July 2015
Vol. III, No. 7
Land, Water, and Wood: Managing Resources in Ancient and Modern Egypt
By: Juan Carlos Moreno García
Egypt has the aura of an unchanged landscape. But how much of what we see today and in the recent past really applies to antiquity? Are they in fact two fundamentally different entities? And what do the similarities between past and present tell us about the future of Egypt?
Nineteenth century tourists, scholars and travellers visiting Egypt often considered that the economic and administrative practices observed in the Nile Valley were a simple continuation of those prevailing in the past. In fact, the alleged continuity between ancient and modern Egypt has enjoyed a durable, and perhaps misleading, impact in the way we interpret the civilization of the Pharaohs.
One example is bureaucracy. The huge quantities of papyri recovered from Ptolemaic sites, not to mention the discovery of earlier important administrative documents like the Wilbour papyrus of the 20th Dynasty (ca. 1147 BCE) and others, led historians to suppose that ancient Egypt was the archetypical model of a bureaucratic centralised state. There, a myriad of scribes recorded every activity and resource of interest for the state, and of course, the king.
Another example is water management. Once again, scholars thought that the modern Egyptian landscape had remained basically unchanged since Pharaonic times. This landscape, of boats floating slowly on the Nile, fellah (or agricultural peasants) toiling in the fields, and with pyramids and monuments scenically engulfed in sand, was repeated endlessly in paintings and woodcuts, then photographs and films. These images engrained the idea that the legendary agricultural wealth of the Nile Valley was only possible because of the control of the seasonal flood (and its potential dangers) by a central power in charge of the irrigation network. Centralisation, bureaucracy and absolutist power seemed thus inherent to Egyptian history, ancient and modern, justifying the alleged conservatism of Egyptian society over the millennia. One of the crowning images of this type of power from the mid-20th century was that of the Aswan High Dam, which presumably tamed the Nile’s floods once and for all.
Such a reductive image is no longer tenable, but its echo still pervades current interpretations of ancient Egypt. Rather than centralization and administration, it is more useful to focus on ecological conditions that imposed severe restrictions on the availability of basic goods, on the quality of soils (and thus on agricultural potential) and on the impact of the annual flood. The responses of the inhabitants of the Nile valley showed many common features over the centuries, mainly due to the limits imposed by difficult communications, poor energy sources and limited technologies, typical of pre-industrial societies.
Timber, for instance, was a basic and strategic commodity in a country where it was rather scarce. However, timber was crucial in order to maintain a merchant and naval fleet and in large-scale building activities. More generally, wood was an essential source of energy in “industrial” activities like metallurgy and glass and ceramic production, among others, where the high temperatures required could only be obtained from good quality wood. Texts from the middle of the 2nd millennium BCE mention that the monarchy watched over cutting down sycamores and other species of trees, while administrative documents from the time of king Seti I record in detail the wooden parts of ships and other timber kept in the hands of officials.
Letters and administrative sources also mention collecting and transporting charcoal, a highly prized item, to the point that it was proudly mentioned among goods donated to temples. In fact, searching for a regular and abundant provision of timber dictated the politics of Egypt both in ancient and modern times. Byblos became a privileged commercial partner of the Pharaohs in antiquity, not only as a gateway to the lucrative Levant routes but also as provider of cedar wood. But much later rulers of modern Egypt like Muhammad Ali (1769-1849) also launched several campaigns to the Levant in order to secure access to Anatolian and Lebanese forests. Thus timber partly explains the geopolitics of pharaonic Egypt, when access to strategic but scarce commodities within the Nile Valley nourished both trade networks and military expansionism abroad.
Land management and taxation also represented a challenge for ancient and modern administrators. Land could be completely, partly or scarcely flooded, and salty and marshy areas could result from evaporation or stagnation depending on the level reached by the annual inundation. The abundance or absence of enough nutrients led to quite different yields and, depending on the availability of manpower, fields could be laboured, left fallow or simply became waste and bushy.
Medieval agronomists like Al-Makhzumi classified Egyptian fields into many different categories according to their physical characteristics, yields, location and accessibility to water. In fact his work continued a well-rooted tradition going back into pharaonic times, when teams of scribes travelled around the countryside measuring the fields and calculating the expected return according to their characteristics.
The Wilbour papyrus, for instance, distinguished three main categories of fields depending on their expected return: 10, 7.5 and 5 sacks per aroura (about 1.5 acres). It has been debated if true land registries actually existed in pharaonic Egypt, regularly updated. While the Wilbour papyrus shows that land assessment was technically possible, at least for a restricted area of Egypt (northern Middle Egypt) and for land tenure belonging to institutions (mainly temples), it has been argued that such a task would have been exceedingly difficult for the whole country.
However, there is evidence that at least pharaoh Psammetichus I ordered a general census of all fields of his kingdom. Of course, such a measure was indispensable in order to calculate the fiscal revenue expected by the state, hence its administrative importance. Actual examples are well known for latter periods. Following the Ottoman conquest of Egypt in 1517, the sultan ordered the assessment of the fields of the country in 1527-1528, and a land register from this period has partially survived. The analysis of the different types of handwriting reveals that nine officials were in charge of the compilation of the notices: name of the village, location, types of land, etc. This example reveals that the administration was able to know, at least approximately, the different types of fields present in a given area and the taxes expected from them.
But land was not the only item subject to control by zealous officials. Pharaonic texts also reveal that wells and basins were carefully recorded in administrative documents. It is not rare that in some detailed examples records of land sales gave not only the size of the field but also the number of wells and of different types of trees (date-palms, sycamores, etc.) present.
This opens the debated question of the actual role played by the central administration in the management of irrigation. Older interpretations considered that the king organized and took care of the irrigation network of the Nile Valley (dikes, canals, basins, etc.) in order to control and regulate the annual flood and to maximize the area cultivated and the revenue expected from it. The overall idea was that Egypt represented an achieved example of “hydraulic despotism.”
Nevertheless, a careful reassessment of pharaonic sources provides no proof of a centralized management of the irrigation system. In fact, irrigation devolved upon local communities and was practised in a rather small and autonomous scale. Only in Ptolemaic times the rulers of Egypt undertook the task of controlling the flood in the Fayum, thus putting thousands of hectares into cultivation, but this seems to have been a rather exceptional and geographically circumscribed experience. Later on, in the 19th century, when cotton began to be cultivated on a massive scale, huge works were accomplished in order to coordinate the irrigation of the entire Nile Valley and the basin system was then established. Yet it would be erroneous and anachronistic to consider this later development as the continuation of a well-rooted practice going back to the pharaonic period.
To sum up, pre-industrial societies in the Nile Valley faced similar problems relating to irrigation and management of local resources. But the solutions implemented varied from period to period, thus making it inaccurate to think about Egypt as an immutable or “eternal” society deprived of any true dynamism. This myth is still tenacious, but as Egypt’s population has grown from around 4 million at the beginning of the 19th century, to over 80 million today, these issues are more pressing than ever.
Juan Carlos Moreno García is Directeur de recherche in the French National Centre for Scientific Research (Egyptology department of the University Paris-Sorbonne).
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