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Abstract
The article challenges Karabacek’s and Grohmann’s classic thesis that the Abbāsid state maintained a monopoly over all Egyptian papyrus production. As demonstrated here, there is no evidence for state monopoly. Documents show that the Abbāsids maintained a contract with Egyptian papyrus producers which secured a high price for the producers in return for the best quality papyrus. There is neither evidence nor reason to believe that this contract was forced on the manufacturers by the government. Another free market provided lower quality papyrus at lower prices.
Abstract
This paper is about wages and work life in Early Islamic Egypt. Its methodology is essentially historical rather than philological. It contains no new editions but rather relies on the work of other papyrologists. This research is, therefore, not so much a work of discovery as of collation, synthesis, and analysis. One of the major criticisms of Arabic papyrology is that it is too philological. Papyrologists spend a lot of time locating and editing texts, but they don’t do much with them in terms of historical interpretation. Their scope is too narrow and their work too technical to serve the purposes of the larger historical community, or so the critics contend. This paper attempts to address that criticism.