Shipping and Trade in Ramesside Egypt

Abstract

Apart from commerce carried on at the local level between villages, the redistribution system of the Egyptian economy, in a physical sense, operated by shipping along the Nile and ancillary canals. For this reason, a study of the documents concerned with shipping and trade is essential to a study of the commercial operations of the large institutions, their relationship to one another and whatever private enterprise may have existed apart from these institutions. On this last point, it should perhaps be kept in mind from the start that because any small scale private enterprise is less likely than the bureaucracies of the large institutions to have left direct documentary evidence on papyrus, we should expect to find a bias towards the official bureaucracies there. On the other hand, evidence on ostraca is likely to be biased towards transactions on a smaller scale. In general, the main sources on which we have to rely are records kept by temple and state institutions. These may include documents dealing with the transport of grain, ship's logs recording daily transactions and movements of personnel and goods, accounts of transactions between institutions and other entities, administrative

Cite this work

No public copy is stored for this record, so only the metadata is cited.

Stored only when both papers are in the corpus — 65 citations exist upstream.

Papers that cite the same references — the relational fallback while embeddings are still backfilling.