ABSTRACT
The only region of the late Roman world, east or west, for which sufficient documentary evidence exists to engage realistically in study of the agrarian economy and of agrarian social relations is Egypt, from which there survive valuable collections of documentary papyri. These papyri have revealed interesting and significant features of the late antique economy. The Oxyrhynchite Apion papyri constitute the single most extensive collection of sources relating to late antique great estates for any part of the post-Diocletianic Roman world. The rather more fragmentary papyrological collections concerned with the agrarian possessions of other Egyptian landowning families would suggest that the bipartite structuring of estates was not, however, unique to the Apions. The hypothesis proposed by Fustel de Coulanges in the late nineteenth century, that the early medieval bipartite manor was essentially a survival of pre-existing Roman estate structures, has been widely rejected.
