An Arab writer of the Middle Ages remarks, not without irony, that the Egyptians were perhaps the only people in the world who never kept any stores of provisions by them, but each one went daily to the market to buy the pittance for his family.  The improvidence which he laments over in his contemporaries had been handed down from their most remote ancestors.  Workmen, fellahin, employes, small townsfolk, all lived from hand to mouth in the Egypt of the Pharaohs.  Pay-days were almost everywhere days of rejoicing and extra eating:  no one spared either the grain, oil, or beer of the treasury, and copious feasting continued unsparingly, as long as anything was left of their wages.  As their resources were almost always exhausted before the day of distribution once more came round, beggary succeeded to fulness of living, and a part of the population was literally starving for several days.  This almost constant alternation of abundance and dearth had a reactionary influence on daily work:  there were scarcely any seignorial workshops or undertakings which did not come to a standstill every month on account of the exhaustion of the workmen, and help had to be provided for the starving in order to avoid popular seditions.  Their improvidence, like their cheerfulness, was perhaps an innate trait in the national character:  it was certainly fostered and developed by the system of government adopted by Egypt from the earliest times.  What incentive was there for a man of the people to calculate his resources and to lay up for the future, when he knew that his wife, his children, his cattle, his goods, all that belonged to him, and himself to boot, might be carried off at any moment, without his having the right or the power to resent it?  He was born, he lived, and he died in the possession of a master.

[Illustration:  147.jpg A FLOCK OF GOATS AND THE SONG OF A GOATHERD]

     Drawn by Faucher-Gudin, from a photograph by Emil Brugsch-
     Bey.  The picture is taken from the tomb of Ti.

The lands or houses which his father had left him, were his merely on sufferance, and he enjoyed them only by permission of his lord.  Those which he acquired by his own labour went to swell his master’s domain.  If he married and had sons, they were but servants for the master from the moment they were brought into the world.  Whatever he might enjoy to-day, would his master allow him possession of it to-morrow?  Even life in the world beyond did not offer him much more security or liberty:  he only entered it in his master’s service and to do his bidding; he existed in it on tolerance, as he had lived upon this earth, and he found there no rest or freedom unless he provided himself abundantly with “respondents” and charmed statuettes.  He therefore concentrated his mind and energies on the present moment, to make the most of it as of almost the only thing which belonged to him:  he left to his master the task of anticipating and providing for the future.  In truth, his masters were often changed; now the lord of one town, now that of another; now a Pharaoh of the Memphite or Theban dynasties, now a stranger installed by chance upon the throne of Horns.  The condition of the people never changed; the burden which crushed them was never lightened, and whatever hand happened to hold the stick, it never fell the less heavily upon their backs.