Agriculture

Agriculture, as the basis of the Egyptian economy, provided the livelihoods for most of Egypt’s population and as well as the incomes for the elite of the country. In addition, agriculture was central to the finances of the state, whether it was the Ptolemaic kingdom or the Roman Empire. Consequently, much of the administrative structure maintained by the state revolved around a continuous effort to capture revenues from agriculture. Egypt’s agricultural resources made it strategically important. In the late Ptolemaic Period it represented a prize for successive Roman military dynasts. Under the Principate Egypt, together with the province of Africa, was one of the chief sources of production of grain for the annona at Rome, the program of distributing wheat on a monthly basis to some 150,000 recipients. In late antiquity the food supply of the imperial capital city of Constantinople was maintained to a large extent with Egyptian grain and other foodstuffs.

Egypt’s unique geography made agriculture there different from much of the Graeco-Roman world. In parts of the ancient world with a ‘‘Mediterranean’’ climate, characterized by wet and rainy winters and hot and dry summers, agriculture generally depended on managing water supplies resulting from scarce and irregular rainfall to cultivate the basic staples in the ancient diet of grain, olive oil, and wine (Foxhall and Forbes 1980; Horden and Purcell 2000). In Egypt agriculture was subject to quite different geographical constraints. The vast majority of farmland in Egypt was either in the Nile Valley or the Nile Delta, although there were also oases, such as the Dakhla Oasis, where agriculture also flourished. Since Egypt had little rainfall, all land had to be irrigated, either directly by the Nile flood or indirectly by mechanical means.

In the Nile Valley and Delta, managing the flood of the Nile was crucial to survival, and it required a community-wide organization. The agricultural calendar revolved around the Nile flood. The Nile would begin to rise in the summer and subside in the late autumn (Bagnall 1993:17-18, 21-3; Manning 2007: 438-9). The task that villages faced was to channel as much of the water as possible into their fields and to keep it there as long as possible, and then to drain it so that farmers could plough and plant their fields. Maintaining an irrigation system was a constant concern of the central state, which tended to impose the task of organizing the required labor and resources on village authorities (Manning 2003c: 27-30; 72-3; Bonneau 1993). All farmers in Egypt were expected to contribute to this effort. In Roman times this meant that all adult men, with the exception of a relatively few exempt because of their privileged status, were required to perform five days of labor each year on the dykes and canals. In addition, taxes (the naubion) were collected from agricultural land to support the maintenance of communal facilities. This type of basin agriculture tended to be more productive in terms of yield for each unit of land than Mediterranean dry-farming, with yields that were in all likelihood on the order of 10:1 or even higher, that is, about 1,000 kg/ha (Rathbone 1991: 242-3, 465). Grain crops were generally cultivated in land that was flooded naturally by the Nile or other major water source (such as the Bahr Yusuf in the Fayum, which channeled water from the Nile into Lake Moeris). Vineyards and orchards were often enclosed areas, called ktemata, and they were generally situated on higher land or at some remove from water sources. They were irrigated artificially by means of the ancient counterparts of the shaduf and saqiya, a water wheel powered by animals.

The most characteristic pattern of landholding in Egypt involved farmers cultivating relatively small parcels interspersed along the thin strip of arable land in the Nile Valley. They key was to have land close to the river or, in the Fayum, to the canals bringing water from the Nile. As a consequence, landholdings often consisted of modest-sized parcels rather than contiguous plots of land. This is the case for small farmers as well as for owners oflarge estates. For example, in the Roman Period the great estate of the Alexandrian magnate Appianus was divided into individual units or phrontides, each organized around an individual village in the Fayum (see below). The units, in turn, were composed of numerous individual parcels of land that were interspersed among the other lands in the village that belonged to local landowners. In late antiquity the lands belonging to the vast estate of the Apiones in the Oxyrhynchite nome were situated side by side with other farmland in the various villages of the nome. The one major exception to this tendency of estates to consist of multiple smaller holdings is the estate in the Ptolemaic Period that the king Ptolemy II Philadelphos granted to his financial manager, or dioiketes, Apollonios. This estate included a large contiguous parcel of land, comprising 10,000 arouras, near the village of Philadelphia in the Fayum (Manning 2007: 454). The king could grant such an estate because, as will be discussed below, the Fayum was undergoing intensive land reclamation, so there was likely to have been more land available than in other regions of Egypt whose land had been cultivated for millennia.

Agriculture in Egypt was subject to different risks from those associated with other regions in the Mediterranean world. Whereas in most of the Graeco-Roman world the major risk was from periodic droughts, in Egypt the risk was that the flood would not reach the land to be cultivated. Land that went without water during the flood season would be classified as ‘‘waterless,’’ or abrochos, and abrochia was often grounds for tax abatements or claims for remission of rent in farm leases. One famous example of the former was a tax moratorium issued by the Roman emperor Hadrian in 136 as a response to a disastrously low Nile flood (Oliver 1989: no. 88). The practice of cultivating multiple plots of land, as discussed above, provided Egyptian farmers with one important means to reduce their exposure to this type of risk.