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This chapter examines the nature and role of the elders of the public farmers (presbuteroi georgon) and the village elders (presbuteroi komes) at Bacchias and Karanis in the first two centuries of Roman rule (AD I-II), using the Greek papyri. Although geographically very close, lying by the same canal, these two villages were very different in historical and socio-economic terms, which makes a comparative investigation of their elders particularly interesting.

This paper examines the role of the state farmers, their organisation and changes as a village institution in Roman Egypt. Since the cultivation of public land in Roman Egypt constituted one of the major sources of the income for the province, it is not surprising that the state farmers, usually called demosioi georgoi (public farmers), were one of the most important groups of the rural population. As public land was usually cultivated through a hereditary lease, the rural population saw the plots which were attached to their villages as their own property. It was, therefore, a natural consequence that the state farmers became involved in the management of their village’s affairs and in doing so cooperated with the local administrative officials.

This chapter examines whether and in what ways legal practice differed in villages and metropoleis in Roman Egypt. A key question that will be asked if whether people living in villages and metroploeis could access the same legal instrumenta and if so, whether this involved higher costs for villagers. The focus will be the wills, since in both Roman law and local legal practice this type of document required a certain level of solemnity and had original character in comparison with other legal deeds.

This introductory chapter provides an overview of the book's main themes. This book aims to understand the role played by social capital in irrigation water management generally, and in the recent creation and operation of water users' organizations (WUOs) in Egypt in particular. It examines networks of social relationships and norms and their impact on the exercise of social control and collective irrigation water management practices in Egyptian villages. It focuses on four villages in the Kafr al-Sheikh (KSH) and Fayoum governorates in Egypt, looking at informal water user groups and formal WUOs over two time periods—the 1950s and 1960s, and the 1970s onward—to understand how they function and change over time. The book draws on two main concepts, social capital and community-based natural resource management, which are discussed in the remainder of the chapter.