Welcome back! We are back from our November hiatus and thus back to regular weekly posts! This week we’re going to answer the runner-up question in the last ACOUP Senate poll (polls in which you too can vote if you become a pater aut mater conscriptus via Patreon). The question, posed in two different ways by Tristan and DW Rowlands was “what made Roman Egypt such an unusual part of the Roman world?“
I’ve mentioned quite a few times here that Roman Egypt is a perplexing part of understanding the Roman Empire because on the one hand it provides a lot of really valuable evidence for daily life concerns (mortality, nuptiality, military pay, customs and tax systems, etc.) but on the other hand it is always very difficult to know to what degree that information can be generalized because Roman Egypt is such an atypical Roman province. So this week we’re going to look in quite general terms at what makes Egypt such an unusual place in the Roman world. As we’ll see, some of the ways in which Egypt is unusual are Roman creations, but many of them stretch back before the Roman period in Egypt or indeed before the Roman period anywhere.
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(Bibliography note: Because the evidence from Egypt is so ample, there is a lot of scholarship focused on it, both on the evidence itself and also speaking to the question of how typical that evidence might be. I am not an Egypt specialist (at some point I’d love to get some of the Egypt specialists I do know to come here and chat about it), so this bibliography is only going to hit the high-points, as it were. On Roman Egypt generally, I think C. Riggs (ed.), The Oxford Handbook of Roman Egypt (2012) is an excellent starting point. Note also for a developmental history, R.S. Bagnall, Roman Egypt: A History (2021), L. Capponi, Roman Egypt (2011), L. Capponi, Augustan Egypt: The Creation of a Roman Province (2005) and A. Monson, From the Ptolemies to the Romans: Political and Economic Change in Egypt (2012). On the demography of Roman Egypt, see R.S. Bagnall and B.W. Frier, The Demography of Roman Egypt (2010) as well as W. Scheidel, Death on the Nile: Disease and the Demography of Roman Egypt (2001). On the military-social footprint in pre-Roman (that is, Ptolemaic) Egypt, see P. Johstono, The Army of Ptolemaic Egypt (2020), and C. Fischer-Bovet, Army and Society in Ptolemaic Egypt (2014). On the question of the ‘typicality’ of Roman Egypt itself, see also D. Rathbone, “The Romanity of Roman Egypt: A Faltering Consensus?” Journal of Juristic Papyrology 43 (2013): 73-91, which is in turn responding to N. Lewis, “The Romanity of Roman Egypt: a growing consensus,” Atti del XVII Congresso Internazionale di Papirologia (1984). As I think this bibliographic selection shows, this is a debate that is still very much ongoing – the consensus, while narrowing is not narrow but very much contested.)
What Makes Roman Egypt So Valuable To Historians?
I should start by noting that Roman Egypt is not necessarily the only ‘strange’ place in the Roman Empire. Italy, of course, was a unique sort of place on the Roman Empire, but so was Roman Britain – conquered late and less fully urbanized than much of the empire (Dacia, held even more briefly, has the same set of problems). I think Egypt is still probably the oddest large region in the Roman world, but it is not the only stand out.
Instead what makes Roman Egypt’s uniqueness so important is one of the unique things about it: Roman Egypt preserves a much larger slice of our evidence than any other place in the ancient world. This comes down to climate (as do most things); Egypt is a climatically extreme place. On the one hand, most of the country is desert and here I mean hard desert, with absolutely minuscule amounts of precipitation. On the other hand, the Nile River creates a fertile, at points almost lush, band cutting through the country running to the coast. The change between these two environments is extremely stark; it is, I have been told (I haven’t yet been to Egypt), entirely possible in many places to stand with one foot in the ‘green’ and another foot in the hard desert.
That in turn matters because while Egypt was hardly the only arid region Rome controlled, it was the only place you were likely to find very many large settlements and lots of people living in such close proximity to such extremely arid environments (other large North African settlements tend to be coastal). And that in turn matters for preservation. When objects are deposited – lost, thrown away, carefully placed in a sanctuary, whatever – they begin to degrade. Organic objects (textile, leather, paper, wood) rot as microorganisms use them as food, while metal objects oxidize (that is, rust).1 Aridity arrests (at least somewhat) both processes. Consequently things survive from the Roman period (or indeed, from even more ancient periods) in Egypt that simply wouldn’t survive almost anywhere else.
By far the most important of those things is paper, particularly papyrus paper. The Romans actually had a number of writing solutions. For short-term documents, they used wax writing tablets, an ancient sort of ‘dry erase board’ which could be scraped smooth to write a new text when needed; these only survive under very unusual circumstances. For more permanent documents, wood and papyrus were used. Wood tablets, such as those famously recovered from the Roman fort at Vindolanda, are fairly simple: thin wooden slats are smoothed so they can be written on with link and a pen, creating a rigid but workable and cheap writing surface; when we find these tablets they have tended to be short documents like letters or temporary lists, presumably in part because storing lots of wood tablets would be hard so more serious records would go on the easier to store papyrus paper.
Papyrus paper was lighter, more portable, more storeable option. Papyrus paper is produced by taking the pith of the papyrus plant, which is sticky, and placing it in two layers at right angles to each other, before compressing (or crushing) those layers together to produce a single sheet, which is then dried, creating a sheet of paper (albeit a very fibery sort of paper, as you can see). Papyrus paper originated in Egypt and the papyrus plant is native to Egypt, but by the Roman period we generally suppose papyrus paper to have been used widely over much of the Roman Empire; it is sometimes supposed that papyrus was cheaper and more commonly used in Egypt than elsewhere, but it is hard to be sure.
Now within the typical European and Mediterranean humidity, papyrus doesn’t last forever (unlike the parchment paper produced in the Middle Ages which was far more expensive but also lasts much longer); papyrus paper will degrade over anything from a few decades to a couple hundred years – the more humidity, the faster decay. Of course wood tablets and wax tablets fare no better. What that means is that in most parts of the Roman Empire, very little casual writing survives; what does survive were the sorts of important official documents which might be inscribed on stone (along with the literary works that were worth painstakingly copying over and over again by hand through the Middle Ages). But letters, receipts, tax returns, census records, shopping lists, school assignments – these sorts of documents were all written on less durable materials which don’t survive except in a few exceptional sites like Vindolanda.
Or Egypt. Not individual places in Egypt; pretty much the whole province.
