Gerald E. Kadish - Studies Simpson 2

ne aspect of the considerable diversity of William Kelly Simpson’s scholarly interests and talents is reflected in his valuable studies of the Reisner papyri. I would like to offer a few observations on those documents to honor his achievements and the riches he has given us to explore.¹

By far the largest portion of the waking hours of most Egyptians was devoted to work or, in the case of bureaucratic and/or aristocratic over-seers, to the watching of work.² The greatest number of workers was engaged in agriculture, but a significant segment of the labor force was in crafts and construction. Workers and their managers went about their daily tasks, the rhythms of their labor shaped by the natural indicators of day, season, and year, as well as by the artificial constructs of civil cal-endar, festivals, the formal length of the work day, and, at least in some periods, regular days off. To paraphrase the words of the poet of the hymn to the Aten, each day, when the sun has risen, the entire land went off to work.

Work and workers needed to be organized so as to achieve a desired level of production and delivery of goods and services. While laborers of all sorts were subject to a certain amount of violent coercion, that is not a sufficient explanation of the generally successful discipline of labor, nor is the likely correct notion that workers obliged to perform corvée labor on major royal projects, such as pyramid-building, were, at least in part, motivated by religious devotion (i.e., to the monarch).³

The Reisner papyri⁴ offer exceptional insights into the organization of work in Middle Kingdom Egypt, reflecting usages for the calculation of labor needs, the logistics of labor, the nature of labor record-keeping, etc. They also afford an opportunity for a look at the relationship

1 An early attempt at this problem was presented to a meeting of the Egyptological Seminar of New York; the present essay is part of a larger study of the temporal aspects of ancient Egyptian economic life.

2 The non-royal tombs offer numerous examples of the tomb-owner watching his estate laborers at their tasks.

O

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between time and work, especially at two related issues: time as a factor in worker discipline and the role of a culture of timeliness. To look at these issues, I have adopted the interpretational framework of the now famous and widely influential article by the late English historian, E.P.

Thompson, entitled “Time, Work-Discipline, and Industrial Capital-ism.”⁵ While it is true that Egypt’s economy presents a rather different profile from that of England during the transition to a capitalist econo-my, Thompson’s analysis brings into bold relief features of the relation-ship between time and work that are applicable to the ancient setting.

Thompson argued that, before the institutionalization of industrial capitalism in factories, workers—and here he means both skilled and unskilled laborers, but not those employed in agriculture for the most part—were in the habit of deciding pretty much for themselves how much time they would invest in a unit of production.⁶ The forces that might persuade them to work faster were largely those of the market and a sense of their own needs rather than any externally imposed norms or work quotas. This pre- or proto-capitalist manufacture Thompson char-acterizes as “task-oriented” or chore-determined. He notes that this dif-fers from agriculture, where production is strongly determined by other factors, such as nature’s cycles. For Thompson, a crucial transition took place when labor was timed, when the workplace came to have a clock on the wall. The essential point is that henceforth the owner of the clock, i.e., the owner (or his agent) of the plant or construction project now controlled the amount of time—rather precisely measured—to be

3 On corvée labor, see in particular two articles by Ingelore Hafemann: “Zum Problem der staatlichen Arbeitspflicht im Alten Ägypten. I,” Altorientalische Forschungen 12 (1985), pp. 3–21, and “Zum Problem der staatlichen Arbeitspflicht im Alten Ägypten. II,” Alt-orientalische Forschungen 12 (1985), pp. 179–215. I have not considered here the issues connected with the important question of corvée labor. The Reisner workers are likely free workers with some state labor obligation to discharge; time constraints on them reflect the fact that these are imposed on them. Still there are issues that need to be addressed in a fuller treatment.

