Within the basic constraints set by population and technology, law and legal institutions, especially those defining property rights to land, played an important role in the economy of Egypt. The most important institutional development in our period involved changing the legal status of the land, with a long-term process of moving from a system of state and institutional control of land to private ownership. The tendency for land to come under private control increased the incentives for the type of investment described above, since landowners exercised greater freedom in how they exploited their land, and they also could be more confident that they would receive an adequate return on their investment.
At the beginning of our period the Ptolemies built on institutions that they had inherited from the Saite kings (664-525) and the Persian satraps (525-332, with interruptions). The Ptolemies managed what could be called a ‘‘tributary state’’ (Manning 2007: 446). The monarch claimed the ultimate ownership over all the land and, on this basis, the right to derive revenues from it. This claim of sovereignty was buttressed by land surveys, theoretically of all the land in every nome. These surveys were often not accurate and might on occasion be woefully out of date, but they served to assert the monarch’s divine claim on the land (Manning 2007: 449). However, if the Ptolemies, like their predecessors, were able to amass considerable wealth from their agricultural revenues, the monarchy was not the only institution that exercised ‘‘economic rights’’ over the land (for this concept, see Barzel 2002: 15). Rather, the Ptolemies and other rulers had to work through local institutions and elites, principally temples and their priests. Thus in the Thebaid, Demotic papyri recording transfers of land among local cultivators indicate a multi-layered hierarchy of institutions and individuals who exercised rights over the land. The actual cultivators came from a restricted class of people with the designation ‘‘servant of x divinity.’’ They enjoyed private rights to their land, since they could transfer them to other people, at least those who shared their status. At the same time, the land in some sense belonged to a temple, since revenues from the land supported the temple and its priests. Ultimately, the monarch also claimed control over this land, but as a practical matter this control could not be exercised (Manning 2003c: 79, 89).
The Ptolemies used land to support their political control over Egypt. One of the chief methods they used to achieve this was to provide soldiers with land grants, or kleruchies, whose size depended on the rank of the soldier. Cavalry received 100 arouras, while infantry received 20, 25, or 30 arouras (Manning 2003c: 56). The kleruchy system goes back to the earliest period in Ptolemaic rule as a way to reward the Greek and Macedonian soldiers who supported the regime. Originally, the kleruchies were revocable, and so they served to provide an economic basis to support a military class that could be called upon to support the monarchy. At the same time, they provided a way of settling the land with a class of people whose loyalties lay first and foremost with the monarchy. Later, soldiers of Egyptian origin received kleruchies, especially after the battle of Raphia in 217 bc. It seems likely that the principal location of kleruchies was in the Fayum region; much of the land reclaimed by the draining of the Fayum must have been awarded to kleruchs (cf. Monson 2008).
Over time, kleruchic holdings became hereditary, and the holders of this type of land came to represent one of the wealthiest groups in Ptolemaic Egypt. This is confirmed by third-century bc census lists of people required to pay the salt tax, which was a kind of capitation tax. In these declarations, kleruchs had the largest households, with livestock, domestic slaves, and dependent farmers. They were classified as ‘‘Hellenic,’’ a privilege that gave them a more favorable tax status (Clarysse and Thompson 2006). In economic terms the kleruchs became landowners who often exploited their holdings by leasing them out to farmers of Egyptian status. This represented the beginning of a landowning class that would persist under the
Principate. In that period there emerged a class of landowners who, while residing in nome mltropoleis, owned a substantial portion of land in villages and leased it out to local tenants (Rowlandson 1996). Under the Ptolemies hereditary rights to land were associated with status, and the status distinctions established by the Ptolemies, primarily between Greeks and Egyptians, would provide the basis for the social hierarchy that existed under Roman rule. This does not mean, however, that status was identical with ethnicity: many ethnic Egyptians gained Hellenic status in return for service to the state. Egyptians with Hellenic status would often have two identities: they would use a Greek name for legal transactions involving Greek law and a Greek milieu, but for other aspects of their lives they would have an Egyptian name and identity (Clarysse and Thompson 2006).
