There are three interrelated aspects of the economy of Roman Egypt. The most important is the agricultural production of the Nile Valley and the Delta. The fecundity of Egypt was well known and the city of Rome relied heavily on the Alexandrian grain ships to feed its teeming population. A second facet is the mineral extraction focused largely, but by no means exclusively, on the Eastern Desert. Here gold had been exploited since pharaonic times, but during the Roman period it was also a source of exotic stones such as the granito del foro and imperial porphyry. The red granite of Aswan has a long history of exploitation and it is not surprising that it was also one of the most important decorative stones used by the Romans.
The third aspect of the economy is the role that Egypt played in articulating Roman trade. Alexandria was, of course, one of the great trading cities of the ancient world, but Egypt is uniquely placed, with access to both the Mediterranean and the Red Sea, which itself leads to the Indian Ocean and beyond. The country thus played a major role in Rome’s trade with the Orient: with India in particular, but through it contact was made with Malaysia and possibly even China.
To many people today Egypt is a long thin ribbon of land expanding to a triangle in the form of the Delta. This is where the population lives and works and this is where the food is grown. Today, as in the past, the fertile land produces a surplus. The cause of this fertility is not, of course, the climate, for rainfall is negligible, but the river Nile. Before the building of the first Aswan dam, the river would burst its banks annually, depositing a fresh layer of rich silt on the surface of the fields. So important were these floods that their height was measured with specially constructed Nilometers, Roman examples of which can be seen at, for example, Aswan and Luxor, with a fine medieval one at Cairo. The level of taxation was adjusted to the height of the water: a good flood would mean a good crop, and the populace would be able to stand higher taxes. Pliny (Historia Naturalis, 5.58) is quite specific about the importance of flooding:
An average rise is one of seven metres. A smaller volume of water does not irrigate all localities and a larger one, by retiring too slowly, retards agriculture: and the latter uses up the time for sowing because of the moisture of the soil while the former gives no time for sowing because the soil is parched. The province takes careful note of both extremes: in a rise of five-and-a-half metres it senses famine and even at one of six metres it begins to feel hungry, but six-and-a-half metres brings cheerfulness, six-and-three-quarters complete confidence and seven metres delight, (trans A. Bowman)
Rome’s reliance on Egyptian grain has a long history, stretching back to the Ptolemies, when, as early as 211 or 210 bc, Rome requested a consignment of grain from Ptolemy IV. The arrival of the Alexandrian grain ships was to become an important element in the economy of Rome, upon which the fates of emperors might hang. Under Augustus it may have reached 20 million modii (well over I million tons). The corn trade was part of the annona, the tax in kind levied by Rome on the producing provinces. There is some evidence to suggest that even the cost of transport from the estate to the Nile had to be met by the producers.
The supply of grain from the growing areas to the warehouses of Alexandria was a carefully regulated operation. The shipment was carried out by the sitologos (corn official) aided by the antigrapheus (clerk) and a financial assistant.
A sealed sample or deigma would be entrusted to the boat’s captain for delivery with the consignment. This would be a check against Adulteration or substitution of the cargo with one of lower quality during the voyage. In any case, it seems to have been normal practice for a soldier to be present on board during the journey. On arrival at the great granaries in Alexandria, the corn would be in the care of special Roman procurators who, with their staff were responsible for its safe-keeping and condition.
The corn ships generally left Alexandria in May or June and the journey to Rome, against the prevailing northerly winds, could take a month or perhaps even two. The route would be along the North African coast or north to Cyprus, then hugging the south coast of Turkey. The return with a tail wind took about a fortnight, the ships travelling ‘with the speed of racehorses’, as the emperor Gains claimed. Either way, the journey was not without its hazards, as St Paul’s shipwreck on Malta vividly illustrates.
Archaeologically, we know very little about the estates that produced this corn, but the papyri known as the Heroninos archive permit the detailed reconstruction of the working of one of them operating during the third century ad, the Appianus estate in the Faiyum. It appears that the owner of the estate, Aurelius Appianus, was a landowner of some standing with holdings comparable with those of Roman senators. His central administrators, bound by patronage, were recruited from the town councillors and landowners of the nome, and below them were the phrontistai or production managers, probably recruited from wealthy rural families, who perhaps worked for several estates simultaneously. The labour was provided by a nucleus of full-time workers supplemented by extra labourers when needed. It seems that the supply of paid labour from the poorer classes in rural Egypt made it unnecessary and uneconomic to seek slave labour.
There were three categories of full-time labourers: the paidaria, oiketai, and metrematiaioi. The first two categories seem to have been employed for life and perhaps provided with free accommodation, while the metrematiaioi were independent villagers contracted to work for a varying set number of years. Casual labourers came from many different backgrounds sometimes outside the village.
