~Bulletin of the American Society of Papyrologists 50 (2013) 265-281
Natural Resources in Roman Egypt
Extraction, Transport, and
Administration'
Colin Adams University of Liverpool
Abstract
The administration of natural resources in Roman Egypt deserves
more scholarly attention. Focusing on a number of case studies, this
paper collects some of the relevant data, considers the extraction of
natural resources, their transport, and administration, and suggests
questions for further study. The Roman state carefully regulated the
supply and sale of natural resources, and their administration was
carried out by contractors and liturgists who were also regulated.
While the state was able to profit directly from the exploitation of
natural resources, it was also able to devolve their administration onto
the local population. This paper seeks to understand some ways in
which Rome made demands on its provincial territory.
The Roman state's control over and administration of natural resources
in the province of Egypt has not received sufficient scholarly attention. Egypt's
wealth in a wide range of resources, agricultural produce, stones and minerals,
and papyrus, among many other products, is well known. Recent research has
focused largely on agriculture and the economy of Egypt and the wider Roman
world or on detailed analyses of estate management or tenancy within the land
economy.2 There has also been much work on the extractive industries, princi1 My thanks to Matt Gibbs, and to the anonymous referees, for comments on an
earlier draft.
2 D. Rathbone. Economic Rationalism in Third Century AD Egypt: The Heroninus
Archive and the Appianus Estate (Cambridge 1991), D. Kehoe, Management and Investment on Estates in Roman Egypt during the Early Empire (Bonn 1992), and J. Rowlandson, Landowners and Tenants in Roman Egypt, the Social Relations of Agriculture in the
Oxyrhynchite Nome (Oxford 1996), with the discussion of A.K. Bowman, "Quantifying
Egyptian Agriculture," in A.K. Bowman and A. Wilson (eds.), Quantifying the Roman
Economy: Methods and Problems (Oxford 2009) 177-204.
