Observations on the economy in kind in Ptolemaic Egypt

The opposition “economy in kind vs. cash economy” has often been used as a way to describe and represent the opposition of “Egyptians vs. Greeks”, especially in former studies on Ptolemaic economy. This opposition has been already criticized or attenuated in the last 20 years (Rathbone, Von Reden), especially in the revision process both of primitivism and modernism, yet it remains often a powerful key to a brief, but tricky, description of the economic life of Graeco-Roman Egypt. The aim of this paper is to reexamine some of the documents used as a proof of such counterpoise, regarding in particular the currency-function of wheat (Bingen, Gara-Foraboschi, Rowlandson), the apparently inconsistent regime of loans in money and in kind (Pestman, Vandorpe), the use of payments in kind for leases of land (Bingen). The revision should show how far the Egyptians, and the Greeks in the chora, led the knowledge of the opportunities given by the use of money and how much mixed up among Greeks and Egyptians it was.