Egypt

Book Review: The Development of Accounting in an International Context

Desicritics.com (Review by Dr Bhaskar Dasgupta)

The Development of Accounting in an International Context: A Festschrift in Honour of R. H. Parker (Routledge International Studies in Business History)
T.E. Cooke (Editor), C.W. Nobes (Editor) 1997

Accountants are actually High Priests, drawing order out of chaos.

When I read a paper by Mahmoud Ezzamel on how accounting was performed in Ancient Egypt, I could not suppress a chuckle. Once that was done, it made sense to me. So what is Dr. Ezzamel’s argument? In effect, he is saying that the ancient Egyptians in the New Kingdom (1552-1080BC) had a world view which was defined by the Gods, the Pharaohs, the living and the dead. As long as the relationship between these four parties was established and on track, everything was fine and dandy. It was the scribes (read accountants in modern parlance) who were responsible for making sure that the right numbers of wheat ounces, gold weights, cattle etc. were offered to the Gods by the Pharaohs, and were mentioned in the tombs, etc.

Where does accounting come in? Well, accounting as formally defined is a practise of entering in a visible format, a record of items and actions. There is a value attached to these accounts and a way of capturing them and the definition of these values. In Ancient Egypt, this was inextricably linked with religion.

- Feature: Ian Parker, Letter From Cairo, “the Pharaoh,”
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- Book Review: Household And Family Religion In Antiquity
Scholia Reviews (Review by Mark Kirby-Hirst) Scholia Reviews ns 18 (2009) 5. John Bodel and Saul M. Olyan (edd.), Household and Family Religion in Antiquity. The Ancient World: Comparative Histories. Blackwell Publishing, 2008. [Chapter 10 looks at Egypt]...

- The Egyptian Book Of Living And Dying
Joann Fletcher Duncan Baird Publishers London 2002 ISBN: 1-904292-05-4 This lovely and colourful paperback opens with an introduction on the ancient Egyptian religion and practices of their beliefs through complex and often conflicting systems of positive...

- The Egyptian Book Of The Dead
James Wasserman Chronical Books San Francisco, CA 1998 ISBN 978-0-8118-6489-3 This large Chronicle book is the complete papyrus of Ani in the collection of the British museum with a preface by Carol A. R. Andrews and an introduction by Dr. Ogden Goelet....

Egypt