Under these superior and intermediate authorities stood the local officials, the presidents of the Egyptian as of the Greek towns, along with the very numerous subalterns employed in the collecting of the revenue and the manifold imposts laid on business-dealings, and again in the individual district the presidents of the sub-districts and of the villages—positions, which were looked upon more as burdens than as honours, and were imposed by the higher officials upon persons belonging to, or settled in, the locality, to the exclusion, however, of the Alexandrians; the most important among them, the presidency of the nome, was filled up every three years by the governor. The local authorities of the Greek towns were different as to number and title; in Alexandria in particular four chief officials acted, the priest of Alexander,[220] the town-clerk (ὑπομνηματογράφος),[221] the supreme judge (ἀρχιδικαστής), and the master of the night-watch (νυκτερινὸς στρατηγός). That they were of more consequence than the strategoi of the nomes, is obvious of itself, and is shown clearly by the purple dress belonging to the first Alexandrian official. We may add that they originate likewise from the Ptolemaic period, and are nominated for a time by the Roman government, like the presidents of the nomes, from the persons settled therein. Roman officials of imperial nomination are not found among these urban presidents. But the priest of the Mouseion, who is at the same time president of the Alexandrian Academy of Sciences and also disposes of the considerable pecuniary means of this institute, is nominated by the emperor; in like manner the superintendency of the tomb of Alexander and the buildings connected with it, and some other important positions in the capital of Egypt, were filled up by the government in Rome with officials of equestrian rank.[222]

Insurrections.

As a matter of course, Alexandrians and Egyptians were drawn into those movements of pretenders which had their origin in the East, and regularly participated in them; in this way Vespasian, Cassius, Niger, Macrianus ([p. 103]), Vaballathus the son of Zenobia, Probus, were here proclaimed as rulers. But the initiative in all those cases was taken neither by the burgesses of Alexandria nor by the little esteemed Egyptian troops; and most of those revolutions, even the unsuccessful, had for Egypt no consequences specially felt. In the Palmyrene period.But the movement connected with the name of Zenobia ([p. 107]) became almost as fateful for Alexandria and for all Egypt as for Palmyra. In town and country the Palmyrene and the Roman partisans confronted each other with arms and blazing torches in their hands. On the south frontier the barbarian Blemyes advanced, apparently in agreement with the portion of the inhabitants of Egypt favourable to Palmyra, and possessed themselves of a great part of upper Egypt.[223] In Alexandria the intercourse between the two hostile quarters was cut off; it was difficult and dangerous even to forward letters.[224] The streets were filled with blood and with dead bodies unburied. The diseases thereby engendered made even more havoc than the sword; and, in order that none of the four steeds of destruction might be wanting, the Nile also failed, and famine associated itself with the other scourges. The population melted away to such an extent that, as a contemporary says, there were formerly more gray-haired men in Alexandria than there were afterwards citizens.

When Probus, the general sent by Claudius, at length gained the upper hand, the Palmyrene partisans, including the majority of the members of council, threw themselves into the strong castle of Prucheion in the immediate neighbourhood of the city; and, although, when Probus promised to spare the lives of those that should come out, the great majority submitted, yet a considerable portion of the citizens persevered to the uttermost in the struggle of despair. The fortress, at length reduced by hunger (270), was razed and lay thenceforth desolate; but the city lost its walls. The Blemyes still maintained themselves for years in the land; the emperor Probus first wrested from them again Ptolemais and Coptos, and drove them out of the country.

Revolt under Diocletian.The state of distress, which these troubles prolonged through a series of years, must have produced, may probably thereupon have brought to an outbreak, the only revolution that can be shown to have arisen in Egypt.[225] Under the government of Diocletian, we do not know why or wherefore, as well the native Egyptians as the burgesses of Alexandria rose in revolt against the existing government. Lucius Domitius Domitianus and Achilleus were set up as opposition-emperors, unless possibly the two names denote the same person; the revolt lasted from three to four years, the towns Busiris in the Delta and Coptos not far from Thebes were destroyed by the troops of the government, and ultimately under the leading of Diocletian in person in the spring of 297 the capital was reduced after an eight months’ siege. Nothing testifies so clearly to the decline of the land, rich, but thoroughly dependent on inward and outward peace, as the edict issued in the year 302 by the same Diocletian, that a portion of the Egyptian grain hitherto sent to Rome should for the future go to the benefit of the Alexandrian burgesses.[226] This was certainly among the measures which aimed at the decapitalising of Rome; but the supply would not have been directed towards the Alexandrians, whom this emperor had truly no cause to favour, unless they had urgently needed it.

