxes (e.g., slaves, cattle, horses, cereals, wine, oil, metals, and timber; in the case of Nubia, gold, ivory, precious skins of exotic animals, and ebony). It was also accompanied by the delivery of prestige goods (e.g., incense, gold, silver, pre­cious stones, and the products of craft specialists: chariots, wooden objects, prized textiles, stone vessels, as well as gold and silver items). Other services involved access to harbors and livestock centers in order to supply armies, messengers, diplomats, and Egyptian officials in transit.^[96] This usually meant that the resources of a given area were evaluated and taxes imposed, as in the case of the agricultural domains founded in the Jezreel Valley, which produced 207,300 sacks of wheat.^[97] In any case, the regular delivery of gold and silver by Levantine Egyptian vassals implies that trade was active in this region and that even small polities managed to accumulate significant quantities of precious metals. The campaign of Pharaoh Sheshonq I in Palestine (tenth century bce), which was followed by massive donations of gold and silver to the Egyptian temples (182 tons of silver in one case, 209 tons of gold and silver in another)^[98] give an idea of the wealth controlled by the pharaohs in previous centuries, when Egypt dominated, among other routes, the lucrative traffic in what would later become the Incense Road.^[99]

Temples figure among the main beneficiaries of tribute thanks to royal donations. This included precious metals, cattle, and serfs/slaves, to the point that “filling the stores of the temples” became a topos in royal inscriptions.

Another important consequence of empire was the rise of the army as a signif­icant social, economic, and political force.^[103] The military included highly skilled forces like charioteers and foreign mercenaries, as well as officials who occasionally played an important role in political events (the generals Horemheb and Herihor, for example, became pharaohs, while the Nineteenth Dynasty was founded by a family of military men from Lower Egypt). Nevertheless, the activities of the army were in no way limited to warfare, as soldiers and officials were also employed in agriculture, quarrying, mining, and building. In addition, it appears as an auton­omous branch of the administration, whose activities quite often overlapped with those of other departments. The fact that officials were rewarded with substantial agricultural domains, in many cases associated with temples, royal statues, and crown lands, altered the structure of the local elite. Military people appear as a rural gentry, closely linked to the monarchy in the Wilbour papyrus. They also ap­pear in inscriptions like those of Ahmose son of Abana, who, risen from the ranks, obtained land and slaves and was able to bequeath wealth to his descendants and to found a family that reached the upper echelons of the civil service. The same is true of Neshi, who was rewarded with a plot of land that became the subject of a long dispute among his descendants, centuries later. The army thus opened new paths for social promotion that enabled commoners to rise in society, accumulate wealth, and enter into patronage networks^[104] while serving the interests of the monarchy in key institutions (temples, for example), in the countryside, and in counterbalancing the influence of other sectors of the ruling elite (i.e., the priesthood, local nobility, and civil service).

As for the cost of empire, military losses appear to have been significant toward the end of the New Kingdom (this included personnel sent to the quarries and mines—up to 10 percent of the total under Ramesses IV, even 50 percent in other texts).