21.
Egyptian administration (and care): *
The Old Kingdom collapsed at the end of the 6th dynasty. This breakdown was caused by a sudden, unanticipated & catastrophic reduction in the Nile floods over 3 decades. Famine gripped the country & paralysed the political institutions. This lasted from 2181 to 2055 BC. From 2134 BC recovery begins though unity lapsed. The northern rulers (9th & 10th dynasties) of Heracleopolis in Lower Egypt restored order & stability as the Nile floods again allowed plentiful harvests. The Theban rulers (of the south) positioned themselves to resurrect a unfied monarchy, on a collision course with the Herakleopolitan kings. In 2033 BC Thebes won this struggle. The Theban Mentuhotepe II (11th dynasty, 1st pharaoh of the Middle Kingdom) & his successors unified Egypt. Although the Herakleopolitan kings lost, their polices & notions of justice, mercy & social services were never lost. Some of their writings on such ideas became Egyptian classics. They include the instructions of the Herakleopolitan King Khety to his son Merikare stressing social obligations & advising him to remember god created rulers to fortify the backbones of the weak & counteract ill fate.
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Egypt survived the First Intermeidate period & soon re-invented centralized government. Now the image of kings included divine descent but more importantly also a duty to uphold order & justice, care for the dispossessed, show mercy & compassion. The earlier crisis transformed the pharonic institution. The new monarchy reflected social justice, and laid the foundations for mercy and compassion as fundamental virtues. In the early 12th Dynasty the outlines of Herakleopolitan social values are reflected in works like The Tale of the Eloquent Peasant, a piece of official wisdom. It is a bill of rights for ordinary citizens & the responsibility of state officials towards the poor & powerless. The ruler is a father to the orphan, husband to the widow, brother to she who is divorced, a garment to the motherless, a just ruler who comes to the voice of those who call him. Economic paternalism is reflected in the state controlled economy. Agriculture was the main activity & farmers, the bulk of the population; their produce was owned directly by the state, temple or noble family that owned the land. They were subject to a labour tax requiring work on irrigation or construction projects in a corvée system. Artists & craftsmen were a higher status than farmers but were also under state control, working in shops attached to the temples, paid directly from the state treasury. A type of money-barter system was used, based on standard sacks of grain and the deben (a weight of roughly 3 oz of copper or silver), which served as a common denominator. Workers were paid in grain; prices were fixed across the country & recorded in lists to facilitate trading; grain could be traded for other goods, according to the fixed price list.
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Egyptian temples were houses of worship for the state religion and responsible for collecting & storing the nation's wealth in a system of granaries and treasuries administered by overseers, who redistributed grain & goods when needed. They were not intended as places for worship for the general populace, instead, the state-run temples housed physical images of the Gods, their intermediaries. the images were cared for & provided with offerings, a service necessary to sustain the gods. The temple included others besides priests, such as musicians & chanters in temple ceremonies and outside the temple were artisans & labourers who supplied the temple's needs, and farmers who worked on temple estates. All were paid with portions of the temple's income. Large temples were important centres of economic activity, employing thousands of people. Temples were central to Egyptian society, and vast resources were devoted to their upkeep, including both donations from the monarchy and large estates of their own.
22.
Chou dynasty (and care): *
Agriculture in the Zhou dynasty was intensive & directed by the government. Under the Zhou, the fengjian system developed, in which nobles were given land, governing their own fiefs under the authority of the king. Lands owned by nobles were given to their serfs (similar to European feudalism). In the well field system, land was divided into 9 squares, grain from the middle square taken by the government, the surrounding squares kept by individual farmers. The government stored surplus food & distributed it in times of famine or bad harvest. This system was replaced by private land ownership during the Warring states period. The state also engaged in large projects during the Spring & Autumn period (722–481 BC). One revolutionary improvement was the large-scale harnessing of rivers & the development of water conservation. Engineers in the 6th & 5th century BC developed major hydraulic projects, focused upon improving irrigation systems. Duke Zhuang gave the chancellor of Wei, Sunshu Ao, the responsibility of constructing a large river dam that would create an enormous planned reservoir to allow irrigation. This reservoir accumulated water from the mountains north of the Yangtze River and supplied irrigation to 6 million acres
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Confucious was a philosophical light of this age. He looked back on the Western Zhou, with its strong centralized state as an ideal. He was pragmatic, & sought reform of the existing government, encouraging a system of mutual duty between superiors & inferiors. He stressed tradition & believed that an individual should strive to be virtuous & good mannered, fit into his place in society. He urged the political classes to model themselves on earlier examples. In times of division, chaos, & endless wars between feudal states, he wanted to restore the Mandate of Heaven, to unify the world under Heaven, giving peace & prosperity to the people.
23.
Chou Li: *
(aka Liu Xin) The Rites of Zhou appeared in the middle of the 2nd century BC; its first editor was Liu Xin, who credited it to the Duke of Zhou. The Song dynasty continued this attribution, claiming that Liu Xin's edition was the final one. In the late 19th & early 20th centuries the book was labeled a forgery by Liu Xin. The date of its authorship is also contested.