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Egyptian Provincial Administration in the Early Middle Kingdom

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Egyptian Provincial Administration in the Early Middle Kingdom 1 EGYPTIAN PROVINCIAL ADMINISTRATION IN THE EARLY MIDDLE KINGDOM Laverne Schnare PhD University College 1 The objective of this paper is an historical study of the workings of the provincial government of the late Eleventh and early Twelfth Dynasties, pri- marily on the basis of the titles of the officials of that Period, particularly the provincial governors. To this end, a Prosopography of early Middle Kingdom officials is included in Chapter two and four Appen- dices chart the frequency and patterns of occurrence of twenty-three separate titles held by these officials. The evidence points to a destruction of the old 'feudal' system of provincial government during the late Eleventh Dynasty and its transformation, in the early Twelfth Dynasty, into a system of centralized control of provincial affairs. High-ranking royal officials bearing the titles of provincial governors were stationed in certain key geographical areas. Like most high offices, the governorship at this per- iod seems to have been an appointive office and not an hereditary one. This fact, in addition to the individuals' close relationship to the king, seems to have ensured the loyalty of these officials to the Crown. By stabilizing the provincial administration and re-establishing strong central control, Amenemhat I and ýS'enusert I created the conditions necessary for the rapid expansion of the Twelfth Dynasty into Nubia. 2 A, CKNOWLEDGEMENTS There are a number of people to whom I would like to express my gratitude for their help and encouragement either in my academic life in general or in the writing of this particular paper. My sincere thanks to Dr. Gerald E. Kadish and Dr. D. B. Redford for a firm foundation, to Prof. H. S. Smith and Ms. Anthea Page at University College for all their hard work on my behalf, to Dr. J. Malek at the Griffith Institute for giving me access to the files there, to Dr. H. Satzinger of the Kunsthistorisches Museum for helping me to find my way through the collection there, and to the staffs of the Wilbour Library at the Brooklyn Museum and the New York Public Library Refer- ence Collection for being helpful and friendly at all times. I would also like to thank Dr. V. Menning for many helpful suggestions during the typing of this paper. And special thanks are due to Dr. G. T. Martin who carefully read this work at several different stages and offered many valuable suggestions as well as making available his own knowledge of the field. 3 ABBREVIATIONS ASAE Annales du Service des Antiquites de .00 llEgypte BIFAO Bulletin de l'Institut Franýais d'Arch- **o eologie Orientale du Gaire BMMA BuZZetin of the MetropoZitan Museum of Art., New York JEA JournaZ of Egyptian ArchaeoZogy JNES JournaZ of Near Eastern Studies LAAA University of LiverpooZ AnnaZs of Arch- aeoZogy and AnthropoZogy LS Lange, H. 0. and J. H. Sch'afer, Grab-und Denksteine des mittleren Reiches im Museum von Kairo_, No. 20001 - 20780. Berlin, Reichsdruckerie, 1902-25.4 vols. IVDAIK Mitteilungen des deutschen Instituts fýr agyptische Alterthumskunde in Kairo Pm Porter, B. and R. Moss, Topographical Bibliography of Ancient Egyptian Hiero- glyphic Texts, ReZiefs_, and Paintings. Oxford, Clarendon Press, 1927-51.7 vols. 2 nd I 1_, 1960,1 2., 1974, ed. pt. pt. -T-T_, 1972) 111 (with J. Malek), 1974. PSBA Proceedings of the Society of BibZicaZ ArchaeoZogy R ec. Trav. Recueil de Travaux reZatifs %a la Philo- 4 Zogie et a Z'ArcheoZogie e"gyptiennes et assyriennes ZAS Zeitschrift fuir a'*gyptische Sprache und AZterthumskunde 5 TABLE OF CONTENTS 1. Abstract 2. Acknowledgments 3. Abbreviations 6. Chapter One - Introduction 24. Chapter Two - Prosopography of Early Middle Kingdom Officials 106. Map of Sites from the Prosopography 107. Chapter Three - Some Titles Associated with Provincial Goverment in the Early Middle Kingdom 161. Chapter Four - Structure and Operation of the Provincial Government during the Early Middle Kingdom 193. Conclusions 196. Appendix One - Frequency of Titles 197. Appendix Two - Relationships of Titles 221. Appendix Three Geographical Distribution 222. Appendix Four Governors' Titles by Location 224. Index of Titles 228. Bibliography 6 INTRODUCTION The present work represents an attempt to assess, in the light of the available evidence, the provincial government of Egypt during the early Middle Kingdom, which for our purposes comprises the period from the late Eleventh Dynasty until the end of the reign of Senusert I in the Twelfth Dynasty. The perspective will be historical, in so far as is possible, and not primarily linguistic. Since there has been a tendency in the past to confuse history with chronology, a short definition of the term as used in respect of this paper is desirable. H-istory is the