Villages were the backbone of rural organization in Pharaonic Egypt. Inner solidarity and family ties are recorded in literary texts as well as by the use of certain terms, which highlight their “clanic” structure, at least from the New Kingdom on. The relations between villages, royal administration, and institutional centers like the temples or the domains of the crown enabled the rural elite to enhance their status and wealth, thus preserving inequalities while providing paths to social elevation. But specific village values centered on solidarity, the praise of fellow citizens, and the celebration of prominent local ancestors served to strengthen the communal ties of its members.

Deir el-Gabrawi, the most important Old Kingdom necropolis of the Upper Egyptian 12^th nome, is formed of two cliffs, the northern one near the village of Arab el-Atiyat and the southern one near the village of Deir el-Gabrawi. Its tombs date back to the late Old Kingdom, although an earlier chronology has been suggested. However, no trace of a contemporary town has yet been found. Later on, a late Roman locality called Hierakon and the quartering of a Roman cohort were built in its close vicinity, and the dead from these settlements were buried in the tombs of the old necropolis. A rather peculiar characteristic of Deir el-Gabrawi is that some local governors simultaneously controlled the 12^th as well as the 8^th Upper Egyptian nomes during the 6^th Dynasty.

Estates (also referred to as “domains”) formed the basis of institutional agriculture in Old Kingdom Egypt. Estates were primarily administered by the temples or by state agricultural centers scattered throughout the country, but were also granted to high officials as remuneration for their services. Sources from the third millennium BCE show that estates constituted production networks where agricultural goods were produced, stored, and kept available for agents of the king who were traveling on state business.

The household was the basic unit of the Egyptian social organization, but its composition varies depending on administrative or sociological considerations: administrative records focus on nuclear families while private sources stress the importance of the extended family. Households included people linked by family ties but also serfs, clients, dependants and “friends”, sometimes encompassing hundreds of persons. As for their sources of wealth, they consisted of patrimonial and institutional goods, and household strategies tried to keep and enlarge them within the family. Nevertheless, menaces like debts, shortages or disputes over inheritances could lead them to their disappearance. Hence the importance of ideological values which tied together their members while celebrating their cohesion, autonomy and genealogical pride.

Land donations are frequently attested in the written record of ancient Egypt. Used by the king asa means to recompense and honor high dignitaries, civil servants, and temples, they were in no waya royal prerogative. Private individuals also donated land both to temples and royal statues, whichappears to have been a social and economic strategy to strengthen their links with the monarchyand with powerful patrons. In other cases, enough evidence reveals that such donations sought topreserve individual patrimonies from the interference of their owners’ kin. Temples figure at thecore of land donations, especially as beneficiaries of the king’s largesse and of private endowments;their position as local centers of power and authority and their role as heads of patronage networksexplain why they received so many donations of land during the Third Intermediate Period andunder the Saite rule, when political insecurity and state rebuilding made them privileged tools forthe protection of the patrimonies of the elite.

Microhistory is a rather ambiguous term, usually referring to the lives, activities, and cultural values of common people, rarely evoked in official sources. In the case of ancient Egypt, both the urban and village spheres provide some clues about the existence, social relations, spiritual expectations, and life conditions of farmers, craftspersons, and “marginal” populations (such as herders), and also about “invisible” elites that played so important a role in the stability of the kingdom. In some instances, exceptional archives (the Ramesside tomb-robbery papyri, Papyrus Turin 1887, recording the “Elephantine scandal,” and the thousands of ostraca recovered at Deir el-Medina) cast light on the realities of social life, in which crimes and reprehensible practices appear quite common. In other cases, structural archaeological evidence reveals the harsh conditions under which many Egyptians lived and died. Finally, small private archives, often associated with temple activities, reveal how some individuals managed to thrive and to follow personal strategies that enabled them to accumulate moderate wealth. Microhistory clearly has a role to play in Egyptology in balancing the information provided by official texts, with their biased perspectives of the social order and cultural values prevailing in the Nile Valley.

Agricultural productivity, and its variation in space and time, plays a fundamental role in many theories of human social evolution. However, we often lack systematic information about the productivity of past agricultural systems on a large enough scale in order to be able to test these theories properly. The effect of climate on crop yields has received a great deal of attention resulting in a range of empirical and process-based models, yet the focus has primarily been on current or future conditions. In this paper, we argue for a “bottom-up” approach that estimates productivity, or potential productivity based on information about the agricultural practices and technologies used in past societies. Of key theoretical interest is using this information to estimate the carrying capacity of a given region, independently of estimates of population size. We outline how explicit crop yield models can be combined with high quality historical and archaeological information about past societies, in order to infer the temporal and geographic patterns of change in agricultural productivity and potential. We discuss the kinds of information we need to collect about agricultural techniques and practices in the past, and introduce a new databank initiative we have developed for collating the best available historical and archaeological evidence. A key benefit of our approach lies in making explicit the steps in the process of estimating past productivities and carrying capacities, and in being able to assess the effects of different modelling assumptions. This is undoubtedly an ambitious task, yet promises to provide important insights into fundamental aspects of past societies, and will enable us to test more rigorously key hypotheses about human socio-cultural evolution.