Tenth International Congress of Egyptologists Abstracts of Papers

XICE – Abstract of Papers
Macedonian culture. Everyone in Egypt would have handled coins to some extent,
since the ubiquitous salt tax was necessarily paid in coin. Some scholars have argued
that in implementing such policies, the Ptolemies were aggressively insisting on the
use of their coinage, and that the monetization of the Egyptian economy was swift.
However, the Ptolemies never officially regulated the media of exchange used in
private transactions. If it were practical and beneficial to the parties involved to use
coins, surely they would have done so. Just as, in pharaonic times, individuals like
Heqanakht carefully chose which medium of exchange to use for their business,
Egyptians in the Ptolemaic period made calculated decisions about how to use the
newly-implemented coinage, which was so prevalent in the rest of the Hellenistic
world.
No detailed study has yet attempted to establish in which situations and why the
Egyptians used coins in this period. Little has been known of the Egyptian view of
coinage, whether a coin was perceived as having intrinsic value or simply value based
on its weight in bullion. The scholars of the monetization of Egypt thus far have been
primarily Classicists working with Greek papyri, especially family archives. Such
documents do not provide much information about Egyptians’ use of coins or view of
them. This paper represents an attempt to address this dearth of understanding by
analyzing demotic documents. I have chosen for analysis texts recording marriages
between people with Egyptian names, limiting my study to those documents collected
in Lüddeckens’ Ägyptische Eheverträge. As such, this analysis represents a
preliminary exploration into an area of research that requires more extensive
investigation in the future. These documents, dating from throughout the entire
Ptolemaic period, list various types of property brought into marriages, along with
their values. I analyzed the relative frequency of terms describing the weight of metals
as well as specifically named coins in an attempt to learn whether, for Egyptians,
coins had intrinsic value or value based on their metallic content.
The vast majority of items in the marriage documents are actually valued in terms
of debens of copper, so it seems, from this evidence, that specific Ptolemaic coins did
not fully percolate the Egyptian economic psyche as a common standard of value. The
Egyptians therefore did not need coins to develop a monetary system of worth. Their
own system, based on various items, including metals and grain, allowed them more
flexibility and complexity than one based solely on coinage. Coins may have
nevertheless been useful as a medium of exchange. In several cases, “money”
described in terms of metallic weight was given in both cases of divorce and for the
maintenance of the wife. Coins may have represented simply a useful, practical form
of metals for the wife to use to buy goods on her own. Future research, especially an
analysis of documents of sale, will address the issue of how payments were made in
more detail. It is generally agreed that by the Roman period, Egyptians were
commonly using coins for private transactions. This paper shows that although coins
were exchanged in the Ptolemaic period, Egyptians did not perceive them in the same
manner as the Greco-Macedonians in their midst.
Old Kingdom sacerdotal texts
Harold Hays
JAN ASSMANN’S three-volume Altägyptische Totenliturgien meticulously examines
“mortuary liturgies” from the Middle Kingdom and later; these are texts which were
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