Demography

The demography of Roman Egypt during the first three centuries ad is well documented, for we have about 300 papyri recording census returns. These returns detail not only members of families living in the Nile Valley, but also their lodgers and slaves.

Estimates of the population of Roman Egypt are fraught with difficulty, not least because the two principal historical sources contradict one another. Diodorus Siculus puts the population in the first century BC at 3 million, while Josephus, writing in the first century ad, gives a figure of 7.5 million exclusive of Alexandria. On the whole, modern scholars find the figure given by Diodorus to be the more credible.

Alexandria, one of the most populous cities in the ancient Mediterranean, is said by Diodorus to have a population of 300,000, which is not so far removed from the modern estimates of around 500,000. It can also be argued that the rural population was distributed over

2.000- 3,000 villages, each with an average population of around

1.000- 1,500, giving a total figure of 3 million, which accords well with the probable rural population before the nineteenth century. Such calculations by modern scholars give a total population of 4.75 million, of which 1.75 million lived in the towns.

The census returns enable us to flesh out these bare figures. It seems that around two-thirds of households comprised conjugal families (with their siblings) or multiple families linked by kinship, while most of the remaining households were occupied by solitary persons or by families extended by the presence of co-resident kin. Lodgers seem to have been comparatively rare. Slaves, on the other hand, constitute about ii per cent of the total population. Since the returns give ages, it is possible to estimate death rates. Among women, it seems that very few lived to their sixties, and female life expectancy at birth was probably in the mid - to low twenties. Male life expectancy, on the other hand, was at least twenty-five years. The sex ratio of the 1,022 persons whose sex can be adduced was 540 males to 482 females, but among slaves it is reversed (thirty-four males to sixty-eight females).

Marriage in Roman Egypt was a legal status that had consequences for the offspring, but weddings and divorces were private matters in which the state did not intervene. The wife would nearly always live in the husband’s household, often with his extended family. About a sixth of all marriages were those between brothers and sisters. Most women would have married by their late teens and virtually all by their late twenties, but only half of all men had married by the age of 25. The average age of women at maternity was around 27 years. The demographic picture of Roman Egypt thus corresponds closely with that of a typical pre-industrial Mediterranean population.