Download PDF | Colin Adams, Land Transport In Roman Egypt A Study Of Economics And Administration In A Roman Province, Oxford University Press On Demand ( 2007).
346 Pages
Preface
This monograph began as an Oxford DPhil thesis, written at Christ Church and completed in December 1996. It is much revised and rewritten, for on many points of detail I have changed my mind, either in the light of evidence published subsequently or because on reconsideration I thought my original interpretations wrong. I have tried as far as possible to include all relevant ancient evidence and modern literature that has been published since 1996.
In some areas—principally with relevance to the Eastern Desert—considerable material has appeared. I am aware that land transport is only one part of the transport system in Egypt, and therefore this study can only present part of the picture. It might serve, however, as a study of a major part of the economics of transport, and provide a starting point for other work. As such, it is intended to be both a point of reference for papyrologists engaged in reading texts, but also hopefully of some interest to economic historians, for it considers issues fundamental to the workings of the Roman imperial economy.
A number of publications came too late to be incorporated fully in the text. Several documents of clear relevance have been published in P. Oxy. LXIX. I have not been able to see the recent Oxford DPhil thesis by Michel Cottier on taxes and customs duties.
Many debts have been incurred during the long process of working on this material. In Oxford as a graduate student I benefited greatly from the help and advice of John Rea, Revel Coles, and Fergus Millar (who has constantly encouraged me to bring the study to publication). My friends and contemporaries Nikolaos Gonis and Michael Sharp provided a forum for discussion; Nick continues to be of great help as an advisor on papyrological matters. My examiners Peter Parsons and Dominic Rathbone made many useful comments, of which I have tried to incorporate as many as possible. The former kept me well nourished at High Table in Christ Church. Many friends at Oxford and elsewhere—Tom Harrison, Kevin Bradshaw, Jon Coulston and Hazel Dodge, Roger and Aileen Rees, Brian Campbell, John Curran, Anne Kolb and John Vanderspoel—provided company, advice, and support in many ways and over many years. Steve Sidebotham kindly read the whole text and offered many useful suggestions for its improvement, and I benefited greatly from his unrivalled knowledge of the Eastern Desert of Egypt. Tom and Clare Litt provided hospitality on many trips to the libraries of Oxford, and Matthew Gibbs provided frequent help with references and photocopies.
The monograph was largely completed during a British Academy Postdoctoral Fellowship, for which I thank the Academy, and work continued during my appointment at the University of Leicester. A period of study leave allowed for more revisions. My colleagues in the School of Archaeology and Ancient History provided a supportive and friendly environment in which to work, and I must thank especially Graham Shipley, Lin Foxhall, Graeme Barker, David Mattingly, David Edwards, Jonathan Prag, and Marijke van der Veen. Graham Shipley read and commented upon a number of sections; Lin Foxhall and Hamish Forbes discussed matters of animal husbandry; and Marijke van der Veen advised on the food supply of the Eastern Desert. David Edwards cast a perceptive eye over the whole. My thanks to Debbie Miles Williams for preparing the maps and to Helen Foxhall Forbes for compiling the Index Locorum. Final corrections were made after my appointment at the University of Liverpool, and I thank Chris Mee for his allowing me time free from teaching and other commitments, which allowed for completion.
My greatest debt, however, is to Alan Bowman, who supervised the thesis and has given much needed advice and support in the years since. He has constantly urged me to complete what follows, and most importantly helped to convince me that it is worthwhile. If there is any merit, it is due to him. For any shortcomings, neither he nor any of the above are responsible.
My family has always provided support. My mother, father and brother have been supportive in every way, and their love and encouragement means everything. My wife Jo and daughter Caitlin are at the centre of my life. They tirelessly endure the demands of academia, and they, with the ever-willing support of Heidi and Jasper, create an environment without which nothing would be possible. The book is dedicated to them with love.
Colin Adams
Notes for the Reader
ABBREVIATED REFERENCES
Papyri, ostraca and other documents are referred to according to the conventions listed in J. F. Oates, et al., Checklist of Editions of Greek, Latin, Demotic and Coptic Papyri, 5th edn (BASP Supp. 9, 2001). This is regularly updated and available on the World Wide Web at http://scriptorium.lib.duke.edu/papyrus/texts/clist.html. Also indispensable is H-A. Rupprecht, Kleine Einfiihrung in die Papyruskunde (Darmstadt, 1994).