4 William Kelly Simpson, Papyrus Reisner I. The Records of a Building Project in the Reign of Sesostris I (Boston, 1963); idem, Papyrus Reisner II. Accounts of the Dockyard Workshop at This in the Reign of Sesostris I (Boston, 1965); idem, Reisner Papyrus III. The Records of a Building Project in the Early Twelfth Dynasty (Boston, 1969); idem, Papyrus Reisner IV. Personnel Accounts of the Early Twelfth Dynasty (Boston, 1986). Hereafter cited as pReisner I, pReisner II, pReisner III, and pReisner IV respectively. See also Simpson’s entry (Pap. Reisner I–IV) in LÄ 4 (1982), cols. 728–30. Simpson has conveniently listed major reviews of pReisner I–III and some of the literature in Papyrus Reisner IV, p.

26.

5 Past & Present 38 (1967), pp. 56–97.

6 See H. Goedicke, “Bilateral Business in the Old Kingdom,” DE 5 (1986), pp. 73–101, for the view that some Old Kingdom artisans engaged in tomb-building or decorating played an active work in negotiating their remuneration.

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Gerald E. Kadish, Observations on Time and Work-Discipline in Ancient Egypt

expended on a unit of production. The control of the rate of production had been transferred to the hands of the entrepreneur, and the employed craftsman lost control of his time/labor investment. Indeed, in subse-quent periods, a classic worker tactic was to attempt to slow down pro-duction to achieve certain work conditions or pay concessions. Since power resided elsewhere until comparatively recently, such efforts were largely doomed to failure. In the USSR, the clock-owner (i.e., the state) developed the idea of the Stakhanovite in order to put pressure on the workers to continually exceed, let alone meet, work norms imposed from above, all the time exhorting them to perform better for the greater good of the state. In these systems, the laborer’s power to resist was mut-ed by the very real danger of starvation as an alternative to working by the clock. Moreover, the state, while not directly involved in the factory’s processes, was nonetheless a guarantor, through its police power, of the entrepreneur’s ability to impose his will. But there is another factor.

Not only did this change alter the work situation as an institution-alized reality, but it was accompanied by an insidious co-feature: a con-scious inculcation of a value system in which timeliness became a social virtue. It is no accident that in some places a gold watch came to be thought of as an appropriate retirement gift to a worker who had, during his working lifetime, met the time/work demands of the new produc-tion system. The parodic slogan of George Orwell’s 1984 “Work is Pleasure, Time is Gold” comes to mind. Not only did labor market real-ities discipline the worker,⁷ but he was further subverted by the value system. Not surprisingly, there is resistance, although typically in such a less overt form as the hangover from Sunday’s drinking excesses be-coming a cause of absenteeism on the first day of the work week, memo-rialized by the workers into an alleged observance of the feast of a mythical “St. Monday.”⁸ Work avoidance was the only other, rather pre-carious, option for the laborer in a surplus labor situation. The key change is characterized by Thompson as a “greater sense of time-thrift among the improving capitalist employers.”⁹

A last item from Thompson’s article is in order. One of his earliest and most interesting sources of information is the records of the Crowley Iron Works, ca. 1700. There it is apparent that the

record-7 That this can even apply to agricultural labor in a pre-industrial society is evidenced by the Great Revolt of 1381 in England, a violent reaction to the Statute of Laborers of the 1370s which limited how much an employer of labor was allowed to pay in wages.

8 Thompson, op. cit., p. 72ff.

9 Ibid., p. 78.

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keeping that backed up the enforcement of time/work discipline was organized on a temporal basis. Records were kept of loitering, time-serv-ing, sloth, etc. Time-sheets were kept for each worker noting work hours, mealtime breaks, time-keepers, informers, and fines. So hostile to the system were the workers that the clock had to be locked up to pre-vent the workers from surreptitiously changing it.¹⁰ It should be stressed that this temporal documentation served two purposes: the dis-cipline of labor and the rationalization of production pace and costs; the managers’ doubt obliged to maintain control and justify expenses. We can turn now to ancient Egypt.¹¹

Consisting mainly of manpower planning, utilization, and compen-sation accounts for construction projects and dockyard activities dating to the early Middle Kingdom, the Reisner papyri present a number of fea-tures that reflect the relationship between work and time. They allow us to observe these connections over reasonably long periods of time (at least for Egyptian records): for example, the pReisner I documents cover periods of seventy-five to 122 consecutive days, while pReisner II in-cludes records for periods of 228 days and 1,245 days (i.e., three years and five months), the latter group not continuous. In addition, the number of named workmen accounted for in the documents exceeds 300. Lists of workmen and their ration allotments (compensation) are not at all un-usual in the surviving Egyptian records, but the Reisner accounts offer some uncommon aspects.