In the extremely dry conditions of the Egyptian desert, papyrus can survive (albeit typically in damaged scraps rather than complete scrolls) from antiquity to the present. Now the coverage of these surviving papyri is not even. The Roman period is far better represented in the surviving papyri than the Ptolemaic period (much less the proceeding ‘late’ period or the New Kingdom before that). It’s also not evenly distributed geographically; the Arsinoite nome (what is today el-Fayyum, an oasis basin to the West of the Nile) and the Oxyrhynchus nome (roughly in the middle of Egypt, on the Nile) are both substantially overrepresented, while the Nile Delta itself has fewer (but by no means zero) finds. Consequently, we need to be worried not only about the degree to which Egypt might be representative of the larger Roman world, but also the degree to which these two nomes (a nome is an administrative district within Egypt, we’ll talk about them more in a bit) are representative of Egypt. That’s complicated in turn by the fact that the Arsinoite nome is not a normal nome; extensive cultivation there only really begins under Ptolemaic rule, which raises questions about how typical it was. It also means we lack a really good trove of papyri from a nome in Lower Egypt proper (the northern part of the country, covering the delta of the Nile) which, because of its different terrain, we might imagine was in some ways different.
Nevertheless, it is difficult to overstate the value of the papyri we do recover from Egypt. Documents containing census and tax information can give us important clues about the structure of ancient households (revealing, for instance, a lot of complex composite households). Tax receipts (particularly for customs taxes) can illuminate a lot about how Roman customs taxes (portoria) were assessed and conducted. Military pay stubs from Roman Egypt also provide the foundation for our understanding of how Roman soldiers were paid, recording for instance, pay deductions for rations, clothes and gear. We also occasionally recover fragments of literary works that we know existed but which otherwise did not survive to the present. And there is so much of this material. Whereas new additions to the corpus of ancient literary texts are extremely infrequent (the last very long such text was the recovery of the Athenaion Polteia or Constitution of the Athenians, from a papyrus discovered in the Fayyum (of course), published in 1891), the quantity of unpublished papyri from Egypt remains vast and there is frankly a real shortage of trained Egyptologists who can work through and publish this material (to the point that the vast troves of unpublished material has created deeply unfortunate opportunities for theft and fraud).
And so that is the first way in which Egypt is unusual: we know a lot more about daily life in Roman Egypt, especially when it comes to affairs below the upper-tier of society. Recovered papyrological evidence makes petty government officials, regular soldiers, small farming households, affluent ‘middle class’ families and so on much more visible to us. But of course that immediately raises debates over how typical those people we can see are, because we’d like to be able to generalize information we learn about small farmers or petty government officials more broadly around the empire, to use that information to ‘fill in’ regions where the evidence just does not survive. But of course the rejoinder is natural to point out the ways in which Egypt may be unusual beyond merely the survival of evidence (to include the possibility that cheaper papyrus in Egypt may have meant that more things were committed to paper here than elsewhere).
Consequently the debate about how strange a place Roman Egypt was is also a fairly important and active area of scholarship. We can divide those arguments into two large categories: the way in which Roman rule itself in Egypt was unusual and the ways in which Egypt was a potentially unusual place in comparison to the rest of Roman world already.
The Romans Made Egypt Unusual
When it comes to Roman governance in Egypt, perhaps the best summary of what we know about how typical it was would be to say that Roman rule in Egypt was somewhat unusual, but rather less unusual than we used to think it was, and it become more typical over time (so the level of unusualness is greatest under Augustus and then declines as a factor of time). Ironically, it has been in no small part coming to understand the wealth of the papyrus evidence that has led to this shift, revealing that our literary sources sometimes overstated the degree to which Egypt was unusual.
A lot of that comes from how Tacitus represents the structure of Roman rule in Egypt: he describes Augustus as having ‘kept in the [imperial] house’ (retinere domi) the governance of Egypt, assigning it to an equestrian2 prefect.3 Egypt was a relatively late addition to Rome’s growing Empire; the Ptolemaic dynasty had ruled it since the death of Alexander the Great in 323. From the 160s that Ptolemaic kingdom had become effectively a client of Rome, its independence maintained by the threat of Roman arms (demonstrated vividly in 168 when Rome turned back a Seleucid invasion of Egypt with noting more than a consultum of the Senate), but had remained independent until Cleopatra’s disasterous decision to back Marcus Antonius (Mark Antony) in the last phase of Rome’s civil war. After their defeat, Octavian (soon to be Augustus) had in 30 BC after the suicide of Cleopatra, annexed the kingdom, creating the province of Roman Egypt.
Tacitus’ description of Augustus keeping the rule of Egypt ‘in the house’ led early scholars to assume that Egypt was taken essentially as the private property of the emperors. This is less crazy than it initially sounds; later emperors administered massive estates through a parallel state treasury called the fiscus (distinct from the main treasury of the Roman state, the aerarium Saturni; the fiscus was the private accoutns and property of the emperor) administered in some cases by equestrian officials, so the idea of running an entire province effectively out of the fiscus, with the whole of Egypt effectively the private property of the emperor administered by an equestrian official wouldn’t have seemed impossible and it certainly seems to be what Tacitus is describing.
But as our evidence for the activity of these prefects has improved, what we see are officials who act quite a lot like other provincial governors, despite their non-senatorial origins. Praefecti Aegpyti typically served around three years (fairly typical), where generally not from the province they oversaw (also typical), and wouldn’t be reassigned to a post back in that province (also typical). Unlike with the earlier Ptolemaic government, there was no royal court in Egypt, the prefect’s entourage more nearly resembling that of a Roman governor, nor was the emperor personally present. Residents of Egypt who wished to petition the emperor had to do it through the same channels as any other resident of the Roman Empire. The military enforcement forces in the province, too, were typically Roman, drawn (as was normal) from provinces other than where they served. Consequently, as Dominic Rathbone (op. cit.) notes, local elites looking to operate with this new form of government found that they had to adjust themselves to a system of rule, quintessentially Roman, rather than the more personalistic Ptolemaic regime where favor might be curried with important local figures or the royal court itself.
That said, while we’ve increasingly found that the Praefectus Aegypti was more of a normal governor than we thought, vision into the lower levels of the Roman administration in Egypt reveal a complex and in some cases peculiar system. In most of the Roman Empire, Roman governors oversaw largely self-governing communities, run by local elites, which handled most local affairs. Those communities generally delegated governing functions to elected or appointed magistrates who were amateur part-timers drawn from the elite (the curiales, we’ve mentioned these fellows before).
In Egypt, by contrast, while the Romans disassembled the royal Ptolemaic court, they initially seem to have left much of its administrative apparatus of salaries administrators in place. The division of Egypt into administrative districts – called nomes – was kept and the seat of government in the province was firmly entrenched in Alexandria (whereas at least in the first two centuries, most Roman provinces had no clearly established ‘capital’). Each of the nomes was governed by a strategos (while the word means ‘general’ these were purely civilian officials), typically drawn from the Alexandrian upper-class (rather than being truly local elites), assisted by a salaried basilikos grammateus, ‘royal scribe.’ Villages also generally had a komogrammateus, village scribe, who reported to the strategos; these fellows also seem to have initially been salaried officials.4 Some of these positions gradually became truly liturgic in nature, mirroring more closely systems of local governance in much of the rest of the Roman world, but perhaps only in the late second century.