Agriculture.Economically Egypt, as is well-known, is above all the land of agriculture. It is true that the “black earth”—that is the meaning of the native name for the country, Chemi—is only a narrow stripe on either side of the mighty Nile flowing from the last rapids near Syene, the southern limit of Egypt proper, for 550 miles in a copious stream, through the yellow desert extending right and left, to the Mediterranean Sea; only at its lower end the “gift of the river,” the Nile-delta, spreads itself out on both sides between the manifold arms of its mouth. The produce of these tracts depends year by year on the Nile and on the sixteen cubits of its flood-mark—the sixteen children playing round their father, as the art of the Greeks represented the river-god; with good reason the Arabs designate the low cubits by the name of the angels of death, for, if the river does not reach its full height, famine and destruction come upon the whole land of Egypt. But in general Egypt—where the expenses of cultivation are singularly low, wheat bears an hundred fold, and the culture of vegetables, of the vine, of trees, particularly the date-palm, as well as the rearing of cattle, yield good produce—is able not merely to feed a dense population, but also to send corn in large quantity abroad. This led to the result that, after the installation of the foreign rule, not much of its riches was left to the land itself. The Nile rose at that time nearly as in the Persian period and as it does to-day, and the Egyptian toiled chiefly for other lands; and thereby in the first instance Egypt played an important part in the history of imperial Rome. After the grain-cultivation in Italy itself had decayed and Rome had become the greatest city of the world, it needed constant supplies of moderately-priced transmarine grain; and the principate strengthened itself above all by the solution of the far from easy economic problem how to make the supply of the capital financially possible and to render it secure. This solution depended on the possession of Egypt, and, in as much as here the emperor bore exclusive sway, he kept Italy with its dependencies in check through Egypt. When Vespasian seized the dominion he sent his troops to Italy, but he went in person to Egypt and possessed himself of Rome through the corn-fleet. Wherever a Roman ruler had, or is alleged to have had, the idea of transferring the seat of government to the East, as is told us of Caesar, Antonius, Nero, Geta, there the thoughts were directed, as if spontaneously, not to Antioch, although this was at that time the regular court-residence of the East, but towards the birthplace and the stronghold of the principate—to Alexandria.

For that reason, accordingly, the Roman government applied itself more zealously to the elevation of agriculture in Egypt than anywhere else. As it is dependent on the inundation of the Nile, it was possible to extend considerably the surface fitted for cultivation by systematically executed water-works, artificial canals, dykes, and reservoirs. In the good times of Egypt, the native land of the measuring-chain and of artificial building, much was done for it, but these beneficent structures fell, under the last wretched and financially oppressed governments, into sad decay. Thus the Roman occupation introduced itself worthily by Augustus subjecting the canals of the Nile to a thorough purifying and renewal by means of the troops stationed in Egypt. If at the time of the Romans taking possession a full harvest required a state of the river of fourteen cubits, and at eight cubits failure of the harvest occurred, at a later period, after the canals were put into order, twelve cubits were enough for a full harvest, and even eight cubits yielded a sufficient produce. Centuries later the emperor Probus not merely liberated Egypt from the Ethiopians but also restored the water-works on the Nile. It may be assumed, generally, that the better successors of Augustus administered in a similar sense, and that especially with the internal peace and security hardly interrupted for centuries, Egyptian agriculture stood in a permanently flourishing state under the Roman principate. What reflex effect this state of things had on the Egyptians themselves we are not able to follow out more exactly. To a great extent the revenues from Egypt rested on the possession of the imperial domains, which in Roman as in earlier times formed a considerable part of the whole area;[227] here, especially considering the small cost of cultivation, only a moderate proportion of the produce must have been left to the small tenants who provided it, or a high money-rent must have been imposed. But even the numerous, and as a rule smaller, owners must have paid a high land-tax in corn or in money. The agricultural population, contented as it was, remained probably numerous in the imperial period; but certainly the pressure of taxation, as well in itself as on account of the expenditure of the produce abroad, lay as a heavier burden on Egypt under the Roman foreign rule than under the by no means indulgent government of the Ptolemies.

