Trade and economic life

sided portrayal we have preserved in Ploutogenes’ petition.²¹⁷ At any rate, it vividly illustrates how village tensions could spill over into violence, and how local power brokers could be drawn into conflict with each other. The village elite was not a homogenous group.²¹⁸

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Products manufactured in cities were sold in villages and vice-versa. Far-flung trade with other provinces via the Mediterranean and the Red Sea provided Egypt with foreign goods, and products from Egypt were exported back along the same routes.²²² Textiles were an important commercial product, in Egypt as throughout the ancient world, and linens were considered an Egyptian specialty.²²³ While clothes were generally not sold in bulk, Peter van Minnen has shown that exports could reach high totals.²²⁴ Textile work was probably, as a rule, situated in domestic spaces,²²⁵ but some weavers leased workshops from wealthy landed elites and/or collaborated with other weavers, employing a number of assistants.

The opportunity for cotton cultivation in the oases may have given the people of Dakhleh a competitive advantage within Egypt. This could help to explain the development of private commercial adventures dealing in textiles between the Nile Valley and the Great Oasis, evident in the papyri from Kellis, although cotton-products are not mentioned explicitly in the House 1–3 letters. Other factors likely played a part as well; I return to these questions in Chapter 7. In order to follow the arguments there, as well as some of the arguments for dating actors and circles, some familiarity with measures of weight and prices in the mid–late fourth century is necessary. Table 1 lists common measures in Roman Egypt, as well as some that are rarer but occur in the Kellis texts. Talents, the dominant monetary measure in the fourth century, is shortened T.

222 Alston, ‘Trade and the city’. For Red Sea trade in the fourth century, see Eivind H. Seland, ‘The Liber Pontificalis and Red Sea trade’, in Navigated Spaces, Connected Places: Proceedings of Red Sea Project V held at the University of Exeter, 16–19 September 2010, ed. D. A. Agius (Oxford: Archaeopress, 2012).

223 Panopolis was famed for its linen products, while Arsinoe and Karanis both had linen-workers’ quarters (although whether production was concentrated there or not is uncertain). See Gibbs, ‘Manufacture’, 42–43;

Rathbone, ‘Roman Egypt’; Kerstin Dross-Krüpe, ‘Spatial concentration and dispersal of Roman textile crafts’, in Urban Craftsmen and Traders in the Roman World, ed. Miko Flohr and Andrew Wilson (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2016).

224 A mid-third century papyrus from Oxyrhynchus (P. Oxy. Hels. 40) documents the export of 1956 pieces of clothing in the course of five days. In turn, this could – by Minnen’s estimate – indicate that the city’s (or the nome’s) export totalled some 80 000–100 000 pieces a year. See Peter van Minnen, ‘The volume of the Oxyrhynchite textile trade’, Münsterische Beiträge zur antiken Handelsgeschichte 5, no. 2 (1986): 92–93; also discussed in Bagnall, Reading papyri, 68–69; and Gibbs, ‘Manufacture’, 41–42. For some cautionary remarks, see John-P. Wild, ‘Facts, figures and guesswork in the Roman textile economy’, in Textilien aus Archäologie und Geschichte: Festschrift für Klaus Tidow, ed. Lise B. Jørgensen, Johanna Banck-Burgess, and Antoinette Rast-Eicher (Neumünster: Wachholtz Verlag, 2003), 41–43.

225 Ewa Wipszycka, L'industrie textile dans l'Egypte Romaine (Wrocław: Wyadawnictwo Polskiej Akademii Nauk, 1965), 55.

Type Measure Value Modern measure Account unit 1 talent (T.)

Coin 1 nummus Ca. 1 T.²²⁶

Coin 1 solidus (sol.) Ca. 8000 T.²²⁷ 72 sol. = 323 g gold

Roman pound 1 litra 323 g

weight 1 mna Ca. 1 litra 323 g

weight 1 lithos (lith.) (10+ litrai?) (3.23 kg+?)

weight 1 centenarion (cent.) 100 litrai 32.3 kg

dry measure 1 artaba (art.) 10 mat. (23 mat.) 38.78 litres (30 kg wheat) dry measure 1 mation (mat.) – large 1/10 art. 3.876 litres (3 kg wheat) dry measure 1 mation (mat.) – small 1/23 art.²²⁸ 1.686 liter (1.3 kg wheat) liquid measure 1 marion (mar.) 20 sext. 10.8 litres

liquid measure 1 keramion (ker.) 18 sext. 9.72 litres

liquid measure 1 boxion (box.) 9 sext. 4.86 litres

liquid measure 1 chous 6 sext. 3.24 litres

liquid measure 1 agon 3 sext. 1.62 liter

liquid measure 1 sextarius (sext.) 0.54 liter

liquid measure 1 hin (0.45 liter?)

