Agricultural tenancy and village society in Roman Egypt

TLDR: The use of land lease contracts for the understanding of agrarian conditions in Greek and Roman Egypt has been discussed in this paper, where the authors use the complexity and detail of these documents to set them into their particular social and agricultural contexts.

Abstract: MY CONTRIBUTION T o THIS VOLUME is concerned with how the land lease contracts which survive on papyrus can be used most effectively as a source for the social history of Roman Egypt. This involves not only treating them as a source for statistics, on rent levels, for instance, but also exploiting the complexity and detail of these documents to set them into their particular social and agricultural contexts. A very significant advantage of these texts is that, unlike the evidence on which many of the other contributors rely, these leases were not records of public administration, but were mainly private arrangements made at the local level between individual landowners and tenants. They therefore offer the chance to look at agrarian relations in the countryside of Roman Egypt from the perspective, not of the state, but of those people most concerned with actually farming the land. Land leases have been widely recognised as one of the most important sources for the understanding of agrarian conditions in Greek and Roman Egypt, because of both the sheer numbers of surviving texts and their broad chronological range. Well over one thousand land leases written in Greek have been published to date, 'spanning a millennium from the third century BCE to the seventh century CE, essentially the whole period of the Ptolemaic, Roman, and Byzantine administration of Egypt.' Despite minor variations of format over time and between regions, these texts all basically share the single legal form of the misthosis (lease contract), and are thus readily comparable in content. There was also, of course, an Egyptian tradition of agricultural tenancy, originally independent, and