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 in 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 Egyptianartisans 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 ofthe 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.