1 The Birth of Science - MSRI

9.7 Ancient Science and Production 231
Privately owned factories, with wage-earning employees, are attested
in Egypt, in many cases down to the Roman period. Also documented
are wage negotiations between employers and workers 89 and strikes for
salary raises. 90
In Ptolemaic Egypt we encounter for the first time a central State Bank,
whose business is to manage the state’s finances and to invest public resources,
even making loans to private individuals. 91 Bank deposits are
very widespread, even among artisans and retailers. Among transactions
we see for the first time papers transferring sums from one bank account
to another.
To summarize, it seems that the use of terms such as bourgeoisie and
capitalism in a situation like that of Hellenistic Egypt is at once reasonable
— given the presence of elements such as privately owned factories
with salaried employees — and dangerous — given the strong role of the
state, the survival of Pharaoh-era structures, and the lack of certain features
we tend to associate with capitalism, such as a capital market of the
type that arose in modern Europe.
It should be stressed, too, that many of the features we have discussed
lasted until Roman times in Egypt, but were never present in the Western
provinces of the Roman Empire, where slavery, for instance, played
a much greater economic role. Geography here seems to provide a better
basis for a breakdown than time periods, and not only in terms of the economy
but also regarding other institutions. For example, the possibility of
dissolving a marriage through the wife’s initiative, long inconceivable to a page 288
Roman, is recognized in Egyptian matrimonial contracts of the Hellenistic
period. 92
9.7 Ancient Science and Production
The considerations made so far allow certain conclusions and raise important
problems.
I think there can be no doubt about the importance that ancient science
and Hellenistic technology could potentially have had for production processes,
but in assessing the extent of the applications actually deployed in
89
Apprenticeship contracts specifying wages appear for example in Papyrus Oxyrhynchus 275
(A.D. 66), P. Oxy. 724 (A.D. 155), P. Oxy. 725 (A.D. 183), P. Oxy. 2977 (A.D. 239). Wage negotiations
in the imperial age are documented in P. Oxy. 1668, for example.
90
Papyrus Bremen 63; [Aubert], p. 107; [Minnen], pp. 62–63.
91
[Rostovtzeff: SEHHW], vol. II, pp. 1283–1288.
92
Some marriage, divorce and repudiation documents from the Hellenistic, imperial and late
ancient periods are collected in [SP], vol. I, pp. 2–30.
Revision: 1.4 Date: 2002/10/12 00:00:03