Prices and wages in late antique and early Arab Egypt

Ancient economic history has had a great impulse in the 20th-century from the publication of new documentary and archaeological material. Of crucial importance for the research into and the development of models of the ancient economy is knowledge about prices and wages. Central to historical questions about buying power and living standards, they are also essential for the comparison between relative values of different products, and the interplay between the costs for raw materials, work, wholesale and retail prices, as well as market conditions, in determining the price of finished products. In the study of prices and wages papyri take, more than other ancient sources, an important place: they supply a mass of direct and un-tampered data, providing us with reliable and verifiable information, that allow us to reconstruct a coherent and functioning prices and wages system. However, because of the difficulties in using papyrological material for non-specialists, economic information from the papyri has not always been adequately taken into account by historians. Works that collect, order and discuss the fragmentary and dispersed papyrological data are essential tools for scholars of economic history. While up-to-date collections of prices and wages are available for the Ptolemaic and Roman period, a satisfactory collection of this kind is surprisingly missing for late antique and early Arab Egypt (5th to 8th centuries). This project will collect in one volume, through a systematic, direct and critical examination of the published papyrus documents, the data on prices and wages preserved in papyri from this period of great political, social, and economic changes, presenting them in tables, but also discussing specific features, changes, and the relationships between them. The availability of connected data that can be analyzed and compared over a long period allows us to address, in addition to the already mentioned topics, issues like the existence of inflation, in particular for the transition period from Byzantine to Arab rule in Egypt; to what extent and in what way more common and less perishable foodstuffs like wheat, barley, wine and oil, assumed the role of means of payment in economic exchanges; the existence of particular local or limited economic systems with their own price conditions. By making easily accessible for economic history a mass of information that is otherwise difficult to retrieve and often even harder to understand, and which has therefore remained underexploited, the project will give a more solid base for historical studies on the economy, the standard of living and earning costs in antiquity, the Arab and Byzantine worlds, and the middle ages, but also for broader comparative studies of different epochs and cultures up to the modern period.

Knowledge about prices and wages is of crucial importance for the research into ancient economy. These data are central to historical questions about buying power and living standards, but also essential for the comparison between relative values of different products and the interplay between the costs for raw materials, work, wholesale and retail prices, as well as market conditions, in determining the price of finished products. The project aimed at collecting economic data from the rich papyrological documentation ca. 25000 papyri, potsherds, wooden tablets in Greek, Latin, Coptic and Arabic from Egypt, but also from other areas of the late antique and early Arab Mediterranean world, for the period between the 4th and the 8th centuries AD. In particular, the project focused on prices of movable goods foodstuffs, materials and craft products, animals with reference to wages of ordinary workers. After the information was collected in a database, priority was given to materials and craft products, which often pose interpretation problems and had been singularly neglected by previous research. This has led to broadening the focus of research from the simple collection of prices to the consideration of many aspects related to material culture, lexicographical issues, modes of production, etc. The part on materials and craft products has thus developed into an autonomous volume which, following the guiding thread of prices, analyses a range of aspects that go beyond simple quantitative data. By making available for historians and more generally for non-specialists of papyrology a huge amount of reliable, comprehensive and contextualized data for a quantity of products that was unimaginable until now, the volume will constitute an essential point of reference for the economic history of the period, but also for broader comparative studies about different epochs and cultures until modern times. It is to be expected that the economic information preserved in the papyrological documentation, largely freed from the difficulties often mentioned in earlier literature (obscurity of many texts, uneven reliability of editions and interpretations, as well as of existing data collections), will receive more attention in studies of economic history than has been the case; and it is to be hoped that it will help lead research towards paths and topics that until now could not be pursued; these include levels of wealth and lifestyles of different social groups; changes in the relationships between the relative values of different products in different areas and periods, with their possible causes in market, political or environmental changes; evaluation of surplus value and added value, on the basis of the relationship between costs of raw materials, labour and finished products.