Authors: Joyce Tyldesley
The vast majority of Auletes’s Egyptian subjects led lives that
would have been instantly recognisable to their earliest dynastic forebears. The bottom tier of their inflexible social pyramid was made up of the manual workers and peasants, the millions who lived in insignificant mud-brick villages and hamlets dotted along the Nile and the tributaries of the Delta, and who worked the land owned by the king, the temples and the elite. Illiterate and poor, these peasants have left many simple desert graves but few material remains and no writings, so, in consequence, we can say little about their lives and ambitions. We can, however, understand something of their work. Egypt’s phenomenal wealth derived from her abundant natural resources: the gold in the deserts, the papyrus in the marshes and, above all, the rich agricultural land. The Ptolemies had made some improvements – there were new iron tools, new crops, new harvesting policies, new methods of irrigation and vast tracts of newly reclaimed land in the Faiyum – but farming life continued much as it had for centuries. The late summer inundation was followed by an autumn sowing. The late spring/early summer harvest was followed by a dry season, when the hot sun baked the fields and sterilised the soil. Then the river burst her banks, the fields flooded and the cycle started all over again. We can get a flavour of this time-honoured, uniquely Egyptian rhythm by looking at the vivid agricultural scenes engraved on the private tomb walls of the Old, Middle and New Kingdoms.
Higher up the social pyramid came the skilled artisans and the educated scribes who lived in the towns and cities, and who made up what can loosely be defined as the middle class. Higher still came the elite: the high-ranking bureaucrats and the hereditary priests who worked closely with the new regime and who, having benefited from Ptolemaic generosity, used their private wealth to maintain Egypt’s religious and funerary traditions. Included among this group was the extended family of Egypt’s last native king, Nectanebo II, who had fled Egypt in 343.
The royal family occupied the final tier of the social pyramid, with
the king standing alone and untouchable at the peak. For 3,000 years the king of Egypt had been recognised as the chief priest of all cults, the head of the civil service and the commander of the army. Only the king could offer to the gods; only the king, through his offerings, could prevent Egypt from being overwhelmed by the sea of chaos that surrounded and constantly threatened his tightly controlled world. Unique and irreplaceable, he was a demigod in his lifetime and a full god at death; Egypt simply could not manage without him. Any king – an infant, a woman, even a foreigner – was considered better than no king at all, and it was understood that the official coronation ceremony could instantly convert a mere mortal into a powerful monarch. Recognising that this belief in the semi-divine kingship did much to keep them in power, and appreciating the need to please the still-powerful and deeply conservative Egyptian priesthood, the Ptolemies were always happy to be seen to be conforming to the royal tradition that distinguished Egypt from the rest of the world. However they dressed, spoke and thought at home, however much they ran Egypt as a profitable business, in public they appeared more traditionally Egyptian – building and restoring temples and reviving long-forgotten rituals – than the Egyptians themselves.
Egypt’s most venerable tourist supplies a lively account of this traditional Egyptian way of life. Herodotus of Halicarnassus (modern Bodrum, Turkey) visited northern Egypt some time after 450, at a time when Egypt, temporarily reconciled to Persian rule, was both peaceful and prosperous. An experienced traveller, he could not hide his astonishment at finding himself in a land where everything appeared contrary to the natural order of things:
Not only is the Egyptian climate peculiar to that country, and the Nile different in its behaviour from other rivers elsewhere, but the Egyptians themselves in their manners and customs seem to have reversed the ordinary practices of mankind. For instance,
women attend markets and are employed in trade, while men stay at home and do the weaving. In weaving the normal way is to work the threads of the weft upwards, but the Egyptians work them downwards. Men in Egypt carry loads on their heads, women on their shoulders; women urinate standing up, men sitting down. To ease themselves they go indoors, but eat outside in the streets, on the theory that what is unseemly but necessary should be done in private, and what is not unseemly should be done openly. No woman holds priestly office, either in the service of goddess or god; only men are priests in both cases. Sons are under no compulsion to support their parents if they do not wish to do so, but daughters must, whether they wish it or not … Men in Egypt have two garments each, women only one.
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Herodotus is by no means an infallible source. Culturally, he is unashamedly anti-Persian, pro-Greek and, up to a point, pro-Egyptian. He is prone to believing what he is told, no matter how unlikely, and he is attracted to tales of the strange and unexpected. Far from keeping an open mind, he contrasts all his experiences with the proper (i.e. Greek) way of doing things. Yet there is clearly more than a grain of truth in his writing. Egypt’s rainless climate was peculiar, and the river was undeniably strange; it flooded in summer, whereas normal rivers, as everyone knew, flooded in winter. And Egypt’s women, however they might choose to urinate, were definitely unusual when compared to the women in Herodotus’s own family. Egyptian women were free to live alone, and to own, inherit, buy and sell property. They could choose their own husbands, initiate a divorce and raise children without male interference. In marked contrast, Greek custom decreed that women should play a non-conspicuous role in society, living permanently under the protection of a male guardian. As Greek women never formally came of age they could never become legally competent; they had no independent political or social rights, no right to choose a husband and no rights over their own children. Family
circumstances permitting, Greek women were expected to remain indoors, providing for the family, guarding their chastity and weaving wool.