Similarly, it was often assumed early on that land ownership and tenure would look very different with the emperor maintaining a lot of direct control and nearly all of the land in Egypt being effectively public land. That perspective was potentially reinforced by the evidence out of the Arsinoite nome (again, modern el-Fayyum) because most of the land there under the Ptolemies belonged to military settlers and thus had special obligations placed on it and was thus not truly private land. But what we see under the Romans is that first this military settler (cleruchic or katoikic; the distinctions here are a post for another day) land is fully privatized and taxed like it would be anywhere else. Meanwhile, the evidence from the other nomes on the Nile itself suggest that private land was more common there even under the Ptolemies. That said, the expansion of private land holdings seems to have been a process taking place mostly under Roman rule, which in turn meant that in many cases land tenure might look quite different in Egypt (where much land was either public or held by temples) than in the rest of the empire where most land was in private hands (although public and temple lands were also common), though it tended to look more and more like the rest of the empire over time, with the process supposed to be substantially complete by the end of the second century. Scholars broadly seem to still be very much divided on the degree to which late Ptolemaic and early Roman Egyptian landholding was exceptional, but it certainly had its substantial quirks.
Meanwhile the Romans did another odd thing in that they didn’t change: the currency system. While the Roman Empire minted its currency in a series of regional mints (not centrally), the Romans almost always brought new areas under their control into the existing Roman currency system (based principally around the gold aureus, the silver denarius and the copper-alloy sestertius). That was both a tool of Roman imperialism, a way to make physical Rome’s notional dominion over conquered lands, but it also served (probably unintentionally) to lower transaction costs and encourage economic interaction between provinces. But Egypt was not brought into the Roman currency system, instead maintaining the Ptolemaic currency system based on the silver tetradrachma (Egypt was already a very monetized economy under the Ptolemies). That barrier between the economy in Egypt and outside of it can make it tricky to know how representative prices within Roman Egypt were for the rest of the empire. Egypt is only brought into the broader Roman currency system with the currency ‘reforms’ of Diocletian (r. 284-305)
At the same time, Egypt was hardly ‘cut off’ from the broader Roman economy. We have good evidence of quite a lot of trade out of Egypt, particularly in agricultural staples. But here again, Egypt is strange: Egyptian grain was the foundation for the imperial era annona civilis, the distribution of free grain to select citizens in the city of Rome itself. That meant a massive, continuous state-organized transfer of grain, specifically wheat grain, from Egypt to Rome. Some of that grain was taxed in kind, but much of it seems to have been purchased in Egypt; in either case transport was essentially subcontracted by the state. Egypt was hardly the only source of grain for the annona (the province of Africa, modern Tunisia, was another major source), but few provinces likely saw the scale of state-organized goods transfer that Egypt did. And it’s striking that attested Egyptian agriculture is quite heavily dominated by wheat farming, rather more than we might normally expect, which both speak to the high yields the Nile could offer but also Egypt’s role as the breadbasket of the Roman Empire.
But Egypt Was Already Unusual
At the same time, there are some ways in which Egypt was, or at least we might supposed Egypt to have been, a unique place quite apart from the governmental structures imposed upon it, especially with regard to the rest of the Roman world.
A big part of this has to do with the Nile and the structure of agriculture it creates. Most of the Roman world was reliant on rainfall agriculture, meaning that the all-important moisture which sustained the crops was from rain. This might be supplemented in some cases either by dry-farming techniques (methods of retaining moisture in the soil in areas where rainfall is lower) or by limited irrigation from rivers and streams, but even a cursory glance at Roman agricultural writers (or earlier Greek ones) reveal a focus on the tremendous impact of rainfall on agricultural productivity. And just about everywhere Rome went, that was the system they encountered.
But in Egypt, agriculture is entirely oriented around the Nile; rainfall is functionally a non-factor in ancient Egyptian agriculture. Egypt’s agricultural season was based on that flooding with three seasons, first the flood (Akhet) when the Nile rose and inundated the fields, providing not only the necessary moisture (where water might be channeled and retained using systems of irrigation canals and levies) but also deposited a fresh layer of nutrient-rich silt. Then the next season is Peret, when planting and growing would take place (generally in winter), then followed by the harvest (Shemu) before the cycle repeated again.
This sort of river-valley agriculture wasn’t rare globally; Mesopotamian agriculture worked similarly (albeit with less regular and more destructive flooding), but within the Roman Empire – which despite occasionally extremely optimistic maps you may see, did not include any meaningful amount of Mesopotamia proper – this sort of agriculture was rare. First, it is clear that Egyptian agricultural yields (understood as either production-per-unit-land-area or production-per-unit-seed-sown) were generally higher than what we think to have been the norm for much of the Roman world. While arguments about yields in Italy and Greece tend to suggest ranges between 4:15 and perhaps 8:1, while as Erdkamp6 notes yields in Egypt seem to have been much higher. Some tax evidence we have suggests normal yields in excess of 16:1 and tax rates high enough that at 7:1 – a good yield in Italy – a farmer would be swiftly taxed into starvation. Consequently, it seems like agriculture in Egypt was always substantially more productive than rainfall agriculture in the rest of the Roman Empire.
Meanwhile, river-based agriculture also requires different capital investments: it has to be irrigated through systems of ditches and canals to actually get the water to the fields. This is something that was crucial in Egyptian agriculture but often doesn’t make it into popular representations (e.g. games like Children of the Nile (2008), where the flood is important, but the player cannot do anything to shape or channel it), but was extremely important for agriculture around the Nile. Irrigation channels could direct waters towards fields and away from flooding settlements. That mattered because water exposure mattered and indeed a set of tax categories were established based on the water exposure of land: land which had not been flooded for some time was considered inferior (and exempt from taxes), while land which flooded entirely or required extensive irrigation to flood was taxed at lower rates.7 Those irrigation systems in turn had to be maintained, representing a form of capital investment – with substantial labor demands in construction and upkeep – that is much rarer in rainfall agriculture systems. Whereas in ancient Mesopotamia this seems to have been organized by the state, my sense is that irrigation direction in Egypt happened more locally, but I confess I’ve found it hard to find a direct discussion of the matter.
