“Silver, small data and grand narratives: towards an (integral) agrarian history of pharaonic

Ancient Egypt was one of the earliest agrarian civilizations in the world. With the introduction of writing (about 3300 BC) institutions such as temples, the crown and others produced large amounts of documents dealing with agriculture, the organization of the agricultural workforce, the management of cultivated land, etc. Yet the very origins of these documents, as well as the vivid descriptions of rural life in many literary texts, have inspired a rather biased image of pharaonic agriculture. According to this view, institutions appear as the overwhelming dominant actors in agricultural life, peasantry as an undifferentiated mass of impoverished cultivators and agrarian structures as essentially the same for nearly three millennia (prior to the Ptolemaic Period). Furthermore, the role of markets and commercial agriculture is considered irrelevant or, in any case, dwarfed by the alleged weight of the redistribution networks controlled by the monarchy. However, recent research from nearby areas (Mesopotamia), led by Govert Van Driel, Michael Jursa and others, shows a different picture, in which markets, early “monetization” of agrarian exchanges and indirect forms of agricultural management (through rural entrepreneurs, merchants, etc.) had a much greater impact on agrarian production and decision-making than previously thought. Egyptian sources show that these conditions can be also found in the Nile Valley and that, in fact, the organization of agriculture and peasantry was rather more complex and differentiated than the usual depictions still prevalent in Egyptology. Institutions were not as dominant as previously thought; alternative productive options were available to the inhabitants of the Nile Valley depending on the impact of the tax-system; rational decision-making is described in a surprisingly vivid way in some early documents; and the use of silver suggests that commerciallyoriented agriculture was significant, at least in some periods of Egyptian history. In all, pharaonic agriculture emerges as a rather dynamic economic sector, subject to deep changes over time and embedded in economic relations that transcended the limits of the Nile Valley. I. Private land ownership, contracts and metals used as means of exchange Pharaonic Egypt has been traditionally considered one of the most achieved examples of “hydraulic civilization”, an absolutist power whose authority and legitimacy were supposed to derive from three pillars: control of the irrigation system, control of the agricultural production of the country and control over a complex redistributive system encompassing most of the resources of the kingdom. If one adds scribes and an abundant use of administrative records, the picture of a hyper-centralized, bureaucratic monarchy is complete. Under this perspective, the king was supposed to own all the land of the country and private ownership of land was, at best irrelevant. As for the redistributive network controlled by the state, it left allegedly no room for private initiative. However, the organization of agriculture should be greatly qualified in the light of recent research. While in the ideological sphere the Pharaoh was represented as the absolute master of all resources of the kingdom (including land), in practice things were quite different. To begin with, private ownership of land is well attested in private documents from the middle of the 3 millennium on. As for royal tenures, they were limited to special categories of land, such as extensive domains on high ground (called khato-fields in 2 millennium sources), new islands formed by the accumulation of sediments, riverside flooded areas where cultivation was only possible when conveniently drained, etc. Judging from the available evidence, royal domains were scattered in the countryside and their management was frequently assumed by wealthy