We are well into our second year of our four year grant from the US National Science Foundation (Award # 1824770, https://nsf.gov/awardsearch/showAward?AWD_ID=1824770).
Time really does fly when you are having fun! For the Yale team, the bulk of our time has been dedicated to two agendas: (1) tracking down all relevant climate proxy records that we think may be of help in our understanding of Nile river flooding anomalies in the last four centuries BCE, and (2) coding historical information derived from papyri and inscriptions, primarily, that help us understand Nile flood conditions. Here we follow the lead of the great work of Danielle Bonneau, Le Fisc et le Nil (1971), but we have added many new texts, including Egyptian language sources, and several other data about the source. In addition to attempting to code the quality of the flood year by year, we add Geocoding, an uncertainty index, and pertinent information from each source.
One of the nice local events we did last Spring was to take the Yale team into the Beinecke Rare Books library, having one of the largest collections of papyri in North America, in order to show everyone the nature of some of our sources for the Ptolemaic period. Just like our visit to the Desert Research Institute last year to show some of our graduate students what an ice core Geochemistry lab looked like and what was involved in deriving climate data from ice cores, so too it was rewarding and informative to show our science colleagues how historians work with their material, what kinds of information ancient texts preserved, and what the problems and uncertainties were with these sources.
Sifting through the large corpus of Greek and Egyptian language documentary sources to find, for each year, some information about Nile Flooding can be arduous. But it also pays dividends. Take for example leases of agricultural land. It has been known for some time that there were no known demotic Egyptian language land leases dated to the third century BCE. Accident of preservation, or revealing of some shift in the legal regime whereby demotic written leases became normative (we have many Greek language leases)? It was anyone’s guess. But working through recent publications of Egyptian documents, we came across an article by CJ Martin in a volume dedicated to Professor Mark of Smith at Oxford (Illuminating Osiris. Egyptological Studies in Honor of Mark Smith, Ed. R. Jasnow & G.Widmer, Lockwood Press, 2017), who has just recently retired. Often such volumes dedicated to senior scholars contain new publication of texts. The title of the article immediately caught my eye: “A third-century demotic land lease (P. BM EA 10858).” Wow- there went the theory that written demotic leases were not made! Here was a lease of land to produce fodder. But it was a bit unusual. The lessee was a man named Pasis, but the lessor was an Alexandrian citizen, and the land holder was a Persian. It is quite rare to find an Alexandrian involved in a very small (less than one acre) lease of land in the Nile valley, and also fairly unusual to find a Persian in the Ptolemaic period as a land holder. More on this at a later date. For our current work, we code such leases as an indication that, for the area in which the lease was made, it represents a “normal” agricultural year (although there is some uncertainty with this text, the month is not preserved in the dating formula that begins the contract so we cannot be sure that the lease was drawn up in the light of flood conditions that year). Water had sufficiently flooded to write a lease contract and produce crops. That was great information to have for the year 251 BCE. But in the process of entering the information in our database, we noticed that the entry came next to a Greek language letter from the famous Zenon archive, the largest archive of the Ptolemaic period, dated to the same year. The text, P.Cair.Zen. 259279, is a letter written by Pasis to the famous estate manager Zenon about the latter’s order for fodder! Could this be the same person, and indeed the same transaction (responding to an order for fodder and the leasing of land to produce the fodder crop?). It’s something worth pursuing.
So we’ve managed to fill in a year, 251 BCE, in our historical coding of Nile conditions, and we may have made an interesting connection between a Greek letter and an Egyptian land lease. That was one afternoon of stimulating work in coding our historical sources for Nile conditions. Stay tuned!
Author: Joe Manning, PI (Yale University)