Both those labor demands and the high agricultural productivity around the Nile led in turn to what seem to have been – given the limits of the evidence – substantially higher population density in Egypt than in most other Mediterranean regions. We generally suppose the population of Ptolemaic Egypt to have been roughly equivalent to that of Roman Italy, between five and seven million or so. But in Egypt, almost all of those people were living directly along the Nile, on that green strip of land, a dramatically smaller and more contiguous area of settlement than what we see in, say, Roman Italy, much less more sparsely populated provinces like Spain or Gaul.
And that in turn is tricky because as we’ve discussed, family formation patterns, disease and mortality and lots of other key demographic variables are subject to variation based on settlement patterns and agriculture. We have a lot of data about age distribution, family size, marriage ages and so on from Roman Egypt, but demonstrating that, with its higher yields and higher population density – as a consequence of its unique climate – that these were typical in the Mediterranean is tricky. That said it’s not impossible either and some scholars have made careers out of demonstrating the applicability of just such extrapolations (Bruce Frier comes immediately to mind). But one must tread with caution.
And then there is the other major fact about Egypt: Egypt is really, really, really old. A quick set of date comparisons between Italy and Egypt can make the point. Farming is arrives in Egypt c. 9,000 BC; in Italy that’s c. 6,000 BC (please note those ‘c.’ circa indicators are doing a lot of work here). By 4,000 BC in Egypt we’re starting to see the emergence of cities; we won’t see serious urbanism in Italy until the early-to-mid first millennium BC. By 3,000 BC, Egypt is organized into a single state, with large urban administrative centers; Italy’s unification under the Romans won’t happen until the 270s BC.
Or as I put it to my students, it is the case that the Pyramids (constructed c. 2670-2400) were about as old to Cleopatra and Caesar as Cleopatra and Caesar are to us now (in fact, if you do the math, the Pyramids were a little older). Now that huge sweep of time should caution us against the sort of ‘eternal Egypt’ assumptions; Egypt in 2300BC was a very different Egypt than the Egypt of 230 or 23 BC.
But it also means we have to be aware that settlement and urbanism in Egypt were long, long settled before the Romans showed up. That’s actually a fairly large contrast to many areas in the Roman Empire (particularly in its western half), where the Romans were themselves a key impetus towards the development of substantial urbanism (although it is important not to overstate this; in a lot of cases Roman rule is causing cities to emerge in societies that already had modest towns. And of course in North Africa and the Eastern Mediterranean, urbanism was long established.)
At the same time Egypt was ruled from 323 to 31BC by members of the Macedonian Ptolemaic (or Lagid) family, beginning with Ptolemy I Soter, one of the companions of Alexander the Great. Ptolemaic rule itself brought changes to Egypt, many of which persisted into the Roman period. Not the least of this was the establishment and aggrandizement of the Ptolemaic capital of Alexandria, which would remain the political center of the province under the Romans. Ptolemaic pharaohs also encouraged a degree of religious syncretism, particularly through the cult of the god Serapis, though the Greek and Egyptian upper-classes remained largely distinct and non-intermixed under the Ptolemies (with the Greeks ‘in charge’ as it were). One of the impacts of Roman rule is the fairly quick fusion of these two elites now that both were subjects in empires that did not belong to them.
Meanwhile, the geography of Egypt has tended to somewhat isolate it from the broader Near East and the Mediterranean. Now that word ‘tended’ also does a lot of work because there was almost always significant connectivity between Egypt and the Mediterranean, but at the same time periods of political unity involving Egypt and regions beyond it are rare and generally fairly brief, such as periods of Assyrian (670-656), Persian (525-404, 343-332) or Roman rule (31BC-646AD),8 or of course the very brief period under Alexander before his empire fragmented.
Now it’s important to be clear what I’m not saying here. Older scholarship often posited a sort of culturally ‘eternal Egypt’ which resisted the pressures of ‘Romanization’ (itself now a contested term rarely used by scholars); that vision of a total lack of cultural exchange just doesn’t hold up to the evidence. There is a lot of evidence for Roman cultural identity emerging in Roman Egypt as time went on (so more in the second and third centuries AD than the first). And while Latin didn’t catch on, we do see in Roman Egypt a continuation of the process (starting under the Ptolemies) whereby Greek steadily seems to supplant Egyptian Demotic, bringing Egypt linguistically more into the broader Roman world. Importantly, that means that Roman Egypt seems to have become a less unusual part of the Roman world as time went on. On the flip side, those were processes which took much of the Roman period to occur. In the meantime, Egypt was a place where Greek and Roman cultural elements coexisted with the worship of indigenous Egyptian divinities millennia older than the city of Rome itself.
Conclusion
There’s certainly more we could talk about on this topic and I encourage anyone who wants to know more to browse the bibliography list at the beginning of this post. We haven’t, for instance, talked too much here about the Roman Army in Egypt, in part because of the whole Roman apparatus, the army seems to have been by far the most broadly typical of Roman rule: the Roman army was famously (Polyb. 6.41.10-12) the Roman army wherever it went. This is simply a very voluminous topic.
In no small part that’s because so much research into the Roman Empire makes use of Egyptian papyrus evidence and thus in turn has to address the degree to which that evidence can be generalized. That means there are a lot of arguments over that question and I doubt that will change any time soon. That said, it does seem to me that the scholarly consensus on the question of the ‘strangeness’ of Roman Egypt is very slowly narrowing, as both Roman Egypt and also the rest of the Roman world slowly but surely become clearer to us as the body of published archaeological, epigraphic and papyrological evidence grows larger. The great thing is that we are never left with a ‘useless’ discovery: a fact about Roman Egypt which turns out not to be more broadly applicable to the rest of the Roman world is nevertheless something we’ve learned about Roman Egypt, which was itself an important and interesting place!
- Stone is the big exception. People often assume that the ancients built everything in stone, which is really quite wrong: stone was a very expensive building material only used for the most important buildings. However all of the buildings made in wood, mudbrick, thatch and other perishable materials long since vanished (even brick tends to crumble much faster than stone), leaving only the stone buildings behind, a classic case of survivorship bias. Always be suspicious of ‘they don’t make ’em like they used to’ really meaning ‘only the very highest quality products from the past tend to survive to the present.’
- A member of Rome’s economic elite (the ordo equester or equestrian class) who did not have an independent political career (which would confer membership in the Senate and thus the ordo Senatus in the imperial period). Emperors often employed officials drawn from the equites in various key bureaucratic positions which would either be beneath the dignity of a senator (being functionally secretarial in nature) or which would be too politically sensitive for a senator (who might be a potential political rival for an emperor).
- In contrast to a provincial governor, who would have been a proconsul or propraetor in the provinces still controlled directly by the senate, or by a legatus Augusti in provinces controlled directly by the emperor (most of the provinces with meaningful military forces). Both pro-magistrates and legati were drawn from the members of the Senate who thus kept their traditional perogative of being Rome’s governors and army commanders, even under the empire.
