This volume is a must. It is up to date and replete with pertinent (and detailed) information. E.’s intent was not to provide an economic history of pharaonic Egypt. Rather, he analyses the necessary scribal backgrounding to economic conceptions and the mundane use of documents – whether legal, purely epistolary, or the like – for his analysis of the seemingly tightly knit regulation of daily life from ancient Egypt. There is a worthwhile stress upon the ‘archives’ at the workmen's village of Deir el Medineh as well as a reiteration of the so-called Duties to the Vizier. (He dates that ‘document’ to Dynasty XIII, or at least the Late Middle Kingdom.) E. does not hesitate to note the use of documents as permanent reference tools for the ancients as well as the remarkably lengthy records of land acreage and productivity, the ‘census’ situation, and the necessity of regulating, or controlling, the country through a minute series of written documents. Here, the theme is a crucial one: the power of the text, or to be more specific, the authority invested in writing.

One may feel that E. has avoided the methodological overarching vault that results from any accounting procedure, especially in light of M. Ezzamel's Accounting and Order (2012), a work that is not included in the bibliography. But if we can accept the absence of M. Weber and K. Polyani, whom many feel to be outdated, then this reviewer was surprised to see the works of M. Megally and D. Warburton present. On the other hand, control over the vast historiography of ancient Egyptian economic life is hard to maintain, even if other perceptions of the same administrative machinery were curtailed. E. clearly did not prefer to rehash the old hypotheses of Weber et al.

Any ‘ordinary’ lay understanding of this important work would probably be limited owing to the specifics that E. has included. But for advanced undergraduates as well as prospective postgraduates and Egyptologists, this study is a necessary, well thought out compendium on a difficult subject. True, a diachronic evaluation of the material is missing owing to E.’s approach. Often, to me at least, E. jumps too fast from epoch to epoch, even though I was quite conversant with the documents involved in his study. If, however, such temporal links were followed, I feel that E. would have sacrificed his orientation on themes rather than on historical eras.

I particularly liked E.’s opening comments where he emphasises the ‘culture of government and hierarchy, exploiting ideological claims to meritocracy’ (pp. 10–11), a point that moves onto the realms of corporate entities, such as the cleruchy, the military and the scribal bureaucracy – all, in fact, competing for power within the so-called, and often assumed, simple pyramidal structure of pharaonic Egypt. Yet when E. describes the assumed rational and efficient, if not impersonal, nature of administrative machinery in Ancient Near Eastern societies, and argues for a more ‘ramshackle and highly personalized administration’ (pp. 6–15), one may differ. I see more of a bending if not plastic, indeed pliable, adaption to life, resulting in a mature adaption to it by Egyptian administrators. Should we trust those who mould reality to their thoughts or thoughts to reality? The human race seems to persist in following the first vector, and with frequent disastrous results, I would argue.

These Egyptians, presumably ‘ramshackle’, may have realised the humane and more effective way of dealing with the world, one that allowed a reasonable degree of fudging and imprecision in order to allow finished works of glory to be created, if not for all time, at least for millennia. Hence, E.’s somewhat negative feelings with regard to the ‘efficiency’ of these ancients may very well be a displaced modernist perception of what was a greater tolerance for errors.