2025 Winner
Brendan Haug, Garden of Egypt: Irrigation, Society, and the State in the Premodern Fayyūm. (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 2024)
Available in open access: https://doi.org/10.3998/mpub.11736090
Garden of Egypt is an innovative work of environmental history, startlingly original in conception and execution, and, in a time of acute climate crisis, of more than academic relevance. Like the unique landscape of the Fayyūm depression on which it focuses, the breadth of Haug’s examination in chronological, linguistic, evidentiary, and socio-political terms is without parallel. Ranging from its pharaonic reclamation from the Birkat Qārūn, the lengthy era of Graeco-Roman occupation enabled by further Ptolemaic intervention, its early Islamic period, whose ongoing vitality is recorded in al-Nābulusī’s thirteenth-century Villages of the Fayyūm, and even extending into the nineteenth century, the approach to the Fayyūm is a holistic and synthesizing one, treating human interactions with the landscape on the basis of all the available evidence.
Throughout Garden of Egypt, a complicated nexus of relationships is traced and analyzed. The perennial water of the Baḥr Yūsuf is the story’s protagonist, but the ways in which it is (re)shaped and (re)conceived over the centuries – by the irrigation machinery that supplied and distributed it, the countless communities and villagers who both depended upon it and who competed for access to it, and the governments whose policies and judiciary regulated it – make this a study that is as interesting for the sociology of the premodern Fayyūm it brings to life as for the insights it sheds on the region’s administrative history.
Although the sources which inform the study are diverse, evidence drawn from antiquity’s papyrological legacy is at the heart of the book. Far from limiting its scope to general trends or evolving phenomena, the longue durée under examination is repeatedly animated by the vivid testimony of the Fayyūm’s premodern inhabitants, and the sociological phenomena pertaining to individuals’ relationships to water are grounded firmly in the documentary record. Disputes over water rights between particular villages, penthēmeros receipts documenting the ‘coordinated localism’ that distributed the responsibility for canal maintenance in a collective way, an order to dam a canal briefly (in the hope that the water’s subsequent release would irrigate properties further downstream), the collapse of Theadelphia’s population in the early fourth century – papyrological testimony for the manifold issues surrounding access to water in the Fayyūm peppers the book. Garden of Egypt is the history of a unique environment, yes, but especially of its inhabitation and its inhabitants across the centuries.
For the originality of its analyses of the relationships between individuals, communities, institutions, water, and the broader environment across more than a millennium of Egyptian history, we are delighted to honor Garden of Egypt with the inaugural 2025 American Society of Papyrologists Book Prize.
Jury: C. Michael Sampson (Chair), Brian McGing, Francisca A. J.Hoogendijk
2025 Brendan Haug, Garden of Egypt
2025 American Society of Papyrologists Book Prize
The ASP Book Prize is an annual award that recognizes an outstanding papyrological monograph or edition published by one of our members. It carries an honorarium of $1,500.
Brendan Haug, Garden of Egypt: Irrigation, Society, and the State in the Premodern Fayyūm. (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 2024)
Available in open access: https://doi.org/10.3998/mpub.11736090
Garden of Egypt is an innovative work of environmental history, startlingly original in conception and execution, and, in a time of acute climate crisis, of more than academic relevance. Like the unique landscape of the Fayyūm depression on which it focuses, the breadth of Haug’s examination in chronological, linguistic, evidentiary, and socio-political terms is without parallel. Ranging from its pharaonic reclamation from the Birkat Qārūn, the lengthy era of Graeco-Roman occupation enabled by further Ptolemaic intervention, its early Islamic period, whose ongoing vitality is recorded in al-Nābulusī’s thirteenth-century Villages of the Fayyūm, and even extending into the nineteenth century, the approach to the Fayyūm is a holistic and synthesizing one, treating human interactions with the landscape on the basis of all the available evidence.
Throughout Garden of Egypt, a complicated nexus of relationships is traced and analyzed. The perennial water of the Baḥr Yūsuf is the story’s protagonist, but the ways in which it is (re)shaped and (re)conceived over the centuries – by the irrigation machinery that supplied and distributed it, the countless communities and villagers who both depended upon it and who competed for access to it, and the governments whose policies and judiciary regulated it – make this a study that is as interesting for the sociology of the premodern Fayyūm it brings to life as for the insights it sheds on the region’s administrative history.
Although the sources which inform the study are diverse, evidence drawn from antiquity’s papyrological legacy is at the heart of the book. Far from limiting its scope to general trends or evolving phenomena, the longue durée under examination is repeatedly animated by the vivid testimony of the Fayyūm’s premodern inhabitants, and the sociological phenomena pertaining to individuals’ relationships to water are grounded firmly in the documentary record. Disputes over water rights between particular villages, penthēmeros receipts documenting the ‘coordinated localism’ that distributed the responsibility for canal maintenance in a collective way, an order to dam a canal briefly (in the hope that the water’s subsequent release would irrigate properties further downstream), the collapse of Theadelphia’s population in the early fourth century – papyrological testimony for the manifold issues surrounding access to water in the Fayyūm peppers the book. Garden of Egypt is the history of a unique environment, yes, but especially of its inhabitation and its inhabitants across the centuries.
For the originality of its analyses of the relationships between individuals, communities, institutions, water, and the broader environment across more than a millennium of Egyptian history, we are delighted to honor Garden of Egypt with the inaugural 2025 American Society of Papyrologists Book Prize.
Jury: C. Michael Sampson (Chair), Brian McGing, Francisca A. J.Hoogendijk