- on this, see Rathbone, op. cit. 84-5. There is considerable uncertainty as to if these lower level officials, often casually called ‘liturgists’ but where we do not necessarily know their jobs were liturgic (that is, assigned to specific rich-people in a non-voluntary way of devolving state action on the wealthy).
- These are seed yields, so for every 1 unit of seeds sown (typically measured in dry volume), four units are harvested.
- P. Erdkamp, The Grain Market in the Roman Empire (2005), 44-5.
- This is discussed by K. Blouin in C. Riggs, op. cit.)
- One of these things is not like the others.
Glad to see you’re back! Looking forward to what’s in store.
You briefly touch on family structures. One thing I’ve seen pop up now and then is that Roman census records suggest something like a quarter of registered marriages in Roman Egypt (or at least the areas we have records for) were between siblings. The impression I get is that that’d be an emulation of royal Ptolemaic policies of conspicuous excess rather than older indigenous traditions of sibling marriage. But what seems odd to me is that it doesn’t seem to feature heavily in Roman polemic or ethnographic writings about Egypt, at least as far as I’ve seen (which has me wondering whether the high incidence of non-royal sibling marriages is good scholarship or not). Or do Roman writers comment on it more often that I think?
Sibling marriage is a contentious issue. It was once believed to be routine but later studies show that it was extremely uncommon outside the royal family, as was polygamy. It’s fair to say sibling marriage was perfectly legal but quite uncommon in the Dynastic period. There does seem to be evidence for more sibling marriage from Ptolemaic Egypt but that could be survivor bias, maybe such marriages were more likely to be recorded in formal contracts.
Is it known to a high degree of reliability that “sister” and “brother” actually translate to blood siblings born of the same parents, not as honorifics between i.e. wards, adoptees, etc.? Or if actual siblings, purely pro-forma marriages for religious/legal/inheritance reasons?
It is known with a degree of reliability amounting to certainty that ‘Brother’ and ‘Sister’ were used as terms of endearment and did not necessarily indicate a blood relationship. Women living in a man’s household are often describes as ‘Sisters’ a term that probably indicated various blood relations as well as servants and potential sex partners.
In a letter written by a grieving and aggrieved widower to the spirit of his late wife who he believes has somehow afflicted him, he passionately describes their happy marriage and how he’s grieved for her for three years and not so much as ‘entered into any of the sisters of the household!’
There have been cultures where it could also mean “cousin.”
OTOH, one anthropologist, working in a culture where all parallel cousins, no matter how distant, were “brother” or “sister” — and their unions incestous — discovered that people in it talked of their “real” brothers and sisters meaning exactly what we would. When he tested stories about a brother and sister violating the taboos by talking alone in a room with large windows open to the street, if he specified “real” people grumbled, but if not, they were outraged because obviously something was up.
Marvelous post as always, and glad to see you back. I vaguely remember you stating in what may have been the second part of Europa Universalis’ critique that mercantilism did not work, which I believe you have not written about.
I feel that would be an interesting topic to cover, although it being that out of your wheelhouse it might be better as a Fireside Friday. Cheers
To quote Kermit the Frog; Yaay! Missed you.
Not me jumping for joy to see a new blog post!
Good to have the blog back. Hope the month away was productive for your own book!
As for this article: do any of the book you mentioned in the bibliography go into plague and maternal mortality rates in Egypt compared to other parts of the empire? I would generally assume that higher population density equals disease striking harder, but if there’s any hard data that would be amazing to have.
I do not know if that question is answered but if it is addressed, it’ll be in Scheidel’s Death on the Nile.
Looks nice, but damn is it pricey to get. I wonder if I can get my library to obtain a copy on ILL.
One thing I’ve seen mentioned about Egypt is that it’s not just easier to produce a surplus there, but also that it’s easier for a state with ancient-scale state-capacity to extract that surplus, because the population and its produce is all laid out neatly on a line that you can sail cargo barges up and down. Was that a real factor for its status as breadbasket?
Absolutely. If it weren’t, the population would have increased to the point where they eat most of the surplus (since the population is, to a first approximation, determined by the bad years), and to the extent the trade of the era could support such a thing, it would have been “the workshop of the (Mediterranean) world” instead.
Longtime reader, first-time commenter.
This is an excellent and informative post, and I’m very glad to have this back in my Friday routine.
A few typos I’ve spotted:
“private accoutns”
“another odd thing in that they didn’t change: the currency system”-superfluous colon?
Also, could you give a brief explanation of why the term “Romanization” has become problematic, and what alternatives scholars are now using for various aspects of it?
Couple more typos:
“apparatus of salaries administrators in place”
“Farming is arrives in Egypt c. 9,000 BC”
“where generally not from the province they oversaw”
I think that the Amara letters (cuneiform tablets, found in Akhenaten’s capitol, containing ~30 years of Pharaonic diplomatic correspondence) shows that even during the Egyptian New Kingdom, in the 1300s BC, there were extensive connections between Egypt, what is now Turkey and Mesopotamia, and Canaan (the regions in between). I suspect that Egypt was always heavily involved in the Western Mediterranean geopolitics, but Amara makes the depth of that involvement clear.
Ancient Egyptian contacts with the Levant and points east goes all the way back to the dawn of dynastic times going by trade goods discovered in both places.
> Anyway, what are other good examples where a game uses a particular music cue to sell the feeling of a place?
“Dazil, City of Burning Sands” from the game Xenogears
The entirety of Chrono Trigger.
Fortress of Regrets from Planescape: Torment.
I see we’re using this as the place where us non-Twitter users can respond to him.
Anyway, I have a lot of potential examples, but Skyarrow Bridge from Pokemon Balck and White is still seared into my memory over 10 years after I first played the game: https://youtu.be/AWy-fL5Evw4
Also, Homecoming from Thronebreker never fails to hit me in the feels: https://youtu.be/CZOPjYk_7Vchttps://youtu.be/CZOPjYk_7Vc
Solid use of the comments, I do see them, even if I don’t have time usually to respond.
Very interesting post! I am not interested in most video games, so a lot of the most recent posts were not in my wheelhouse, so it’s great to see you back and with an excellent post.
What do you think about another unique aspect about 1st century Roman Egypt is how much of the population was Jewish? I’ve seen estimates that Alexandria was over 1/3 Jewish, and there are loads of sources in the Talmud and elsewhere testifying to the uniqueness of Egypt’s Jewry.
Relatedly, what do you think about the high-end estimates that over 10% of the Roman Empire were Jews in the 1st century? Completely off, or reasonably close to the truth?
Sounds far too high to me. In parts of the Empire sure but the whole schmiel? I doubt it.