Another form of Ptolemaic land grant was the ‘‘gift estate,’’ a grant of land to a close associate of the monarchy. The best known of these is the estate of the finance manager or dioiketes for Ptolemy II Philadelphos, Apollonios, which was administered for many years (262-39 bc) by his agent Zenon. This estate included an impressive concession of 10,000 arouras (6,700 acres, or 2700 ha) near the village of Philadelphia in the Fayum. In addition, Apollonios received a series of parcels of land in the Memphite nome. The extensive Zenon archive provides numerous insights into the management of this estate and the economic planning of the time (Manning 2003c: 110-18). In view of the large size of the concession near Philadelphia it seems likely that the cultivation of this estate involved the reclamation of a great deal of land. Apollonios and Zenon, moreover, seem to have been very adventurous in experimenting with new crops. In addition to cultivating vines on a large scale, they created a ‘‘vertically integrated’’ clothing industry, involving the control of both the production of raw materials and the manufacture of finished goods. They cultivated their own flax for linen and also raised sheep for wool. In addition, they were involved in the manufacture of luxury clothing items, presumably to meet the demand of the newly established and growing royal court (Loftus 1999). From the point of view of the monarchy gift estates rewarded service and also created revenues (at least for the associates of the court, if not for the crown) from land that might otherwise not be exploited in any significant way. The gift estates were a phenomenon of the Ptolemaic Period, and, since they did not involve hereditary rights to the land, they must have passed back to the crown upon the death of the holder.
Land classified as ‘‘royal’’ represented perhaps the most important source of revenue for the Ptolemaic crown as well as a means for the crown to exercise political and economic control. Theoretically, this land was leased out on an annual basis to farmers in exchange for a rent in kind for each unit of land that would be adjusted in accordance with changing conditions. The cultivators would receive a seed grant to be paid back with the rent. The sizes of the plots known to have been leased out ranged from the very modest to as much as 160 arouras, and groups as well as individuals might lease the land.
Royal land was to be found in large portions in every region of Egypt, but the exact extent of it is unknown. We can gain some sense of its importance to the village economy by considering the late second-century bc archive of the scribe Menches from the village of Kerkeosiris in the Fayum (Manning 2003c: 119-20, based on Crawford 1971). Kerkeosiris was a village with a population of some 1,520 persons during Menches’ tenure, and it had 4,000 arouras of arable land. Royal land accounted for just over half of the total (52%), and it was worked in small plots, with an average size of about eight arouras. There were 148 royal farmers, some working in groups, and about one-fifth of the land was classified as unproductive. Temples controlled another 16% of the land, and another third was classified as kleruchic land. This category was leased out in parcels generally larger than with royal land. For the royal land rents accounted for approximately 50% of the crop (conservatively assuming a 10 artab/aroura yield). The figures for Kerkeosiris cannot be taken as representative for Egypt as a whole since it seems likely that the land reclamation project in the Fayum resulted in the creation of royal land, but the distribution of land is suggestive about the roles that royal, kleruchic, and temple land played in the local economy. In some parts of the Nile Valley it is likely that the portion of royal land was smaller, since this was the location of powerful temples with long-established rights to the land.
If, in theory, royal land was subject to re-leasing every year, tenure on it seems to have been relatively secure. From one perspective the extent of royal holdings suggests that the Ptolemies fostered a class of dependent, small-scale farmers, whose production of wheat provided the basis for the monarchy’s wealth. However, the cultivators of this land, ‘‘royal farmers’’ or basilikoigeorgoi, seem to have enjoyed a coveted status, since they emphasize it in petitions to the king or other higher officials. They enjoyed certain basic rights, such as freedom from billeting soldiers and from harassment during the planting and harvesting seasons. In addition, they had the right to have cases tried before Greek courts (Manning 2003c: 54-5; 2007: 452). This claim to status finds its analogue in the Roman Empire in the similar claim made by tenants of imperial estates, that is, lands that belonged to the imperial treasury. Both royal farmers and imperial tenants enjoyed protection from the government because of the important role they played in supplying revenues.