Trades.Of the economy of Egypt agriculture formed but a part; as it in this respect stood far before Syria, so it had the advantage of a high prosperity of manufactures and commerce as compared with the essentially agricultural Africa. The linen manufacture in Egypt was at least equal in age, extent, and renown to the Syrian, and maintained its ground through the whole imperial period, although the finer sorts at this epoch were especially manufactured in Syria and Phoenicia;[228] when Aurelian extended the contributions made from Egypt to the capital of the empire to other articles than corn, linen cloth and tow were not wanting among them. In fine glass wares, both as regards colouring and moulding, the Alexandrians held decidedly the first place, in fact, as they thought, the monopoly, in as much as certain best sorts were only to be prepared with Egyptian material. Indisputably they had such a material in the papyrus. This plant, which in antiquity was cultivated in masses on the rivers and lakes of lower Egypt, and flourished nowhere else, furnished the natives as well with nourishment as with materials for ropes, baskets, and boats, and furnished writing materials at that time for the whole writing world. What produce it must have yielded, we may gather from the measures which the Roman senate took, when once in the Roman market the papyrus became scarce and threatened to fail; and, as its laborious preparation could only take place on the spot, numberless men must have subsisted by it in Egypt. The deliveries of Alexandrian wares introduced by Aurelian in favour of the capital of the empire extended, along with linen, to glass and papyrus.[229] The intercourse with the East must have had a varied influence on Egyptian manufactures as regards supply and demand. Textiles were manufactured there for export to the East, and that in the fashion required by the usage of the country; the ordinary clothes of the inhabitants of Habesh were of Egyptian manufacture; the gorgeous stuffs especially of the weaving in colours and in gold skilfully practised at Alexandria went to Arabia and India. In like manner the glass beads prepared in Egypt played the same part in the commerce of the African coast as at the present day. India procured partly glass cups, partly unwrought glass for its own manufacture; even at the Chinese court the glass vessels, with which the Roman strangers did homage to the emperor, are said to have excited great admiration. Egyptian merchants brought to the king of the Axomites (Habesh) as standing presents gold and silver vessels prepared after the fashion of that country, to the civilised rulers of the South-Arabian and Indian coast among other gifts also statues, probably of bronze, and musical instruments. On the other hand the materials for the manufacture of luxuries which came from the East, especially ivory and tortoise-shell, were worked up hardly perhaps in Egypt, chiefly, in all probability, at Rome. Lastly, at an epoch, which never had its match in the West for magnificent public buildings, the costly building materials supplied by the Egyptian quarries came to be employed in enormous masses outside of Egypt; the beautiful red granite of Syene, the green breccia from the region of Kosêr, the basalt, the alabaster, after the time of Claudius the gray granite, and especially the porphyry of the mountains above Myos Hormos. The working of them was certainly effected for the most part on imperial account by penal colonists; but the transport at least must have gone to benefit the whole country and particularly the city of Alexandria. The extent to which Egyptian traffic and Egyptian manufactures were developed is shown by an accidentally-preserved notice as to the cargo of a transport ship (ἄκατος), distinguished by its size, which under Augustus brought to Rome the obelisk now standing at the Porta del Popolo with its base; it carried, besides 200 sailors, 1200 passengers, 400,000 Roman bushels (34,000 hectolitres) of wheat, and a cargo of linen cloth, glass, paper, and pepper. “Alexandria,” says a Roman author of the third century,[230] "is a town of plenty, of wealth, and of luxury, in which nobody goes idle; this one is a glass-worker, that one a paper-maker, the third a linen-weaver; the only god is money." This held true proportionally of the whole land.

Egyptian navigation of the Mediterranean.Of the commercial intercourse of Egypt with the regions adjoining it on the south, as well as with Arabia and India, we shall speak more fully in the sequel. The traffic with the countries of the Mediterranean comes less into prominence in the traditional account, partly, doubtless, because it belonged to the ordinary course of things, and there was not often occasion to make special mention of it. The Egyptian corn was conveyed to Italy by Alexandrian shipmasters, and in consequence of this there arose in Portus near Ostia a sanctuary modelled on the Alexandrian temple of Sarapis with a mariner’s guild;[231] but these transport-ships would hardly be concerned to any considerable extent in the sale of the wares going from Egypt to the West. This sale lay probably just as much, and perhaps more, in the hands of the Italian ship-owners and captains than of the Egyptian; at least there was already under the Lagids a considerable Italian settlement in Alexandria,[232] and the Egyptian merchants had not the same diffusion in the West as the Syrian.[233] The ordinances of Augustus, to be mentioned afterwards, which remodelled the commercial traffic on the Arabian and Indian Seas, found no application to the navigation of the Mediterranean; the government had no interest in favouring the Egyptian merchants more than the rest in its case. The traffic there remained, presumably, as it was.

Population.Egypt was thus not merely occupied, in its portions capable of culture, with a dense agricultural population, but also as the numerous and in part very considerable hamlets and towns enable us to recognise, a manufacturing land, and hence accordingly by far the most populous province of the Roman empire. The old Egypt is alleged to have had a population of seven millions; under Vespasian there were counted in the official lists seven and a half millions of inhabitants liable to poll tax, to which fall to be added the Alexandrians and other Greeks exempted from poll tax, so that the population, apart from the slaves, is to be estimated at least at eight millions of persons. As the area capable of cultivation may be estimated at present at 10,500 English square miles, and for the Roman period at the most at 14,700, there dwelt at that time in Egypt on the average about 520 persons to the square mile.