The Nile Delta's notoriously poor papyrological documentation obliged earlier historical studies of Ptolemaic and Roman Egypt to pay it little attention, despite the acknowledged importance of a region which throughout this period included the centre of government and also constituted over half of Egypt's usable land. Recent decades have seen a spate of important archaeological work in the Delta (see the Egypt Exploration Society Delta Survey: http://deltasurvey.ees.ac.uk/ds-home.html), but little of this has yet been synthesized with the other available evidence into a rounded historical analysis. Katherine Blouin's study is not only the first to be devoted to the Mendesian nome, but is the first in English on any agricultural region of the Delta (as opposed to the cities of Alexandria and Naukratis). It at last permits the Delta to be integrated effectively into the overall picture of Roman Egypt's agriculture and land exploitation, hitherto almost wholly based on the rich papyrus resources of the Fayum and nomes of Middle Egypt. The monograph also stands out from previous studies on Roman Egypt in its awareness of environmental factors; and while obviously the Delta's environment was unusually complex and unstable, the book provides a paradigm for incorporating environmental history into studies of the ancient world, both of Egypt and other regions (cf. 9 and B.'s article ‘Environmental History’ in the Blackwell Encyclopedia of Ancient History).

Ch. 1, ‘Hydrological Context’, is an excellent overview of the hydrographical parameters within which human exploitation of the Nile valley and Delta developed, highlighting how the divine order and practical water management strategies alike represented attempts to tame the Nile's unpredictable bounty. The explanation (22–36, with accompanying maps) of how the courses of the river's several branches underwent radical transformation over the Ptolemaic, Roman and later periods under the combined impact of the annual flood's power and of deliberate canalization and other human intervention, will be required reading not only for specialists in Egypt but everyone attempting to make sense of the Greek and Roman accounts of the Delta.

The subsequent chapters of Part I introduce the archaeological and papyrological evidence used for the study (ch. 2), especially the important archive of carbonized papyri (rather irritatingly referred to as ‘the CAT’) predominantly of Antonine date, apparently unearthed from the public archive of Thmouis after destruction by fire (our only papyrus archive from an Egyptian metropolis found in situ); and (ch. 3) a conspectus of the Mendesian nome over the Pharaonic and Ptolemaic periods. The progressive eclipse of Mendes by Thmouis as the nome's main urban centre, which B. traces in detail (helpfully illustrated by fig. 3.1) was partly caused by the Mendesian branch's eastward shift which before the first century a.d. had caused the complete silting up and desertion of Mendes' harbours, and also encouraged by the settlement of Greek migrants in Ptolemaic Thmouis (which unlike Mendes was built to a grid plan, and apparently possessed vacant space to accommodate new residents).

Parts II and III set the papyrological evidence against our latest understanding of the geophysical and hydrophysical environment in the Roman period, reconstructing the nome's topography and administration (ch. 4), land tenure (ch. 5), land use and fiscality (ch. 6) and marginal land and its forms of exploitation (ch. 7; the carbonized archive's numerous references to semi-arid or arid land widely dispersed throughout the nome implies that a substantial part of Mendesian territory was not very productive, although not completely unproductive). The resulting picture invites comparison with previous studies of the Fayum and Oxyrhynchite nome, confirming a large degree of congruity (for example, imperial estates (150–3); female landowners (203); tenants responsible for multiple parcels (205)) alongside some differences (notably the conspicuous evidence for pastoralism and hunting/fishing (224–30); gē limnitikē, with its own financial department, is the only land category unattested elsewhere, reflecting the prevalence of lacustrine areas (135–6); the absence of the category gē katoikikē, so important in other nomes, is surprising but as B. notes (143) could be an accident of the surviving evidence). While stressing that the Mendesian papyri cannot support any secure conclusions on population density, and the probability of much local diversity, B. largely corroborates Monson's suggestion of a relatively thin overall population, more comparable to the Fayum than to the Nile valley (125).

Finally, Part IV gives a thorough and well-balanced discussion of connected phenomena which have attracted much scholarly attention: the massive depopulation of many Mendesian villages from the 150s to early 170s and how this was related to the contemporary ‘Antonine plague’ (ch. 8); and the ‘revolt of the Boukoloi’ documented by both ancient literary authors and the carbonized Thmouis papyri (ch. 9). B.'s approach of considering the interaction of environmental and anthropic factors in tandem brings a valuable perspective to these events, and offers comparison with the environmental degradation which later affected many Fayum villages and the Kharga Oasis (265); while also making clear that these problems, serious as they were, had specific and localized causes which do not betoken a general crisis for Egypt as a whole. The depiction of the rebel Boukoloi in Cassius Dio and Achilles Tatius, although undoubtedly owing much to the literary theme of the Delta marshes as the abode of the wild, uncivilized ‘other’, is shown to contain more elements of the realities of the second-century Mendesian agricultural environment than previous scholars have recognized.

Despite these substantial environmental and social problems, B. makes a strong case for the commercial prosperity of Ptolemaic and Roman Mendes-Thmouis, tracing its importance in linen production right through to the medieval Arabic sources (233–9). In this well-structured and reader-friendly book, B. has placed our understanding of the Roman Nile Delta on an entirely more secure footing.