53. Report on the Survey of Social Conditions in Lower Egypt (II)

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Well, while a lot of modern people would find it hard to believe, the ancient Egyptians did implement the system of communal ownership of land and jihua economy for three thousand years. Like the landlords and yeoman farmers that were common in ancient China, there were no such thing in ancient Egypt at all! Most of the land in the country was in the hands of the temple group, and a small part was in the hands of the pharaohs and nobles. This makes the country a highly public, or "highly nationalized" society.

In this system, the temple was equivalent to the state-owned enterprises and people's communes of China's Jihua economic era, the priests were equivalent to the bureaucracy "within the system", the aristocracy was equivalent to the generals and colonels of the army, and the pharaoh held the position of "chairman of the military commission and president of the state (the former being the main one)", and sometimes had the power of a chancellor. Ordinary laborers, on the other hand, are peasants in the people's communes and workers in state-owned enterprises, and they cannot change their occupations or move freely for generations, and can only engage in the same occupation in the same place from father to son, similar to the serfdom system in Russia or the caste system in India.

The reason why the Egyptians did this was also based on practical considerations - first, the characteristic of ancient Egyptian agriculture was that it relied on the flooding of the Nile, and after the flooding, it was necessary to raise the dikes, store the floodwater, and then discharge the flood water to maintain the water level of the cistern...... The organization of these projects is very complex and requires strict organization and leadership. Small families really can't do it themselves. Second, the Nile floods every year, and the farmland along the river floods once a year, waiting until the flood waters recede. The landmark ridge or something has long been washed away. If you engage in private ownership of land, you will have to fight lawsuits every year just to determine the boundaries of land, or you will have to play group fights every year. Not to mention that the water level of the Nile River varies every year, and the good paddy fields that can be planted this year may be submerged to the bottom next year, and then exposed again the year after...... How can we engage in private ownership of farmland that is changing at any time?

So. Forced by the realities of the situation, the Egyptians were forced to work together rather than a small plot of land for each family – the size and location of the cultivated land changed from year to year. There is no way to be self-employed - it is a collective farming in the villages, and then the products of labor are distributed together. But this kind of collective agriculture obviously needs someone to organize and lead, and when there is a contradiction, someone needs someone to judge and judge, so the temple priest, who is good at fooling, is honorably appointed. Became the hereditary "Captain of the Production Brigade of the People's Commune"! They are obligated to pay public rations. Xiangxia holds the power to calculate the labor for farmers and distribute agricultural products, and can be said to be the overlord of each village.

However, the priests of ancient Egypt did not have the dedication and lofty ideals of modern communists, but preferred to enjoy the offerings of believers in the name of God. At the same time, the clever low use of religion to anesthetize the Egyptian resistance and perpetuate the brutal and rigid system of caste slavery - for the ancient Egyptians, death was only an interruption of life, not an end. People don't disappear after death. will enter another more beautiful than this life haode eternal shijie. In order to pursue a more beautiful reincarnation, all the suffering endured in this life is worth it......

Therefore. Strictly speaking, the society closest to ancient Egypt in modern Shijie is actually not China in the Jihua economic era, but in old Tibet before liberation. Egyptian religion is the main body of ancient Egyptian traditional culture. Just as Lamaism is the main body of traditional Tibetan culture. What kind of noble character did the Tibetan lamas, living Buddhas, serf owners represent, and what kind of moral models the ancient Egyptian priests were. How Tibetan Buddhism hindered the progress of Tibetan society, and how the Egyptian priesthood brought ancient Egyptian civilization into the abyss in history.

From a macro point of view, almost all of Egypt's main social production was controlled by the temple, and the priestly group controlled almost all of Egypt's human and material resources, while the pharaoh relied on his own army to maintain a balance with the priestly group. In this way, when the pharaoh was able to fight well and the army was strong, the control of the temple was still more effective. Once the pharaoh's ability to fight weakened, the scales of royal power and divine power would tilt towards the divine power of the temple state-owned enterprises. What's worse is that the selection of officials in the government of the pharaohs of ancient Egypt was also controlled by the temple priests - because the government officials could not fail to understand the written language, and the grammar and teaching of hieroglyphs were strictly controlled by the temple priests, and the pharaoh could not avoid the temple priests if he wanted to rule the country.

