An Egyptian temple was never only a building where rites were performed. Attached to every major cult center was an estate, in Egyptian the god's per, literally house, that functioned as a working economic institution in its own right. Fields worked by tenant farmers, herds of cattle, fowl yards, vineyards, workshops producing textiles, beer and bread, granaries storing surplus grain against famine years, and river boats moving goods between temple holdings all belonged to the god in a real legal and administrative sense, even though the god obviously never managed any of it directly. That work fell to a large lay bureaucracy of scribes, overseers, storehouse keepers and field managers who functioned alongside, and numerically outnumbered, the priests who performed the actual daily cult rituals inside the temple building itself.
The clearest surviving evidence for how large these estates could grow is the Wilbour Papyrus, a New Kingdom land survey covering roughly ninety miles of Nile valley and recording thousands of individual plots, many held in the names of specific temples and their gods, together with the taxes and dues owed on them. Documents of this kind let historians see, with unusual precision for the ancient world, just how deeply temple estates were woven into Egypt's wider agricultural economy rather than sitting apart from it as purely religious enclosures.