Kom Abou Bellou is located halfway between Cairo and Alexandria, two kilometres west of the current Rosetta branch of the Nile. Despite early interest in the site and its good general state of conservation, it has remained largely ignored. Work undertaken in 2013 at Kom Abou Bellou reassesses our knowledge of the territory. The space, which includes the city, is considered over the long-term chronology to facilitate an analysis of the city and its space from the point of view of its internal organisation, its functions and its relation with its natural, political and socio-economic environment. The site has been occupied from the Old Kingdom until at least the tenth century CE. Diachronic study makes it possible to highlight the phenomena of creation, modification and appropriation of this space, notably the displacement of the settlement according to the periods and the reuse of previously occupied spaces. These transitions provide many examples that allow us to observe changes in the urban system and, more broadly, data on the land use patterns and the perception of space. This chapter aims to present the first reflections on this matter, which will be expanded as the archaeological site and its documentation are studied.

This chapter discusses the history of the Nile Delta during the periods of Persian and Macedonian rule, as demarcated by the journey of Herodotus in the middle of the fifth century BCE and Strabo’s stay in the wake of the prefect Cornelius Gallus. The four centuries separating the two journeys were marked by a major event: the foundation and emergence of Alexandria. While Herodotus provides the description of a polycentric Delta, composed of a dozen large cities, Strabo’s description is dominated by the presence of Alexandria. Yet, however momentous, the Alexandrian history does not summarise that of the whole Delta. The development of the Eastern Delta is marked both by increased militarisation and by the strengthening of trade and economic relations between Egypt, the Levant and the Arabian Peninsula. Located far from the eastern military rampart but also away from the western capitals, the role of the Memphis area was gradually reduced by the development of east–west transversal routes converging on the Canopic branch, where the political nucleus of Egypt was located. Finally, the Western Delta was a political centre long before Alexandria, with ongoing connections to the history of the Libyan desert.

Chapter 5 builds the case that, in order to better facilitate the collection of agricultural taxes, the Hieronian state brought about the standardization of volumetric measurement throughout southeastern Sicily during the course of the third century BCE.

In the chapters that form the first part of the book, I asked the reader to view the monarchy of Hieron II as one fundamentally akin, in both principle and practice, to the forms of autocratic rule familiar to us from the Successor kingdoms of the eastern Mediterranean. The surviving evidence – both literary and material – offers clear witness to the flexible approach taken by Hieron and his court in service of legitimating his political authority over the cities of southeastern Sicily. Moreover, it reveals that the modes of communication and display emanating from the royal capital at Syracuse were fashioned in a manner receptive to contemporary trends taking place in the courts of the Successor kings. We see this, for instance, in Hieron’s early efforts to wrap his claims of legitimate political authority in the cloak of military power, grounded in demonstrable success on the battlefield.

Chapter 8 considers how the consolidation of royal authority impacted the agricultural and economic landscapes of southeastern Sicily, paying particular attention to the ways in which the tithe administration may have fostered trade and economic prosperity for the cities of the kingdom.

Chapter 6 takes as its focus the remains of two aboveground granaries that once stood in the agora of Morgantina, one of the cities that recognized Hieron’s authority as king. After a brief discussion of the buildings’ architectural form and function, the chapter explores where the Morgantina granaries fit within the corpus of known Hellenistic granary buildings and goes on to argue they played a central role in the projection of Hieron’s royal authority at the western edges of his kingdom.

Alarming decreases in cotton production have been reported over the last three decades due to neoliberal agrarian policies, agribusiness and shrinking areas of cultivatable land, among other factors. These changes underline the importance of creating an archive of knowledge about the production of cotton. Its history, the role of the state and the forms of hierarchical and exploitative divisions of labour need to be reconstructed and recalled as an exercise in nurturing the collective memory, for they are currently suffering a pervasive process of memory erasure by the powers that be. This short chapter is, in a way, an appendix to my book The Cotton Plantation Remembered (2013). It focuses on some ten documents derived from account books of the Fuuda family’s ‘izba located in Balamun in the Nile Delta, which accumulated wealth by acquiring massive tracts of agricultural land during the second half of the nineteenth century. This chapter is an attempt at attesting and reviving the significance of these account books for an alternative historical reading of such estates, as well as for rethinking what constitutes an archive.

Chapter 4 focuses on an institution central to the administration of the Hieronian state: the agricultural tithe collected annually from the cities subject to Hieron’s authority.

Cartography can help us understand how European knowledge of the topography and toponymy of the Delta has evolved over the centuries; however, we must be aware of the intellectual, social, religious and economic conditions under which maps were produced. Their content is far from exclusively geographic and the same map could show many levels of miscellaneous knowledge. Often, no European traveller had ever seen the cities drawn on the map. Consequently, before the nineteenth century, maps of Egypt and the Delta were unstable and contradictory – different maps expressed different Deltas, different representations of the world. The maps discussed in this chapter will paint a picture – a necessarily uncertain, shifting and composite picture – of knowledge acquired on the north of Egypt. This chapter will hopefully be a useful tool for understanding the evolution of European knowledge of the Delta and the research conducted in different places. By providing a list of the main documents, both cartographic and textual, relevant to the evolution of the cartography of the Delta, I hope to make place-specific research possible for those who wish it. It will also allow us to better understand what a thirteenth- or eighteenth-century map can say and not say.