Pastoralism in Roman Egypt

Abstract

The communications of the IX International Congress of Economic History were recently (1988) published in a volume entitled Pastoral Economies in Classical Antiquity.1 The volume's papers very much follow, or anticipate, Deborah Hobson's advice to papyrologists in her essay, "Towards a Broader Context for the Study of Greco-Roman Egypt," Echos du Monde Classique 32, n.s. 7 (1988) 353-63. They rely as far as they can on literary and archaeological evidence, but where this fails (and even where it doesn't), they turn to the riches of comparative history and ethnology. Works prominently cited with praise include A.M. Khazanov's brilliant study of pastoral nomadic societies,2 and J.K. Campbell's much-admired ethnological work on the Sarakatsani.3 Equally, if not more influential, is the work of the French Annalistes, especially Fernand Braudel's famous pages on Mediterranean transhumance and nomadism.4 The contributors to the Cambridge volume on Pastoral Economies, therefore, sometimes write about pastoral nomadism and often about transhumance. The casual reader may find this concern obsessive and may also find himself lost in a bewildering forest of jargon about pastoral "strategies" and "specialisation," about various types of "transhumance"--"normal," "inverse," "vertical," "horizontal," "Alpine";5 and about transhumance's structural opposite, sedentary agricultural-pastoral "symbiosis." He may even begin to worry over the problem of "manure loss."

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