Since the Egyptians did not take censuses, unlike the Romans, attempting to determine one cannot say with any certainty how many slaves lived in Egypt during the New Kingdom. This is considerably less than his estimate that 1 out of 3 persons were slaves in the rest of the Roman Empire.
John Madden estimates that during the Roman Empire the slave population never rose above ten percent. Any attempt to do so is unfortunately largely speculative. Ĭonsidering the complications in estimating the population growth over time, and uncertainty about the number of foreigners who arrived in Egypt at different times and the extent to which they were integrated into the population, it is very difficult to determine the number of slaves living in Egypt at a given time precisely. David O’Connor puts the population during the New Kingdom at 2.9 – 4.5 million and as high as 7.5 million in Hellenistic and Roman Egypt.During the New Kingdom ( c. 1550-1069 B.C.E.), this leads to a population total of approximately 2.5 – 3 million. Karl Butzer estimates a generally steady growth from just under 1 million inhabitants in the Predynastic era ( 6000-3100 BCE) to over 5 million in Roman/Byzantine times ( c.30 BCE -640 CE).Guillemette Andreu has suggested that the population more than doubled from 850,000 at the start of the third millennium to over 2 million by 1800 B.C.E.This problem has long vexed scholars, who have offered wildly differing estimates of the population at different times: The absence of anything approaching a census or list of slaves in ancient Egypt (as opposed to ancient Rome) makes it difficult to arrive at a reasonable population estimate of slaves. There is no clear method with which to determine population of Egypt, let alone an accurate figure for the number of slaves in Egypt at any given point.
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