Where reference is made to commentaries of documents in papyrological editions, these are signalled by the use of page numbers rather than text numbers, with the customary p. or pp. References to the standard work on corrections to papyri, E Preisigke, et al., Berichtigungsliste der griechischen Papyrusurkunden (Berlin-Leipzig, 1913-), are made according to volume and page number, and where it is necessary to provide a number of corrections in volumes J-VII, the reader is referred to the concordance (W. Clarysse, R. W. Daniel, E A. J. Hoogendijk and P. van Minnen, Konkordanz und Supplement zu Berichtigungsliste Band I-VII (Leuven, 1989) using the abbreviation BL Konkordanz).
Abbreviations used for periodicals can be found in the Checklist (101-2) and in Rupprecht, Kleine Einfiihrung, 221-2. Abbreviations for periodicals not specific to papyrology can be found in L’Année Philologique (Paris, 1927—). When referring to inscriptions, I have chosen to use IGRR and OGIS rather than the misleading IGRom or OGI. Books and articles are referred to in full in the footnotes when they first occur, and thereafter by abbreviated titles.
TECHNICAL TERMS
Some important technical terms are described below. I have refrained from quoting extensive passages in Greek, but technical terms are usually given in Greek in the first instance, and subsequently in transliteration; short passages of Greek are translated. Those unfamiliar with the political structures of Graeco-Roman Egypt will find accessible treatments in: N. Lewis, Life in Egypt under Roman Rule (Oxford, 1983); A. K. Bowman, Egypt after the Pharaohs: 332 Bc-Ap 642: From Alexander to the Arab Conquest, 2nd edn (Oxford, 1996); id. “Egypt, in A. K. Bowman, E. Champlin, and A. Lintott (ed.), Cambridge Ancient History X? (Cambridge, 1996), 676-702. A useful guide to Egyptian months and how they relate to the agricultural year can be found in Lewis, Life in Egypt, 115-16.
Introduction: Transport and the Economy of the Roman World
Transport has been described as ‘the greatest failure of ancient technology’! Limitations in both water and land transport are very much at the centre of any serious study of the economy of the ancient world, for they are seen to be one of the main contributing factors to the absence of growth in its economy. This was dictated by two main factors: first, similarities in climate and topography in the Mediterranean basin meant that regions had the same needs and surpluses; second, that transport was costly, especially by land, which further restricted the movement of goods and growth of trade.
There is little doubt as to the similarity of climate in the region, but it is all too easy to exaggerate this; there was clearly at the same time a great regional diversity. The Roman empire was not confined to the Mediterranean, but ran from the shores of the Atlantic to those of the Black and Red Seas, and included landscapes as diverse as the Alps and the Sahara. There is good reason, however, to question the validity of the belief that transport was inefficient. It was, of course, by modern standards, but it is only in the last three centuries that major advances in technology have facilitated easy, if not cheap, transport. Recent work, however, has shown not only the great diversity and complexity of the whole region (and beyond) in antiquity, but also what has been described as its ‘connectivity’, a mobility of both goods and people not paralleled until recent times.”
There have been a considerable number of studies devoted to transport by sea,>? but land transport, usually seen as the poor relation, has received less attention, despite the well-established importance of Roman roads.* The prevailing view has been that, while sea travel was severely affected by seasonal weather and the inability of ancient ships to sail close to the wind, it still remained an efficient and cost-effective form of transport.
Travel by land, on the other hand, was certainly affected by difficulties of terrain and brigandage, but most importantly was expensive. By far the most important and influential statement of this view is by A. H. M. Jones.> Basing his calculations on the costs of transport established by Diocletian’s Edict of Maximum Prices and the cost of transporting wheat, he calculated that a wagon-load of wheat with a value of 6000 denarii would double in price if transported 300 miles, and a camel-load’s value would double if carried 375 miles. Sea freight, he argued, was much cheaper, and ultimately it was ‘cheaper to ship grain from one end of the Mediterranean to the other than to cart it 75 miles’® Similarly expensive land transport costs, much earlier in the Roman period, are noted by Cato in his discussion of the cost of buying and transporting an olive mill. His figures suggest that the cost of transporting the mill 25 miles amounted to 11 per cent, while transporting it 75 miles increased this to 39 per cent.” No clearer statement of these problems is made than the observation of Pliny the Younger, in a well-known letter to Trajan:
There is a large lake, not far from Nicomedia, over which marble, foodstuffs, timber, and materials for building are easily and cheaply transported as far as the road; after which all has to be transported to the sea, with much effort and greater expense.®
On this evidence, the first a notoriously difficult, misleading and often misunderstood inscription, the second a treatise less on the technicalities of farming than a cultural ideal, and the third, a vague and unquantifiable statement, much of the view of the comparative cost of transport in the ancient economy rests.
