These attitudes and their potential dissemination through society counterbalanced inequality, but how far they were accepted cannot be known. The core group of wealthy officeholders numbered at most a few hundred, and the administrative class of minor officials and scribes, most of whom could not afford to leave memorials or inscriptions, perhaps 5,000. With their dependents, these two groups formed perhaps 5 percent of the early population. Monuments and inscriptions commemorated no more than one in a thousand people.
According to royal ideology, the king appointed the elite on the basis of merit, and in ancient conditions of high mortality the elite had to be open to recruits from outside. There was, however, also an ideal that a son should succeed his father. In periods of weak central control this principle predominated, and in the Late period the whole society became more rigid and stratified.
Egyptian hieroglyphic numerals.Encyclopædia Britannica, Inc.
Egyptian hieratic numerals.Encyclopædia Britannica, Inc.Writing was a major instrument in the centralization of the Egyptian state and its self-presentation. The two basic types of writing—hieroglyphs, which were used for monuments and display, and the cursive form known as hieratic—were invented at much the same time in late predynastic Egypt (c. 3000 bce). Writing was chiefly used for administration, and until about 2650 bce no continuous texts are preserved; the only extant literary texts written before the early Middle Kingdom (c. 1950 bce) seem to have been lists of important traditional information and possibly medical treatises. The use and potential of writing were restricted both by the rate of literacy, which was probably well below 1 percent, and by expectations of what writing might do. Hieroglyphic writing was publicly identified with Egypt. Perhaps because of this association with a single powerful state, its language, and its culture, Egyptian writing was seldom adapted to write other languages; in this it contrasts with the cuneiform script of the relatively uncentralized, multilingual Mesopotamia. Nonetheless, Egyptian hieroglyphs probably served in the middle of the 2nd millennium bce as the model from which the alphabet, ultimately the most widespread of all writing systems, evolved.
The dominant visible legacy of ancient Egypt is in works of architecture and representational art. Until the Middle Kingdom, most of these were mortuary: royal tomb complexes, including pyramids and mortuary temples, and private tombs. There were also temples dedicated to the cult of the gods throughout the country, but most of these were modest structures. From the beginning of the New Kingdom, temples of the gods became the principal monuments; royal palaces and private houses, which are very little known, were less important. Temples and tombs were ideally executed in stone with relief decoration on their walls and were filled with stone and wooden statuary, inscribed and decorated stelae (freestanding small stone monuments), and, in their inner areas, composite works of art in precious materials. The design of the monuments and their decoration dates in essence to the beginning of the historical period and presents an ideal, sanctified cosmos. Little in it is related to the everyday world, and, except in palaces, works of art may have been rare outside temples and tombs. Decoration may record real historical events, rituals, or the official titles and careers of individuals, but its prime significance is the more general assertion of values, and the information presented must be evaluated for its plausibility and compared with other evidence. Some of the events depicted in relief on royal monuments were certainly iconic rather than historically factual.
Egyptian Book of the DeadIllustration from an Egyptian Book of the Dead, c. 1275 bce, showing the jackal-headed god of the dead, Anubis, weighing the soul of the scribe, Ani.Mary Evans Picture Library/age fotostock
The highly distinctive Egyptian method of rendering nature and artistic style was also a creation of early times and can be seen in most works of Egyptian art. In content, these are hierarchically ordered so that the most important figures, the gods and the king, are shown together, while before the New Kingdom gods seldom occur in the same context as humanity. The decoration of a nonroyal tomb characteristically shows the tomb’s owner with his subordinates, who administer his land and present him with its produce. The tomb owner is also typically depicted hunting in the marshes, a favourite pastime of the elite that may additionally symbolize passage into the next world. The king and the gods are absent in nonroyal tombs, and, until the New Kingdom, overtly religious matter is restricted to rare scenes of mortuary rituals and journeys and to textual formulas. Temple reliefs, in which king and gods occur freely, show the king defeating his enemies, hunting, and especially offering to the gods, who in turn confer benefits upon him. Human beings are present at most as minor figures supporting the king. On both royal and nonroyal monuments, an ideal world is represented in which all are beautiful and everything goes well; only minor figures may have physical imperfections.
This artistic presentation of values originated at the same time as writing but before the latter could record continuous texts or complex statements. Some of the earliest continuous texts of the 4th and 5th dynasties show an awareness of an ideal past that the present could only aspire to emulate. A few “biographies” of officials allude to strife, but more-nuanced discussion occurs first in literary texts of the Middle Kingdom. The texts consist of stories, dialogues, lamentations, and especially instructions on how to live a good life, and they supply a rich commentary on the more one-dimensional rhetoric of public inscriptions. Literary works were written in all the main later phases of the Egyptian language—Middle Egyptian; the “classical” form of the Middle and New kingdoms, continuing in copies and inscriptions into Roman times; Late Egyptian, from the 19th dynasty to about 700 bce; and the demotic script from the 4th century bce to the 3rd century ce—but many of the finest and most complex are among the earliest.
Literary works also included treatises on mathematics, astronomy, medicine, and magic, as well as various religious texts and canonical lists that classified the categories of creation (probably the earliest genre, dating back to the beginning of the Old Kingdom, c. 2575 bce, or even a little earlier). Among these texts, little is truly systematic, a notable exception being a medical treatise on wounds. The absence of systematic inquiry contrasts with Egyptian practical expertise in such fields as surveying, which was used both for orienting and planning buildings to remarkably fine tolerances and for the regular division of fields after the annual inundation of the Nile; the Egyptians also had surveyed and established the dimensions of their entire country by the beginning of the Middle Kingdom. These precise tasks required both knowledge of astronomy and highly ingenious techniques, but they apparently were achieved with little theoretical analysis.
Whereas in the earliest periods Egypt seems to have been administered almost as the personal estate of the king, by the central Old Kingdom it had been divided into about 35 nomes, or provinces, each with its own officials. Administration was concentrated at the capital, where most of the central elite lived and died. In the nonmonetary Egyptian economy, its essential functions were the collection, storage, and redistribution of produce; the drafting and organization of manpower for specialized labour, probably including irrigation and flood protection works, and major state projects; and the supervision of legal matters. Administration and law were not fully distinct, and both depended ultimately on the king. The settlement of disputes was in part an administrative task, for which the chief guiding criterion was precedent, while contractual relations were regulated by the use of standard formulas. State and temple both partook in redistribution and held massive reserves of grain; temples were economic as well as religious institutions. In periods of decentralization similar functions were exercised by local grandees. Markets had only a minor role, and craftsmen were employees who normally traded only what they produced in their free time. The wealthiest officials escaped this pattern to some extent by receiving their income in the form of land and maintaining large establishments that included their own specialized workers.