The Egyptian Landscape: New Insights on Agrarian and Rural Trends in the Late Medieval and Early Modern Periods
Panel 253, 2019 Annual Meeting
On Sunday, November 17 at 8:30 am
Panel Description
Although late medieval Egypt's agricultural landscape was the economic base of several successive states and vibrant cultural productions, our understanding of this pivotal aspect of history remains inadequate. Few surviving records from contemporary literary sources and even rarer archival documents exist from a period that encompassed agricultural changes in concurrence with political upheavals, environmental transitions, and socio-economic disruptions. The lack of documentation, especially for the late medieval period, has created a dilemma for scholars. Previously, academic enquiry has employed a methodology of utilizing traditional textual analysis leading to broad interpretations that overlooked trends not expressly mentioned in those sources. These explanations - as to the changes in Egypt's rural landscape - are often posited as narratives of decline resulting from demographic crises following the Black Death, the political instability of the late Mamluk regime (792-923/1390-1517), or general economic decline. This panel proposes to challenge these interpretations regarding Egypt's medieval and early modern landscape using a multi-disciplinary approach and integrating digital methods, such as GIS mapping, in conjunction with traditional textual analysis. In so doing, it is possible to arrive at a more nuanced approach to investigating long trends during a complex period. Each paper in this panel tackles a different aspect of Egypt's agricultural or environmental history by proposing the development of databases from previously under-utilized sources and methodological approaches that will provide solutions to these historiographical issues. These databases allow for the manipulation of large amounts of data previously unavailable, which will result in new interpretations.
Furthermore, the panel provides an opportunity to engage in the larger academic discussion surrounding the viability of such an approach, especially regarding the use of digital tools. Such an approach offers advantages over previous endeavors but also may present unforeseen disadvantages that necessitate an open discussion on the long-term utility of this type of scholarship. The outlay in time and money for the development of digital databases and related tools requires scholars to devise strategies for the operability of these resources in the future, especially in relation to expanding the usefulness of data for other researchers. The exploration of these issues in the context of this panel's individual projects presents the opportunity to improve the chances of success for other future endeavors.
Mamluk Cairo witnessed massive expansion during the first two centuries of Mamluk rule, which only came to an abrupt halt as a result of the plague outbreak of 1348 CE. Yet for all of the city’s growth, vast swaths of land – especially within the city proper – remained agricultural. These properties were linked to urban institutions through the waqf system and were integral to the food provisioning of Cairo, especially in terms of its fresh produce and perishable victuals. Gardens, plantations, and farms surrounded the city both intra and extra muros. Additionally, open spaces reserved for marketing and leisure were important to the urban experience. As Cairo’s history has traditionally been one of built-up spaces and structures, looking at open and green spaces is critical to having a more complete picture. While the traditional urban/rural dichotomy is being revised and more scholarship is emerging regarding Cairo’s garden spaces, there is still much to be understood about the ways in which lands were incorporated into urban endowments and transformed as a consequence of urban expansion and sprawl. Beyond agricultural land, natural landscape features and some man-made topographies shaped the ways in which the city’s growth occurred and how surrounding lands were developed. This paper proposes to look at some of these evolutions of landscapes and uses of spaces in light of Cairo’s expansion in the early Mamluk period (1250-1348 CE). It will also highlight how the use of digital mapping in reconstructing the layout of these farmlands, open market spaces, and natural landforms can help to better illustrate Cairo’s urban history and development. Beyond recreating the city’s topography, this sort of mapping also highlights and makes clear the connections between agricultural properties and urban marketplaces. In using digital mapping to recreate Mamluk Cairo’s topography, this paper will offer a new understanding of how Cairo’s landscape shaped its development and enhanced the urban experience. Thus, by reimagining the city’s topography and reconsidering the usage of open spaces and natural features, a more complete image of Mamluk Cairo may emerge.