It is worth considering the likely economic incentives that resulted from the property regime maintained by the Ptolemaic monarchy. As emphasized in recent scholarship on the Ptolemaic Period, it does not seem possible that the Ptolemaic crown, or any ancient government for that matter, was capable of establishing a command economy in which production was directed from some central bureau. The immense costs of gathering sufficient information rule this out. In addition, as Joseph Manning has emphasized in his recent work on the Ptolemaic economy, the regime was interested first and foremost in achieving stable sources of revenue (Manning 2003c: 141-2). Managing a planned economy was simply not possible, even if the monarchy had ever hoped to do this.
To achieve its revenues the monarchy set up a property regime that privileged its ability to secure steady revenues over incentives for greater productivity. For example, the monarchy’s reserving royal land for its own revenues and requiring grain to be cultivated on it removed flexibility that might have allowed private owners of the land to make more informed decisions about what crops to cultivate and in what proportions. Moreover, the lack of secure rights to the land would have diminished the incentives to invest substantial resources in long-term improvements. Although many people enjoyed various private rights to their land, the purely private sector of the Ptolemaic agrarian economy was restricted largely to the gift estates, but even these were not exactly private property but instead were held in a sort of revocable trust. The state’s goal, however, was not to foster a system of property rights that maximized productivity, but rather to maintain revenues in various agricultural commodities, principally wheat, that represented one of the monarchy’s most important assets. The real task that the monarchy faced, as Manning points out, was to create and foster a system of local agents who could be relied upon to collect revenues from royal land and taxable land and turn it over to the central government. The village scribes were very important in this process, since they were responsible for the registration of land (Manning 2003c: 150ff.), but controlling the village scribes and other local officials involved in the collection was no easy manner. One step the crown took was to use royal banks and granaries in the collection of taxes instead of temples (Manning 2007: 444). On occasion the crown employed members of the Greek elite in administrative positions to counter some of the power that local elites exercised. The Roman administration would address this problem in a more fundamental way by appointing governors of the nomes, strategoi, who were prohibited from governing the nome from which they originated and, in the first century were recruited from the elite class of Alexandria (Bowman and Rathbone 1992: 125-6). It seems likely that much of the land that was theoretically taxable simply escaped official registration.
The Romans were also dependent on agricultural production for revenues, but they tended to impose the liability for taxes corporately on villages. To make sure that the villages had the resources to meet their obligations the state compelled people to remain in their village of origin, or idia. This requirement was difficult to enforce, and villagers commonly abandoned their villages either to escape liability or to seek economic opportunities elsewhere, for example, in Alexandria and other major cities. The phenomenon of leaving one’s village of origin, or anachoresis, became a problem that the state continually had to confront. Affected villages would lose the personnel they needed to perform civic liturgies (compulsory public services, such as collecting taxes or maintaining irrigation facilities) or to cultivate their lands and pay taxes, and they frequently petitioned the authorities for relief when this occurred. For its part, the state sought to enforce the obligation ofpeople to remain in their village of origin with occasional amnesties and sometimes with force. In one famous example the emperor Caracalla ordered the expulsion of native Egyptians from Alexandria so that they would return to their villages and perform their duty to cultivate the land (Sel. Pap. II 215, 215 ad). Caracalla’s edict is an extreme manifestation of a policy that did not weigh the advantages of one form of economic activity against possible alternatives but, instead, sought to achieve a goal of overriding importance to the state.
The Ptolemaic crown’s policy of maintaining more or less direct control over royal land also had distributional consequences in that it promoted greater equality of land holding at the village level and helped to maintain a viable class of small-scale farmers. It certainly impeded the accumulation of large tracts of land by locally powerful people, which might have had the effect of compromising the authority of the monarchy. Rather, the monarchy was very jealous of the privileges that it granted, since it bestowed gift estates on a relatively narrow circle of close associates of the monarch. The kleruchs were a strength but also a potential danger to the monarchy, and the state attempted to exercise control over their land by foreclosing the possibilities of alienating it; kleruchic land could be bequeathed but not sold to other landowners. This was a restriction that the Roman administration removed, with the result that kleruchic land came to represent private property (see below). Political conditions compelled the Ptolemies to alter some of these arrangements. After the battle of Raphia in 217 bc the government rewarded Egyptian soldiers with kleruchic grants, sometimes using royal land for this purpose. After the major revolt in the Thebaid ended in 186 bc, the monarchy settled soldiers in this region, at the expense of temple estates.
