Egypt

The imperial capital was at Constantinople on the Balkan side of the Bosporos, but up to the 640s the empire’s economic heartland was Egypt. Seen from space the importance of Egypt is obvious. Egypt is the Nile, the valley and the delta. In satellite photographs these stand out against the surrounding desert as a bright green strip ending in the huge green triangle of the delta (Http://visibleearth. nasa. gov/view_rec. php? id=i2748). The desert can barely support human life, but the valley and the delta added in antiquity up to about 27,000 square kilometres of the most fertile land in the Mediterranean (Butzer 1976: 82). It is a world of irrigation channels and ditches, but unlike Iraq, the irrigation system was effectively natural. The key to Egypt’s prosperity was as much the annual Nile flood that deposited a new layer of mineral-rich alluvium on the farmers’ fields as it was human effort. The result was levels of agricultural output not matched elsewhere in the Mediterranean. High output multiplied by an area of some 27,000 square kilometres made Egypt an agricultural producer on a scale that dwarfed any other Roman province. It has been convincingly suggested that a quarter of the sixth-century empire’s population lived in Egypt, and that it provided 40 per cent of the empire’s fiscal revenues (Bowman and Rogan 1999; Sarris 2006:10-11).