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The scribe on the mat with his scroll and grain samples. Egypt paid its wages in barley and staffed itself with men who could count it.

Egypt had no coined money for most of its history and did not need it. The economy ran on grain: wages were paid in it, taxes were assessed in it, temples were endowed with it, and the whole apparatus of the state existed to measure how much there was and where it went. The Nile flood arrived every summer, and the height it reached decided the year. A flood too low meant famine; too high meant washed-out villages and ruined seed. So the government measured the river with nilometers, stone staircases running down into the water with graduated marks, and set the tax rate from the reading before the harvest existed. What that produced was the world's first paperwork civilization. Scribes counted the cattle, the fields, the sacks, the workers, the jars, the days of labor owed; the surviving tax registers, ration lists and delivery receipts are more numerous than the poetry by an enormous margin. A scribe was exempt from manual labor and knew it. The advice text known as the Satire of the Trades exists to say so, running through the misery of every other job, the potter grubbing in clay, the fisherman working beside crocodiles, the smith with fingers like crocodile hide, and ending each time on the same refrain: be a scribe. The biblical story of Joseph, the foreigner who reads a dream about seven fat and seven lean years and is made overseer of the granaries, is the outsider's version of that system, and it is accurate about the mechanism if not the man: store the surplus of good years, feed the country in bad ones, and end up owning the country. Famine records are real enough. One inscription on a rock at Sehel describes seven years of low flood under a king of the Old Kingdom, though it was carved 2,000 years after the reign it claims to report, which is its own comment on how Egyptian bureaucracy handled an inconvenient past. Alma-Tadema painted Joseph in 1874 in a room built entirely from museum study: the striped throne, the painted plaster, the pigeon-shaped jars, a scribe on the floor with a scroll and a heap of grain samples on the mat in front of him. The overseer looks past all of it. He is the only person in the picture not doing arithmetic.