only a moderate proportion of the produce must have been left to the small tenants who provided it, or a high money-rent must have been imposed. But even the numerous, and as a rule smaller, owners must have paid a high land-tax in corn or in money. The agricultural population, contented as it was, remained probably numerous in the imperial period; but certainly the pressure of taxation, as well in itself as on account of the expenditure of the produce abroad, lay as a heavier burden on Egypt under the Roman foreign rule than under the by no means indulgent government of the Ptolemies. [Sidenote: Trades.] Of the economy of Egypt agriculture formed but a part; as it in this respect stood far before Syria, so it had the advantage of a high prosperity of manufactures and commerce as compared with the essentially agricultural Africa. The linen manufacture in Egypt was at least equal in age, extent, and renown to the Syrian, and maintained its ground through the whole imperial period, although the finer sorts at this epoch were especially manufactured in Syria and Phoenicia;[228] when Aurelian extended the contributions made from Egypt to the capital of the empire to other articles than corn, linen cloth and tow were not wanting among them. In fine glass wares, both as regards colouring and moulding, the Alexandrians held decidedly the first place, in fact, as they thought, the monopoly, in as much as certain best sorts were only to be prepared with Egyptian material. Indisputably they had such a material in the papyrus. This plant, which in antiquity was cultivated in masses on the rivers and lakes of lower Egypt, and flourished nowhere else, furnished the natives as well with nourishment as with materials for ropes, baskets, and boats, and furnished writing materials at that time for the whole writing world. What produce it must have yielded, we may gather from the measures which the Roman senate took, when once in the Roman market the papyrus became scarce and threatened to fail; and, as its laborious preparation could only take place on the spot, numberless men must have subsisted by it in Egypt. The deliveries of Alexandrian wares introduced by Aurelian in favour of the capital of the empire extended, along with linen, to glass and papyrus.[229] The intercourse with the East must have had a varied influence on Egyptian manufactures as regards supply and demand. Textiles were manufactured there for export to the East, and that in the fashion required by the usage of the country; the ordinary clothes of the inhabitants of Habesh were of Egyptian manufacture; the gorgeous stuffs especially of the weaving in colours and in gold skilfully practised at Alexandria went to Arabia and India. In like manner the glass beads prepared in Egypt played the same part in the commerce of the African coast as at the present day. India procured partly glass cups, partly unwrought glass for its own manufacture; even at the Chinese court the glass vessels, with