Apartheid

199
5.1. Tax unto Starvation
Ptolemaic Egypt manifests the most highly exploitative of all known systems of
oppression throughout antiquity 420 . During the so-called Dynastic period, ancient Egypt
between ca. 3100 BCE and 332 BCE, the taxes of common peasants amounted to around 10
per cent of their harvests, at least during the parts of the Dynastic period that we know. 421
Under Ptolemaic rule, however, taxes rose to at least 50 per cent of the harvest, sometimes
partly in order to line the pockets of corrupt tax-collectors, which in practice meant that
almost the entire indigenous population now had to live close to minimum subsistence levels,
if not actually below them. 422 The domestic economy of Egypt was in the process of
becoming monetarized when Alexander arrived, and many other taxes were levied on the
Egyptian peasants and services required of them, usually leaving Greek people exempt. In
short, ethnicity was ‘not only a social… but also a legal and political reality’. 423
Roman rule brought no relief for the Egyptians, rather the opposite:
Unfortunately...the profit principle proved no less irresistible to
Roman administrators, businessmen, and, all too soon, senators than it
had done to the Macedonians. The tradition, after all, was well
established. It had been what panhellenism was all about, as early as
the fourth century: a united ethnic crusade against the East, with
wealth and power as its objectives, cultural superiority (and Xerxes’
long-past invasion) as its justification. That had been the whole moral
basis of Alexander’s expedition, of the sharing of the spoils by his
successors. Material greed and racial contempt had been the fuel that
maintained Macedonians in power... 424
After the Romans had established themselves as rulers, the Egyptian farm labor had
two upper classes of foreigners in Egypt to supply, aside from delivering the largest share of
food for the city of Rome itself, which had by now become the first city in human history to
boast a population of over a million people. The greed and contempt manifested by the elites
are remarkable. The Graeco-Roman system remained one of taxation, rather than payment of
ethnically discriminatory low salaries, as most of the exploitation in South Africa and Israel
would be.
The bulk of the tax fell on the poorest of the population, with Roman
citizens and the citizens of the three Greek cities exempt. Priests of the
major temples were also spared, though in general the temples came
under increasing state control. . . . The weight of taxation became so
oppressive that there are appeals by the collectors to their supervisors
that whole villages have fled or been so impoverished they can no
longer pay. . . . At times of crisis the tendency was to increase the
oppression of the poor. The second century physician Galen, writing
on how disease spread among the poor, mentions in passing that at
times of famine the city dwellers would strip the local countryside of
its food, bringing starvation to its inhabitants. 425
420
Koch 1993: 488
421
Iliffe 1995: 20
422
Ibid: 26; Lewis, N. 1983: 23. This percentage was never again paralleled in colonial Africa, not even in the
equally productive semi-slave economies during the 19 th and early 20 th centuries CE, by which time
technological progress presumably would have made an even higher tax possible; cf. Iliffe 1995: 196ff, and
Gehrke 1990: 66.
423
Koenen: The Ptolemaic King as a Religious Figure, 1993: 35
424
Green 1990: 648. Xerxes was a Persian ruler who attempted but failed to conquer Greece in the fifth century
BCE.
425
Freeman, C.: Egypt, Greece and Rome: Civilizations of the Mediterranean, 1996: 439. Around one-third of
Rome’s entire wheat supply came from Egypt. See Clauss 2003: 84f; Iliffe 1995: 26; Lewis, N. 1983: 142, on the