The primary aim of the unit was the production of wine for external sale. The other crops were grown to provide food for the employees, fodder for the estate draught animals, and grain for tax. All of these were necessary to permit the economic functioning of the estate. It is thus apparent that the grain for which Egypt was renowned was produced as part of a complex and sophisticated system of farming, which made profits in other ways.
The mineral resources of the Eastern Desert were known and exploited during pharaonic times. For example, the amethyst mines of Wadi el-Hudi have yielded a stele recording the use of the army in mines operated under Senusret I of the Middle Kingdom. Furthermore, the New Kingdom temple of Sety I at Abydos was granted rights at the gold mines in the Eastern Desert, a gang of workmen to bring back the gold, and a settlement at the mines themselves. These may well be the mines at Umm el-Fawakhir in the Wadi Hammamat, which still in use at the end of the twentieth century. A remarkable papyrus map in the Turin Egyptian museum is thought to depict this area.
Interest in the mineral resources, particularly gold, persisted through the Ptolemaic period into Roman times. Finds of black gloss pottery at sites such as Abu Zawal, about 20 km. west of Mons Claudianus, suggest that it, and probably other mines, were established before the Roman conquest, although they undoubtedly continued to operate after it.
Gold working sites have been little studied, but their appearance is distinctive. There is usually a cluster of small huts surrounded by stone heaps, and everywhere there is evidence of the apparatus used to crush the quartzite from which the ore would be extracted. The principal tool seems to be a well-made type of curved saddle quern with a heavy upper stone shaped like Napoleon’s hat, the ‘brim’ of which formed the handles. Water would be needed in considerable quantity to separate the pay dirt from the gangue, and some sites, of which Abu Zawal is characteristic, have a substantial well forming the core of the complex. In other cases the crushed rock would have been taken away and separated elsewhere.
The meliiod of extracting the gold was observed by the Greek geographer Agatharchides, who visited the mines in the second century BC. His original work has been lost, but fortunately his description has been preserved in the writings of Diodorus Siculus. He tells us that the rock was broken by fire setting and the use of hammers. It was then crushed in large stone mortars to the size of a pea, after which it would be ground to a fine powder in hand mills before being washed with water on a sloping surface to separate the gold and country rock. Presumably, the saddle querns, now so much in evidence on these sites, were used in the final grinding.
Stone quarrying also has a long ancestry in Egypt. The most celebrated example must be the great complex at Aswan, now unfortunately much disturbed and built over by the expansion of the modern Town. Aswan produced a variety of granitic rocks, the most celebrated of which was the red - or rose-coloured granite. During the pharaonic period it was used for sarcophagi, for obelisks, and as capping for the great pyramids of Giza, perhaps because its reddish colour suggests the sun. During the Roman period, the quarries continued unabated, and columns carved from Aswan granite are found in quantity around the shores of the Mediterranean. It is, in fact, one of the ‘big three’ decorative rocks of the Roman world, on a par with the granito violetto from the Troad and Cipollino from Greece.
The success of Aswan clearly results from its location on the banks of the Nile. The products could easily be loaded onto barges and floated to Alexandria, where they would be transferred to the lapidariae naves, the special stone ships used for transporting heavy loads across the Mediterranean. Other successful quarries such as those for sandstone at Gebel el-Silsila or those for ‘Egyptian alabaster’ (or ‘calcite alabaster’) in Middle Egypt, were also situated within easy reach of the Nile (although the principal calcite-alabaster quarries at Hatnub were at least half a day’s journey away, and presumably somewhat longer when hauling large blocks). At Aswan, the quarries seem to have had a long life, the Romans continuing a tradition of quarrying of several thousand years.
For obvious logistical reasons, the large-scale quarrying of remote desert stone (for use in buildings or sculpture) was eschewed by the pharaohs, with the exception of bekhen, a greywacke sandstone from Wadi Hammamat, and even more remarkably, the so-called ‘Cheph-ren diorite’, an anorthosite-gneiss from Gebel el-Asr in the Western Desert about 200 km. south-west of Aswan. During the Roman Period, however, an attempt was made to exploit the very considerable lithic resources of the desert more thoroughly, and the focus was the Eastern Desert, where a range of hard basement rocks was exploited, comprising mainly porphyry and varieties of diorite.