Ceramic finds are frequently the most ubiquitous of artifacts found at sites of human occupation. As a result, ceramic sequences are used as tools for identifying chronological periods and tracing cultural history in landscape surveys. Ceramics have been crucial in the identification of settlements which date from the early Islamic to Ottoman periods in the Near East. While nearly all the survey methods and resources available in the Near East are also available in Egypt, the same amount of archaeological investigation has not been devoted to medieval Egyptian landscapes. Urban centers like Cairo continue to receive most of the attention in studies of medieval Egypt. Until recently, Egypt has suffered from a complete lack of studies which focus on utilitarian ceramics from the medieval period, especially in rural or provincial areas, which may reflect different traditions from those of Cairo and the Nile Delta. Joint excavations in Aswan, Egypt by the Ministry of State of Antiquities and the Swiss Institute for Architectural and Archaeological Research in Cairo have produced stratified contexts which enable quantified studies of everyday domestic ceramics from medieval Aswan. This corpus of ceramics is highly distinctive and was exported in significant quantities to sites along the Nile River Valley in Egypt and Nubia, the Eastern Desert, and along the Red Sea Coast. Utilizing a catalogue of medieval Aswan pottery, archaeological survey could help to create more nuanced maps of human occupation between the 9th and 16th centuries CE throughout Egypt. Studies of medieval material culture can provide alternative perspectives on consumption, economic exchange, and daily life. The incorporation of reliable ceramic sequences into archaeological survey as a tool for identifying and dating settlements may also problematize traditional historical narratives and help to create new models of occupation and land use in provincial and rural Egypt.
Economic historians who study the medieval or Ottoman Middle East or any point prior to the twentieth century have been unable to make long-term comparisons of quantitative data from land surveys – and for a very good reason. A quantitative comparison of this nature is impossible because it amounts, as the saying goes to “the comparison of apples and oranges.” A primary example of this problem is trying to compare two of the most important land surveys of Egypt spaced several centuries apart: al-Nasir Muhammad's (r. 1310-41) cadastral survey (al-Rawk al-Nasir) in 1315 and Muhammad Ali’s (r. 1805-1849) cadastral survey in 1814. As they stand, it would seem clear that these two surveys cannot be compared. Over the intervening five centuries, not only did the methods for conducting surveys change but also the methods for classifying land and the units of measurements. In addition, units of currency or the valuation of output had changed. An additional complication is that rural villages had either moved or disappeared between these two periods.
Studying long term changes between these two surveys can’t be done using linear comparisons.
So we propose a new method for grappling with comparisons of this sort. Systems Ratio Analysis compares these apples (1315 CE cadastral data) with those oranges (1814 CE cadastral data) by comparing separately (set a1) 1315 data with (set a2) 1315 data and (set b1) 1814 data with (set b2) 1814 data. We will show how, given certain specific preconditions, the problem can be solved by calculating the relative ratio between ratios (a1/a2) (b1/b2). Very effective comparisons across periods of time (longer than 500 years) can be made. We provide proof of our method in this discussion by analyzing and comparing results from the 1315 and 1814 survey using Systems Ratio Analysis.
Although the dramatic changes to the land tenure system of medieval Egypt that occurred during the crucial period of Mamluk rule (648-923/1250-1517) has been a matter of academic enquiry for decades, earlier interpretations deserve re-evaluation in light of new evidence and methodologies. Earlier studies have largely focused on the fifteenth century and the growing amount of agrarian land subsumed by endowments (sing. waqf, pl. awqaf). This paper intends to outline the complexity of the changing agrarian landscape that took place over the course of the Mamluk period using a digital database that combines the data from Ibn al-Ji'an's (d. 885/1480) cadastral survey with the first digital mapping of Mamluk Egypt's land tenure system using GIS. The database, built around the earliest dateable and as yet unpublished manuscript of Ibn al-Ji'an's survey held at the Bodleian Library, describes in textual terms the state of Mamluk Egypt's land tenure system at two important crucial periods: the reigns of Sultan al-Ashraf Sha'ban (r. 764-778/1363-1377) and al-Ashraf Qaytbay (r. 872-901/1468-1496). The ability to manipulate this 'big data' source will allow previously buried trends to be revealed.
By employing data visualization techniques with traditional textual analysis, this paper shows not only the origins of long-term trends but also changing inhabitation of rural communities. The "waqfization" of state lands so prominent in the late fifteenth century will be shown to have originated in the late fourteenth century. This earlier origin date has large historiographical implications since this trend has often been generally attributed to economic decline of the fifteenth century. Furthermore, the database provides a starting point for future enquiries. The changing inhabitation patterns of rural communities outlined in the survey's data, due to depopulation and Bedouin encroachment, offers tantalizing opportunities for archeologists wishing to explore these important events. Finally, while the increased investment for digital projects has often been viewed as a potential drawback, this paper will show the advantages outweigh those concerns.
