INTRODUCTION

In order to substantiate both the propositions and reservations I have expressed in the previous chapter, I wish to present in the form of a case study the price developments in Egypt from the third to the first centuries bc. In the case of grain prices, a reasonable amount of information has survived, which permits investigation in serial form. The corpus of wheat prices from Ptolemaic Egypt comprises some 100 figures. Most belong to the period between c. 275 and c. 80 bc, that is, from the reign of Ptolemy II Philadelphos to the death of Ptolemy XII Soter II. Important periods of economic change during the early period of Ptolemaic rule under Ptolemy I Soter and the very end of this rule under Kleopatra VII are not represented in these data. Not all information, moreover, is equally useful for economic analysis, and several prices just duplicate each other. Moreover, despite the relative wealth of information, we have to bear in mind some fundamental problems.

The first problem addresses the question of generalization: Is our material representative of prices in Egypt as a whole? The largest proportion of Greek papyri containing price information comes from areas of Greek occupation in the Fayum and the adjacent areas of the Oxyrhynchite and Herakleopolite nomes in Lower and Middle Egypt. Although markets and coinage were not totally absent from the less Hellenized areas of Upper Egypt, levels of urbanization, population density and economic organization – in short, the conditions of price formation – varied considerably.