Roman Egypt was a strange province | Hacker News Reader

Roman Egypt was a strange province

acoup.blog

219 pointspicture53 comments

I wonder if the existence of a stable overclass of alexandrines distinct from the native population pre-prepared Egypt to be a Roman vassal state: it was already functioning as an analogous model, they just replaced the top set, but kept the governance model as-is.

Egypt was a breadbasket for Rome long before it was incorporated as were Tunisia and Sicily. I suspect "do not break the supply chain" was huge in not altering the governance

> I wonder if the existence of a stable overclass of alexandrines distinct from the native population pre-prepared Egypt to be a Roman vassal state: it was already functioning as an analogous model, they just replaced the top set, but kept the governance model as-is.

No, those are two different phenomena. The piece notes that once the Romans took over the Greek elites immediately fused with the native elites.

Any time anywhere with a functioning administration is conquered, the local administration is mostly left alone. The existing administration is already doing the job you want it to do; why would you change it?

But it's not relevant (to this question) that the top level of the Ptolemaic administration was ethnically distinct.

So which other Roman provinces had functioning civil service which was taken over? Parts of Greece I guess.

Italy, Greece, Anatolia, the Levant, North Africa, parts of Spain, Crimea, and Armenia and mesopotamia for the brief period they controlled them. ie, the areas containing the vast majority of the population and economic productivity of the empire.

Now, few of these regions had an overarching government or civil service - but they were all developed regions made up of various kingdoms, empires and city states, and each of those had their own elites and methods of economic management and tax collection.

Egypt was pretty unique in its size, wealth, history and organisation, but in the vast majority of places they conquered the Romans worked with existing power structures and elites (where they didn't wipe them out).

As the piece notes, Gaul and Spain were in the very early stages of that process, but the rest of the empire - the areas to the south, southeast, east, and northeast of the Mediterranean - all did. Greece was a comparative newcomer.

You can fruitfully think of administration as a phenomenon which originates in Egypt and Iraq and radiates outward from there.

> Any time anywhere with a functioning administration is conquered, the local administration is mostly left alone.

Not universally true - this presupposes that maximum economic output is the only goal of a conquering power. Conquering rulers are not always rational, or they may have other rational goals.

The Mongols maintained the existing administrations wherever they submitted to them, but wherever they faced stiff resistance they wiped out the old power structures (and much of the population at large). In mesopotamia they even destroyed ancient, essential irrigation systems to an extent that the the region's productivity didn't recover for centuries.

Even the Romans weren't always so conciliatory and rational - in conquering Carthage they sold the entire surviving population into slavery and destroyed the original city entirely. It wasn't exactly rare for them to choose to be brutal to make a point.

> Even the Romans weren't always so conciliatory and rational - in conquering Carthage they sold the entire surviving population into slavery and destroyed the original city entirely.

But Carthage wasn't just a city, it was a region. The city was sacked for standing up to Rome -- essentially the same policy the Mongols used. What happened to the rest of the region?

Britain during and after the fall of Rome is worth considering here; it's similar and also different. Roman Britain was overrun by Germanic tribes and the system that resulted wasn't closely related to the system in place under the Romans.

But I see that as related to the invasion being decentralized. It was more "a large number of small groups of people showing up" than "Genghis Khan showing up with his horde".

We may have different ideas of what "the local administration is left in place" means. The Yongle emperor (Chinese) deposed his own nephew (also Chinese) and subsequently executed a very large share of the people who had been administrators (still Chinese) under the previous regime, along with their families.

But the system of Chinese administration was left untouched by the mass executions. A slate of administrators was wiped out and replaced by very similar people doing very similar things.

Well all bureaucracies must do a very large number of very similar things regardless of location, culture, etc..

You might think so, but that just isn't true. There are a few core tasks, like tax collection, that have to be done everywhere.

But even those core tasks are handled in very different ways from place to place. Questions like who is eligible to potentially be an administrator; how do they actually become one; what does the org chart look like; and what functions does the administration perform, all vary radically between different cultures.

Every military hierarchy in a sizeable country (> 10 million population), since WW1, has been organized almost identically except during the communist revolutions, and even then they reverted to the norm.

I'm pretty certain there are close to optimal organizational structures for certain other functions as well, given the same standard human and technological limitations.

Comparing two societies at different points in time would obviously yield much larger differences.

> What happened to the rest of the region?

They were left alone? e.g. the elites in Utica probably didn't mind the destruction of Carthage that much. However the core of the Carthaginian territory in North Africa was a collection of 'allied' cities dominated by Carthage (just like Roman Italy before the Social War). So there wasn't really much of a centralized system to keep in place (unlike in China and some other empires)

> The Mongols maintained the existing administrations wherever they submitted to them, but wherever they faced stiff resistance they wiped out the old power structures (and much of the population at large).

This is what broke the power of the Hashishim, or Order of Assassins. The Mongols didn’t use local talent for palace guards and so on, so they couldn’t play their usual game.

> The Mongols didn’t use local talent for palace guards and so on

Did the Fatimids? I thought filling military positions with captured foreign slaves was really common under Arabic rule.

Good question. I assume there was a distinction between the various foreign soldiers and the ruler’s bodyguard under the Fatimids, but I can’t say for certain.

Muslim rule generally. The Ottomans had the Janissaries. The Qajars in Persia had the Ghulam. The only one of the Muslim gunpowder empires not to use slave soldiers were the Mughals who were ethnically distinct anyway. Persians and some Arabs and Turks ruling over South Asians.

The previous empires that the Mughals conquered used slave soldiers (Iltutmish, Khilji, Aibak, Lodis)

> Even the Romans weren't always so conciliatory and rational - in conquering Carthage they sold the entire surviving population into slavery and destroyed the original city entirely. It wasn't exactly rare for them to choose to be brutal to make a point.