The conventional view was challenged by Burford, who argued that long-distance transport of bulky goods was feasible, a view with which Brunt disagreed, stating: ‘she merely showed what governments could do, regardless of cost, for defence, prestige or piety; it was no more possible for private entrepreneurs to emulate them than for IBM to put men on the moon? The conventional view received firm support from Finley in his highly influential model of the ancient economy, though the term ‘model’ might seem alien to Finley’s ‘primitivist’ approach.!° Indeed it is a central feature of Finley’s work, whether explicit or implicit, that the economic elements Finley claimed were absent—trade, economic rationality, occupational specialization—were at varying levels factors that were dependent upon or affected transport.
Ultimately, Finley stated that individuals could not move bulky merchandise long distances by land as a normal activity, nor could any but the wealthiest and most powerful communities. As he puts it, ‘most necessities are bulky—cereals, pottery, metals, timber—and so towns could not safely outgrow the food production of their own immediate hinterlands unless they had direct access to waterways.!! But the evidence on which these observations were made remained the same, and had the same flaws. Briefly, these flaws were that Diocletian’s edict and Cato’s calculations depended on the assumption that transport was hired; in reality this might not always have been the case.
Transport costs might often be hidden or even unimportant if farmers transported their own produce on their own animals, or could cheaply hire or borrow animals, perhaps from friends or relations. The economics behind this were as clear then as they are today: that it was often cheaper to transport one’s own materials than to hire transporters. Fluctuations in market price, which would certainly have affected the relative cost of transport, are not taken into account, or are even assumed not to have been important. Finally, and crucially, they argue from particular circumstances (which in themselves may have been unusual) for a general validity. !?
A more complex model of the Roman economy has been postulated by Keith Hopkins; the so-called ‘taxes and trade’ model.13 His basic premise was that Rome’s imposition of taxes in its empire itself stimulated trade, for, in order to pay their taxes, individuals had to sell their produce. So regional economies were stimulated, and this accompanied a growing sophistication and scale in production and manufacture, with increased monetization. Hopkins’s model had a profound effect on the study of the Roman economy, but recent work has tried to balance this with Finley, for no model can account for the complexity of Roman economic behaviour, even if it provides a genuinely important way of thinking about it.!4
On the issue of transport, Hopkins interestingly suggested that although it was certain that sea and river transport were important, one major point was usually omitted in discussions of the relative importance or cost when compared to land transport: land transport was an essential part of a larger system of transport, for goods had to be taken to ports by land in most cases. An obvious, but important observation. It is simplistic to separate land, river and sea travel into separate units, for, in the course of many journeys, more than one mode of travel will be used.!5 Human movement and transport are governed by six main factors: the location of populations; their size; the geography and topography of the region to be traversed; transport technology; the products to be transported; and finally cultural and political considerations.!© With these in mind, it is not acceptable to state that transport was restricted in antiquity simply because of its cost.
TRANSPORT IN ROMAN EGYPT
We must now turn to the Egyptian evidence. There is little doubt that the Nile dominated almost every facet of life in Egypt, and its importance to transport and communication is clear. Perhaps this is the reason why Egypt and its rich papyrological evidence has been left out of discussions on the nature and feasibility of land transport in the classical world. Land transport has always been seen as marginal in the presence of such a river. There is no doubt that the Nile was central, but it is the purpose of this book to study land transport in order to establish its place in an overall system which included river transport. Produce had to be transported by land, whether through human porterage or by pack animal or wagon. Not all parts of the Nile Valley and its environs were close enough to the river to negate this requirement, and not all had access to navigable irrigation channels or canals that might facilitate transport.
