Ladurie, Les Paysans de Languedoc (1966 available trans. Bloch, La Société Féodale (1940 available trans. I am less well read on Medieval European agriculture, but I should note some reliance here on M. Egypt is an important reference for demographic data because relatively more records survive there due to the arid conditions preserving papyrus. Frier, The Demography of Roman Egypt (1994) for the Egyptian demographic modeling. Scheidel, Death on the Nile (2001) and R. Fischer-Bovet, Army and Society in Ptolemaic Egypt (2014), W. Rosenstein, Rome at War: Farms, Families and Death in the Middle Republic (2004) Foxhall and Forbes, “Σιτομετρεία: The Role of Grain as a Staple Food in Classical Antiquity,” Chiron 12 (1982) and Foxhall, “The Dependent Tenant” JRS 80 (1990), and just reading a pile of Greek and Roman agricultural writers (Columella, Cato, Pliny the Elder, Xenophon, etc). Erdkamp, The Grain Market in the Roman Empire (2005) N. My information for the ancient Mediterranean is drawn from a number of sources, the most important of which are P. And if you want updates whenever a new post appears, you can click below for email updates or follow me on twitter for updates as to new posts as well as my occasional ancient history, foreign policy or military history musings.īibliography note at the outset: for the sake of keeping these posts readable, especially since I don’t have an easy footnote function here, I am not going to laboriously cite everything at each point of reference, but I’ll include a bibliography note up front for the whole series. For this series, we’re going to focus on wheat production, with a bit of a Mediterranean bias (but I’ve tried to pull in some evidence from North China as well by and large I’ve found that wheat cultivation seems to create similar patterns everywhere, but there is local variation).Īs always, if you like what you are reading here, please share it if you really like it, you can support me on Patreon. Where I know there are major exceptions, I’ll try to note them, but it’s simply not possible to know every production permutation everywhere and at every time. And in the case of farming in much of the pre-modern world, the survival strategies of subsistence farmers exert a very strong shaping influence on the countryside and life for non-farmers (terminology note: ‘subsistence’ farming refers to farming directed primarily towards the survival of the farmers and their families in much of the pre-modern world, there was a fairly sharp divide between most farmers who farmed on a subsistence basis and the largest market-oriented estates of the wealthy, who will be our focus next week).Īs a final caveat before we dive in, I specialize in the economy of the ancient Mediterranean, so my observations here are going to tend (where not otherwise noted) to be most true in the Mediterranean world, in that period (c.
#TALES FROM THE VOID PHAROH SAURON SERIES#
One thing I want to highlight in this series are the many different jobs and occupations and the people who did them who tend to lurk in the background of our imagination of the past, where they appear at all. That said, this post is mostly about farmers more than farming (we will talk about the mechanics of farming, just not right away!). Every person in an agrarian society whose job – mining, smithing, tanning, timber-cutting, trading, tailoring, everything – doesn’t involve primary food production is subsisting off of the food production of others, typically (as we’ll see) many others. I wanted to start with farming instead of something more flashy and exciting like iron production (where I know there is quite a lot of interest in how one goes from reddish rock to polished sword), for the simple reason that agriculture sits at the foundation of every other form of production. I think this series will run in four parts (possibly with a fifth part addendum), but no plan survives contact with my tendency to overwrite. Throughout, I want to highlight not only the jobs, but also the people who did them and the human landscapes they created.Įach entry in this series is likely to come in multiple parts – as you will soon see, almost everything worth making has to be made in quite a few steps and each step is often complex enough to occupy its own weekly post. This isn’t a how-to guide (we’re not going to go into that much depth) but instead intended as a window into the many tasks that made a pre-modern society work, tasks that are so often left out of the modern imagination of the past. This essay will hopefully be the first post in a series ( II, III, IV, A) covering some of the basics of how things in the past, particularly in the ancient world, were made. Thanks to our helpful volunteer narrator, this entire post series is now also available in audio format!
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