Potmarks as a Rationing System on Egyptian Food Producing Sites: Defining Egypt’s Proto-Bureaucracy

Abstract

In this multidisciplinary discussion, the author advances the hypothesis that pre-firing potmarks placed externally onto bread moulds constituted a locally regulated rationing or wage payment system throughout Egypt in Late Predynastic and Early Dynastic times. In the absence of both formal writing and a centralized government, the invention of potmarks is seen as an administrative ‘first response’, an adaptive mechanism in the truest Darwinian sense, to meet an urgent need for order and control in a climate of increasing economic complexity as people transitioned from private to public spheres of food production. Furthermore, the distribution of geographically discrete but similar potmark corpora across Egypt suggests the presence of a ‘proto-bureaucracy’ before state formation, with this genre of mark situated at its core. This proto-bureaucracy is seen as inherently different from the bureaucracy of the impending state, dominated instead by elements of an adhocracy, a form of administration based on non-centralized management. The term adhocracy and its tenets, although developed in the modern era for present-day and future restructuring of bureaucracies, permit for the first time a cogent modelling of potmark administration.