Egyptian Deportations of the Late Bronze Age

A Study in Political Economy

Christian Langer

• Publisher: De Gruyter
• Year: 2021
• ISBN:
  9783110732207
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Historia
• Subtopic: Historia del antiguo Egipto

Egyptian Deportations of the Late Bronze Age explores the political economy of deportations in New Kingdom Egypt (ca. 1550–1070 BCE) from an interdisciplinary angle. The analysis of ancient Egyptian primary source material and the international correspondence of the time draws a comprehensive picture of the complex and far-reaching policies. The dataset reveals their geographic scope, economic and demographic impact in Egypt and abroad as well as their interconnection with territorial expansion, international relations, and labour management. The supply chain, profiting institutions and individuals in Egypt as the well as the labour tasks, origins and the composition of the deportees are discussed in detail. A comparative analytical framework integrates the Egyptian policies with a review of deportation discourses as well as historical premodern and modern cases and enables a global and diachronic understanding of the topic. The study is thus the first systematic investigation of deportations in ancient Egyptian history and offers new insights into Egyptian governance that revise previous assessments of the role of forced migration und unfree labour in ancient Egyptian society and their long-term effects.

1 Introduction

1.1 Towards a History of Egyptian Deportation Policies

This historical study investigates Egyptian deportation policies during the New Kingdom (or Late Bronze Age) between c. 1550 and 1069 BCE and integrates these with the wider history of Egyptian deportations between 3000 and 332 BCE, i.e. pharaonic history from the onset of the Egyptian state in the Predynastic to the Alexandrian conquest. It is the first comprehensive investigation of the topic, combining an original set of approaches.

Over the past decade, there have been several studies dedicated to exploring the perception of foreigners in Egyptian society or the treatment of prisoners of war during the New Kingdom.¹ What these studies have in common is their focus on iconography and foreigners as a device of (elite) discourse or object of cultural production. In comparison, the role of war captives and other deportees in the political economy of ancient Egypt and international relations of the Late Bronze Age is under-studied. This study aims to remedy this situation.

The general lack of a (multidisciplinary) theory of deportation integrating premodern and modern policies necessitates devising an original analytical framework that accomplishes just that. In this sense, one aim of the study was to determine general features of deportation policies on a global and diachronic scale to be able to identify them in the extant record of ancient Egypt. Ideally, this will also enhance interdisciplinary discussions of premodern deportations more generally beyond the scope of this work. Yet more importantly, it has to be used to establish the parameters of Egyptian deportation policies.

These parameters are mainly to do with the political economy of deportations conducted by the Egyptian administration. Possibly the most important questions thus revolve around the short- and long-term developments of Egypt’s policies and the supply chain. Hence, it was imperative to work out when and how many people were deported during the New Kingdom. To establish the supply chain, the institutions supplying, (re)distributing, and receiving deportees had to be identified from the extant record. Connected is the question of the respective structural weights. The identification of the institutions opens the possibility to enquire which Egyptian offices and individual officials may have been implicated.

These factors raise the issue of the socioeconomic impact on Egypt and other societies, and the long-term effects the deportations may have had on either. The underlying matter is that of causes and motivations: why and by what means Egypt deported people. The geographic frame of the policies had to be established as well. This relates to questions on their reach and directionality, and whether Egypt employed uniform policies in the different parts of its realm or adjusted them to local circumstances.

Other important questions concern the deportees themselves: their construction as deportable by Egyptian society; their composition; and the general conditions they experienced. The first issue relates to how Egyptian ideology constructed deportees as an Other and legitimate object of aggression. Related to this is the question of Egyptian discourse on the deportees and how they appear in the extant record. The second issue connects to the geographic and social origins of the deportees, as well as their gender and age. The last matter is to do with the transfer as such and the outcome for the deportees within Egypt or elsewhere: the selection processes and transport between places, the modes of dwelling of the affected people, which sectors of Egyptian society they were assigned to and which associated labour tasks they had to perform.

What is not considered in the study is the deportees’ perception or perspective on their situation. This is simply because their perspective is not conveyed by the sources. Rather, they appear as passive objects that are talked about by the deporters or those involved with integrating them in Egyptian society. They do not have a voice of their own in the extant record. Without any information to go on it is futile to try and reconstruct their perspective. Hence, questions concerning their material conditions are raised primarily.