In the face of such a large and pervasive priestly group, the reason why the ancient Egyptian pharaohs could barely maintain their power, rather than let Egypt become a theocratic state like the old Tibet, is mainly because there are too many gods in Egypt, the total number is more than 2,000, and each region has different gods (Thebes is the god Amun, Memphis is the god Ptah, and some villages in Lower Egypt are cat gods), and the priest groups that serve them are naturally scattered. Temples that worshipped different gods were often not subordinate to each other, but rather had serious rivalry and were never able to form a joint force to wage war against the royal power, as Tibetan Buddhism and European Christianity did. The pharaoh could sow discord and hold up one temple to suppress another at any time, while keeping members of the royal family as high priests to prevent the priesthood from swelling out of control. For example, Pharaoh Tutankhamun was a high priest for a while, and only took over the position after the death of his predecessor, Pharaoh Ekhnatun.

But there are also many after-effects of this method, such as Pharaoh Ekhnatun, Pharaoh Tutankhamun's predecessor, in order to strike at the powerful Shili in the capital Thebes region, almost emptying the temple of Amun, which almost overthrew the royal power, and once carried out a religious reform. He first moved the capital elsewhere to avoid the "home advantage" of the temple of Amun in Thebes, and then set up the god of the wheel of the sun as the main god, Atun, and deposed the other temples in order to weaken the religious shili. However, after Tutankhamun ascended the throne, he could not withstand the great pressure of the priests of the temple of Amun, so he re-established the god Amun and restored the temple...... Tossing and turning like this, the ranks of the gods of ancient Egypt quickly swelled viciously. According to the custom of ancient Egypt, every god needs to build a temple and set up priests to make offerings of incense and pray for oracles...... I got zuihou. The army of immortals in ancient Egypt is almost going to bring down the national economy! Just as the countless lama monasteries in Tibet and Mongolia have turned these two once fierce war-fighting peoples into kidney failure.

After the establishment of the Ptolemaic dynasty of the Greeks, the same problem was raised before the Ptolemaic royal family - it was impossible to rule Egypt without the recognition and support of the Egyptian priesthood. Giving carte blanche to the Egyptian priesthood was in danger of being hollowed out as a puppet.

On the one hand, the Ptolemaic dynasty adopted a method of mixing sand and trying to migrate other peoples from Shijie to settle in Egypt. Changing the demographics of Egypt. For more than two hundred years, at least the ethnic composition of Lower Egypt has been made into a palette, from Jews to Caucasians. There were people of almost every nationality, and these foreign immigrants did not believe in the Egyptian gods; On the other hand, every effort was made to expropriate the temple from its lands and nationalize it as much as possible - the Ptolemaic family did not believe in the Egyptian gods, so there was no pressure at all on the angry curses of the priests - and at the same time allocated part of the money for the construction of a luxurious temple. As a pacification to the priests of the monks.

But here's the thing. Even if the land was nationalized, because there were not so many grassroots officials familiar with the Egyptian countryside, in many places, especially in Upper Egypt, where immigrants were scarce, the Ptolemaic Zuihou still had to rely on the priestly community to manage and collect taxes.

With the decline of the Ptolemaic Dynasty, the originally suppressed Egyptian priests Shili once again swelled viciously, not only defaulting on taxes and enriching their own pockets, but also turning temple priests in many places into rebel leaders. The hegemony of one side made the Ptolemaic dynasty more and more turbulent.

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“…… So it seems. Microscopically, Egypt's social structure is somewhat similar to China during the Jihua economic era, but more like the pre-liberation serfdom of old Tibet. Macroscopically, it is similar to the late Tang Dynasty in China...... Uh, considering that the Ptolemaic dynasty was a foreign foreign colonial power, it seems more like a British Indian colony with many princely states and a caste system that has not changed for thousands of years? ”

After carefully reading the "Survey Report on the Social Conditions in Lower Egypt" written by Professor Yang, and combining the actual situation observed in the temple of Memphis City, Wang Qiu couldn't help muttering while reaching out and tapping on a sheet of ancient Egypt on the table.

