50 3 Carbonized loaf of bread, Boscoreale (Italy), 1st century CE, Boscoreale, Antiquarium. The intense heat generated during the eruption of Vesuvius in 79 CE carbonized organic fibres, thereby at least preserving their shapes. This loaf provides rare insights into the highly standardized Roman production of bread, in which bread moulds were used. The current war in Ukraine illustrates the fragility of the dependency on food resources: the disruption of harvests and the interruption of transport routes severely disrupted global wheat transport chains (fig. 4). The securing of agricultural land and trade routes has therefore always been a central task usually carried out by state institutions. From the 16th century onwards, securing the supply and correct storage of grain was an important aspect of legitimizing the rule of the Russian tsars (p. 97). In ancient Athens in the 5th century BCE, merchants who supplied large amounts of wheat in wartime could be awarded honorary citizenship. The political rise of the general Pompey in 1st-century BCE Rome was due in part to his victories against the pirates who were severely disrupting trade routes in the Mediterranean. The storage of grain is of great importance for the food supply of the population. It was usually the responsibility of the authorities or the ruler, sometimes also of large landowners or merchants. Control over the storage and distribution of supplies according to the principle of redistribution was an important factor in the creation of asymmetrical dependencies, both among the Maya and in the Near East or in Egypt. The biblical story of Joseph in Egypt is emblematic (see p.98): Joseph, who had been enslaved, was able to correctly interpret Pharaoh’s dream of seven lean and seven fat cows as a sequence of seven years of abundance followed by seven years of famine. As a result, Joseph was made vizir, i.e. the chief administrator of Egypt, and put in charge of the granaries; he was able to alleviate famines by distributing grain (fig. 5). It seems that Egypt’s granaries were still well filled in the hellenistic period: King Ptolemy III, for example, sent over 30,000 tonnes of grain to the strategically important Greek city of Rhodes after it was hit by an earthquake in 227 BCE.1 In Rome at the time of Augustus, 200,000 people – around one third of the population – received their grain for free. The purpose of this grain dole, known as
RkJQdWJsaXNoZXIy MTMyNjA1