ABSTRACT
Bent Hansen begins with the northern Delta, where the peasant had a permanent plot, taxation was in cash and crops were small, and the Valley, where plots were allocated annually, taxation was mainly in kind and crops were heavy. All peasants, in consequence, were ‘desperate to avoid’ the state of landlessness which would oblige them to depend upon employment of this kind. The system of basin irrigation which applied to the Nile Valley from Aswan to the southern half of the Delta required local management but not central control until the progressive introduction of permanent irrigation in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. The undoubted growth of a Muslim element on the peasant population during the ‘Abbasid period nevertheless combined with the continual migration of the peasantry in search of better terms within the area of basin irrigation, and with the spread of the great estates of the Arab nobility, to change the fiscal system.
