Egypt
Recommended: the Manning website.
- *The Nile and the social organization of Egypt: Joe Manning
- You should know the Wittfogel argument and some counterargument by others.
- * Jones, "Taxation in Antiquity"
Required pages : p.153-159. (Ignore for now the rest of the article which is on Rome).
- *Manning, Joe (2013). "Egypt", Peter Fibiger Bang and Walter Scheidel, eds, chapter 2 in The Oxford Handbook of the state in the Ancient Near East and Mediterranean. (p. 61-89). Not all the pages are required. Read it once and focus on the main arguments about causality, geographic determinism, taxation, information and enforcement. Skip the rest.
- Lecture notes: not required (written some time ago and needs revisions).
ADDITIONAL MATERIAL
- Ray, John (2002). Reflections of Osiris: Lives from Ancient Egypt, Oxford University Press, Chapter 2, "A Farmer's Problems," pages 23-39. If you can get the book, buy it. There is a very short summary of the history of Egypt which is required knowledge.
- Baer, Klaus, (1963). “An Eleventh Dynasty Farmer’s Letters to His Family,” Journal of the American Oriental Society, 83, 1-19.
- Jursa, Michael and Juan Carlos Moreno García (2015). "The Ancient Near East and Egypt," in Andrew Monson and Walter Scheidel, eds., Fiscal Regimes and the Political Economy of Premodern States, Cambridge University Press, Chapter, 4, 115-165: Fiscal systems in ancient Egypt.
- Manning, Joe (2017). "Volcanic suppression of Nile summer flooding triggers revolt and constrains interstate conflict in ancient Egypt," Nature, text.
- Chaney, Eric (2013). "Revolt on the Nile: Economic Shocks, Religion, and Political Power," Econometrica, 81(5), 2033-53.
- More discussion of Wittfogel (hydraulics and despotism) for Egypt in Manning's draft. (not required but useful).
- For an in-depth analysis of the Heqanakhte letters: Baer (1993).
- Butzer, Karl, W. "Long-Term Nile Flood Variation and Political Discontinuities in Pharaonic Egypt".
- Butzer, Karl (1976). Early Hydraulic Civilization in Egypt, A study in cultural ecology. Chicago, chapter 9, “Conclusions and Implications”.
- Eyre, Christopher J. (1999). "Review of "State and Economy in Ancient Egypt: Fiscal Vocabulary of the New Kingdom by David A. Warburton," Journal of the Economic and Social History of the Orient, 42, 575-577.
- Murnane, William J. "The organization of government under Amenhotep III," chapter 6.
- Manning, Joe (2004). "Toward Modeling of the Ptolemaic State and the Ptolemaic Economy".
- Manning, Joe (2009). "Economic policy under the Ptolemies," chapter 5 (part of) in The Last Pharaohs: Egypt under the Ptolemies 305-30 BC.
- Herodotus, Book 2