Few had wealth in ancient EgyptHouses hint
at polarized society 3,500 years ago.
29
November 2002
PHILIP BALL
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| Property and possessions reflected
wealth in Ancient Egypt. |
| © Museum of Fine Art,
Boston. | | |
Most ancient Egyptians were on the poverty line while a handful of
priest-kings held fabulous wealth. Children earned their keep from a very
early age and two out of every three people in an average family had to
work.
At least that's what the fourteenth century BC house market suggests,
according to Egyptian mathematician A. Y. Abul-Magd of Zagazig
University.
The number of dwellings of different sizes in the ruined city of
Akhetaten hints that wealth distribution was more polarized in ancient
Egypt than in most societies today, he argues1.
The area of a house, says Abul-Magd, is a good measure of its owner's
wealth in a society without money such as Ancient Egypt. Most of the
houses were single-storey, made of mud brick and covering about 60 square
metres. But one or two cover about seven times that area.
Akhetaten provides a perfect snapshot of wealth distribution, contends
Abul-Magd. At about 2 km across it was relatively big, but it was also
very short-lived, and so didn't acquire the alterations of many
generations.
King Akhenaten founded the city and attempted to introduce a new
religion with a single god called Aten. He uprooted the entire culture,
shifting the capital from Thebes - now Luxor - to his new city.
When he died, the new religion was abandoned, Thebes was reinstated as
the capital, and Akhetaten was deserted. It was occupied for just two or
three decades before being buried in sand.
Fundamental law
In all urbanized societies, the number of people with a certain
proportion of the wealth decreases as that proportion gets bigger. The
degree of inequality can be gauged from the steepness of this decrease:
the steeper it is, the more poor people and the fewer very rich people
there are.
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| Akhetaten was occupied for just a
few decades. |
| © Museum of Fine Art,
Boston. | | |
In 1897 the Italian sociologist Vilfredo Pareto claimed that all modern
cultures display the same kind of wealth distribution. Plotted on a
certain kind of graph, this becomes a downward-slanted straight line. For
his contemporary Italy, Pareto observed that 20% of the population held
80% of the wealth.
The 'Pareto distribution' came to be regarded as a fundamental law of
society. One economist claimed in 1940 that it was "destined to take its
place as one of the great generalizations of human knowledge". The new
findings lend weight to that assertion.
Akhetaten has a Pareto distribution, albeit a very narrow one. There is
no middle class to spread the wealth, so it benefits only a privileged
few.
Archaeologists have studied Akhetaten since 1891, when the Egypt
Exploration Fund of London began excavation. Today there is a city called
Tell el-Amarna on the site. | 