Method and TheoryThe Colonisation of Pharaonic Egypt: the Modernisation of Order in Pharaonic Egyptian Administration

Abstract The paper explores the way that European colonialism has, at least in part, set the agenda for describing the ancient regime of pharaonic Egypt: finding types of order that the primary data does not show, and would not itself imply, and so incorporating the ancient world into the developmental trajectory of the West, disengaged from the later apparently decayed history of indigenous populations. The underlying agenda here is to justify which models describe the reality of imperfectly documented societies. Specific issues discussed are the use of the documentary record to seek for legal and administrative impersonality; the mapping of titles and epithets onto reconstructions of administrative structures; mapping and geographical knowledge as a context for evaluating the penetration of government; the ownership of land and people, envisaged in ideas of slavery and the existence of census.