Huh, what language / alphabet is that Roman Egyptian papyrus in? Looks a lot like Arabic to me but of course the timing doesn’t line up.
I believe that would be the Greek alphabet. Ancient handwriting tends (to the untrained eye at least) to look rather different from inscriptions in stone
I mean, plenty of modern people’s handwriting doesn’t resemble letters as produced by printers, and plenty of handwriting probably only looks like written characters to us because we’re looking for them. So it broadly lines up just with common experience.
Even looking at examples of neat handwriting, the shape of ‘standard’ handwriting on paper evolves out of certain practical needs. You’re shaping a lot of letters, you don’t want the writing to get smudged, if you’re using something with a sharp tip you want to make sure you don’t accidentally somehow tear or damage the paper, and so on.
The requirements of literally engraving writing into a stone tablet are very different. You’re making the marks with a hammer and chisel. Keeping strokes to a minimum is important if you don’t want your arm to fall off from exhaustion. It’s not practical to engrave complex delicate curves, so written symbols have to look different.
So just for ergonomic reasons, the same alphabet won’t look the same when written by hand on papyrus, when chalked or painted onto a wall, or when engraved onto the side of a monument.
The “modern handwriting” you mention is, presumably, some form of cursive roundhand. It does, in fact, stem from the same place as our normal printing typography: the papal court of the 16th century, where people actually wrote in a hand that strongly resembles Times font. That humanistic cursive gave brith to antiqua typefaces. On the other hand, the roundhand was a related, but independent development of the same style into something else. The English Roundhand style forms the basis of most Continental European and North American school scripts. As it has plenty of ligatures, it is very difficult to make it into a good font, so it differs from printed text quite a lot.
However, there are actual handwriting scripts that look like print matter: both the German blackletter and our beloved antiqua look very much like the respective handwriting styles.
Yeah, it’s the right timeframe for it and I can recognize a few letters here and there (a chi, a phi, a gamma, a rho…).
Lovely to see you post again, and on such an interesting topic as well! I had hoped you would mention the influence Egypt had on the rest of the Empire as well, for instance the cult of Isis, but perhaps that is a topic for some other time
This is a bit of a tangent, but given the ratios that you quoted for a typical harvest, what do you make of the Parable of the Sower that Jesus told (Matthew 13)? The amounts promised there are thirty, sixty, and hundred-fold.
Would Jesus’ listeners have just thought a 30:1 harvest was a very good year, or would they call it something of a miracle?
Is that for wheat or another grain?
The parable doesn’t seem to specify.
The first step in finding an answer would be discovering what was the staple grain in first century Palestine. I believe that the answer is wheat, but I’m not sure.
I’m not a Biblical scholar of any sort, but if I had to guess, I think the likely understanding is “Yeah, this fisherman guy just pulled a number out of his hat, he means it was a good harvest.”
30:1 doesn’t seem like an impossible number for a particularly fertile and well-tended field in a good year, farming being a famously local and specific business and that 7:1 figure being an average over a whole region across good and bad years. But “Eh, somewhere between 30 and a hundred” does not seem like the kind of precision that’s intended to communicate anything agriculturally-specific.
I’m no expert, but to me it sounds like 30/60/100:1 was supposed to sound to the audiance like an lottery win sounds to us.
Nitpicking spelling pendantry: “Praefecti Aegpyti” should be “Praefecti Aegypti”.
That’s some pretty tough nitpicking. And do you usually use the archaic pendantry for pedantry?
Unmitigated!
The post says that the top lever of governorship of Egypt looks like other provinces but the larger administration and districts were largely kept as they had been and evolved over time. If we zoom out a bit and look at Roman practices for incorporating new territory was this unusual? Did Rome usually replace the administration top to bottom or leave it intact but subservient to Roman governance at the top?
“where generally not from the province they oversaw”
Were, I suspect.
I’ve heard it said that the pyramids actually had a practical purpose for the ancient Egyptian state. Namely, that because agriculture there was so productive, it was very important to give the peasants something labor-intensive to do in between harvests to keep them busy, so that they wouldn’t have time to rebel against the pharaohs/priests. Is there any evidence for that, or is that just some urban legend?
There’s apparently debate over how much the Egyptians actually conscripted the peasantry for pyramid building as compared to having (relatively) small teams of professionals.
I feel that anyone who has to force the forced labourers to labour on something useless to keep them busy, because he can’t think of anything useful they could do, ought to be required to give up his slave-driving licence.
There is ALWAYS something useful you can force the forced labourers to do.
Construction of new irrigation channels, maintenance of old ones, textile manufacture, entertaining the important people with choral singing, whatever. There is always something for them to do other than make-work.
Apparently monument building isn’t (just) vanity. It’s important for political and social display purposes.
That seems like modern (or at least late-antiquity) thinking though. Think like an ancient Egyptian pharaoh or high priest.
New irrigation channels? The Nile is already fully irrigated as much as it can be. The desert is impossible to irrigate. And there’s plenty of food to go around. Old ones are being fully maintained too.
textile manufacturing? All the important people have plenty of fine clothes, which require skilled artisans. You don’t really care about providing more clothes for the peasants. Same with choral singing or whatever- you want a small number of professional artists, not a horde of peasants doing it in the off-season.
Building pyramids is something that can be done by lots and lots of part-time laborers, while also raising your own status in a very visible way. And it wasn’t slaves, they were being paid for their work (mostly).
Military: drilling/practicing for war, building/maintaining forts and roads and such, plus campaign seasons are a thing so part time soldiers are a going thing.
Infrastructure: Building roads (Nile is the main transportation, but outposts or bridges or such might need further connection), ports, extra irrigation channels into arid regions may have use for, say, ranching/livestock or marginal crops.
Mining/quarrying: Build more buildings out of stone, more intensively mine what is there.
If you’re talking about the old kingdom when the GIza Pyramid were built, they just didn’t do most of that stuff, at least not in large numbers. They weren’t training a professional army or building forts, because the desert + local conscripts was enough to keep enemies out. They weren’t building ports because everyone lived along the one river. They didn’t really build bridges or roads for the same reason. And the main buildings they built out of stone… were the pyramids.
Again I say that’s modernist thinking in general. You’re thinking like it’s the responsibility of the state to grow the economy and boost the standard of living for the working class. If you’re an immortal god-king, why should you worry about that stuff?
I think it’s easy to assume that people in the past were the equivalent of Martians or something, that they just didn’t respond to or understand incentives as we understand them. The reality is more complicated than that- because those incentives did exist, but were mixed, or expressed themselves differently.
A pharaonic god-king is still not going to have a very long reign if he isn’t doing more or less the things any other ruler would. The details vary but the core of it is still there. Making sure everything is ticking over smoothly still matters. Making displays of wealth and might still matters. Demonstrating the power to conquer foreign lands (even if just “fight your way up to the next cataract of the Nile”) still matters.