The Fayum is worthy of note in this respect, lying as it did, at some points, as far as 100 km from the Nile. Land transport in this region assumed a particular importance; as did the deserts, both Eastern and Western. Communities in these marginal regions were supplied from the Nile Valley and beyond, and the Eastern Desert formed the conduit for trade luxuries between the Roman empire and the East. This trade and the supply of the region were on a very large scale. The oases of the Western Desert were very different in that they were not the focus of such intensive trade, but it is clear that they were inextricably linked to the Valley communities, and indeed that considerable wealth was generated through these connections. The distances involved were considerable, and it is certain that non-luxury, bulky produce such as olive oil was transported in these regions, and that it remained possible for it to compete with other produce at market. For this reason alone, it seems that a study of land transport in Egypt is worthwhile. Another reason is that despite its clear importance, and the volume of evidence for it, it has largely been neglected.
PAPYRI AS EVIDENCE FOR THE ECONOMY
Apart from the work of A. C. Johnson, papyri have not figured heavily in the study of the ancient economy until relatively recently.!” Finley was acutely disparaging, describing them as ‘a paperasserie on a breathtaking scale and an equally stupendous illusion’!8 Such staggering bias is, thankfully, no longer tenable. Recent work has demonstrated the important role that papyri can play in the study of economies, not only of Egypt, but of the Roman empire more generally.!9 Not only that; the distinctiveness of Egyptian papyri is no longer so stark, for similar evidence is beginning to appear from other parts of the Roman empire, from the Vindolanda tablets from Britain to papyri and ostraca from the Near East and Africa. Similar documents show similar phenomena, the most important feature being the similarity in approaches to the farming of marginal land in desert regions. Also of great importance is the recent combination of the study of documents from Egypt with archaeology, particularly in the desert regions; documents are now studied not only in their archaeological context, but in a manner more fully informed by the full range of archaeological approaches.
Even if the uniqueness of Egypt and its papyri can no longer be argued with any cogency, historians must be mindful of problems in the interpretation and application of evidence.2° Papyri are unevenly distributed through time and in place. The chronological span of this book ranges from 30 Bc to about ap 300; some parts of this period are better represented than others. For example, on the first century AD, and the important period of transition from Ptolemaic kingdom to Roman province, we are ill-informed. Much of our evidence is concentrated in the second and third centuries AD, so it is sometimes difficult to establish continuity, and often difficult to say for certain when a particular reform or institution of a particular official or liturgy took place. Problems in the temporal spread of evidence are complicated still further by the geographical distribution of our texts, which is largely determined by patterns of preservation. We have few texts from the Delta region, the most highly populated and most important agricultural region. The corollary is that we have little or no direct evidence for the centre of administration in Alexandria.
Similar problems impact on our understanding of other regions within Egypt. The Fayum has produced by far the greatest number of papyri, the Nile valley—most notably with the exceptions of Oxyrhynchos, Hermopolis, Panopolis and Antinoopolis—has produced far fewer. We are then left with the question of how typical our evidence from the Fayum is of the rest of Egypt, especially in view of regional diversity in matters of administration and taxation. Even within the Fayum, our evidence hails mainly from outlying villages rather than the metropolis, so we lack clarity on a major issue, the relations between metropolis and nome. These are general problems that compound the inherent difficulties of using archival and often anecdotal evidence to assess broader historical questions; moving from the particular to general.
However, it is all too easy to be disparaging of our evidence. What we do have is a roster of evidence on papyri, ostraca, and, to a lesser extent, stone, that is second to none. We have two of the best-documented sites of the ancient world—Oxyrhynchos and Mons Claudianus—and the bonus that we can be confident that our knowledge of Roman Egypt will grow as our evidence continues to multiply. Mons Claudianus and Karanis in the Fayum are especially important in that they have yielded a huge amount of documentary evidence that, importantly, can be placed in an archaeological context.21 Few would now dispute the importance of papyri for the study of economic history, and the notion that Egypt was different from other provinces (as if there was a ‘standard’ province) has been forcefully refuted.22 The evidence is neither banal nor hopelessly ephemeral, but rather is a solid guide to economic, administrative, and social behaviour, not only within Egypt, but which can provide insights into similar phenomena throughout the Roman world.
