Money in Ptolemaic Egypt: From the Macedonian Conquest to the End of the
Third Century BC. By SITTA VON REDEN. Cambridge and New York: Cambridge
University Press, 2007. Pp. 378. Cloth, $110.00. ISBN
978–0–521–85264–7.
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-Transliterated Greek has been set off within double asterisks
-Aspiration and accent (in that order) follow their vowel
CJ Online 2009.04.02
The conquests of Alexander the Great brought about an extraordinary spread
of coined money that transformed the economies of the eastern
Mediterranean. There could be no better case study for the process of
monetization than Ptolemaic Egypt, where we can compare actual coins with
papyri and ostraca that document many types of official and private
transactions. The sheer abundance and technical nature of both the
numismatic and the papyrological evidence have tended to make specialists
in those fields insular and to deter historians from engaging with the
material. Sitta von Reden (VR) is one of the daring exceptions who
approaches Ptolemaic Egypt from a historical perspective, having studied
the social and ideological aspects of exchange in ancient Greece. [[1]] VR
brings to her task a balanced judgment and an assiduous use of primary
sources as she attempts to synthesize the work of specialists and to draw
general conclusions about how money circulated in Ptolemaic Egypt. Her book
is an important contribution to the literature and will hopefully entice
others to attempt to push the analysis further.
If there is a central thesis to this book, it is that monetization was a
state-driven process that entailed comprehensive top-down reform rather
than incremental change (pp. 5, 15–16). While coined money lowered
transaction costs and facilitated exchange, VR maintains that it was
predicated on a central state intent on projecting its power ideologically
and integrating local economies into the royal administration. Along the
way, VR enters into detailed discussions of the monetary system and
economic relationships of the 3rd century BCE. Part 1 (Chapters 1 and 2)
examines the coins themselves, including their weights, metals, images,
denominations and domains of circulation. Part 2 (Chapters 3–6) deals
with why some payments and taxes were in coin while others were in kind.
Part 3 (Chapters 7–10) addresses the circulation of money through loans.
Part 4 (Chapters 11 and 12) considers the role of banks as instruments of
taxation and credit.
In Part 2, a central element of VR’s thesis is on display: substantial
royal revenue in kind, especially rents on royal land, which the state
could trade for the precious metals Egypt lacked, was a necessary condition
for maintaining a supply of coined money (pp. 16, 119–20). This “binary
economy” model contains the implicit assumption that a market mechanism
would have failed to convert Egypt’s agricultural surplus into metals
capable of sustaining a monetized economy spurred by taxation in coin. VR
does not explore this assumption, even though it conceivably challenges the
logic of Hopkins’ taxes-and-trade model for the Roman Empire. [[2]] Given
the frequent shortages of coined money in the countryside documented in her
later chapters, Ptolemaic fiscal policy preserving the traditional taxes in
kind on arable land may have been part of the problem rather than the
solution, as VR suggests (pp. 298–9). VR makes an arguably false—and,
for her argument, unnecessary—distinction between harvest taxes in kind
on private land and rents due in kind on royal land, treating them in
separate chapters. [[3]] Outside of agricultural rents and taxes, she
maintains that most labor agreements were based on cash payments,
indicating a high degree of monetization. But it is unclear that one can
generalize, since most of her evidence concerns the Fayyum estate of
Apollonios, finance minister of Ptolemy II, and state-financed irrigation
projects in the Fayyum that presumably infused coined money into the local
economy and are not necessarily indicative of private transactions
generally.
In Part 3, VR shifts from her thesis about state-driven monetization and
delves into the nature of the money economy in the 3rd century BCE. Again
evidence from the estate of Apollonios looms large, as one of VR’s
arguments is that estate managers and their agents lacked sufficient coined
money and therefore frequently had to borrow to make ends meet. Her
statement that these were “consumption loans” that did not serve to
raise profitability and development (pp. 161–2) is misleading, since her
own analysis shows that they provided crucial liquidity to smooth
transactions, without which the estates would have been less profitable and
the agricultural economy less developed. VR plays down the extent of larger
loans, particularly on the security of arable land, but this may stem from
her reliance on Greek sources (many of which concern officials and their
agents) from the newly reclaimed Fayyum, where there was less private
ownership except in vineyards and orchards (p. 174). [[4]] VR’s lengthy
argument in Chapter 9 that prepayment in cash to contractors, designed to
allow them to hire laborers to complete projects, was “modeled” on seed
loans in kind to farmers hangs on her more general argument in Part 2 that
such contractors lacked sufficient cash reserves just as farmers lacked
grain reserves. On the other hand, who would not be reluctant to start an
expensive project without seeing some of the money up front? Finally, the
idea presented in Chapter 10 that being another person’s agent (**o(
para\ ti/nos**) was an exclusively Egyptian social role, unknown even
linguistically in the Greek world, is puzzling, especially given that VR is
referring to the Greek milieu of Apollonios’ gift estate and to the
subordinates of Greek officials. She imputes to this relationship a moral
obligation, which allegedly explains why agents appeal to their boss rather
than to an impersonal lending institution for short-term credit.