The centre that articulated most of this activity seems to have been Mons Porphyrites (Gebel Dokhan), about 70 km. north-west of Hur-ghada. Ostraca from Mons Claudianus state that the men working there were part of the numerus of Porphyrites and the arithmos of Claudianus. Similarly, the workers at nearby Tiberiane (Barud), the source of the granito bianco e nero, seem to have been of the numerus of Porphyrites and the arithmos of Tiberiane. To this can be added the scatter of tiny chips of porphyry found on most quarry sites in the Eastern Desert, suggesting that men who had worked the porphyry were being sent to other quarries.
A recently discovered inscription documents the discovery of this area in a remarkable way. It tells us that the resources were found by Gains Cominius Leugas, who must have been the Roman equivalent of a field geologist, on 23 July ad 18. He appears to have discovered porphyry, black porphyry, multi-coloured stones, and knekites (‘safflower stone’), which has yet to be geologically defined.
The dating of the earliest quarrying at Mons Porphyrites to the reign of Tiberius (ad 14-37) is confirmed by a further inscription, and it appears to have persisted until the late fourth or possibly even the early fifth century ad, if the pottery dating is correct. Purple had been worn as a mark of nobility in the Mediterranean region for many thousands of years and no doubt the discovery of a purple rock would have been a major event of considerable interest to the emperor personally. The operation itself has been described, with some justification, as the most remarkable manifestation of Roman activity to be seen anywhere in the empire. It was necessary to supply the quarries with food, to dig wells tapping the fossil water (which, contrary to popular belief, abounds in the desert), and to construct forts for the military and villages for the workers. While the two might have cohabited to some extent, the quarries are on the tops of mountains and it was convenient to post workers nearer to their place of labour. The site seems to have begun as a series of scattered mountain villages, which were later, in the second century ad, to be controlled by a fort at wadi level. In the late Roman period convicts may have been used, and a passage in the writings of Eusebius refers to a group of Christians (almost certainly quarry-workers) who had their eyes gouged out and their hamstrings cut before being deported to Palestine—presumably for trying to proselytize the garrison. However, for much of the time the operation was probably manned by civilians and soldiers working together, which was certainly the case at Mons Claudianus. Even Christianity was generally tolerated, as a number of inscriptions attest.
Mons Claudianus, some 50 km. to the south of Mons Porphyrites, was the source of a grey granodiorite used mainly for columns. This is now the most intensively studied of the Roman quarry sites in the Eastern Desert. The complex comprises a fort of Domitianic date, and an earlier one that has produced an ostracon of Nero, with 130 small quarries scattered within a radius of about i km. around; each was connected to the main wadi bed by a slipway, which terminated in a loading ramp—the place where the products would be transferred from rollers or sledges to carts for the 120-km. journey across the desert to the Nile. Some of these carts must have been very large, for a 20-m. column would weigh over 200 tonnes. Here, it is pertinent to note that an ostracon refers to a twelve-wheeled cart and, in the Naq el-Teir plain, tracks have been observed with a span of 3 m.
It used to be thought that the rock of Mons Claudianus, also known as the granito del foro, from its frequent occurrence in the Roman forum, had a pan-Mediterranean distribution. However, a programme of chemical and petrographic analysis during the 1990s has shown that its distribution is virtually restricted to some of the finer monuments in Rome. It appears that Mons Claudianus lay outside the normal orbit of Roman trade and may have been more or less the personal property of the emperor. It is interesting to note that other grey rocks of similar appearance were exploited in more accessible outcrops on the islands of Elba and Giglio, and also in western Turkey. The rock of Mons Claudianus was special, not because of its properties, but because of where it came from. It was a product from the utmost end of the empire and could be won only by extraordinary efforts. This could be the secret of the whole quarrying enterprise in the Eastern Desert, which makes little sense in rational economic terms.
The importance of Egypt to the Roman economy went beyond production. Perhaps one of the strangest and most bizarre aspects of taste among the Roman nobility was the predilection for oriental luxuries: pearls, pepper, silks, frankincense, and myrrh, as well as various other spices and exotic medicines. Egypt articulated this trade, for these goods were brought by ship across the Indian Ocean and thence to the western shores of the Red Sea. Here they were offloaded and dragged across 150 km. of desert to the Nile, whence they were floated to Alexandria and then on to Rome. India benefited from this trade, for in return it received glass, textiles, wine, grain, fine pottery, and precious metals as well as human cargoes, such as singing boys and maidens for the pleasure of Indian potentates.
