In order to understand the manner in which the government of Egypt was
conducted, we should never forget that the world was still ignorant of
the use of money, and that gold, silver, and copper, however abundant we
may suppose them to have been, were mere articles of exchange, like
the most common products of Egyptian soil. Pharaoh was not then, as the
State is with us, a treasurer who calculates the total of his receipts
and expenses in ready money, banks his revenue in specie occupying but
little space, and settles his accounts from the same source. His fiscal
receipts were in kind, and it was in kind that he remunerated his
servants for their labour: cattle, cereals, fermented drinks, oils,
stuffs, common or precious metals,--"all that the heavens give, all
that the earth produces, all that the Nile brings from its mysterious
sources,"* --constituted the coinage in which his subjects paid him their
contributions, and which he passed on to his vassals by way of salary.

* This was the most usual formula for the offering on the
funerary stelo, and sums up more completely than any other
the nature of the tax paid to the gods by the living, and
consequently the nature of that paid to the king; here, as
elsewhere, the domain of the gods is modelled on that of the
Pharaohs.

One room, a few feet square, and, if need be, one safe, would easily
contain the entire revenue of one of our modern empires: the largest
of our emporiums would not always have sufficed to hold the mass of
incongruous objects which represented the returns of a single Egyptian
province. As the products in which the tax was paid took various forms,
it was necessary to have an infinite variety of special agents and
suitable places to receive it; herdsmen and sheds for the oxen,
measurers and granaries for the grain, butlers and cellarers for