One of these is the accounting methods used for reporting and deter-mining work and rations allotted. In pReisner I, Section A, the summa-ries are given, not as one might expect, in terms of numbers of men and days worked, listed separately, but rather in terms of “man-days.” There is no specific term for this unit that is ubiquitous in the Reisner papyri, but it is evident that the manpower summaries are a product of the to-tals of men employed and the number of days each worked, a “man-day”

apparently by this time defined as a ten-hour day.¹² Simpson suggested that this section represents a pay-sheet prepared perhaps for a disbursing

10 Ibid., p. 81ff.

11 The literature on the various aspects of the Egyptian work force is large. Two articles of particular importance might be mentioned, both in Marvin A. Powell, ed., Labor in the Ancient Near East, Ancient Oriental Series, 68 (New Haven, 1987): C.J. Eyre, “Work and the Organization of Work in the Old Kingdom” and C.J. Eyre, “Work and the Organization of Work in the New Kingdom.”

12 The use of the concept man-day goes back to the Old Kingdom, according to an article by I.I. Perepelkin (cited by O.D. Berlev in his review of pReisner I in BiOr 22 (1965), p. 264, n. 4). I have been unable to consult the original. Section H’s calculations appear to indicate a man-day equaled one man working for one ten-hour day. Cf. pReisner III, p. 14.

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or fiscal agency.¹³ The close connection between men working and days worked was part of the calculation of rations. These figures represent the number of “man-days” multiplied by a standard unit—the trsst— perhaps originally a kind of bread-loaf, but here clearly a formal unit of account for compensation; in Section A, the ratio is not clearly the otherwise normal 8:1 in the Reisner papyri.¹⁴ A standard work-day length, then, had already been formalized.

The “man-day” was used, however, as a labor planning unit as well as a worker compensation basis. One cannot help, like Simpson, being

“amazed and bewildered by the complexity of the bookkeeping prac-tices, whereby an accountant recorded such details as the exact dimen-sions of blocks of stone to a fraction of a fingerbreadth and the sum of man-days to a fifth of a working day.”¹⁵ pReisner I, Sections G, H, and I correlate length, width, and thickness of blocks of stone with numbers of workers, a table which appears to represent a standard assignment of work units based on the physical requirements of the project. This is corroborated in pReisner I, Section J, where a number of such work assignments are quite explicit, e.g., “IV Peret 15: Given to him in order to erect three interior portals: six workers, two and a half days (equal-ling) 15 (man-days).” ¹⁶ The results achieved were reported, and one sup-poses they would be expected to conform with the original projects.

Section K is such a report, indicating, among other things, that 715

“man-days” were spent moving stone and 101½ in carrying sand, for a total investment of 816½ man-days for this stage of the project, while the overall summary reports a total expenditure of 4,312½ man-days.¹⁷ pReisner II, Section K details day-by-day the expenditure of “man-days”

in the royal dockyard for a period of 228 days.¹⁸ pReisner III adds to the accounting repertoire with a series of documents that appear to be peri-odic work status reports which detail for each worker the number of

“man-days” expended and those still available out of an allocation.¹⁹ The crucial observation to be made here is that the constraints on manpower and remuneration put into the hands of those making the allocations—whether a private contractor or a state agency—control

13 pReisner I, p. 24.

14 pReisner I, pp. 26, 35. Further on this unit, cf. Simpson, “Two Lexical Notes to the Reisner Papyri: w∞rt and trsst,” JEA 59 (1973), pp. 220–22. Cf. D. Mueller, “Some Remarks on Wage Rates in the Middle Kingdom,” JNES 34 (1975), pp. 249–63.

15 pReisner I, p. 52.