Of course, building a really great tomb for yourself also matters, and that’s part of making displays of wealth and might. But it’s not as simple as “you have so much surplus labor and you can’t think of anything for them to do, so you build a pyramid.” There’s plenty of other things you could think of for them to do, it’s just that this is the one that’s most important to you.
Clothes wear out. There is no such thing as having plenty of clothes.
The workers in that field illustration are just wearing the same simple skirt (?) and nothing else. I don’t think the pharaohs cared much about providing the working class with varied clothing. Besides, the clothing would presumably be made by women, not the (I would assume) men hauling stone for the pyramids.
Pre-modern Egyptian agricultural workers were doing hard manual labor in a hot climate, and they’d have spent a lot of their time wading in mud, the kind that sucks shoes and sandals right off your feet and makes pant legs weigh about twenty pounds each. Wearing a kilt and not much else would be a practical decision for them even if they had nicer, more comfortable clothes.
More generally, textiles are valuable and relatively easy to transport. And if your Egyptian dynasty can get the kingdom to manufacture a surplus, it has a valuable trade good it can exchange for valuable things not found in Egypt, such as tin, good building timber, and so on.
So among many other things an Egyptian god-king might profitably order workers to do, “textile production” is on the list.
“Think like an ancient Egyptian pharaoh or high priest.”
It seems to me that if I do that, I conclude that my situation in the afterlife will depend on the situation in which I enter it, and with what possessions I enter it. And if I want to enter it with many possessions I have to stop some chiselling little scrote from stealing them from my grave.
Hence the advantage of having the peasantry pile up a great big pyramid on top of said grave, to stop anyone from getting to it. It would be a false economy to skimp on something that could define my position in existence for all eternity.
Pyramid building might have been regarded by the seasonal workers as a Great Adventure. You got to see Egypt and meet people from different provinces. Working and living conditions were good by Fellahin standards and you’d probably get a glimpse of Pharaoh himself! Work gangs not only named themselves but daubed those names on the blocks they handled indicating high morale. And of course at the end of indunation you went back home with a lifetime’s worth of exciting anecdotes about the people you’d met and the sights you’d seen.
Pyramids were the culmination of a general old Egyptian close relationship with the dead. They started small, were ‘improved’ until Giza and then went back down the scale (there are over 100 in total – many now slumped mounds). Villagers built tombs, decorated them, had picnics with dead grandmother at the cemetery, wrote letters to her and so on. As well as pyramids there were funerary temples, memorials, chapels – the landscape was an interwoven mesh of the dead and the living, at all levels.
> the quantity of unpublished papyri from Egypt remains vast and there is frankly a real shortage of trained Egyptologists who can work through and publish this material
Out of curiosity, why would Egyptologists be needed, as opposed to classicists? I’d have thought most of the written texts from that period in Egypt would be Greek or Latin – is this incorrect?
Depending on the period, some might be Egyptian written with Demotic script. Greek became the administrative language but didn’t 100% replace Demotic, which eventually evolved into Coptic which is still around as a liturgical language. So depending on what you’re studying, you may need some level of Demotic.
Demotic has been described as row upon row of agitated commas, very hard to read on crumbling papyrus
Indeed, as far as I know Demotic is more prominent than Latin in most of the Roman period
I was to Egypt once. I can attest to the starkness of the contrast between green and desert. We spent most of the time on the red sea shore, but took two trips to the Nile. There were places, were there were lush green fields on the one side of the road, and yellow gray desert on the other side. I guess a lot of the sharp contrast has to do with irrigation, but still.
A bit like Las Vegas in that sense – there are places like that where a casino will have an irrigated lawn on its side and the other will be vacant (the place I saw was part of the storm system, so would not be built on) which is basically gravel and sand.
Well sure, there are tourist places like that in Egypt, too. But it is still differnt, tourist places will have no weeds growing on the side of the streets, and stuff. It’s very artificial in a way, that those fields along the Nile are just not.
This post inspired me to get into an argument with GPT-3 over whether Rome ever controlled the Great Pyramid.
For reference it seems to think Egypt was some form of satrapy in 170AD and the land couldn’t be described as owned by Rome. Wondering whether it’s being tripped up by Eternal Egypt writing or by writings about various other states.
Since GPT-3 doesn’t actually know anything and just pattern-matches words to other words in a giant database, it’s very, very good at obtuse, meandering arguments that make no sense.
And there’s no way to convince it of a fact, because it doesn’t have any facts. It just puts words in front of more words.
It is sometimes responsive to being corrected; when I asked a hypothetical about nuclear war with India and it said India doesn’t have nukes I corrected it and it gave a new output acknowledging India did have nukes.
But yeah, I poked around with questions about some moderately popular fiction and the fact that it doesn’t actually know things became apparent. Like asking for a list of characters and their superpowers got powers from the wrong setting, or asking it about the Stormlight Archive had it say the Horneater Peaks were home to a civilization of dwarves and giants.
I’m curious why Egypt now has to import wheat from Ukraine when it was known to be so fertile in antiquity.
Well for one, there were 5-7m people in Egypt in antiquity, but there are 107.7m people there now.
The other problem (which also afflicts the Tigris and Euphrates river basins) is salinity. Long-term use of irrigation without a lot of concern for drainage leads to steadily increasing soil salinity; the river water contains some small percentage of salts which it carries with it into the field when irrigated. The plants absorb the water, but leave the salt, which stays in the soil in situations where water drainage isn’t sufficient to dissolve and carry those salts away. Over time, this results in higher salinity, which reduces fertility. The Nile, Tigris and Euphrates have been irrigated in this way for thousands of years, so the land degradation is significant. That can be counter-acted by leaching out the salts with extra water and controlling water salinity and so on, but that requires capital investments; Egypt is both not a rich country anymore and also its government has chosen to redirect a lot of its wealth to shoring up the military (or more correctly, the military’s support of the regime).
I thought part of it was also the Aswan High Dam which provides electricity and flood control, but ends up trapping all that fertility-enhancing silt that used to get dumped on the flooded fields.
This gets really complicated. You’re talking about the intersection of hydrology, soils science, and biology here; an entire career would not be sufficient time to fully explore this.
You both touch on parts of the issue. Soil salinity is a major concern–plants absorb some of the minerals in river water but not others, and over time those unabsorbed minerals increase salinity of the ground. This is why oceans are salty: Nothing makes shells out of salt, so nothing but evaporation removes it. This can be mitigated by soil migration–you can’t saturate soil with salt if you’re constantly getting new soil, after all! Dams by their nature capture sediment (which is one reason they have a finite lifespan), which exacerbates the issue.