Under Roman rule, the property regime in Egypt changed gradually but significantly. To begin, the state continued to be the largest landowner (Rowlandson 1996: 76-101). Royal land, ge basilike, remained under the control of the state, but state land was augmented by public land, or ge demosie, which was confiscated from temples or other supporters of M. Antonius and Kleopatra. A third category of state land created under the Principate, ousiac land, or ge ousiake, was land that had been granted to members of the Julio-Claudian family or close associates of the court, such as Seneca or the freedman M. Antonius Pallas (Parassoglou 1978). After the demise of the Julio-Claudian regime the Julio-Claudian ousiai came under state control and were administered like other categories of state land. The conditions under which this land was cultivated certainly varied from region to region, but broad principles guided the state’s policy in administering it. It was generally leased out in small parcels, usually under ten arouras, but sometimes it could be leased in larger amounts. As under the Ptolemies, the rents were theoretically subject to constant oversight, but they seem to have remained stable for the long term, generally changing only at the request of a cultivator. The most common range of rents was between 3 1/2 and 4 1/2 artabs per aroura for wheat land. As under the Ptolemies, tenure on this land was relatively secure; the major concern of the state was to find sufficient cultivators for its land. The rights to cultivate state land could even be passed on to heirs. In addition, the cultivators, or georgoi, of state land included people who owned land on their own or leased in private land. The rents must have remained below the level of rents for private land, since otherwise cultivators would have withdrawn their resources and devoted them exclusively to private land. The state on occasion tried to address revenue shortfalls by assigning public land to private cultivators under the system known as epibole (see above). The possibility of leasing in state land under what were surely favorable conditions served to help maintain a more equal distribution of land in Egyptian villages than must have been the norm in many other parts of the Roman Empire.
The second major change under Roman rule was the increasing development of private land. The Ptolemaic system of recruiting soldiers from kleruchy holders was something of the distant past, and kleruchic land for all intents and purposes represented private land, even if it required a special legal form to convey it from one owner to another. It is possible that the range of eligible owners of kleruchic land was restricted to the elite Greek-speaking class in the nomes, those people belonging to the gymnasial class (the local elite with Greek status; Rathbone 2007: 701 n. 14), but with time this restriction would have disappeared. The extent of private land in all likelihood increased as the state auctioned off public land lacking cultivators (Rathbone 2007: 700-1). In the third century this process of returning state-owned land to private ownership seems to have gained steam. By the early fourth century royal land was for all intents and purposes another category of private land, distinguished from ordinary private land only by a higher tax rate (2 1/2 artabs of wheat per aroura, as opposed to generally one artab per aroura on private land). The tax rates for these lands are known from a decree of the emperor Diocletian preserved in the Isidoros archive (P. Cair. Isid. 1; Rathbone 2007: 702).
The property regime that the Romans inherited from the Ptolemies and to some extent maintained must have been a major factor in slowing the creation of large estates and an increasing stratification of landownership that was characteristic of many other regions in the Roman Empire. To be sure, in all periods, wealthy citizens of Alexandria owned land in other nomes, and many may have accumulated quite substantial holdings. One example would be the wealthy Alexandrian aristocrat and office-holder C. Calpurnius Firmus, who purchased a vineyard at Oxyrhynchus in the third century for his young son from Aurelia Apollonia, alias Harpokratiaine, also a citizen of Alexandria (P. Oxy. XXXIV 2723; for the family, see Rowlandson 1996: 110-11,196-7). Firmus also had ties to Oxyrhynchos, since he had held civic offices there and had provided the city with benefactions. This vineyard no doubt represented only a portion of the land owned by either party to this transaction, and it is likely that the elite of Alexandria commonly owned land in multiple locations in the Egyptian countryside.
