The Political Economy of Royal Mortuary Practices in Dynastic Egypt

Adam Kaiser

Advisor: Peter T. Leeson, PhD, Department of Economics

Committee Members: Peter Boettke, Tyler Cowen

Online Location, https://gmu.zoom.us/j/99456209781
May 23, 2025, 11:00 AM to 01:00 PM

Abstract:

This dissertation explores the economic incentives underlying the costly royal mortuary practices of ancient Egyptian kings during the dynastic period. I argue that the type and scale of royal mortuary expenditures was chosen to distort relative prices in a manner that increased the value of the king's assets and to devalue those of rival elites. By investing in the production of labor-intensive inalienable goods such as large royal pyramids, Lower Egyptian kings were able to raise the price of grain relative to gold and other trade goods. Due to unique features of the local geography, this benefited provinces that were most loyal to the Lower Egyptian kings who specialized in producing grain, at the cost of the politically independent southern provinces, whose elites controlled access to gold and foreign trade goods, and who were most likely to challenge the king's authority. When royal power shifted to the south, the practice of building large pyramids ended, and kings began burying increasing amounts of gold in their tombs, which lowered the price of grain relative to gold instead.

In the first chapter, I present a theoretical model of tenure-enhancing wealth destruction in the presence of asymmetric resource endowments. I apply this model to the royal mortuary practices of Dynastic Egypt to generate testable empirical predictions.

In the second chapter, I examine the distribution of resources within ancient Egypt to establish that it is consistent with the model's assumptions. I find that agricultural output was far lower in southern Egypt than in northern Egypt, but that the provinces in southern Egypt controlled access to known sources of gold during the period.

In the third chapter, I estimate the costs of pyramid construction to the ancient Egyptian economy. I find that it consumed a substantial portion of the country's annual agricultural surplus.

In the fourth chapter, I examine the historical and archaeological evidence for changes in the relative prices of grain and gold following negative supply shocks of grain. Historical records show that the relative price of gold fell substantially during famine periods demonstrating that price of gold was highly sensitive to the quantity of grain available. Data from Nubian grave goods also shows that Egyptian exports from southern provinces fell during periods of active pyramid construction, which is consistent with a falling relative price of gold.

In the fifth chapter, coauthored with Tegan Truitt, we use paleoclimatic data to show that the scale of pyramid construction was closely associated with changes in levels of Mediterranean rainfall. By marginally increasing agricultural productivity in Lower Egypt and lowering the cost of gold-mining expeditions in Upper Egypt, higher levels of rainfall exacerbated the asymmetry in resource endowments and amplified the price effects of strategic wealth destruction.

In the sixth chapter, I show that the pattern of wealth destruction associated royal mortuary practices inverted when Upper Egyptian kings came to power and ultimately ended when large-scale exports of grain became possible. This provided a way for northern rulers to consume the full value of their grain surpluses without appreciating the market value of their domestic rivals' assets and so removed the incentive to construct extremely large, labor-intensive monuments.