Cambridge Ancient Hi.. - Index of

the issues and the evidence 319
cannot tell, because these types of small transaction, vital though they
might be to the well-being of peasant households and to the smooth
running of the agricultural economy, do not show up archaeologically, and
are ‘below’ the level of information that is habitually recorded in documents.
5
In examining the life of the countryside with the scattered and partial
information available to us, the best we can do, then, is work with the constant
awareness that the data may be deceiving us, and in the certain
knowledge that new evidence and new theories will soon alter what we at
present believe. In 1953 Georges Tchalenko published a justly famous
survey of the late Roman villages of northern Syria, whose limestone
buildings are wonderfully preserved, and sometimes dated by inscriptions.
On the basis of these inscriptions, Tchalenko assumed, very reasonably,
that the villages were abandoned in the seventh century; and,
inspired by the Pirenne thesis, he constructed a hypothesis that they had
depended on the production of olive oil for the Mediterranean market (a
trade supposedly halted by the Arab invasion of the region in the 630s and
640s). However, subsequent excavation in one of these villages, Déhès,
has shown that although no new dated houses were constructed, the
buildings that were sampled continued to be inhabited right into the ninth
century. What is more, they were being used by people with enough
copper coins and pottery to suggest that they were still actively involved
in a vibrant regional economy. 6
Written evidence is also, as we have seen, very patchy, and may well be
equally deceptive. Until recently it was argued that the papyri from Egypt
supported the view (derived from the law codes) that late antique rural
society was dominated by the estates of the great and powerful, who used
their public and private might to hold their tenants in rigid subjection.
However, this impression was heavily dependent on the survival and study
of the estate documents of a single great family’s holdings around
Oxyrhynchus. Recently, attention has been drawn to the very different
picture that papyri from Aphrodito provide: here there was no single great
landlord, but rather a fiercely independent group of small and medium
landholders. 7 There is no way of knowing exactly how prevalent these two
very different situations were in late antique Egypt. But without the chance
survival and subsequent study of both these archives, we would naturally
jump to a single conclusion that was, in fact, incorrect.
5 We do, however, know that Egyptian monks earned money, for charity and for their institutions,
by working at the harvest, because several of their recorded sayings refer to this: The Sayings of the Desert
Fathers (Apophthegmata Patrum) (trans. B. Ward, 1975), ‘John the Dwarf ’ nos. 35 & 47; ‘Isaac of the Cells’
7; ‘Lucius’ 1; ‘Macarius’ 7; ‘Pior’ 1. 6 Tchalenko, Villages; Sodini et al. (1980) for Déhès.
7 Apion estates around Oxyrhynchus: Hardy (1931); Gascou (1985). Aphrodito: Keenan (1993) and
ch. 21c (Keenan), pp. 633,6 below.
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