The creation of estates is something different. In the first century the ousiai granted to close associates of the imperial courts represented estates only in a limited sense. They were not contiguous masses of property but collections of individual parcels of land. For this reason, the role of the owner or beneficiary in managing them was likely to have been quite limited, and to a large extent they were leased out to tenants. They do not seem to have been managed in such a way as to create economies of scale. The creation of centrally managed estates seems more to have been the product of the second century and especially of the third. In the mid-second century a wealthy Alexandrian named Ti. lulius Theon owned an estate consisting of properties in various villages in the Oxyrhynchite and neighboring nomes, including the Hermopolite (P. Theon.). This estate, like others in Roman Egypt, consisted of diverse individual properties which were probably accumulated gradually. Another example is the estate in the Fayum belonging to the descendants of a man named Laches. This estate consisted of several hundred arouras near the village of Tebtynis, some of which was cultivated directly, with the rest being leased out to tenants (Kehoe 1992: chap. 3).
The upheaval resulting from by the Antonine plague in 166-7 ad may have speeded the process of estate building in Egypt. The loss of population that the plague caused resulted in economic disruption, among other things leaving a great deal of land without cultivators, although the extent of this is the topic of heated debate (see above). One aspect of this disruption was to create uncertainty about the ownership of land. It has been convincingly argued that the Roman government’s legal doctrine of the longi temporis praescriptio, which protected possessors of land in the provinces against legal challenges, was a response to this crisis (Nclrr 1969). Still, the disruptions cause by the plague created opportunities for the survivors. It should have resulted in decreased rents, benefiting small farmers, but it is also likely that it became increasingly difficult to find cultivators for state land. Enterprising landowners could have taken advantage of this circumstance by purchasing land, including state land from the imperial administration (Rathbone 2007: 701-2).
In the third century Egypt had an elite landowning class comparable to that found in other provinces in the Roman Empire. The wealthiest members of this class had equestrian status and were resident in Alexandria, where they served on the council. They derived their wealth from landholdings in the countryside, sometimes in multiple locations. For example, a member of this Alexandrian aristocracy, Valerius Titanianus, who at one time had been praefectus vigilum at Rome, owned an estate in the Fayum, as is indicated by an account prepared by one of his managers (P. Mich. XI 620, 239-40 ad). The best known case is Aurelius Appianus, whose estate is known from the Heroninos archive, a collection of accounts and other documents connected with one of the administrators of the estate (Rathbone 1991). Appianus’ estate in the Fayum had several divisions, or phrontides, each consisting of a number of diverse parcels organized around an individual village. Each of the division managers, or phrontistai (Heroninos was phrontistes for Theadelphia in ad 249-68), submitted accounts and other reports to the central administration of the estate located at the nome capital.
The task of the managers of the estate of Appianus was to cultivate the parcels of land in their village to produce a variety of cash crops, the most important of which was wine. They employed a relatively small staff of permanent wage workers, called oiketai and metrematiaioi, who were resident at a village or compound, called an epoikion, that formed part of the estate. This type of settlement became characteristic of Egyptian estates into late antiquity. Much of the labor on the estate was provided by wage laborers hired on a daily basis, and these were probably recruited from local small-scale landowners and tenants. The major innovation on the estate of Appianus, and what distinguished it from smaller enterprises, was to achieve economies of scale by organizing substantial resources, including funds but also valuable equipment like draft animals, and sharing them among the various divisions. To assure itself of stable revenues the management of the estate on occasion would farm out the collection of the vintage and the marketing of the wine to middlemen, called karponai. This practice, also followed on other estates in Roman Egypt, helped reduce risk for the estate and managerial costs, while providing a source of cash in advance to meet operating expenses. It is paralleled in other parts of the Empire, notably on the estate of the early second-century Roman senator Pliny the Younger in Umbria (Ep. 8.2).
