Note 227 — Chapter XII · EGYPT.

In the town of Alexandria there appears to have been no landed property to the strict sense, but only a sort of hereditary lease (Ammianus, xxii. 11, 6; Staatsrecht, ii. 963, note 1); but otherwise private property in the soil prevailed also in Egypt, in the sense in which the provincial law knows such a thing at all. There is often mention of domanial possession e.g. Strabo, xvii. 1, 51, p. 828, says that the best Egyptian dates grow on an island on which private persons might not possess any land, but it was formerly royal, now imperial, and yielded a large income. Vespasian sold a portion of the Egyptian domains and thereby exasperated the Alexandrians (Dio, lxvi. 8)—beyond doubt the great farmers who then gave the land in sub-lease to the peasants proper. Whether landed property in mortmain, especially of the priestly colleges, was in the Roman period still as extensive as formerly, may be doubted; as also whether otherwise large estates or small properties predominated; petty husbandry was certainly general. We possess figures neither for the domanial quota nor for that of the land-tax; that the fifth sheaf in Orosius, i. 8, 9, is copied including the usque ad nunc from Genesis, is rightly observed by Lumbroso, Recherches, p. 94. The domanial rent cannot have amounted to less than the half; even for the land-tax the tenth (Lumbroso, l. c. p. 289, 293) may have hardly sufficed. Export of grain otherwise from Egypt needed the consent of the governor (Hirschfeld, Annona, p. 23), doubtless because otherwise scarcity might easily set in in the thickly-peopled land. Yet this arrangement was certainly more by way of control than of prohibition; in the Periplus of the Egyptian corn is on several occasions (c. 7, 17, 24, 28, comp. 56) adduced among the articles of export. Even the cultivation of the fields seems to have become similarly controlled; “the Egyptians, it is said, are fonder of cultivating rape than corn, so far as they may, on account of the rape-seed oil” (Plinius, H. N. xix. 5, 79).