attempt to reconstruct and re- animate past societies. This process involves three distinct, and yet interrelated activities. First, the factual framework of the society in question must be determined as accurately as possible from the evidence available. This framework must extend beyond any one specific topic. Because of the interdependence of the various aspects of a human society, any attempt to treat one sector al- most invariably involves a broad general knowledge 7 of many others. And, in many instances, a working knowledge of neighbouring societies is also required. Once his reconstruction of this general frame- work is as factually complete as possible, the historian is faced with the further task of filling in the skeletal outline. It is this animation of the bare bones, the recreation of the society in question in the mind of the scholar, that is at the heart of the art of history. The imaginative powers of the historian must be brought into play, strictly limited and channeled by the nature and extent of the factual evidence which is available to him. This isthe most dangerous and difficult task for any historian. As we have said, the historian needs a truely encyclopaedic knowledge of the society with which he is dealing and of the world in which it existed. He must also be familiar with those under- lying basics of human nature which he will need to adapt to the specifics of the culture under examina- tion. As an historian, it is his responsibility to analyse the society he is studying from within and to judge it, in so far as is possible, on its own merits rather than by the criteria of his own time and place. Unfortunately, since he is quite often dealing with a people whose basic forms of expression are largely alien to his own age, and because we are all irrevocably products of our own society and its values, the historian can never be entirely 8 successful in this respect. The degree of failure is directly related to the width and depth of the resources of knowledge and experience upon which each individual scholar can draw. Having completed steps one and two as thoroughly as possible, the final, and most important, task for the historian is to act as interpreter between the culture he is studying and the one in which he lives. In the course of this duty he will quite often be called upon to express ancient concepts for which there are no direct modern counterparts, and, more importantly for a scholar whose primary tools are words, no equivalent expressions in modern languages. It is his responsibility to make these difficult ideas as clear as possible to others who have neither the time nor the proper background in the necessary fields to work through the original context for themselves. The use of technical jargon should therefore be avoided in the writing of history whenever it is possible to substitute more 1 universally comprehensible words. Each specific society and topic under historical consideration has its own particular problems, which will, naturally enough, shape the results of any inquiry. As a whole, when dealing with the history of ancient Egypt, certain limitations on the factual level become immediately apparent. First, the tremen- ndous lapse of time, nearly four thousand years 9 from the early Middle Kingdom, for example, to the present day, means that the amount of actual physical evidence which remains is relatively small compared to more recent periods of history. And, since the majority of the surviving material has been preserved because it was deposited in the desert areas of the country rather than the more hospitable land closer to tile Nile where the Egyptians actually lived, certain aspects of ancient Egyptian society 2 are much more fully represented than others. For the most part, what remains for us to study are those things which, for the Egyptians, had eternal signi- ficance. There has, at times, been a tendency to dismiss this problem with the observation that, in ancient Egypt, the close resemblance between this life and the next one would result in a reasonably representative display. While this is, no doubt, largely true from the point of view of-artifacts alone, and allows, for example, a serious typological study to be conducted on a number of different classes of objects, the historian, whose primary concern is with ideas and attitudes, will be able to obtain only limited or general background knowledge from many of these sources. Since ideas and attitudes are usually preserved in language, we would expect to find the majority of the available historical material in a careful study of the relatively extensive body of Egyptian texts 10 which remain to us either in the original, or, more often in the case of literary texts, in later copies. We are thankful that the Egyptians possessed a form of writing, based on the hieroglyphic signs, which preserves at least the outline of their thought.
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