The Ptolemaic society was the society of the Ptolemaic Kingdom of Egypt, which existed from 305 to 30 BC, with Alexandria as its capital. The Ptolemies were a Greek dynasty who ruled over a majority-Egyptian country, and the Greeks and Egyptians lived in isolation from each other, with the Greek minority holding the monarchy and much of the aristocracy, and most Egyptians working as farmers and laborers. The society of Ptolemaic Egypt lasted until its conquest by the Roman Republic under Octavian in 30 BC.
History[]
Rise of the Greeks[]
Alexander the Great at the Siwa Oasis
The first Greeks in Egypt came as merchants and many more as mercenaries during the last centuries of an independent Egypt. The Pharaohs relied heavily on foreign professional soldiers, who were used against both foreign and domestic opponents, and they were not always popular among the native Egyptians due to their alien religions. In 332 BC, Alexander the Great came to Egypt, which the Persians were unable to defend. The Egyptians, who had no love for the Persians, welcomed Alexander as a liberator, and they were genuinely enthusiastic when he was named as pharaoh. Alexander made a long march into the western desert to reach the Temple of Amun at the Siwa Oasis, where the Oracle of Amun welcomed Alexander as Amun's son in a possible slip of hte tongue. Alexander also laid out and began the construction of Alexandria, the most important city founded by him in his own name. In the spring of 331 BC, when Alexander finally left Egypt after several months, he appointed Cleomenes to goverrn Egypt. In 323 BC, Ptolemy came to Egypt as satrap and had Cleomenes dismissed and executed, and, in 321 BC, his men intercepted Alexander's funeral cortege on its way to Macedonia, burying him at a specially-built tomb in Alexandria. Ptolemy himself wrote a detailed history of Alexander's campaigns.
Formation of the Ptolemaic Kingdom[]
Ptolemy began with relatively few soldiers, and he encouraged Greek and Macedonian immigrants to settle in Egypt. From the beginning, Alexandria was to be an overtly Greek city, with its own laws inspired by those of Athens. The Ptolemies rewarded their soldiers with plots of land known as cleruchies to give them a stake in the new regime, doing so quickly and on a generous scale; officers received more than ordinary soldiers, cavalry more than infantry. Their produce was taxed, but their main obligation was to serve in the king's army.
By the 3rd century BC, Egypt had a population as big as 7,000,000, with 500,000 living in Alexandria; a few other cities such as Memphis had populations of around 50,000, but most cities were smaller. The Ptolemies were less enthusiastic about founding cities than others of Alexander's successor states, and most people lived in villages along the Nile Delta and Valley. The Ptolemies developed the Faiyum to the west, creating irrigation systems around Lake Mareotis and elsewhere to make farming possible. Many cleruchies were established there, as were large estates leased to prominent and wealthy Greeks, and adding a third highly-populated area to the country. The development of the area had the advantage of increasing the scale of the harvest, which the king could tax, and he rewarded his osldiers and followers without having to evict large numbers of Egyptians from their land.
Egyptian life[]
Egypt's population remained overwhelmingly rural under the Ptolemies, and it was also overwhelmingly Egyptian. Even in the cleruchies, the bulk of the actual laboring was done by Egyptians, and there were very few slaves outside Alexandria. In many cases the cleruchs leased some or all of their land to tenant farmers, as military duty took the cleruchs themselves away, and many of them became absentee landlords living off rents.
Greeks remained a small minority throughout the rule of the Ptolemies, but it was impossible for the two communities to live in complete isolation. Scarcely any Egyptian words passed into Greek, and the two cultures remained strikingly separate over the centuries. There were separate Greek and Egyptian law codes with their own judges and courts, and individuals from one group could choose to have particular aspects of their life regulated under the other law code if it seemed advantageous; for instance, Greek families would use Egyptian law to allow for their daughters to inherit property.
There were many wealthy and influential Egyptians, with the Ptolemies spending heavily on temple building; the priests were men of considerable importance, acting as judges in cases involving Egyptian law. Other Egyptians served in the royal bureaucracy, which was large and complex, and had tax collection as its principal role. There were never enough Greeks to have provided all the necessary clerks and officials, and there were never enough of them capable of speaking the native language. As a result there were always large numbers of Egyptians at all levels of the administration and over time in the army as well, and many of them could read and write in both Greek and Egyptian, while often adopting Greek names for certain aspects of their life, while retaining their own names in other contexts. In the case of the late 2nd century BC village clerk Menches, he was fluent in both Greek and Egyptian, used his Egyptian name "Menches" over his Greek name "Asklepiades" due to his frequent dealings with fellow Egyptians, and styled himself a "Greek born in this land" despite his predominantly (or wholly) Egyptian descent.
There were some poor Greeks in Ptolemaic Egyptian and considerably more well-off Egyptians, most of whom adopted some aspects of Greek culture and employed the language for their public roles. The majority of Egyptians, however, were not especially wealthy and worked on the land, with some of them owning or leasing fields, and most being paid laborers. Some individuals moved in both communities and there was some intermarriage, but the separateness of the Greek and Egyptian communities endured. The Greeks were dominant, but the Egyptians complied and assisted them, allowing for them to govern and profit. The Ptolemies were first and foremost Greek kings who were never proven to have seen themselves as anything other than Macedonian Greeks, but they fulfilled the role of Pharaoh and supported the temples and their cults.