It might be thought advantageous for the ships to sail up the Red Sea and to cross the isthmus now occupied by the Suez Canal. Indeed, there was a project, begun under Ptolemy II and improved by various successors, particularly Trajan and Hadrian, that connected the Nile with the Bitter Lakes. However, it was not extensively used, at least in the first centuries bc and ad, largely because of the severe northerly wind that blows down the Red Sea for 80 per cent of the year. This would have been a major hazard to Roman shipping and it was preferable to make a more southerly landfall and to take goods overland to the Nile. The two ports established by Ptolemy II Philadephus (285-246 bc) to facilitate this trade were Berenice, named after his wife, and Myos Hormos. It appears that Myos Hormos was pre-eminent during the second century bc and that Berenice began to rise in importance during the first century BC and became dominant in the first century AD, although Myos Hormos continued in use. The India trade was thus developed in Ptolemaic times and the Romans merely took over and perhaps expanded a well-established concern. The Red Sea would also have been known to pharaonic traders, for it undoubtedly gave access to the mysterious East African land of Punt (see Chapter ii), from whence came exotic plants and animals.
The site of Berenice is well established and has been equated with the ruins near Ras Banas in southern Egypt, since its discovery by Belzoni in 1818. Myos Hormos has been the subject of extended debate, most writers siting it at Abu Sha'ar, 20 km. north of Hurghada, because this accords with the latitude and longitude given in Ptolemy’s Geography. However, the 1990s excavations of the little fort on the site demonstrated that it is a late Roman and Byzantine foundation, with no evidence of earlier settlement. However, the site of Myos Hormos is described in some detail in the Classical literature, and study of satellite images suggests that the closest correspondence is with the site of Quseir el-Qadim at the end of the fortified road from Koptos on the Nile. This diagnosis has recently been confirmed by excavations at el-Zerqa about halfway along the route, for these have produced ostraca demonstrating beyond reasonable doubt, that the port at the end of the road was indeed Myos Hormos.
The nature of this trade can be filled out from both literary and archaeological sources. The main document is the Periplus Maris Erythraei, a sailing guide to the Red Sea, the Gulf of Aden, and the western Indian Ocean, compiled in the first century ad. It is supplemented with references in Tamil poems to ‘cool fragrant wines brought by the Yavana in their ships’ or again ‘the thriving town of Muziris, whither the beautiful large ships of the Yavana come bearing gold, making the waters white with foam and return laden with pepper’. It appears that the best time to leave Egypt was July, when the south-western monsoons would drive the ships across the Gulf of Aden and the Indian Ocean, while the return would be delayed until November to take advantage of the north-eastern monsoons.
The south-western monsoons are some of the most ferocious winds on earth, and the ships must have been immensely large and strong to withstand such a voyage, perhaps akin to those on the Alexandria-Rome run, which were up to 60 m. long and had a displacement of
Maps of forts in the Eastern Desert and the routes from the Red Sea ports Berenice and Myos Hormos (Quseir el-Qadim) to the Nile in the Roman Period (30 bc-ad 395)
Around 1,000 tons. Certainly the profits would have made the risks worthwhile: a recently published papyrus describes a shipment of nard (aromatic plants), ivory, and textiles from Muziris in India to Alexandria; this consignment had a value of 131 talents, enough to buy 2,400 acres of the best farmland in Egypt.
Archaeology can also help in understanding this trade. Long ago. Sir Mortimer Wheeler excavated the Roman settlement of Arikamedu on the Coromandel coast of India, where he found amphorae that would have contained the best wine of Campania, and fine red pottery of Tiberian date, produced in the workshops of Lyons, Pozzuoli, and Pisa. In Egypt, an excavation project during the 1990s at Berenice promises to furnish equivalent information on the Egyptian end. In the late 1970S and early 1980s small-scale excavations at Quseir el-Qadim, then thought to be the port of Leucos Limen, produced interesting material, including a sherd with a Tamil inscription on it.
The overland routes from Berenice and Myos Hormos across the desert have been thoroughly studied. The one from Berenice runs in a north-westerly direction for over 350 km. and is equipped with hydreumata (watering places) every 20-30 km. Its destination is Koptos, but about halfway along there is a branch to the west that leads to Apollinopolis Magna (Edfu). The route from Myos Hormos again leads to Koptos, and Strabo tells us that the journey took six or seven days, the route being furnished with hydreumata dug to a great depth. Two of these (el-Mweih and el-Zerqa) were excavated in the 1990s, producing new documentary evidence in the form of ostraca, the publication of which is awaited.
The final leg of the trade, from Alexandria to Rome, may well have been intimately connected with the annona (the tax in kind, mentioned above), since shippers who served the state were able to carry some of their own goods free of tolls. However, this is by no means the whole story. Alexandria has produced many more examples of Baetican oil amphorae than any other major city in the eastern Mediterranean, a single example that serves to emphasize its role as a major port for inter-regional trade of aU sorts and in all directions. To Strabo it was the greatest port in the world, and, of course, its Pharos or lighthouse was one of the wonders of the ancient world.
World History
