Document Type

Article

Publication Date

1992

Publication Title

Bulletin of the American Society of Papyrologists

Volume

29

Pages

175-182

Publisher Name

American Society of Papyrologists

Abstract

Nearly all the Greek papyri from Egypt concern the people of upcountry villages and towns--Syene, Aphrodito, Hermopolis, Oxyrhynchus, to mention several of the most important late antique sites. Rarely do the papyri broach the "exchangist world" of Fernand Braudel or S. D. Goitein with their thriving cities, long-distance trade, and commerical banking.2 Alexandria finds relatively frequent mention in the papyri, but cities beyond Egypt are rarely mentioned, and in the late antique period even the imperial capital, Constantinople, comes into play only a handful of times. No doubt this is because the ancient economy, and Egypt's most especially, was founded on an agricultural base and the labor of masses of peasants, and because the papyri concern mostly local affairs. Consequently, evidence for credit activities, though abundant, comes mainly in the form of upcountry contracts of loan, orders for payment, and crop sales with deferred delivery; but even these activities had an ultimately agrarian base and were not the province of professional bankers.

Comments

Author Posting. © James Keenan, 1992. This article is posted here by permission of the American Society of Papyrologists for personal use, not for redistribution. The article was published in Bulletin of the American Society of Papyrologists 29, 1992.

Creative Commons License

Creative Commons Attribution-Noncommercial-No Derivative Works 3.0 License
This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-Noncommercial-No Derivative Works 3.0 License.

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