Consumption and living costs in a changing world

The centuries between the late 4th and the 8th are a period of great historical changes, whose effects persist, through the middle and modern ages, up to the world of today: the center of the empire moves from Rome to Constantinople, with a shift in the center of gravity of economic and commercial flows from the western to the eastern Mediterranean. The economic and social structure changes, with the definitive establishment of the large estates and its consequences on the status of the peasants. Above all, the arrival of the Arabs on the eastern and southern shores of the Mediterranean leads in the passage of these areas from the Christian to the Arab/Muslim world. Changes in administration, population composition, religion, intellectual and material culture are accompanied by climatic and demographic crises, whose extent and effects on economic, social and political developments have been the subject of recent studies. At the same time, a remarkable continuity in the monetary system provides a solid basis for tracing changes in the values of foodstuffs as well as in the living costs. Egypts papyrological evidence preserves a mass of direct and un-tampered data, providing us with reliable and verifiable information, that allows us to reconstruct a coherent picture of food prices and consumption. However, the data on consumption and cost of living available in the papyri from late antiquity and the early Arab period have never been collected and considered in a systematic and critical way. As a consequence, and because of the difficulties in using first-hand papyrological material for non-specialists, economic information from the papyri has not always been adequately taken into account by historians. The project aims to collect and examine in detail all data on consumption and costs of foods, and to investigate to what extent the changes of the 4th-8th centuries have left traces in the material life of people: what were the cost of living and the diet of different social and ethnic (Egyptians/Arabs) population groups? Can variations be observed over this period of time? Can such variations be related to changes in demand or availability of different products, and ultimately to political, climatic, or demographic changes? Do the Arabs influence the basic diet of the Egyptian population, and are they influenced by it? This project connects large historical developments to day-to-day economic and social life. It will make a quantity of material available for the first time, constituting an essential point of reference for the study of the effects of man-made and natural changes on living conditions in the late antique, Byzantine and early Arab world, but also for broader comparative studies about different epochs and cultures up to modern times.

The centuries between the late 4th and the 8th are a period of great historical changes, whose effects persist, through the middle and modern ages, up to the world of today: the center of the empire moves from Rome to Constantinople, with a shift in the center of gravity of economic and commercial flows from the western to the eastern Mediterranean; the economic and social structure changes, with the definitive establishment of the large estates and its consequences on the status of the peasants. Above all, the arrival of the Arabs on the eastern and southern shores of the Mediterranean leads in the passage of these areas from the Christian to the Arab/Muslim world. Egypt's papyrological evidence from this period - ca. 25000 papyri, potsherds, wooden tablets in Greek, Latin, Coptic and Arabic - preserves a mass of direct and un-tampered data, providing us with reliable and verifiable information, that allows us to reconstruct a coherent picture of food prices and consumption. However, the data on consumption and cost of living available in the papyri from late antiquity and the early Arab period had never been collected and considered in a systematic and critical way. As a consequence, and because of the difficulties in using first-hand papyrological material for non-specialists, economic information from the papyri has not always been adequately taken into account by historians. The aim of the project Consumption and Living Costs in a Changing World was to collect in a monograph and to discuss in detail all data on consumption and costs of foods preserved in the rich papyrological documentation 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. This material allowed to investigate the purchasing power and the diet of different social and ethnic (Egyptians/Arabs) population groups, and to reconstruct the changes in the cost of living, in diet, and in the relative prices of different products, that occurred during the Late Antique period, and then with the transition from Byzantine to Arab Egypt . 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 monograph prepared during the project 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 up to modern times.