In tackling these issues, the ultimate aim was to embed Egyptian deportation policies in wider global (migration) history. It is my hope that this may usher in improved interdisciplinary dialogue in deportation research and the enhanced integration of Egyptology in such ventures.² The prevalence of deportations on a global scale and the intensifying attention given to national deportation policies in Western countries in recent years highlight that this study is highly topical. In this climate it is exceedingly intriguing to set out and explore what Egyptology may have to contribute to current and future debates.

1.2 Methods: Combining Quantitative and Qualitative Approaches

These aims were attained by a wide variety of methods to gain as much information relevant to the topic as possible from the source material. The initial step was thus to conceptualize deportations as a global phenomenon of (collective) human agency by way of a multidisciplinary comparative approach. The first attempt at theorizing deportation integrating premodern and modern cases, this helped to determine features of deportation policies and identify these in ancient Egyptian and non-Egyptian textual source material.³

The study combines political with social and economic history and reverts to using the sources as a tool to explain and track the development of Egyptian deportation policies, rather than making them and their composition the focal point.⁴ This was determined by the problem-oriented approach of the study. In other words, the problem determined how the sources would be used. The point was to embed the source material in the wider (explicitly hypothetical)⁵ context of Egyptian society, primarily its economy and foreign policy.

The sources dealing with Egyptian foreign affairs and labour organization accordingly identified were translated (unless in non-Egyptian languages like Akkadian or Hittite) and the relevant information extracted. The commentary includes discussions on philological difficulties only where it matters for understanding the actual substance of a given attestation so as not to distract from the overall aim of this study. The course was to provide translations that make the content easily accessible for readers from a multitude of research fields and yield a consistent use of key terminology throughout the study.⁶

This ultimately resulted in a qualitative dataset that had to be set in the wider temporal, geographic, and socioeconomic contexts. In qualitative data, the individual aspects appear equal in scale and importance and thus present no “remotely reliable notion of the representative value of scattered references.”⁷ In other words, qualitative data offer no clues as to overall structures. On the Roman slave supply Walter Scheidel remarked that

[a]ny reconstruction of the Roman slave supply depends on two variables: the total number of slaves, and the relative contribution of particular sources of slaves to overall supply. Owing to the nature of the record, these issues are at best only dimly perceptible.⁸

These same issues pertain to the study of Egyptian deportation policies. Following Scheidel’s proposition, the integration of qualitative and quantitative approaches was the only feasible way⁹ to generate a meaningful reconstruction of Egyptian deportations.

Quantifying data generally appears as a suitable approach in historical studies that deal with more or less large numbers, although the results are prone to e.g. elite bias (as the information was collected for purposes other than the historian now intends to use them for) or they may not give a complete picture for a variety of reasons. Hence, statistics assembled from quantifiable data do not reflect reality but rather a partial image based on a selective or biased dataset. Nonetheless, it is commonly thought that quantitative approaches provide historical studies with a more representative picture than qualitative ones that often focus on source material that emanated from elite circles,¹⁰ as in the Egyptian case. The two are not mutually exclusive though and ideally employed complementarily in historical research to summarize or analyse data depending on what and how much information a given source conveys.¹¹ Due to the nature of the dataset the analysis thus comprises a mixture of quantitative and qualitative approaches. The work is partly inspired by Bustenay Oded’s reference work on Assyrian deportation policies in this respect.¹² A quantitative approach was also used by Jean-Christophe Antoine in his works on spatial terminology and the social composition of tenants in P.Wilbour.¹³

The analytical approaches thus differ depending on the issue under discussion. Quantitative approaches, though, form the backbone of the analysis. For instance, the discussions on policy changes or the various institutions involved with deportations in ancient Egyptian history warranted a quantitative method owing to the relative abundance of quantifiable data. Data on the deportees’ origins, social status, etc. could be similarly analysed to close in on their composition. On the other hand, matters like the offices connected with these deportations or the living conditions of the deportees only allowed a qualitative approach due to a lack of quantifiable data. Another advantage of quantification is that lacunae in the extant record become more clearly visible.

In the present case, that enabled the use of quantification to bypass these gaps and generate a virtual, extrapolated dataset that presents an alternate view of Egyptian deportation policies. The extrapolations derive from interpolations of the primary material. Quantification was therefore used to discuss the implications of a ‘complete’ dataset, in order to provide what could be a more realistic pictur...