Part 4 contains a valuable overview of the role of banks in the 3rd century
BCE that also links back to the book’s main thesis. The royal banks
served principally to collect taxes paid in coin, to inspect these coins
for purity and authenticity, and to supply money to local officials to pay
salaries and private contractors. VR tries to account for the unusual
number of banks in the Fayyum, which probably does not merely reflect an
evidential bias. One of her suggestions, that this was because the Fayyum
was “highly populated and urbanized” (pp. 262–3), is almost certainly
incorrect, as the 3rd-century BCE census records indicate that the opposite
was true. [[5]] But her ultimate conclusion is persuasive: the situation
reflects the heavy involvement of the state in the Fayyum, with cleruchic
settlements, gift estates and reclamation projects, in comparison with the
Thebaid, where Egyptian temples maintained more control of the local
economy (p. 268). VR demonstrates that it is difficult to separate the
royal bankers’ role as tax administrators from their role as creditors or
conduits in private transactions. Individuals could hold accounts at the
royal bank and even authorize absentee payments from their accounts. In
paying salaries to officials or temporary workers, the royal banks
sometimes provided a tax credit to be deducted from the payment in cash.
Unfortunately, the private lending activities of banks are still obscure in
many points. Chapter 12 is biased even more than other chapters towards
Apollonios’ estate, especially the section on bankers’ loans, where all
the evidence concerns its manager Zenon (pp. 286–9). In addition to royal
banks, there were also private banks licensed to individuals that could
lend money. While private banks only lent money with some form of security,
royal banks often did not require it. VR suggests that licensed banks were
somehow prohibited from lending without security (p. 294), but one suspects
rather that they would not have wished to and that royal banks did so only
because the recipients of unsecured loans were well-connected people like
Zenon, the manager of the finance minister’s estate, Zenon’s agents and
other royal officials.
This review cannot do justice to the numerous well-reasoned arguments in
the book about particular problems that have troubled specialists. The
level of detail makes it a useful companion for studying the primary
sources on a wide range of topics involving Ptolemaic money. On the other
hand, Greek terms are frequently used without translation, often in a
technical sense, so that many readers would have benefited from a glossary.
The decision to limit the study to the 3rd century BCE gives it a coherent
focus, but an immense proportion of the papyri from that century come from
a single source, the gift estate of Apollonios in the Fayyum. VR never
addresses this problem directly or considers whether the state-driven
process of monetization she describes might have worked differently in
regions that lacked enormous gift estates and state-financed reclamation
projects. Her book is nonetheless a tremendous achievement. It focuses the
discussion of difficult papyrological and numismatic evidence around timely
historical questions, while providing an up-to-date synthesis of sources
and secondary literature for essential and often neglected aspects of the
3rd-century BCE Ptolemaic economy. Scholars will appreciate her effort and
erudition as they attempt to gain a similar mastery of the complicated
Ptolemaic monetary developments of the centuries that followed.
ANDREW MONSON
New York University
[[1]] Sitta von Reden, Exchange in Ancient Greece (London, 1995).
[[2]] In particular his claim that taxation in coin rather than in kind
spurred both monetization and the market for grain: Keith Hopkins, “Taxes
and Trade in the Ro-man Empire,” JRS 70 (1980): 101–25, which VR
mentions briefly on p. 2.
[[3]] That **e)kpho/rion** is a general term for taxes in kind even on
private land is shown, for example, in P. Eleph. 14 and P. Haun. Inv. 407;
the latter is edited by Thorolf Christensen, The Edfu Nome Surveyed: P.
Haun. Inv. 407 (119–118 BC), Diss. Cambridge, 2002.
[[4]] P. Hausw. 18 (212/11 BCE) from the Thebaid relates to a loan of 200
dr. on the security of arable land, which we have no reason to think was
unusual for that region.
[[5]] Willy Clarysse and Dorothy J. Thompson, Counting the People in
Hellenistic Egypt (Cambridge, 2006) II 101.
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