The process of sifting through the historical record for evidence of Nile flood conditions requires a delicate balance of attention to detail and sensitivity to the particulars of geographical and temporal context. This entry in our ongoing blog walks you through the process of identifying and interpreting the evidence of a single document in our record.
My work as a researcher on this grant has consisted of combing through the corpus of papyrus documents for direct evidence of Nile flood conditions throughout Egypt during the Ptolemaic period. My specific task on the historical team is the identification of these documents in specific ancient archives, that is, collections of documents kept together in antiquity by an individual, family, or administrative office and reconstructed in the modern editing process. By limiting my survey to the archive, I narrow the range of documents under examination to a large but manageable corpus with a distinctive advantage: historical context. As a rule, documents that survive in archival contexts are more useful than historical isolates because I can situate their content in a historical circumstance based on a preponderance of internal evidence rather than speculation.
In the interpretation of attested flood conditions in these documents, context is king. Geographical information is particularly crucial. The Nile valley is a dynamic floodplain environment. Variable floods impact different areas of the floodplain in different ways.
The Fayyum depression, which supplies a huge proportion of extant Ptolemaic papyrus documents, received its share of Nile floodwaters via an indirect and highly regulated system of canals and sluices. The Bahr Yusuf, a natural branch of the Nile that debouches into the Fayyum, had a delayed flood response. The Ptolemaic kings took advantage of this hydrological variability in order to create a perennially irrigated agricultural zone in the Fayyum out of this underdeveloped marsh. In order to do so, they needed to control the amount of water flowing into the depression so as to lower the water table and distribute available water over a broader area of the depression. A wealth of evidence documenting the maintenance of these hydraulic works at the Lahun Gap has survived in the archive of the engineers Kleon and Theodoros.
Kleon and his successor Theodoros secured the contract for maintaining the sluices and dikes at the entrance of the Fayyum in the mid-third century BCE. Their archive spans over two decades between the years 260 and 237 BCE. Several texts of this archive provide direct witness to Nile flood conditions.
The papyrus P. Petrie Kleon 17 is a letter to Kleon from the estate manager Panakestor, who is a well-known figure in the contemporary Zenon archive. Panakestor oversaw the creation of a large gift-estate bestowed on the finance minister, Apollonios, by the king. Apollonios’ estate was large, encompassing some 6800 acres, and appears to have consisted largely of previously undeveloped scrubland rendered arable by the hydraulic works overseen by Kleon. The letter, dating to 257 BCE, illustrates an early phase in the estate’s construction, when workmen were beginning to implement the new irrigation system. Panakestor complains that Kleon has not prioritized the estate and threatens to reveal his negligence to Apollonios. Below is my translation of the Greek (which is freely accessible at http://papyri.info/ddbdp/p.zen.pestm;;C).
Panakestor to Kleon, greetings.
We wrote to you previously in the 29th year to send a crew for the outfitting of bends in the small canal, but you seem to have passed us by en route to the small lake. You really ought not to have passed us by, but rather to have briefly dropped by and, upon seeing that the land is not irrigated, inquired for what reason we are not irrigating. For you are appointed engineer of not only the small lake but also this place.
Therefore meet with us tomorrow at the sluice-gate and explain, in your role as engineer, how the water ought to be let through the bends, for we are inexperienced. We will provide men and the remaining funds, however much you appoint. But if you do not come, we will be forced to write to Apollonios that his is the only unirrigated land in the Lake District (the Fayyum) in spite of our intent to supply the entire expense.
Farewell. Year 29, Mesore 21.
As noted above, context governs the interpretation of any document. This letter, written on October 11, and mentioning a request made earlier in year 29, dates to a phase in the Nile Valley’s agricultural cycle when the floodwaters were being drawn off of the fields in preparation for sowing. Landlords were in the process of drawing up contracts with tenant farmers on the basis of the amount of irrigated land available and deciding whether to include clauses protecting their tenants in the event of flood failure. In other words, the Egyptian planting season was already well underway, and Apollonios’ estate had not yet been irrigated.
It is significant that Panakestor blames Kleon, rather than adverse flood conditions, for the delay in irrigation. Indeed, he claims that if Kleon fails to aid the estate’s workmen in operating the sluice that would draw water through the “bends” onto Apollonios’ land, the finance minister would be the only landowner in the region whose land went unirrigated. This argument would only have been effective if the rest of the Fayyum was successfully irrigated at this time. In other words, a document attesting to complete lack of irrigation in its immediate context proves that the opposite conditions prevailed in the rest of the region.
In addition to attesting direct evidence that the flood of 257 was at least “moderate” to “good,” that is, sufficient for irrigating a majority of arable land, the document also attests an overall delay in irrigation taking place in the Fayyum in contrast to the rest of the Nile. As I noted above, in the month of Mesore the majority of the Nile Valley was in the process of draining floodwaters from the fields and allocating plots to cultivators. In the Fayyum, however, irrigation appear to have been in full swing (hence Panakestor’s distress). The delay is likely to be attributed to a little-acknowledged phenomenon governing the timing of the Bahr Yusuf’s flood response.
A recent study of Nile floodplain morphology in Middle Egypt has argued that the Bahr Yusuf served as the primary drain of floodbasins on the western side of the Nile Valley (Willems et al. 2017). This would have impacted the amount of water flowing into this waterway. In addition to flooding in accordance with the Nile’s typical timeframe, the Bahr Yusuf likely underwent a second, less pronounced, flood surge in September-November as a consequence of flood basin drainage. This would have increased the amount of water available for channeling into the Fayyum depression as well as extending the duration of this water’s availability.
In light of this prolonged irrigation regime in the Fayyum, we might read Kleon’s actions in a more favorable light. With excess drainage surging down the Bahr Yusuf from September through November, Kleon likely felt no urgency to the opening of sluices in October. Instead, as Panakestor attests, he was in the process of overseeing the collection of excess water in the “small lake,” probably a local reservoir, which could be used to redistribute water on a perennial basis to supplement that which the flood season supplied. The Fayyum Survey Project has identified traces of several such canal-fed reservoirs in the western part of the depression (Römer 2017). Panakestor, “inexperienced” with this new perennial irrigation system, was not reading the situation properly.
Archival context allows us to compare this document to others in the Kleon archive and contemporary archives such as Zenon. Three other papyri, all from the Zenon archive, attest to the strength of the flood in 257 (PCZ 1 59059, 59109, and 59125). The preponderence of evidence enables us to evaluate this flood with a high certainty variable, which will be important in the statistical analysis of the flood record.
Author: Joe Morgan, Graduate Researcher (Yale University)
Works Cited:
Römer, C. 2017. “The Nile in the Fayum. Strategies of Dominating and Using the Water Resources of the River in the Oasis in the Middle Kingdom and Greco-Roman Period.” In The Nile: Natural and Cultural Landscape in Egypt, edited by H. Willems and J.-M. Dahms. Leuven. 171-192.
Willems, H., H. Creylman, V. De Laet, and G. Verstraeten. 2017. “The Analysis of Historical Maps as an Avenue to the Interpretation of Pre-Industrial Irrigation Practices in Egypt.” In The Nile: Natural and Cultural Landscape in Egypt, edited by H. Willems and J.-M. Dahms. Leuven. 255-344.