The Porphyry Mountains

On 21st of July AD 18, a Roman geologist discovered porphyry. Porphyry is a magic stone, dark purple in colour, and the emperors immediately fell in love with it and demanded to have it in huge quantities. There was only one problem: it is only found in one of the most inhospitable places on earth, high up in the eastern deserts of Egypt, five days' from the Nile. A huge quarrying operation was set up at two sites- MonsPorphyrites itself and nearby at Mons Claudianus, which produced a superb black marble. the columns were quarried high-up on the mountain side - the picture shows a column that broke and was left in position. They were then dragged down the mountain side, 70 miles across the desert to the Nile, then shipped down the Nile, and across the Med to Rome.

The recent excavations have not only revealed the well-preserved quarries and the dwelling places of the quarry men, but have also revealed thousands of ostraca, that is potsherds with inscribed messages, that provide fascinating details of how the quarrying took place, and of how the quarrymen ordered their food - some for themselves, some for their wives on the Nile.

And there were no slaves. Everyone assumed that such mines were worked by slaves, but when all food has to be imported, slaves are too inefficient, and the work was done by highly paid, skilled workers. The story of Roman slavery will have to be re-written.

(Right. View to the peak of the Porphyry mountain, with the high village in the foreground, and the quarries just visible at the top).

No slaves!

How far did the Roman empire depend on slaves? Marxist theology sees slaves as being the essential component of Roman imperialism, and it was widely expected that quarries such as Mons Claudianus would have been worked by slaves - indeed that is one of the main reasons why the project was established in the first place.

However the big surprise is that there were no slaves: among the most important finds from the sites were numerous ostraka - sherds of broken pottery which were used as a writing material on which all the daily details of life in the mines were recorded - such as that shown here.

These record life in the greatest detail: since all food had to be imported from the NiIe - 5 days camel ride away - there are listings of the total number of people on camp - over 1000, as well as instructions from the workers as to how their monthly wages were to be spent - and how much was to be paid to their wives back on the Nile. The workers were very well paid - in these conditions, it was necessary to pay well to attract the best workers.

And none of them were slaves: there may be an exception for the familia Caesaris, the imperial bureaucrats, who ran the organisation. Their status is controversial, and some of them may have been technically slaves; if so, they were very superior slaves, for it was they who gave the orders as to how the workmen should be deployed.

The ostraka from Mons Claudianus - over 9,000 in all - are still being studied, but it is clear that the extent of slavery has been grossly exaggerated - not least by the Romans themselves, for the aristocrats on whose writings we depend, did probably not differentiate too closely between a slave and a highly skilled free workmen - and it was the latter who ran the Roman empire.