The establishment of the Pharaonic state around the year —3000 and
the little-known period that followed undoubtedly corresponded with great
economic development. W e can see some evidence of this in the royal
and private tombs of the Thinite era: the buildings become larger and
the many objects d'art suggest increased luxury and the consummate skill
of the craftsmen. 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. T h e fact remains
that, until the nineteenth century of our 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 yearround
irrigation: there is evidence that it existed as early as the Middle
Kingdom and we may assume that it had taken shape even earlier.1
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 the major operations on the construction of the religious and royal
buildings. T h e Ancients also practised year-round irrigation by raising
water from the canals or from pits dug d o w n 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. (It is possible,
however, that the invention of the shaduf àur'mg the N e w Kingdom made
two crops of grain a year possible in places.)Lacking the knowledge of
how to store water, they did not yet know how to mitigate the consequences
of unusually low floods, which were the cause of infertility in
many basins, and unusually high floods, which devastated land and homes.
However, the development of granaries and river transport enabled them to
ensure food supplies from one province to another or from one year to the
next. Average yields were good: the surpluses fed the large numbers of
government officials and the workers in medium-sized places of employment
(shipyards and weapon factories, spinning mills attached to certain
temples, etc.). Through their control over food resources, which varied
according to the period, the temple authorities and high officials exercised
powers of patronage.
Bread and beer made from grain were the staple diets, but the ancient
Egyptians' food was astonishingly varied. One is struck by the number of
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 eatinggrapes.
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 N e w Kingdom remaining rare and not very successful.
Pharaonic Egypt did not transform the entire valley into productive land
and gardens. It exploited also the vast marshes and lakes along the northern
edges of the Delta and the shores of Lake Moeris, and the low-lying
land on the edge of the desert and in the meanders of the Nile. In these
pehu, abundant and varied wildfowl were hunted or trapped. There was
fishing with seine-net, eel-pot, line or basket for the Nile offered a wide
variety of fish and, in spite of the prohibition of their consumption in
certain provinces or by certain categories, they had a definite place in
the people's diet, which was also supplemented by the gathering of the
roots of the edible cyperus (earth almond), papyrus hearts and, after the
Persian era, the seeds of the Indian lotus. Finally, the marshland gave
pasturage for cows and oxen.
Although the climate was not particularly favourable to cattle-raising
because it was so wet, and herds depleted by these conditions had regularly
to be supplemented from Nubia and Asia, it was of considerable importance
in the country's life and religious conceptions. The tables of the gods and
the great had to be well furnished with beef. The cutting-up of the
carcass was a fine art, the animal fats being widely used to make perfumed
unguents. W e know that the Old Kingdom Egyptians tried to raise a
number of species - oryx, antelope, gazelle, etc., and even cranes and
hyenas - but this proved labour-consuming and the results disappointing,
and it was abandoned, the desert ruminants later becoming, in proverbs
and in rites of sorcery, the symbol of untameable creatures.3 In contrast,
they were very successful in raising poultry, notably the Nile goose. T h e
meat of goats, so harmful to the valley's few trees, and sheep raised
on fallow land and the fringes of the desert, as well as pigs (in spite of
some prohibitions), acquired a considerable place in the people's diet. Well
into historic times, w e see a change take place in the type of sheep reared:
an earlier type of ram with horizontal, twisted horns, which was the incarnation
of K h n u m , Bes, Hershef and other ancient gods, was gradually
replaced round about —2000 by the ram with curved horns, dedicated
to the god A m o n . There is debate over whether it is of African or Asian
origin. T w o African species domesticated by the Egyptians were particularly
successful and are closely linked, in our minds, with the
Pharaonic past: the ass, used as early as the archaic period, not for riding
but as a beast of burden (and paradoxically dedicated to the evil god
Seth), and the domestic cat, which does not appear until the end of the
Old and the beginning of the Middle Kingdom (and which was worshipped
as a more peaceable form of the dangerous goddesses).