The estate of Appianus displayed some of the characteristics that would define estates in late antiquity. It took on the responsibility for organizing its laborers and other people in the village for liturgical and tax purposes, a responsibility that would increasingly be imposed on large landowners (Rathbone 1991; Aubert 1997; Gascou 1983; Banaji 2001). In addition, although the estate itself had a small staff of artisans and craftsmen, it also hired such skilled labor from the villages. So the prosperity of this estate depended on the continued viability of the village economy, and this symbiotic relationship between a large estate and the village economy would also be characteristic of the agricultural economy of late-antique Egypt. Finally, although estate owners under the Principate and in late antiquity leased out much of their land to tenants (some land on the estate of Appianus was leased out), they also employed wage labor on a long-term basis. Slave labor was important in the domestic sphere in Egypt and possibly also in certain crafts, but it does not seem to have played much of a role at all in agriculture in any period (Rathbone 2007: 712).
Farm tenancy was clearly important in the exploitation of state land, but it also played a significant role in the private agricultural economy. Being a tenant did not, in and of itself, determine economic status. Some tenants owned land in their own right, and leased in additional land to increase their sources of income. Such tenants would have been attractive to landowners because of the substantial resources that they might bring to cultivate the land under lease. At the other end of the scale were tenants who could supply few resources of their own and so were tantamount to laborers (Foxhall 1990). The boundaries between landowners and tenants were blurred, but there was also a range in resources provided by tenants. Thus some tenants were substantial farmers in their own right, while others were essentially laborers.
We can develop a better idea of the contribution that tenancy made to the economy by considering some specific examples. Soterichos, a farmer from first-century Thea-delphia in the Fayum (Omar 1979), leased land over a long period from a single landowner, in spite of often being behind on his rent. One of his contributions was to provide for the continuing upkeep of vineyards that he was leasing, as revealed by two leases (P. Soterichos 1-2). In a later period Aurelius Isidorus, a farmer from early fourth-century Karanis, owned as much as eighty arouras of land, but he was only able to cultivate about twenty of these in any given year, probably as a result of the advancing desert. However, he also cultivated land over a long period of time belonging to several wealthier landowners (Boak and Youtie 1960). A somewhat more complicated arrangement to use tenants to produce cash crops is indicated in an account book from the village of Kellis in the Dakhla Oasis in the fourth century. This account book, which recorded rental payments made by tenants, seems to indicate that tenants produced wheat and other foodstuffs, which the administration of the estate used to pay laborers producing olive oil, which was the estate’s major cash crop (Bagnall et al. 1997).
In Egyptian tenancy leases were typically for limited periods of time, from as little as one growing season to several years. Typically, for grain land the rent was set as a fixed amount of crops for each unit of land. For vineyards, leases were generally for shares of the harvest, with the share due from the tenant in inverse proportion to the resources that he contributed. Some leases involved the landowner’s paying the tenant a wage for his services. In late antique Egypt, there is little sign in the papyri for coloni bound to the land, a product of the fiscal system of the later Roman Empire (Bagnall 1993), but long-term leases do begin to appear; often, the tenant’s tenure was set at the owner’s discretion.
Overall in the Roman Empire there was a tendency for landownership to become increasingly stratified, and this phenomenon also characterized agriculture in Egypt, even if large estates developed there somewhat later than in other parts of the Empire. Another important change in late antiquity was the emergence of the church and eventually monasteries as important landowners, but the growth of large estates does not mean the disappearance of the small-scale agriculture characteristic of Egypt. Even in the vicinity of large estates there remained a viable peasant society that had many dealings with the various business agents of large estates. At the same time there were some locations without large estates, such as late antique Aphrodito (Keenan 2000). We can gain some perspective about the distribution of land in late antique Egypt by considering Roger Bagnall’s study of landholding in the Hermopolite nome during the fourth century (Bagnall 1992). During this period, Bagnall argues that there was a relatively egalitarian distribution of land. A majority of landowners had holdings of between 10 and 50 arouras in size (10 arouras is approximately 2.7 ha, an amount of land probably sufficient to support an individual family). There were a few with larger holdings, including residents of the nome metropolis, who presumably had holdings in multiple villages. This distribution of land is comparable to what Jane Rowlandson has found in Oxyrhynchos under the Principate. There most landowners had relatively modest holdings, between five and fifty arouras, with a very few people having much larger holdings of 500 arouras or more (Rowlandson 1996: 102-38).
World History
