Introduction

The major political changes in Egypt during the Graeco-Roman Period had significant consequences for the economy. Property rights and other legal institutions surrounding the economy were gradually transformed, so that an observer familiar with conditions in Ptolemaic Egypt would hardly recognize many of the economic institutions of the later Roman Empire. The difficulty is to assess whether changes in institutions had positive effects on the economy, in the sense of promoting economic growth and the welfare of a broad class of people. Some economic growth resulted from an increase in Egypt’s population, which grew at a modest rate, at least until the late second century ad before the onset of the Antonine plague in 166-7. At its height, this population is reasonably estimated at around five million people, with a high estimate of seven million (Frier 2000: 812; Manning 2003c: 47-8; Rathbone 2007: 699-700, 706-7). Although it is difficult to gauge the level of mortality caused by the plague, it seems highly likely that in Egypt it caused substantial loss of population as well as significant disruption to the economy (Zelener 2003; Duncan-Jones 1996; Bagnall 2000, 2002; Scheidel 2002), but, perhaps more so than in other parts of the ancient world, economic life in Egypt was regularly subject to deadly diseases that killed people in the prime of their lives, when they would be most productive economically (Scheidel 2001).

In spite of a seeming abundance of evidence, at least in comparison to other parts of the ancient world, there are many uncertainties about the Egyptian economy, and it is not possible to offer definitive answers to questions about economic growth and welfare in Egypt. Documentary papyri allow us to see close-up many aspects of the Egyptian economy, including taxation, the organization of landholding, and contracts, such as leases for private or public land, loans, and labor agreements, but these documents do not provide us with anything like a complete picture of the Egyptian economy. The documentary papyri tend to come from two major areas, the Fayum depression and the Oxyrhynchite nome, and recently also from the Dakhla oasis. Far fewer documents survive from much of the Nile valley, the Delta region, and Alexandria, despite its being one of the ancient world’s major urban centers. Ostraka, especially from the upper Nile valley and from desert regions, provide some evidence for areas that have not produced a great many papyri, but this type of evidence, rich as it is, requires us to infer broader economic patterns from numerous particular cases. In recent years our understanding of the Egyptian economy has been deepened by increasingly sophisticated analysis of the numismatic and archaeological evidence for economic activity (Von Reden 2007). In what follows I would like to trace the main developments in Egyptian economic life during the Graeco-Roman Period and to suggest hypotheses about how these developments would affect and be shaped by the relationships among the state, the elite, and the common people.