ABSTRACT
This chapter explores how accounting technologies, including money of account, ordered private economic exchange and constructed reciprocity in the village of Deir El-Medina. The chapter is also concerned with examining the shift from non-coinage through coinage to post-coinage money and comments on their roles in ordering society. The key argument of ered here is that accounting inscriptions and the writing of money of account ordered a signifi cant range of relations within the community of Deir El-Medina, constructed equivalence of exchanged objects and simultaneously constituted an equivalence of the exchange parties, irrespective of differences in their social standing. Further, while pre-coinage money makes possible management at a distance, the emergence of coinage money goes beyond this in making possible the separation of wealth from individuals, thereby producing new forms of social and economic order.