One thing not included here: Fish poop. More specifically, a lot of rivers have a lot of organic matter in them, which creates natural fertilizer. Silt-sized bits of rock aren’t very nutritious to plants by themselves; it’s the organic material that makes river silt beneficial. Dams play merry havoc with ecosystems, blocking upstream and downstream migration.
As a consequence of this reduced nutrient load you can get reduced vegetation, which means soil loss. Dirt stays put because of plants. Mars provides a great contrast–a lifeless planet (or at least lacking macroscopic life), and thus any streams are braided streams, not channelized streams like we get on Earth. Remove the plants from a streambed and you very quickly see erosion speeds increase. You also see loss of delta land, however. Deltas are dynamic geological features and require constant replenishment to exist. If you don’t replenish them the natural settling that occurs when you dump silt into water means that the material will compress and be washed into deeper water, removing available surface area (see the Mississippi Delta).
Then you have the politics. You can absolutely make up for the loss of nutrients via fertilizers–to a point. Ecologically what you’re doing is selecting a limiting factor that allows a higher concentration of a specific organism. What’s that limiting factor? In a desert, it’s water. Once you’ve over-drawn the river, and don’t have desalination plants, your only option is groundwater–which creates a zone of depression, which near coastlines pulls in marine water, ruining the aquifer (see Florida).
To be clear, I’m not saying the dam is a bad thing. Or a good thing. What it is, is an unimaginably COMPLEX thing. Pretty much any response that fits in the space of a blog post comments section isn’t even an introduction; literally every sentence above could be expanded into an entire course at any university!
The innundation and deposition of fertile silt stopped when they built the Aswan Dam. Though I think that actually increased yields by allowing two harvests a year if you artificially fertilise the soil.
Doing a quick google search, it looks like Egyptian agriculture near the Nile is still very productive. But the Nile is only a small area, and the population has gotten very high, plus a good chunk of that farming goes to cotton and some other specialty crops.
Ukrainian agriculture can use a bigger fraction of land area. It’s also more productive per person (Quick google says Ukrainian farming is about 8% of the economy with about 5% of the labor force, Egypt is about 10% of the economy with ~20% of the labor force). Likely the combination of more usable land, more productivity, lower population, possibly more specialization in wheat vs. other specialty crops, means Ukraine can export and Egypt imports.
Yes, nowadays cotton is Egypt’s most famous agricultural product: fabulous long-staple cotton, perfect for high-quality mens’ shirts. The flipside is that no matter how much cotton you grow or how efficiently, you will have to import food.
rough calculations would indicate that Ukraine has less than half the population of Egypt, with something in the region of 15 times times the amount of arable land (Egypt’s not quite twice the size in terms of acreage, but when you take out the ~96% of it that is hard desert, the figures reverse quite drastically).
Bret, hopefully the adage “better late than never” applies here! While I was enjoying your post, I was also noticing a few typos or other issues you might want to address:
place on the Roman Empire > in
the only stand out > stand-out
written on with link and a pen > ink
would be hard so more > hard, so
the easier to store papyrus paper > easier-to-store
was lighter, more > was a lighter, more
much less the proceeding ‘late’ period > preceding
and it become more typical > became
with noting more than > nothing
the private accoutns > accounts
military enforcement forces in the province > [“enforcement forces” sounds redundant/?]
thought, vision into > [Is this what you intended? At least change comma to semicolon]
based on that flooding > [What flooding is that flooding? This is the first mention of flooding/?]
Farming is arrives in Egypt > [delete is/?]
settlement . . . long settled before [settlement was settled?]
If Egypt was an exceptional province this raises the question of which province was the most representative of all the provinces, how likely would details about it be broadly applicable to the rest of the provinces?
Typo: Athenaion Polteia should be Athenaion Politeia.
Off topic but the fans will love this: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=EqZEeFGgsb8
It’s the video of the PDX 2022 History panel with Bret and Eleanor.
Beer factories! Ancient Egypt had them! At least the temples did, which supplied the temples, the worshippers and others too. The true sign of civilization. With all the grains and cereals the Nile River Valley grew, that beer must have been tasty.
“With all the grains and cereals the Nile River Valley grew, that beer must have been tasty.” Or not, depending on what they used for the fermentation
I thought taste was a secondary consideration compared to alcohol content. See the Simpson’s episode “Homer vs the Eighteenth Amendment”.
I’ve often pointed out that Egypt proves we’ve regressed as a society. Contractors today are just as much at the mercy of weather, but we no longer get beer as part of our payment. 🙁
Great Article! One of the most interesting aspects of this period in history is the way that it blended elements of both Roman and Egyptian culture, creating a unique and fascinating hybrid society. The province was also notable for its economic importance, as it was a key center of trade and commerce, and for its role as a major center of learning and intellectual pursuits.
Additionally, the presence of the Roman Empire in Egypt was significant because it marked the first time that Egypt was ruled by a foreign power in over 2000 years. All of these factors make Roman Egypt a truly fascinating and intriguing subject to explore.
While this topic may not be directly related, readers may still find this blog interesting and enjoyable to read: https://www.gangtokian.com
Uh? Hardly the first time:
“Assyrian (670-656), Persian (525-404, 343-332)”
and of course Alexander and the Ptolemies.
Belated, but going back to the blog’s roots of being a pedant about video games, for a very weird take on Roman-era Egypt, check out the original Rome: Total War. Apparently in the alternate universe R:TW takes place in, the Ptolemies took their native Egyptian recruitment really seriously, and the result is their armies look like something out of 1300 BC with chariots and axemen and everything. (Granted, Rome wasn’t divided into exactly three factions that would agree to loosely re-enact the War of Actium either, but still…)
I’m very late to the party (an article I was facing a deadline on), but a comment about the currency system in Egypt you discussed. Alexandria and some of the nomes did pump out a lot of coins of various denominations for an extended period, but they were not unique in this. Provinces, cities, colonies, etc., throughout the Roman Empire also produced local coinage. This usually is collectively referred to as provincial coinage (although David Sear uses “Greek Imperial.” At one point or another, there were something like 600 locations that produced provincial coins. As near as I know, the most locations producing at a particular point in time were about 250 during the Severan era.
Most of these coins were bronze and clearly represented ‘small change’, but there also was some production of silver drachms and cistophori during the early Empire. During the middle part of the 3rd Century, there was very large-scale issuance of debased silver tetradrachms by various cities in the Levant. There still are a lot of questions as to how far some of these coins circulated and the actual value of the smaller coins in particular. Alexandria for an extended period did seem to be the big kid on the block in terms of both coinage output and (perhaps) the value of its coins, but conceptually it did not seem to be unique from the coinage perspective.