Djekhy & Son: Doing Business in Ancient Egypt by Koenraad Donker van Heel (review)

“Ancient Egypt,” an influential survey once observed, “has proved remarkably resistant to the writing of history which is not traditional in character; which is not, in other words, concerned primarily with the ordering of kings and the chronicling of their deeds.”¹ This resistance is only partly attributable to the limited content of vainglorious pharaonic annals and elite biographies; it is equally due to the limited survival of other sources for economic and social history and the limited number of scholars trained to analyze those rare sources.

Koenraad Donker van Heel’s Djekhy & Son examines one such corpus: a group of private contracts written in the Abnormal Hieratic and Early Demotic scripts during the sixth century BCE; these texts were then stored in the archive of Djekhy and his son, Iturech, two ancient Egyptian businessmen who worked alternately as priests, undertakers, landlords, and trustees. Donker van Heel is careful to warn his reader throughout the book that the documents that constitute the focus of his study belonged to the archive of a single ancient Egyptian family and likely represent less than 1 percent of the textual output of that family, much less of the nation as a whole—an insufficient basis for biography, let alone for any grand historical survey of the ancient Egyptian economy (p. 91, also cf. pp. 31, 95). Nevertheless, the book’s microhistorical approach illuminates a wide range of economic activity, from the loaning of silver at interest, the standardization of weights, and the sometimes violent conflicts between local enterprise and national revenue, to the leasing of agricultural land, the sale of cattle, the provisioning of funerary services, and the negotiation of prenuptial agreements and adoptions. Much of this material will have comparative utility for economic and social historians studying other periods and regions, and some facets of Djekhy and Iturech’s world may well surprise the nonspecialist reader—for example, the practice of putting up one’s own children as security for a loan, the financial security guaranteed to certain divorcées, and the power of immigrants in ancient Egyptian society during the first millennium BCE.

The book’s chapters are organized around small sets of interrelated transactions that can be traced across multiple papyri. In some cases, the business in question unfolded across a span of decades, in other cases over just one year. The periods covered in successive chapters frequently overlap, so the author has cleverly sequenced the chapters with a hybrid scheme of both chronological order and shrinking temporal scope; as a result, early chapters provide background for the more episodic purview of later chapters. The inclusion of multiple excurses within these chapters results in a very wandering narrative thread, but the author’s frequent digressions into other textual genres (e.g., ancient wisdom texts and works of historical fiction) are essential for situating individual business transactions into a broader societal context. The thematic outline within each chapter is clearly conveyed by the table of contents, where related discussions and excurses are structured into a hierarchy of indented subheadings; the same outline is unfortunately less transparent during a continuous reading of the book, where all subheadings are left-justified and their thematic relationships indicated only by changes in font. The book is enhanced by six indices, the first five most helpful for Egyptologists, and the final, more general, index a service for the comparative historian.

Donker van Heel is an ideal scholar to bring these economic micro-histories to a broader readership. Not only is he one of perhaps a dozen specialists worldwide with true facility in Abnormal Hieratic, and the first to publish primers for this “least accessible of all ancient Egyptian scripts,”² but his work also displays an affection for humanizing and even humorous details in the workaday lives of both ancient Egyptians and modern Egyptologists (e.g., pp. xii, 24, 49, 91–93, 124, 159). This combination of specialized...