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f i ve THE DINAR JAYSHI AND AGRARIAN OUTPUT IN ENGLAND AND EGYPT Historians of Egypt have made several attempts to evaluate the overall output of Egypt’s agrarian economy before and after the Black Death. Yet there remain many unanswered questions, and some rather dramatic errors that need correction. This chapter will provide new answers to some of the mysteries. The analysis here will also pose new questions and attempt to restructure some of the methodological approaches to the economic history of Egypt. The 1315 cadastral survey (rawk) conducted by Sultan al-Nasir Muhammad provides us with an excellent starting point for the quantitative section of this study. Despite Heinz Halm’s outstanding work on the information provided by Ibn al-Jian and Ibn Duqmaq, the survey remains a valuable, though relatively neglected source for the macroeconomic history of Egypt at this time.1 It is no exaggeration to say that without this source the arguments presented here would remain purely speculative. The 1315 survey offers the best opportunity to get an accurate figure for the agrarian output of Egypt before the plagues. Not only does it give a record of the land area and the relative value of each village in Egypt, but we also know from fourteenth-century sources that this particular survey was conducted with special attention given to accuracy and precision. Tsugitaka Sato has studied the planning and execution of this survey in detail and has concluded that it was carried out under the close supervision of amirs and administered by experts in the lower echelons of the landholding bureaucracy.2 Ibn Mammati’s work of the late Ayyubid period provides a glimpse of procedures used for surveying lands and illustrates the sophistication of the techniques that were employed by the specialists in land management.3 67 t h e b l a c k d e a t h i n e g y p t a n d e n g l a n d 68 Accurate values for the 1315 survey can be established using several methods. The first method of approximation used here will employ the dinar jayshi. The land values for the vast majority of the villages are listed in a money of account known as dinar jayshi. The exact value of the dinar jayshi has always been somewhat of a mystery to historians. It is hoped that the analysis here will finally solve this mystery and, in doing so, explain why the definition of the dinar jayshi has remained so elusive. Some historians of Egypt have accepted a value, quoted in the Mamluk chronicles, of 13.3 dirhams for the dinar jayshi. They have generally accepted this figure as a rough approximation and have been unable to verify its accuracy. Other historians have arrived at different approximations without achieving any scholarly consensus.4 I will argue here that 13.3 is indeed a very reliable value for 1315. However, this value applies only to the period up to 1315 and not to any period following the cadastral survey conducted that year. A vital piece of information needed to establish the 1315 value of the dinar jayshi lies in the mid-twelfth century, some one hundred and fifty years before the 1315 land survey. Sato, in his study of the Egyptian landholding system, discusses the genesis of the dinar jayshi. It was first used in 564/1169 and was then called the dinar qaraqushi. This is a critical piece of evidence, because this precursor was not only intended to equal 131⁄3 dirhams, but also deliberately calculated to reflect the value of an ardabb (a unit of volume) made up of an average of the value of wheat, barley, and broad beans.5 These three crops were the most abundant sources of sustenance in Egypt, particularly for urban residents (although this was less true for the peasants). They were beyond doubt the principal focus of the urban-rural bureaucracy that collected rent from the countryside, and their value reflected that of the surplus-extraction most accurately. Seen in this light, 131⁄3 dirhams, which was the original value of the dinar jayshi, can be viewed in context: it was a money of account that reflected the value of the predominant crops in Egypt. As such, it was a highly useful accounting device when the bureaucracy and the sultanate had a clear understanding of conditions in the rural areas of Egypt. In the political and economic...

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