Table 1: Measures in late Roman Dakhleh (collected from Bagnall and Gardner, Alcock, and Funk)²²⁹

Prices drawn from the material give us an idea of the living costs and relative exchange rate (measured in coinage) of goods for the people of House 1–3. Furthermore, there were major periods of inflation in the mid–late fourth century. Prices for goods from before ca. 355, and

226 See pkc.15, ll.17–20.

227 The recently published O.Trim.19, dated ca. 352–360, gives a price of 7511 T./sol. This fits well with Bagnall’s previous calculation (Bagnall, P. Kell. IV, 57–59.) of a mean of ca. 8000 T./sol. for the KAB, dating to the early 360s, and I have used this value in my calculations. Against this, pkc.11 seems to place the worth of a solidus at ca. 11 500 T. The interpretation of the Coptic is very uncertain, however; see Gardner, Alcock, and Funk, CDT I, 59. It is possible that pkc.11 could relate to a later period (perhaps the early 370s). A price that might be implied in P. Bingen 120 (ll.21–23v), 24 000 T./sol., is at odds with the other evidence from the Oasis, as well as the other prices in the same document. A more likely interpretation, made by Worp and Bagnall, gives 12 000 T./sol., which in fact is close to that found in pkc.11; see Bagnall and Worp, ‘Two 4th century accounts’, 504–7. As P. Bingen 120 can be dated to 367/8, it would support a dating of pkc.11 to the late 360s/370s.

228 This small measure of mation was used in the KAB, mostly for expenditure (see the discussion in Bagnall cited below).

229 Bagnall, P. Kell. IV, 47–51; and Gardner, Alcock, and Funk, CDT I, 58–65.

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from after the late 370s/ca. 380, differed notably from those of the intervening period.²³⁰ The data in Table 2, below, is drawn from Coptic and Greek documentary texts from House 1–3, and compared to prices from the KAB and P. Bingen 120 (Kellis, House 4, d.367/8), all probably dating to the period between ca. 355–380. Most passages relate to prices in Kellis, although a few concern purchases made in the Nile Valley.

Good Amount Value Source

wheat 1 art. 1200 T. (1000–1500 T.)²³¹ pkc.15 (ll.17–20)

barley 1 art. 800–1000 T.²³² pkgr.10 (ll.9–13)

bread 1 bread 30 T. (Nile Valley) pkc.21 (ll.16–17)

cotton 1 lith. 600 T.²³³

jujubes 1 art. 1500–2000 T.²³⁴ pkc.45 (ll.9–10), pkgr.10 (ll.9–13)

olive oil 1 sext. 250–350 T. ²³⁵ pkc.44 (ll.8–9, 19)

papyrus a pair (of rolls?)²³⁶ 1000–1200 T. (Nile Valley) pkc.78 (ll.19–27)

cloth–bag a pair (?) 100 T. pkc.79 (ll.19–20)

Table 2: Selected prices from Kellis ca. 360 (collected from Bagnall and Gardner, Alcock, and Funk)

According to Dominic Rathbone, an artaba of wheat (almost 30 kg) would suffice ‘for an adequate though not generous subsistence diet for an active adult male’.²³⁷ A wage of 60–70

230 For these developments, see Bagnall, Currency and inflation.

231 A range of 1000 T.–1500 T., consistent with the price in pkc.15, can be inferred from the KAB, see Bagnall, P.

Kell. IV, 52. Moreover, a price of 1000 T./art. is found in P. Bingen. 120 (ll.15v, 26v).

232 Ibid., 52–53. A price in the same range, 500 T./art., occurs in P. Bingen 120 (ll.16v, 28v). A price of 2000 T./art.

is found in pkgr.11, but this document probably belongs to a later period (late 370s?); see section 4.1.1.

233 Derived from the KAB, but broadly in agreement with pkgr.61 (from House 1–3). See ibid., 54.

234 The price in pkc.45 (ll.9–10) is 1500 T./art., close to that implied by pkgr.10 (1600 T./art.) and not out of line with that in the KAB (2000 T./art.), although the latter two depend on the stability of the relationship between barley and jujube prices found in the probably later pkgr.11 (1 art. jujubes = 2 art. barley; here, however, 1 art.

jujubes is much more expensive, 4000 T. – for its date, see section 4.1.1)

235 Bagnall, P. Kell. IV, 55. A similar price range, from 233 to 250 T./sext. is found in P. Bingen 120, l.29v, ll.20–21r (although a very different price is found in the same document in l.19v).

236 Presumably, these rolls were rather large: papyrus bought by Theophanes in Antioch earlier in the same century was not that expensive compared to other goods; see John Matthews, The journey of Theophanes: travel, business, and daily life in the Roman east (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2006), 111; and see T. C. Skeat, ‘Was papyrus regarded as "cheap" or "expensive" in the ancient world?’, Aegyptus 75, no. 1/2 (1995).

237 L. Foxhall & H. A. Forbes, ‘Sitometreia: the role of grain as a staple food in classical antiquity’, Chiron 12 (1982), 41–90, cited in Dominic W. Rathbone, Economic rationalism and rural society in third-century A.D. Egypt: the Heroninos archive and the Appianus estate, Cambridge classical studies (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1991), 109–10. See also Raymond W. Goldsmith, ‘An estimate of the size and structure of the national product of the early Roman Empire’, Review of Income and Wealth 30 (1984): 266.

T. a day (ca 1800 T., or 1.6 art. wheat, a month), which was paid to the female weavers of House 3 (see section 7.1.3), would be enough for a subsistence diet for one person in the 360s, at least if the weavers received enough work in the course of that month.