The Nile Delta of Roman Egypt suffers from an inverse correlation between importance and coverage by the sources. The lack of source material means that the Delta has been covered by a thick layer of literary varnish, presenting the area as a mysterious, undifferentiated, marshy space. The Mendesian nome has the potential to play an important role in the analysis of the Delta, as slightly more information is available than about the other Deltaic nomes. The Mendesian nome has already been subjected to papyrological and archaeological publications, but its material is now made available to a wider public in this monograph. B. concentrates on the Roman period, but also includes in her discussion Ptolemaic and late-antique evidence.
B.'s book is well written and clearly organised. It consists of nine chapters grouped together in four sections. A substantial part of the beginning of the book provides general background information. Some of it seems intended more for consultation than to be read – for example the chapter on topography – but even these introductory parts contain important observations. B.'s book not only fills a lacuna in providing a standard reference work, but it is also methodologically interesting, for two reasons.
In the first place, B. advocates a new ecology approach, in which the interaction between humans and ecological (and in particular hydrological) changes is central. She uses the concept of ‘fluvial risk’, which was in fact twofold: there was a direct relation between the height of the Nile flood and the food supply, and the course of the Nile branches in the Delta was far from stable. The ecological dimension dominates the book; it is most notable in her discussion of anachoresis and the Boukoloi uprising in Chapters 8–9, where hydrology serves as an explanatory factor.
Secondly, her book is also of interest because there is a different source balance than elsewhere in Egypt. The Mendesian sources consist of papyri (in particular a series of carbonised texts stemming from a second-century official archive), literary sources and archaeology, with each roughly providing equal amounts of information. At the same time, although each type offers rich opportunities, they are also marred by imperfections. It makes B.'s attempt to integrate the findings into a wider narrative all the more impressive, and one cannot but have great respect for her command of the material.
B. offers an important discussion of the transfer of the nome's capital from Mendes to nearby Thmouis – there are only few places in the ancient world where we can follow such processes of urban transfer in detail. She shows that the balance between the two shifted gradually, in a process of centuries. The harbours of Mendes silted up from the second century b.c. onwards, yet the city continued to exist into early Roman times. Thmouis would gradually take over its role, but can be shown to have existed already for centuries next to Mendes. By the time of the carbonised papyri of the second century a.d., both cities held the title of metropolis (with concomitant tax privileges for its inhabitants). B. argues that changes in the course of the Mendesian branch were an important factor in the shift, though how this happened exactly must remain unclear. Her general case that landscape changes might go a long way to explain shifts in the settlement hierarchy is an important one, however.
An important discussion of agricultural diversification is offered in Chapter 6. P. Oxy. 44.3205 gives for one area exact percentages: grain was cultivated on 76.98% of the land (both the dominance of grain cultivation and the precision of the figure are worthy of note). As B. argues, the general preponderance of grain might be explained by a series of interconnected factors: the land was well suited to grain cultivation, there was a high demand by the state and grain cultivation was profitable. Yet she argues that the dominance of grain does not exclude diversification in other products, the point being that other products can be cultivated in more marginal (i.e. semi-arid and arid) lands.
A discussion of P. Mendes. Genev. shows patterns of land holding that are well known from Middle Egypt. There was high inequality in ownership: there were many owners with only 1–3 plots, very few with 18–21 parcels, and hardly any owners in-between. Among the wealthy owners, it is likely that many were related to each other. As there is a strong possibility that they also owned land elsewhere, the degree of inequality was probably even larger than the text suggests. As B. stresses, wealth primarily meant the possibility to diversify – in the location of holdings, in products, in exploitation, in sources of income.
Where it comes to these other sources of income B. operates somewhat optimistically. To say on the basis of the Zenon papyri that Mendes was ‘an important textile hub in the third century bc’ (p. 236) seems somewhat incautious. Her treatment of Mendes’ ‘perfume industry’ (pp. 85–6) is rather modernising, though in itself her case that perfumes formed an important luxury product is convincing.
The fact that B. is at the same time hesitant to engage in giving population estimates for Mendes and Thmouis is striking: if anyone would be able to produce informed guesses it would be her. Her cautious discussion of settlement population (pp. 123–5) serves mainly to stress heterogeneity in the patterns. Her case is in itself well presented, but discussing tax pressure and anachoresis without a thorough sense of the underlying population dynamics remains odd.
Tax flight is discussed in Chapter 8; the carbonised papyri offer precise evidence on the depopulation of some of the villages of the nome in the second half of the second century a.d. The causes for the flight seem interlinked: attacks by bandits and the Antonine Plague decreased the population, while the practice of making the remaining tax payers collectively responsible for the taxes of the community increased the pressure. B. adds (again) hydrological factors: the dependency on irrigation in combination with the progressive marginalisation of the Mendesian branch of the Nile and a series of low floods caused land to dry up. In the next chapter the Boukoloi uprising is placed in the context of this crisis. B. argues against taking over the stereotypical representations of the Delta as a marshy zone in which nomads roamed and turned to brigandage whenever they saw fit. The uprising was rather a combination of ‘long-term socio-hydrological pressures and Roman period agro-fiscal dynamics’ (p. 296), that at a certain point came to a head.
Although B. certainly presents convincing cases, a simple and fundamental problem remains. There is still relatively little known about what exactly happened in the Roman period with the hydrology of the Mendesian nome. Yet B. uses these changes repeatedly as an explanation. This produces two related problems. One is that of timescales: ecological shifts are usually slow, easily taking a century or two, and are therefore difficult to connect to historical events such as an uprising. The other one is that where so little is known the causality must of necessity remain implicit.
Overall, B. succeeds in her attempt to make the Mendesian nome more normal, and less of a dark, marshy, undifferentiated space. In specific cases one may wonder to what extent water (or the lack of it) forms the only explanation for the phenomena she observes, but the arguments are always well presented and worth taking seriously. If her book makes one thing clear, it is that ecology and hydrology should be placed higher on the agenda in the study of Roman Egypt.
