Agricultural production had to expand to support a growing urban population. One way to increase the productivity of agriculture was to apply new technology, often to cultivate land more intensively. Elsewhere in the Roman world, elite landowners derived substantial portions of their wealth by investing in viticulture and other capital-intensive crops to meet growing urban demand for wine (Purcell 1985). Landowners in Egypt followed this strategy, generating more wealth in the countryside than would have been possible in a rural economy dominated by grain. The Ptolemaic and especially the Roman Period in Egypt saw increasing investment in irrigation equipment, particularly in the saqiya, the animal-driven irrigation device that made it possible to cultivate vineyards and orchards on an increasing scale. These were generally to be found in walled enclosures, ktemata, which were not reached by the Nile flood. Two surveys from the village of Theadelphia in the Fayum suggest the nature of the expansion of viticulture in the Roman Period. In the first survey, from 158-9 AD, some eight percent of the village’s 6,300 arouras of farmland were taken up by vineyards. In 216 ad, although the total area under cultivation had shrunk by about one-fifth, now twenty-nine per cent of the land was devoted to vineyards and orchards (Sharp 1999b; Rathbone 2007: 703). In the third century ad Egypt came under increasing influence of large-scale landowners, such as the aristocratic Aurelius Appianus, whose estate in the Fayum generated much of its revenues from the production of wine (Rathbone 1991; see below). In this period there is greater evidence than previously, both papyrological and archaeological, for substantial pressing rooms, called lenoi, which featured screw-presses, cement floors, and ceramic amphoras (Rathbone 2007: 705). In late antiquity viticulture remained a major source of wealth for aristocratic landowners in Egypt. This was the case for the Apiones, the family which owned a huge estate in the Oxyrhynchite nome in the late sixth century. The Apiones and other members of the provincial elite invested much of their wealth in viticulture to meet a continuing urban demand for wine (Banaji 2001). Since they gained much of their wealth as profits from their collecting taxes for villages surrounding their estate, it is not clear whether this type of investment contributed to economic growth or rather represented a redistribution of wealth from the small farmer to wealthier landowners (Kehoe 2003).
The reclamation of land also increased the productivity of agriculture. The most important land-reclamation project was the massive draining of the Fayum in the third century bc undertaken by Ptolemy I Soter and Ptolemy II Philadelphos. This effort, which involved lowering the level of Lake Moeris by restricting the flow into it from the Nile through the Bahr Yusuf, required the organization of thousands of laborers and enormous expenditures of money. It resulted in tripling the overall cultivated area of the Fayum to between 1,200 and 1,600 km2, roughly five to seven per cent of the arable land in Egypt (Manning 2003c: 99-107). The draining of the Fayum was not the end of land reclamation, since, at least in the Fayum, the advancing desert always threatened the cultivated area. The maintenance of irrigation and drainage canals demanded constant vigilance, and this was an ongoing concern for the state under both Ptolemaic and Roman rule, since its revenues were directly tied to agricultural production. To maintain its revenues the state might offer incentives for private initiatives to restore land to cultivation, such as auctions of derelict properties and tax abatements. On occasion, however, the Romans would seek to counteract losses to revenues by assigning unoccupied land in villages to local farmers to cultivate (or at least to take over the take liability for it) through the institution of epibole, which involved assigning the responsibility to cultivate and pay taxes for unused lands to individual landowners.
World History
