The lot of the peasantry, the third class of commoner to be considered, was a hard one. In ancient Egypt the rich were very rich and the poor very poor. The condition of the peasant under the absolute monarchy of the Old Kingdom was particularly burdensome, so much so that a savage social cataclysm was provoked. A tiny oligarchy commanded the physical resources of a vast labor force, organized in permanent battalions of fifty or a hundred men. …The gangs may have represented family units. The Old Kingdom peasant was bound to the soil. He was transferred from one owner to another as part of the estate to which he belonged.

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If the Cotswold labourer of a century and a half ago received a shilling a day for his services, it is unlikely that the wages in kind of the Egyptian peasant were more substantial. Yet the soil of the Black Land was not the most heartbreaking soil in the world to farm, the bad years were not harder to bear than they were elsewhere, the Egyptian landowner was not notorious as a cruel taskmaster. The peasant was in general a cheerful, indeed a gay person, not commonly stupefied by fatigue and brutalized by apprehensive fear. He had his songs, his pastimes, his children. Above all, he had the sun. The obligation which he owed his master was a reciprocal one, and he was sustained by the knowledge that he was a member of a sound and generally stable social organization. The tomb paintings which have immortalized his activities were not the expression of an arrogant and domineering power bent upon the subjugation of the lower classes. …The history of the Egyptian peasantry in its warm and sunlit retreat is singularly free from the brooding terror which oppressed the poorest classes of the neighbor countries of the ancient Near East.