In ancient Egyptian times, the territory of the whole Egypt was roughly divided into more than forty "Nome", which generally translates to "state" in Chinese. However, please do not associate the "states" of Egypt with the states of the United States, because after deducting the desert no man's land, the habitable area of the whole of Egypt is only 30,000 to 40,000 square kilometers, which is not much larger than the island of Taiwan, so each "state" is a territory of several hundred square kilometers, which is worth a county at most.

At present, among the more than 40 "Nomes", the "Nomes" who are still loyal to Queen Cleopatra and the "Nomes" who are independent are about half to half, and the former is slightly more, but the advantage is not obvious. Queen Cleopatra essentially controlled coastal Lower Egypt, dominating population and economic power. But the soldiers of the interior of Upper Egypt were more warlike and geographically advantageous - their entire terrain was a green corridor along the Nile Valley, with death deserts on both sides, and they had to push all the way to attack them, with no strategic space for detours and maneuvers. The rebel army of Upper Egypt could have fortified along the long river valley, held on step by step, exhausted the intruders' sharp spirit in the continuous positional warfare, dragged the enemy from the lower reaches of the river "fat to thin, thin to death", and finally turned the defense into an offensive and drove the enemy out of the river valley.

Before the Egyptian Civil War, the Ptolemaic dynasty maintained a number of fortresses and strongholds in Upper Egypt, relying on the Nile River for communication, and was able to maintain the Japanese occupation army's domination of the occupied areas of North China in roughly the area around the strongholds, that is, regular sweeps and counter-sweeps, plus entering villages to grab food and being ambushed. But by this time, except for the Faiyum region, which was dominated by Greek immigrants, the whole of Upper Egypt had been completely lost.

Fortunately, since the rebel armies in Upper Egypt were still divided into a dozen or so shili, scattered and unsubordinated to each other, they still nominally remained vassals to the Ptolemaic dynasty, but in reality...... It can roughly refer to the relationship between the late Tang Dynasty and the Chang'an court, or the Warring States daimyo and the Muromachi shogunate.

In short, the rebellious Upper Egypt region, although it was not able to recover it for a while, did not pose much of a threat for the time being. However, the priests of the temple of Memphis, which had once again swelled dramatically, had become a henchman lurking in the Queen's precincts - even though the religious holy city of Memphis had just been looted and slaughtered, and the priesthood had suffered heavy losses. But the foundations of Ptolemaic rule, the coastal towns of Alexandria, Noctis, and the fortress of Pelusim, were also in ruins. If the two sides compare each other badly, it's hard to say whose situation is worse.

Indeed, Queen Cleopatra tried to implement indigenization reforms, reaching a compromise with the temple priests to absorb their share of power, expand the power base of the Ptolemaic dynasty, and dispel the rebellion of the natives of Egypt...... But compromise is compromise, concession is concession, and if the other side is allowed to ride on his head in a big way, just like South Africa, where the status of blacks and whites was reversed after the end of apartheid, then it is not a conditional compromise and concession, but an outright surrender.

So, after some deliberation, Queen Cleopatra came up with a plan to draw salaries from the bottom of the kettle.

“…… After all this period of deliberation, Miss Ben finally had a complete plan for this issue—isn't it just cutting the feudal domain! As long as you take out the method of the Tokugawa shogunate to deal with the Sengoku daimyo back then, you should be fine! She said confidently.

The next day, during a meeting on the aftermath of the war, Queen Cleopatra rejected the priesthood's request for a large grant from the government to help rebuild the temples in Memphis, and instead made a dumbfounded counter-proposal: given that the city of Memphis was in dilapidation, the cost of restoration was too high, and that it would be the frontier of confrontation between the Lower Egyptian Queen's Army and the Upper Egyptian rebel army for a long time to come, it was not suitable for continued use as a religious center.

Therefore, Queen Cleopatra decided to abandon the city of Memphis and its temples and let them decay, and at the same time build a new temple near Alexandria, the capital of the north, and warmly invited the priests of Memphis to leave their homes and join the new temple...... (To be continued......)