QUANTIFYING TRANSPORT COSTS IN THE PAPYRI
The real strength of papyri is that the evidence they provide allows for some quantification. How, then, does our Egyptian evidence sit with the theories on transport and economics discussed above?
The information we need is the cost of transport, distances travelled, wage costs for transporters, and the cost or value of commodities transported. Even with the copious information on cost and wage level that we possess, our picture is far from complete. Evidence for prices has been gathered by Hans-Joachim Drexhage, and it would serve little purpose here laboriously to list every detail in tabular form.?3 Rather, it seems best to offer an analysis of the evidence Drexhage has provided, and offer a distilled interpretation of transport costs, bearing in mind that prices and wages varied according to location and availability of transport, commodities, or labour, and that there were seasonal, temporal, and market-driven fluctuations in cost.
If we consider the cost of transporting 100 artabas of wheat a distance of 100 km, judging by the normal load for donkeys (3 artabas), 33 animals would be required. The operation would take 2 days, and animal hire would cost 33 drachmas,?4 with an additional 6 drachmas for donkey drivers. These are average prices for the first century, and thus, in this period, a total of 39 drachmas is a speculative average cost. The price of wheat per artaba varied considerably, from 3 drachmas (e.g. SBIV 7341 (ap 3)) to 11 drachmas (PB. Lond. 131 recto (ap 78/9)), but an average of 8 drachmas is workable. On this basis, we can suggest that the cost of transporting wheat 100 km was cheap; at 8 drachmas per artaba, transport costs represent c.4.9 per cent of the value of the cargo. Even if we adopt the lowest figure for the cost of wheat, 3 drachmas, transport still represents only 13 per cent of the value of wheat.
In the second century, the costs of animal hire and labour increased substantially, while the average cost of wheat remained much the same. This is probably due to a general increase in monetization, rather than an increase in real cost, and the fact that the cost of wheat stayed at an average of 8 drachmas is a sign of the general increase in prosperity in Roman Egypt, a feature of the first and second centuries ap. Our evidence suggests that the average cost of the equivalent transport was 142 drachmas, but this still only accounts for some 17.75 per cent of value. In the third century, the cost of wheat rose to an average of 12 drachmas, while the cost of transport saw a concomitant rise to 284 drachmas, or 23.66 per cent of market value.
Despite the wealth of evidence for prices and costs preserved in the papyri, due to its anecdotal and patchy nature (and its common failure to contain the full context of any particular matter), we do not have any document that preserves exactly what it cost to transport a certain quantity of wheat from point A to point B. Even if we did, this would be of little importance, as we could not assume typicality from so small a sample. It is therefore left to us to speculate. Taking the figures for the second and third centuries, Drexhage suggests that the cost of transporting 100 artabas of wheat 500 km represented 88.75 per cent and 118.33 per cent of the value of the cargo. This, he implies, fits neatly with the suggestion of Finley (based on the Edict of Maximum Prices) that the cost of transporting wheat 500 km would double its price.?5
But there are serious problems with these calculations, and they certainly offer up a distorted impression of transport cost. First, he simply calculates his estimates by multiplying the cost of transport for 100 km by five. Oddly, he does not do this for the first-century figures, which, by his method, would give a total cost of 195 drachmas (for 100 artabas at 8 drachmas per artaba), which would represent 24.37 per cent of value. We should be mindful also of the fact that these estimates are made on the market value of wheat, not on the cost of its production. Presumably the market price included a mark-up to account for transport costs, and thus these estimates massively inflate the real cost of transport. At any rate, a 500 km journey by land in Egypt is unfeasible. No one would seriously consider travelling such a distance by land in the Nile Valley (this is over half its length), and no part of Egypt lay this far from the Nile. The important issue raised by Hopkins, as we have seen, was that transport should be viewed as a system, including both land and water. This is clearly relevant here, for any interregional transport in Egypt (or indeed anywhere which had a navigable river) involved both land and river transport. It is far too simplistic to suggest that the ancient economy was stifled by high overland transport costs, when in reality very few long journeys would be made solely by land. Moreover, most movement of bulk commodities transported by land was state-driven, and thus represents a false economy.
