The Wealth Of Ancient Egypt

[atalanta]

I have seen the vast amount of gold and treasure of Tutankhamen in the museum in Cairo, and I have read a long and tedious academic tome about him. The amounts of gold and treasure used in his lifetime and in his tomb are staggering. For instance, one of his coffins was of solid 22 carat gold. The craftsmanship of the items found in his tomb was of the highest order. All this suggests that ancient Egypt was swimming in riches. The lower classes did not seem to be downtrodden, there were thousands of priests who did not have to produce anything, and there weren't as many slaves as used to be believed. Only a narrow strip of land could be cultivated alongside the Nile. Pharaohs were all buried with such riches, and they did not all have long life-spans, so such funerals could not have been rare. So where did all this colossal wealth come from ?

[Mosaic]

Not sure about panning the Nile Divebuddy - it's mostly a very deep in alluvium. They certainly had a great capacity to produce gold within their own boundaries especailly when they laid claim to the Sinai peninsula.
Where did the wealth come from? Mainly from the fantastic productivity of the land, yielding 3-plus harvests a year and constantly replenished by the Nile flloods, so there was no issue of soil depletion. There was just (for the most part) a constant and abundant supply of food.
This meant that even in the earliest times, large non-peasant populations could be fed. Priests, soldiers, professional craftworkers, perfumers, lapidarists, etc. Egyptian crafts such as cut gems and linen were traded out, and Egypt at its most powerful controlled the trade and politics of countries from Anatolia to Basra to Crete. That meant effectively they agreed not to attack in return for 'tribute' ie a hefty slice of whatever made those countries wealthy. So Egypt just became richer under its own momentum.
The other half of the case is that this growth also happened because other countries lacked the longevity, food resources and consequent stability that made Egypt prosperous.
The major cults acted in ways that we would recognise as business corporations - they ran farms, traded, employed staff, and were very rich. And this feeds into the tomb-treasure thing. Pharaoh needed his cult priests to ensure the correct burail rituals, including the treasures to enjoy in the afterlife. Although Tut's tomb was amazing, he was a bit player. But of the major names, not a single tomb has been discovered intact. It's my personal belief that the priests ensured the rapid evacuation of most of the treasures through the back door, probably at the time of the burial. I suspect most of the tombs were emptied quite quickly and the gold recycled back into the economy. As you rightly point out, otherwise the demands on gold production would be truly boggling.
Ancient Egypt's phenomenal wealth relied not just on farming but on very close social cooperation, to ensure the damming up of floodwaters to feed the crops, and the storage / distribution of food harvests.

[Peter Pedant]

good answer Moze

after Octavian defeated Anthony 31 BC
he basically made Egypt a personal fiefdom

specifically forbad any Roman knight from going there without his personal permission

[ and that wasnt because he liked Nile water ]

[retrocop]

Brinks Matt heist. Heathrow.

[jno]

some of them were, some of them weren't, divebuddy - the dynasties were still going when Alexander arrived. I don't think there's any point where you can say they stopped being ancient, unless maybe it was when ancient Romans took over.

But Julius Caesar is nearer in time to us than he was to the Pyramids.

[jno]

divebuddy, yes, I expect so. But I was trying to say that just because one Roman and one pyramid were millennia apart, it's not true for all Egypt and all Rome. (Late) Ancient Egypt was still there in the days of the (early) Roman empire.

[Mosaic]

Since posting above I've been thinking hard about the sdame issue that divides Divebuddy and Jno.
This is the point - until about the 8th century AD the core social structure remained ie peasant communities geared to 'harvestiong the floods', with all social organisation flowing from it.
Thereafter, Egypt became increasingly a backwater and although a subsistence economy remained, and was much wealthier than many in northern Europe, it was a very pale shade of its past.
It seems that the Arab invasions combined with the plagues of the late Byzantine Empire took their toll, and that by the time things got straight again the major player in the area was Baghdad.

[Mosaic]

Ah - Nubia (the land of Kush) makes sense - different valley bottom conditions south of the cataracts than in the Nile Valley occupied by the ancient Egyptian civilisations.

[Coppit]

I was serving in the RAF in the Egyptian Canal Zone in 1956 at the time when Britain made peace with Nasser, and stemming from that change was sudden and dramatic. There were fresh vegetables aplenty, the filthy greasy banknotes we had were replaced with new - and tours to Cairo were organised. I must say that the visit to the Cairo museum to see Tutenkhamun's hoard was one of the highpoints of my life, so vast was the treasure displayed.