Brendan Haug's research while affiliated with University of Michigan and other places

This entry discusses various naturally occurring water resources in northeastern Africa: the Nile, the oases of Egypt's Western Desert, surface and subsurface water in Egypt's Eastern Desert, and irregular rainwater capture in Libya.

Reviews of the historiography of irrigation regularly single out Karl August Wittfogel’s “hydraulic hypothesis” as a uniquely deleterious contribution to the study of ancient water management. His errors notwithstanding, this article argues that the ideological misshaping of Western scholarship on irrigation instead emerged from Egypt’s long colonial experience. First articulated in the Napoleonic Description de l’Égypte , the theory of a centralized, ancient Egyptian “hydraulic state” was crafted to justify French attempts to reshape Egypt’s irrigated landscape. British hydraulic engineers later received and refined this narrative during the British colonial period. Their popularizing discourse retrojected the technocratic character of modern irrigation into antiquity, defining the Egyptian “irrigation system” as a static and unchanging fusion of hydraulic expertise and state power. Widely disseminated in specialist and popular fora, this tendentious argument had become received wisdom by the beginning of the twentieth century and subtly shaped early Egyptological descriptions of irrigation in antiquity.

This chapter introduces a selection of critical issues: the environment, the strengths and weaknesses of our evidence, population and the size of the cultivated area, land tenure and taxation. It also introduces crops and diet, the management of Egypt's natural resources, and changes to Egyptian agriculture. The chapter stresses the danger inherent in writing Egyptian agricultural history from the evidence of one region and period. Lacking an irrigation and agricultural bureaucracy capable of governing water resources centrally, the dioiketes instead relied upon the spontaneous initiative of an Egyptian peasantry whose own prosperity was dependent upon the communal self‐regulation of local irrigation works. In antiquity, the Nile's yearly cycle of flood, recession, and low ebb structured the Egyptian agricultural calendar. The higher estimate nonetheless remains the more implausible of the two; indeed, nine million persons is an impossible figure under a premodern agricultural and technological regime in Egypt.

The study of irrigation in ancient Egypt has swung between two poles. Early environmental-determinist scholarship stressed the imperative of state control while the most recent work denies the state any significant role and instead emphasizes the agency of local communities. This article briefly explores the historiography of Egyptian irrigation, critiquing both its colonialist roots and the extreme reaction against colonialist preconceptions that marks current scholarship. A case study of Roman state coordination is then presented as an argument for reintegrating the state into the history of Egyptian water management.

The study of ancient law has blossomed in recent years. In English alone there have been dozens of studies devoted to classical Greek and Roman law, to the Roman legal codes, and to the legal traditions of the ancient Near East among many other topics. Legal documents written on papyrus began to be published in some abundance by the end of the nineteenth century; but even after substantial publication history, legal papyri have not received due attention from legal historians. This book blends the two usually distinct juristic scholarly traditions, classical and Egyptological, into a coherent presentation of the legal documents from Egypt from the Ptolemaic to the late Byzantine periods, all translated and accompanied by expert commentary. The volume will serve as an introduction to the rich legal sources from Egypt in the later phases of its ancient history as well as a tool to compare legal documents from other cultures.