Private transport of commodities such as wheat were at once often cheaper and more sophisticated. Owners of large estates wishing to sell surplus grain at a market would not in every case hire animals to transport it, but rather would use their own. It is likely that most private transport of these commodities then could be done in-house; only in a few cases might they resort to the hire of animals. As we shall see, professional transporters were a feature of the economic landscape of Roman Egypt, and their services were no doubt cheaper than hire, but, in an agricultural economy, it was often easier for landowners to transport commodities themselves, rather than engage a transport ‘company’. Finally, a more sophisticated method of transferring grain of any type from one place to another was by letter of credit, well-attested in the accounts of sitologoi, officials in charge of granaries. It was not always necessary, then, to move grain from one granary to another in the course of small-scale transactions.
What is clear is that previous discussions of transport costs have presented the issue in black and white, and cannot account for the complexities of economic factors involved. It is far too simplistic to see a clear-cut division between land and water transport, and although there is no doubt that ships could carry more volume more cheaply, water transport brought with it a range of hazards and risks not experienced on land. It is meaningless and simplistic to compare them, and cannot have much relation to the real situation. In the pages that follow, it will hopefully become clear that transport by land was an important feature of economic life in Roman Egypt, and that this indicates that any notion that severe difficulties of transport by land, or any suggestion that it was prohibitively expensive, must be put to rest.
THIS BOOK
Papyri from Roman Egypt offer a detailed picture of the role of land transport within the commercial and agricultural economies of Egypt. In Part I, after considering the environment and topography of Egypt and its effect on transport, this book goes on to assess the evidence for transport resources in Egypt, pack animals and wagons, and then to examine their use. In a similar way to our ancient sources, the role of animals is taken for granted in modern works, and usually receives little attention. In the papyrological record, however, there is good evidence for trade in animals, patterns of use, the abilities of animals in terms of carrying capacity, effective working norms, and maintenance costs. This allows us to step away from the ideals of animal husbandry described in the agronomists, and to consider the realities of the economics of animal ownership and use. Although we can have no clear picture of the scale of animal ownership, it seems clear that maintenance costs (as well as initial capital outlay) were expensive. This led to strategies such as part-ownership and hire in order to keep costs low, but also meant that animal ownership was perhaps not as widespread as is generally assumed. If this is the case, then the subjects addressed in Part II, the control of animal ownership and the requisition of animals by the state, assume a great importance because they must have imposed significant pressure on private individuals and made it difficult for farmers to provide for their own transport requirements whilst satisfying the demands of the state.
Part III focuses on a number of case studies. One of the most intensive transport operations in Roman Egypt was the transport of tax grain and was part of a system that extended directly to Rome. This was a process demanding effective central control, not least in the coordination of huge numbers of animals and drivers. The pool providing these was the agricultural economy, which must then have been affected by these demands. This was a perennial feature of life in Egypt, and different in scale to the more specialized economies of the desert regions, for which similar demands on the Egyptian population, but more limited in scale and duration, were made to satisfy demands for military supply and provisioning of the mines and quarries of the Eastern Desert. One important consequence of this was the development of a transport infrastructure in this region which stimulated and catered for trade with soldiers and workers stationed in the desert and for the valuable trade in luxuries with the East. This was no small-scale operation, and indeed what we find is a phenomenon that upsets the primitivist approach to the economy, demonstrated by the involvement of ‘elites’ and of specialized transporters. Finally, we return to the role of transport in the agricultural economy, in an attempt to establish economic behaviour and the effect of transport demands on farming and the labour pool.
A large proportion of land transport takes place with the ‘background noise’ of transport by river. I am aware of the problems of studying land transport in isolation, but the subject is large and important enough to warrant a separate treatment, and different questions can be asked. Oddly there is comparatively little evidence for river transport in Egypt, perhaps a result of the pattern of preservation of our evidence—papyri do not respond well to the poor conditions for preservation found in the highly irrigated and damp conditions of the Nile Valley. There are recent treatments of aspects of river transport, but land transport, as noted, has been neglected, despite its being part of a wider dynamic system of transport.26 Land transport took place on a large scale, even in the presence of the River Nile, and in some cases was preferred.2” The Nile was not the only river in the Roman empire which provided a trade highway, and although there may have been a long tradition of river transport in Egypt, it is therefore surely the case that where large navigable rivers appear in other provinces, land transport played a significant part in a wider transport network there too. Hopefully what follows, then, can add to our picture of land transport in Roman Egypt, and might bear comparison to other parts of the Roman world.
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