Agriculture

The economic base of the Egyptian state lay in agriculture. Well-drained areas of the natural flood-plain provided extremely fertile arable land. Land that did not flood regularly provided scrub vegetation suitable for pasture and plots that could be developed for orchards. Low, poorly draining land formed swamps, with rich seasonal populations of water-birds and fish. The conversion of this wild landscape into a disciplined artificial irrigation regime was the work of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries (Eyre 2004). Artificial watering in the pharaonic period was limited to the hand watering of gardens and orchards (Eyre 1994). The ancient history of water control consisted of gradual, limited, and locally focused efforts to discipline the seasonal flow of water on and off the natural flood basins, improving local efficiency and security of cultivation (Atzler 1995). The partial exception is the Fayum, where Middle Kingdom works to improve and control flow along the connecting channel to the Nile seem to have expanded the areas available for cultivation by natural flood. The Old Kingdom landscape is likely to have been largely undisciplined: irrigation control was neither a cause nor a factor in the development of central government. By the early Ptolemaic Period the landscape certainly appeared more disciplined, and the introduction of the water-wheel and Archimedes screw then extended artificial watering for high value cash crops.

Agricultural decision-making was necessarily local, with land management based on peasant village communities (Eyre 1997, 1999). Annual decisions about cultivation could only be taken when the extent of the flood was clear, when a match had to be achieved between cultivable plots and available labor. The fields were ploughed and sowed in the narrow window after the drainage of the floodwater, when the soil was in prime condition - a very short period of intensive work in the autumn. The crop did not need manuring, watering, or weeding before its harvest in the late spring or early summer - another short period of intensive work. Protection of crops from animals was important, and through the growing season animals were herded away from the fields. Particular regions of the country specialized in large-scale animal herding, notably the Delta but also parts of Middle Egypt (Franke 2007: 160-4), where in the New Kingdom the settlement of cavalrymen marks a specialization in horse rearing. These were presumably areas where inundation-based grain cultivation was less reliable. Professional herdsmen formed an identifiable and socially marginal group. Orchards - fruit trees, dates, and vines in particular - stood outside the inundated land. Vegetable plots might also be situated on small plots of land that became cultivable late or unpredictably. These were small scale enterprises, using hand-watering year-round, although in the New Kingdom specialist wine production - a luxury product - was established on a substantial scale in parts of the Delta (Tallet 1998). Herding and orchard cultivation were specialist, year-round activities, requiring expertise and investment, employing limited numbers. In contrast arable farming was characterized by substantial seasonal underemployment.

The rural economy can be quantified, but the figures do not paint a full picture of the stresses and insecurities of individual peasant life. The measure of land was the aroura: 100 x 100 cubits: approximately 2735 m2, about 2/3 of an English acre or modern Egyptian feddan, but less than 1/4 hectare. The standard calculation is that one sack of seed - the khar, of 76.88 litres - sowed on one aroura of land should produce a crop of 10 khar. The yield seems high, but the figure is standard in revenue calculations. Subsistence in grain for a small nuclear family was 1% khar a month. The maximum area that an individual might plough was 20 arouras, to produce a yield of 200 khar (Janssen 1975b, 148-9), but this represents an ideal of efficiency in farm management with workers employed for wages or rations to produce maximum returns. The use of plough oxen significantly raised costs, and it likely that the poorest farmers worked their fields manually, greatly reducing cultivable area.

In the New Kingdom holdings of 3, 5, and 10 aroura are well attested. The basic calculation for a plot of 3 arouras assumes a yield of 30 khar, from which seed costs of 3 khar, and probably tax of 3 khar (Eyre 1994a: 130; Haring 1998: 85) leave a little more than the annual grain subsistence of 18 khar. Holdings of 5 or 10 arouras, with yields of 50 or 100 khar, provided well above subsistence, sufficient for a landholder to draw income by renting to a farmer on a share-cropping basis: at typical rates committing 1/3 or 1/2 of the crop to rent and expenses, a share-cropping farmer needed to work at least 5 arouras.

These calculations do not tell the whole story, since grain provided only part of the diet, perhaps as little as 1/2 or 2/3 of calorific intake (Foxhall and Forbes 1982), supplemented by edible oils and fats, vegetables, pulses, fish, and poultry. For a peasant family these must come from their domestic economy: field cultivation of non-grain crops, marginal cultivation of vegetable plots, domestic rearing of poultry and small animals - sheep and pigs (Kemp 1987, 36-41; Miller 1990) - and probably seasonal fishing and trapping of wild fowl, although professional fishermen and fowlers are well attested. Edible oil-seed cultivation was important, but it is hardly traceable in the documentation of the Pharaonic period. Flax provided the other important crop for domestic production of linen that both clothed the family and produced cash income for the household.

The economic model was that of a family household, best attested in the early Middle Kingdom letters of Hekanakhte (Allen 2002; Wente 1990: 58-63). He writes to his eldest son about crop choice: emmer, barley, or flax. He discusses costs and rental against expected returns, partly on his own holding and partly on land chosen for rent according to the flood. Unusually he pays the rent in advance in cloth and grain. Rent paid as a proportion of the crop was more normal. He comments on management of seed reserves, of ploughing, and the family herd, and on the hiring of temporary labor for wages for a month during ploughing to maximize the amount of land cultivated. He discusses household weaving and marketing the cloth produced, but he is most concerned with the family food reserves, cutting the family grain ration in half in the face of a national shortage; presumably the previous year had been very bad.

Large farms, on which men were employed for rations or wages, seem to be the exception. Share-cropping cultivation seems to have been more effective even for large land-holders - such as temple endowments - with an economically dependent peasantry working their land and paying shares of the crops, rather than attempting to micro-manage their villages and peasants on unified large farms. The imperative for the revenue system was to ensure that peasants occupied the cultivable land, but there was a difficult balance between hierarchical pressure to maximize income and the problems caused by default and flight if the terms of rural tenure became intolerable to the peasant farmers (Eyre 2004: 182-3).

The picture is one of subsistence farming with farmers producing sufficient grain for the family and roughly equivalent quantities in rent or revenues. In a bad year the socially weakest farmers, with insecure access to workable land, suffered immediately and badly, as potentially did those reliant on rent income or those receiving wages for non-agricultural work. It is a conservative calculation to suggest that in normal conditions village farmers only produced about twice the amount of grain they ate themselves, when a fully employed farmer could physically work enough land to achieve higher productivity, although the calculation must include the cultivation of non-grain crops. In practice, however, the majority of peasants are unlikely to have achieved anything near maximum productivity. The concept of an agricultural surplus, as the basis for a complex state economy, and the efficient management of that surplus as revenue, are not appropriate to peasant thinking in the village. The farmer is focused on annual food security for the family. He does not look to buy or sell grain but grows it in the quantity necessary to eat and meet (with the utmost resistance) any revenue demands in kind. Only then does the enterprising farmer focus on other crops, where his decisions will become highly rational and profit-oriented.

Although well off in peasant terms, the family of Hekanakhte were hungry in a bad year. Attitudes to the economy were strongly focused on fear of hunger and consequent social collapse. Extreme famine was exceptional, but the shortage of inundated land in bad years provoked flight in search of food and employment, with cycles of rural depopulation in marginal areas followed by resettlement and rural expansion in better times. The relief of poverty reads as a cliche in tomb autobiographies, and significant levels of hunger and destitution should be considered a norm of rural society, where rights and management of access to good land produced significant variations in the wealth and security of individual peasants.