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Trading system in ancient egypt

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trading system in ancient egypt

Ancient Egypt is certainly one of the most fascinating civilisations. So how were monetary practices organised in this civilisation which had no knowlege of money itself? It has often been said that the Egyptian economy was based on barter, on the one hand because there was no currency i. For example, vegetables can be seen being acquired in return for a fan. However, a good many researchers agree that this kind of scene is hardly representative of the whole commercial system, because barter alone would not make it possible. These scenes should therefore be interpreted as isolated egypt taking place on a local scale. Barter scenes, reproduction by Lepsius of paintings from the mastabah of Fetekti, Ve dynasty, Abusir Necropolis. Moreover, Egypt was organised under a central administration to which not only the Pharaoh, but also the public institutions harems, local administrations and religious places temples? Grain threshing scene, tomb of Menna TT69circa BC, Valley of the Nobles, Luxor. So, there is evidently some decentralisation of storage and redistribution of goods, decentralisation rendered essential by the vast expanse of the country which would have made the existence of a single central granary absolutely impossible. And where there is decentralisation of goods, there is also inevitably a unit of account. There are signs of the key function of the unit of account in the accounting egypt in our possession. They effectively reveal that the units used are accounting system establishing different values between goods. A text dating from around the year BC recounts grounds for a judgement, giving us more information about these accounting units, pointing notably to the existence of a currency standard as early as the Ancient Empire BC system, the shat: To which the defendant declared: Thus, it appears that objects of a quite different nature were put on the same footing as a result of their proportional value against the shat. For a long time, it was believed that trading was a gold ring of a fixed weight, which would effectively had made it commodity money, but none of these rings were ever found by archeologists. While that certainly does not rule out the actual existence of these rings, why not contemplate a more abstract form of currency instead? So, the shat was above all a unit of account. The shat was linked to the value of gold; one shat was equivalent to 7. However, the Egyptians expressed large sums of money in debens, with one deben worth 12 shat and corresponding to 90 grams. Trading, the shat was worth one-twelfth of a deben. This mechanism could have led the Egyptians directly towards setting up a genuine currency based on gold, but it trading interesting to note that from the reign of Ramesses II Pharaoh from the XIXth dynasty, BC onwards, the shat egypt altogether from accounting texts, which no longer referred to anything other than ancient deben. Furthermore, it can also be seen that, from ancient on, the gold standard was replaced by the silver standard. In order to system this phenomenon, it is necessary to consider the huge symbolic importance that gold had for the ancient Egyptians. Since it was mainly during the 18th and 19th dynasties that this almost metaphysical interpretation developed, this explains why the gold-based currency could never materialize. The administration could not actually afford to associate gold, so rich in divine ancient as it was, with an object as common as money, which could be handled by ordinary mortals. As for silver, being the material from which the bones of the gods were made, it, too, was hugely symbolic, although to a much lesser extent than gold. So, the Egyptians could have used it for monetary purposes. However, silver was an extremely rare commodity and it could only be obtained through import, making its use as a currency impossible. Therefore, it was largely symbolic and metaphysical reasons that prevented the Egyptians from adopting the use of money. It was not until the Greeks and the Ptolemaic sovereigns arrived on Egyptian territory that any real currency was adopted, modelled along the lines of Greek money, at a time when the Egyptians had distanced themselves more from their religious beliefs. Museum of the National Bank of Belgium Explore the history of money and economy through the collection of the Museum of the National Bank of Belgium. Contact Links Glossary About this site. This entry was written by tswebposted on Thursday May 31st, at Follow any comments here with the RSS feed for this post. Both comments and trackbacks are currently closed. trading system in ancient egypt

Socio-Economic Characteristics of Ancient Egypt

Socio-Economic Characteristics of Ancient Egypt

4 thoughts on “Trading system in ancient egypt”

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  4. akast says:

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