Studies in Honor of William Kelly Simpson

over both the time and work of the laborers, as well as their remunera-tion. They define the tasks, the allocation of labor, and the time constraints, right down to the numbers of hours. The immediate super-visors of these projects were obliged to keep and submit detailed records.

These points are of exceptional interest, but there is one other feature of the Reisner papyri that makes them even more compelling.

Returning to pReisner I brings us to the question of worker disci-pline. Section B has to do with essentially the same project and work data as Section A (as the heading makes clear²⁰), but it presents them from a quite different perspective. This text is a roster of laborers. The section is important, because it represents the accountability incum-bent on the contractor to go beyond a simple statement of man-hours expended to provide what is in effect an itemized account of the number of man-days contributed to the project by each worker by name, differ-ent from the status reports noted in pReisner III (which may have been the sort of raw records from which Section B was drawn). In order to pro-vide accurate figures, the project manager kept track of each worker’s activities. Three columns appear alongside the list of names. The first is labeled “Spent on the Road;” one has the impression from the very small number of entries in this column, that this represented a category for remuneration of supervisory personnel, perhaps a sort of portal-to-portal bonus.²¹ The second column specifies actual “man-days” spent working on the project. It is the third column that links the temporal consider-ations with worker discipline, for it lists the number of “man-days” each worker was absent from the work site. The heading “that which he spent fleeing” is a problem. Simpson himself weighed the matter judi-ciously and ended up reluctant to understand the word w™r as implying the shirking of work, pointing out, that it may in fact lump together a variety of reasons for absence from work, or perhaps be merely an indication that not all the workers were needed for every day of the project.²²

20 See Simpson’s comments in pReisner I, pp. 29–30.

21 Ibid.,p. 35. It surely does not refer to any substantial number of the workers.

22 Ibid., p. 36 for his discussion of the term. In pReisner III, p. 19, he seems to have accept-ed “fleeing,” although he offers no further discussion. Simpson does point out, however, in pReisner I, p. 36, that w™r appears always to mean “fleeing.” O.D. Berlev, in his BiOr review cited earlier applauds Simpson’s caution. W. Schenkel discusses the word under the heading “Flüchtling und Flucht aus Arbeitsverhältnissen,” in LÄ 2 (1977), cols. 276–77.

Cf. E.F. Wente, review in JNES 24 (1965), p. 129, in favor of the fleeing idea.

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It is worth taking a look at the range of things noted in Section B.²³ When the scribe makes a single entry in black ink reading I Peret 10, this means the worker in question had a perfect attendance record; he was there working all 122 days. There are eight examples of this. In eleven cases, a date is given in red; this means that the worker was present con-tinuously from the beginning of the project until that date, although, in three cases, the number of man-days does not include the date noted in red, i.e., the worker was not credited with working on that terminal day.

An interesting example of the recording method is item no. 27 (bottom right column), the entry for Si-ese’s son Mentu-hotep. Three dates are given for him: II Akhet 8 (or 7), III Akhet 8, and I Peret 10. He is credited with ninety days on the job and thirty-two days absent, for a total of 122 days, the length of the project. The dates make it clear that this Mentu-hotep worked twenty-nine days from and including the beginning of work on I Akhet 9 until II Akhet 7. He was then gone for thirty-one days (II Akhet 8 to III Akhet 8); the thirty-two day entry under absence makes it clear that he was not paid for the first and last days of this period. On his return, Mentu-hotep works for sixty-two days, from III Akhet 9 through I Peret 10. The three blocks of time add up, predictably, to 122 days.

A similar record is contained in section F,²⁴ although it is for a dif-ferent project, this one for a total of seventy-five days beginning after the one in sections A and B (commencing on III Peret 16 of [presumably] the same year 25). Here the workers are organized according to crew and crew leaders. Three columns are employed for noting “man-days,” but here the first column is actually the sum of columns two and three. Col-umn two represents days working, while colCol-umn three represents days absent. The figures make it clear that not all the workers were engaged to work the entire seventy-five days. Items 33–36 are workers assigned to only eleven days work, although every one of them was in fact absent more than he worked. Indeed only two men seem to have worked the

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