Brendan Haug’s monograph is a captivating environmental study of the Fayyūm over a period of some 1,500 years, covering the Ptolemaic kingdom through to the Ayyubid dynasty. Drawing on the evidence from the Graeco-Roman papyri, Arabic material and comparative evidence, the study examines the intricate and interwoven relationships between the region’s water, its inhabitants and the state. The book consists of five chapters, bookended by an introduction, a conclusion, two indexes and an English translation of al-Maqrīzī’s account of the canals and villages of the Fayyūm, containing an epitome of Abū Isḥaq’s description of its system of irrigation.
In the introduction and the first two chapters, H. establishes the foundations for his later arguments. The introduction provides a historical overview of the Fayyūm, a discussion of the different forms of evidence used as well as their drawbacks, and a consideration of the recent climatic and environmental scholarship, with an inevitable focus on those studies that deal with water. In ch. 1, H. considers the hydrology of the Baḥr Yūsuf and its peculiar nature in supplying the Fayyūm with some water year-round, the region’s unique canal system, and the various solutions both to store and distribute water, arguing effectively that the irrigation infrastructure was designed to ‘capture and contain’ the Nile flood (72). Ch. 2 suggests that, even early in the Graeco-Roman period, the Fayyūm was a ‘hybrid agroenvironment’ (108), and provides an overview of the canal system of the region. The Baḥr Yūsuf and the Fayyūm’s canal system and topography combined to create two distinct agricultural environments shaped by their accessibility to water: the first, a central plain, well-watered, fertile, and durable; the second, the drier outer margins, subject to an insecure water supply (95), which led to an endemic risk of land being uncultivated.
In ch. 3, H. examines the role of successive governments in the management of the Fayyūm’s water. The interests of the Ptolemaic and Roman administrations were intertwined with the maintenance and ‘soundness’ of the region’s irrigation infrastructure, ‘enabling water to flow freely from its head … to its multiple far-flung tails’ (115). The later Ayyubids, however, had little fiscal interest in the Fayyūm’s agriculture, leaving the upkeep of the canal system in the hands of local agents. These differences in governmental interest inevitably led to different responses at the state level: the Ptolemaic kingdom’s motivation was driven by the need to control the countryside and ‘to carve out new agricultural lands’ (114), which could be used for veteran settlement. With extraction firmly in mind and through ‘rural subjectivity’ (34), the Romans sought to maximise agricultural productivity. They delegated responsibility for the maintenance of the Fayyūm’s irrigation infrastructure to those who benefitted from it, namely the farmers themselves, through a system of compulsory public services overseen by the state (115). In contrast, the Ayyubid state’s lack of fiscal interest ‘provided little incentive’ (140) for any sustained involvement in the Fayyūm’s irrigation; the result was that the canal system’s maintenance and management were now entirely in the hands of the local population.
Ch. 4 argues that water rights — ‘the means and methods by which public waters were apportioned among irrigators’ (34) — in rural communities were the result of socio-environmental factors. These factors could be climatic variations, that is, the volume of the Nile floodwater accessible to the Fayyūm communities through the irrigation infrastructure. But perhaps just as important, these could be shaped by human adaptations and decisions, ranging from how much water was taken by individuals, groups or larger estates through to collective action in ensuring the flow of water, in contesting obstructive behaviour of some farmers, or in defending access to the irrigation system itself. This collective action, built on communal obligations, meant that healthy communities invested in the maintenance of their local water. But unfortunately this also meant that ‘communal decline’ and subsequent depopulation undermined a community’s ability not just to defend, but also water their land (177).
In ch. 5, H. takes fourth-century c.e. Theadelphia as a case study. The advancing decline of the community was not necessarily due to depopulation as a result of the Antonine plague, but in large part due to its position at the tail end of the canal system, ‘very far back’ on high ground (201; P.Sakaon 42), continued water shortages, and illicit abuse of the system by those upriver. The community’s gradual depopulation and its subsequent inability to organise the collective action necessary for the irrigation system’s functionality meant that by the late Roman period Theadelphia was ‘already functionally extinct’ (210). At the heart of the community’s decline lay the Roman administration’s failure to understand the socio-environmental factors at work (208). In effect the Romans were prolonging the idea of rural subjectivity in a landscape that had already been irreversibly transformed.
In his conclusion, H. places his study in the broader Egyptian and Mediterranean context. While he concludes that any evidence from the Fayyūm is by its very nature limited in scope (214), he notes that his work aims ‘to study ancient human-nature relationships on their own terms’ (217), and that his intention was to produce ‘a study not only of flowing water but also of choice: the innumerable everyday decisions … that in all periods harnessed water’s flow and put its jointly productive and disruptive capacities to work’ (213).
H., however, has done far more than this. Through his exceptional interpretation of the available evidence and a bottom-up approach, he has fundamentally reshaped our understanding of the Fayyūm’s communities, its irrigation infrastructure and the ever-changing socio-environmental realities that affected the population of the region.
