The Immunity During the Latter Half of the Old Kingdom in Egypt

The extreme centralization of the Fourth Dynasty broke down gradually during the latter half of the Old Kingdom (the Fifth and Sixth Dynasties). In this period, the kings promulgated decrees of immunity upon some temples and funerary foundations. Especially, in the case of the exemptions to local temples in Upper Egypt, it is said that they were related to the two main factors which led to the decline of the State's system : financial difficulties and decentralization. That is, such exemptions damaged the economy of the land and gave rise to the power of the provincial nobles, thereby aiding the course of decentralization. The purpose of this paper will be to examine the validity of these statements. First of all, we will look at why these so-called immunity laws were enacted, what they hoped to accomplish, and the nature of their impact upon the socio-economic conditions of this period. In particular, we will first focus on the triangular relations between the royal authority, the local administrators, and the temples, and then see how these relations were altered by this granting of immunity to the temples, which by virtue of these decrees were exempted from many charges. The conclusions are as follows : (1)From the Fifth to the Mid-Sixth Dynasty, the local administration system in Upper Egypt changed gradually within the framework of central control. In theory, the immunity bestowed upon the temples meant the restraining of the local officials' power by protecting the temples from infringement and the burden of taxation, which were the sources of power for these provincial governors. (2)In practice, however, the temples were sometimes infringed upon by the local offices, although this infringement would have been much greater had the immunity laws not been enacted. (3)It is difficult to conclude that immunity damaged the State's finances severely, because we don't know how many temples or lands were granted these privileges within the same period. Since the kings were able to revoke the immunity we know from some decrees that they actually did, those privileges would not have been accorded without limit. (4)Finally, the local officials still managed in the following period to exert increasing control over the local temples. This can be explained by the fact that in accordance with the immunity decrees, the local officials were allowed to intervene in temple matters when it involved the protection or preservation of these institutions. The provincial governors might have interfered with temple business on that pretext. Therefore, we could say that the policy of immunity was only a temporary stop-gap measure, and in the final analysis, it was unable to check the eventual decline of the monarchy. So we should infer from this that the causes of the decline of the central authority were rooted in the conflict between the royal administrators and the provincial officials. And that in this context, the decrees of immunity were only minutely related to the two aforementioned factors which led to the eventual decline of the State's centralized system.