This is contested. Myth says they "ransacked" the city, but some data might suggest that might not be the case. I am pretty sure they got rid of the "elites" who were running the Carthaginian show. However, without hard-evidence, I am more leaning toward them not really doing much damage.

> toward them not really doing much damage.

Most historical evidence suggest that the city was mostly uninhabited for close to a century until the Roman reestablished it.

Same thing happened to Corinth (actually in the same year as Carthage was destroyed) except that supposedly unlike in Carthage the entire male population was murdered and only the women and children were sold into slavery. Corinth wasn't reestablished for a hundred as well.

Another example is that after the Russians have occupied the Eastern European countries at the end of WWII and after they have installed there puppet governments, they have not only replaced the old administrations, but they have also sent most of their members, including many of those from the lowest levels, into prisons where many have died.

Moreover, the children who had parents or other close relatives who had belonged to the previous administrations were frequently blacklisted and thrown out from any high-level education institution and allowed to do only menial jobs with low qualification requirements.

I think Egypt had been controlled by a foreign overclass since at least the Sea Peoples. Perhaps longer. The Nile is incredibly valuable but also very difficult to defend from invasion.

I seem to hear conflicting reports on whether invest in Greek Egypt (up to Cleopatra) was practiced mainly by the Greeks or by the Egyptians to thumb their nose at the Greeks.

Every time someone obtains power, the first thing they think of is "let's conquer Egypt"

It is surprising that the US didn't do that. But hey, they have a smarter plan.

Ancient/modern Egypt are completely different nations/people.

What does this add to what I said?

the wealth of egypt, its fertile floodplains dwarfs in comparison to mississipi river basin and Rio della Plata basin agriculture wealth and lower population to deal with.

> most of the country is desert

Well, in the manner of speaking only. Back in the day, the "country" was where people had settlements, and that was the delta and the banks of the Nile...

yes, however, having a river does not make the area something other than a desert.

There's a video about Florida in the early days of USA and it was mostly a swamp. The last century made it into a state per se but it's really recent.

Deswampifying Florida is one of the greatest environmental tragedies ever committed. Up there with the building of the Glen Canyon and Hoover Dam. Shortly below is attempting to control the Mississippi River Delta.

The problem is the land owners who didn't see it as a tragedy are still the ones pulling the strings. Florida is on borrowed time.

You're right, but it's a losing battle.

All the hundreds of dams out west built to irrigate high and cold interior deserts really. Each individually unjustifiable environmental destruction, all together a catastrophe. They'll outlast everything else we build and probably even the memory of the name of this country itself.

I have to agree with your sentiment.

The Soviets thinking about reversing the flow direction of some big Siberian rivers (from South to North into North to South) might have topped them all, if the project had actually been executed. [1]

Of course, the same Soviets copied the American capitalists's hydro policy, starting with Stalin and continuing with Khrushchev, with the same negative environmental effects. The Volga Hydroelectric Station project [2] was used as an accusation against Khrushchev by some and said accusation was used for its dismissal, supposedly for the project's negative effects, mainly the huge swathes of very productive agricultural lands which got submerged.

Modern-day Egypt has done the same thing with the Aswan Dam.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Northern_river_reversal

[2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Volga_Hydroelectric_Station

> Hoover Dam

What is wrong with it? It definitely caused damage, but also partially displaced more polluting energy sources, partially increased available energy.

Are you sure that overall balance is so dismal?

Currently Lake Mead is at record lows,

https://www.cbsnews.com/news/lake-mead-water-level-historic-...

https://mead.uslakes.info/level.asp

The Hoover Dam is at half production,

https://www.cnn.com/2022/08/16/us/hoover-dam-hydropower-drou...

The system is failing.

And destroyed the Colorado river delta as a living ecosystem.

What's the relevance of your comment to its parent?

How we perceive space today is not how it was long ago.

Are you suggesting the desert part of today’s Egypt wasn’t a desert during the Roman Empire?

No, that nation/boundaries may not be what they used to be.

Are you suggesting then that Florida’s boundaries were materially different in the early days of the USA than they are now? Aside from losing part of the panhandle, I don’t believe they have changed much since 1776 or that draining the swamps had anything to do with Florida’s borders

no, just that people didn't consider florida as a state beside palm beach, and now every inch of the land has been made worthy

Palm Beach was not founded until 1909, and Florida has some of the oldest cities in America, including “the oldest,” so I’m very curious to understand where your head is at on this one

Boom!

Oldest continuously inhabited towns in US are pueblos in New Mexico and Arizona

It's not about cities but the global area.

It was mostly worthless malarial swamp. The population of Miami was like 10,000 as late as 1900.

Now it is a paradise of sorts, but the foundation is unsound.

Thanks for this necessary context. Roman Egypt did not share the same borders of what we think of as modern Egypt as today.

AD 125: https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/thumb/5/52/Ro...

If you read the rest of the paragraph, you'll see that he's talking about aridness being important for preserving papyri.

People really underestimate what it takes to preserve writing

> Well, in the manner of speaking only. Back in the day, the "country" was where people had settlements, and that was the delta and the banks of the Nile...

Absolutely untrue. The country was the territory held by the king. Most of the people were in the agricultural area, yes, but the Egyptian king also operated a lot of mines and quarries. Those were in the desert.

I think you are right. They also had various outposts, and in various timeframes they were a local superpower.

In terms of what Egyptians themselves thought was Egypt, that might be clued in by the name! The name was “Kemet” , aka “Black land” , referring to the embankment of black fertile land.

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