The Relationship of Pottery and Economy in Old Kingdom Egypt: A Question of State Control

The Egyptian economy is typically described as redistributive, following the framework established by Karl Polanyi. In a redistributive system, the state supports its population by gathering goods from producers and redistributing them among the general population. Previous studies on the Egyptian economy support this theory with textual data from the New Kingdom (ca. 1550-1060 BC). In order to create a basis for an economic model for the Old Kingdom (ca. 2600-2200 BC) by using data internal to that period, this study analyzes ceramics, particularly beer jars and bd3 bread moulds. These two ceramic types were the main vessels used in the production and distribution of bread and beer, cornerstones in the Egyptian non-monetary economy. If the economy was truly state-run, one would expect these vessels to have a standardized volume throughout the country, allowing the government to control and measure the redistribution of resources. In order to assess standardization, this study focused on a sample of beer jars and bread moulds from fifteen sites throughout Egypt, both central and provincial. The volumes of these vessels were measured through a combination of filling on-site (when the author was able to work with the actual vessel) and calculation through Pot Utility v. 1.05 (when only the drawing was available for analysis). Standardization within a sample was then assessed by application of the Coefficient of Variation (CV). Through this method, standardization is shown to have been absent not only in the volumes of these samples when viewed as a unity across Egypt, but also when viewed at the level of a single site during a single period. Data from the iconographic, textual, and archaeological record supplement and support this finding. The study also addresses the few exceptions to this rule. This lack of standardization suggests that control of both ceramic production and distribution of goods did not rest in the hands of central or local governments. Local, informal economies appear to have been the norm in the Old Kingdom, not a large, state-controlled redistribution system