As an educated Greek, Herodotus would have arrived in Egypt with an inbuilt admiration for its ancient traditions, its scientific, magical and medical knowledge, and its gods. The Egyptians were barbarians, it was true, but unlike the Persians they were cultured barbarians worthy of respect, and Herodotus would have felt quite at home in a land where, even before the arrival of the Ptolemies, so many people were of Greek heritage. There were Greek mercenaries in the Egyptian army and navy, a sizeable Greek population in the northern cities, and one specifically Greek city, or
polis
, run on entirely Greek lines in the western Nile Delta. The city-port of Naukratis (modern Kom Ge’if) had been specifically developed to handle trade between Egypt and Greece; Herodotus tells us that the site was given to the Greeks by the 26th Dynasty king Ahmose II (570–526), although archaeological evidence shows Greek settlement at the site dating to at least sixty years earlier. As the only legal outlet for Greek merchandise in Egypt, Naukratis flourished, surviving the political and international upheavals that characterised the later dynasties and outliving the Ptolemies to serve as a trading centre throughout the Roman era.
Ptolemy I had encouraged large-scale Greek immigration, a policy that continued until the reign of Ptolemy V, when almost overnight the stream of new arrivals slowed to a trickle. In consequence, by the time Auletes took his throne Naukratis had been joined by a further two Greek cities. Alexandria, founded by Alexander the Great soon after the Macedonian conquest of Egypt, lay on the Mediterranean coast and was home to some 300,000 people, including the largest Jewish community outside Jerusalem. Ptolemais Hormou (modern el-Mansha, near Sohag), founded by Ptolemy I, lay near the ancient city of Thinis in Upper Egypt and served as a Greek regional capital
that might, it was hoped, provide a check to the notorious hot-headed nationalism of the southern Egyptians.
The early Ptolemies, who were by no means averse to imposing Greek-style rule on their colonies, had recognised the Egyptian bureaucratic system as one of the most competent in the world. Leaving the basic structure in place, they had ‘improved’ it by adding several more tiers of officials to the scribes and tax collectors already in place. An extract from an official document concerning an army enlistment, written in Memphis in February 157, shows just how unwieldy the bureaucracy had become:
… I received back the decree from Ptolemaios the memorandum-drafter and the letter from Epimenides. And I conveyed them to Isidoros … and from him I carried them to Philoxenos and from him to Artemon and from him to Lykos, and he made a rough draft, and I brought that to Sarapion in the office of the secretary and from him to Eubios and from him to Dorion, and he made a rough draft, and then back again to Sarapion. And they were handed in to be read to the chancellor and I received them back from Epimenides and I carried them to Sarapion and he wrote to Nicanor…
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Egypt was still divided into approximately forty traditional
nomoi
or nomes (administrative districts) run by local officials, but the nomes now had Greek rather than Egyptian names, so that the Middle Egyptian Hare nome, for example, became the Hermopolite nome.
8
Each nome had been under the authority of a nomarch, or local governor; the role of the nomarch was now taken over by a Greek
strategos
(literally ‘general’) appointed by the king. The
strategoi
themselves reported to an
epistrategos
.
As increasing numbers of educated Greeks arrived in Egypt, they started to take over the more important administrative posts, while the indigenous Egyptians retained the bulk of the menial and
unpleasant jobs, including all the jobs that in Greece would have been assigned to slaves. The king himself – an absolute ruler – was advised by official ‘friends’, who bore honorific kinship titles designed to stress their personal ties to the royal family, and by high-ranking hand-picked bureaucrats who were, of course, of Greek extraction. He was protected by a Macedonian bodyguard. This institutional racism rankled with the Egyptians, who recognised that they were quickly becoming second-class citizens in their own land. While many elite Egyptians retained their inherited positions, Greek gradually became the language of public life. Ambitious Egyptians were forced to become bilingual; Greeks, on the other hand rarely bothered to learn the notoriously difficult demotic Egyptian script. The decree issued by the priesthood at Memphis on 27 March 196, in honour of the anniversary of the accession of Ptolemy V, had to be published both in the Egyptian language (in two scripts) and in Greek so that all the king’s literate subjects could read it. A copy of this bilingual decree, engraved on the so-called Rosetta Stone, was to prove instrumental in Champollion’s
AD
1822 deciphering of the hieroglyphic script.
Many of the new arrivals chose to live insular, colonial lives in the self-governing Greek cities, where they hoped to maintain Greek traditions, marry fellow Greeks and avoid mixing with the Egyptians, whom, on the whole, they considered their social inferiors. Despite their self-imposed segregation, the city dwellers gradually succumbed to the influence of their adopted land, and we find increasing numbers of Greeks worshipping Egyptian gods, consulting skilled Egyptian doctors and abandoning cremation in favour of mummification. But by no means all the immigrants headed for the cities. The astute Ptolemy I, intent on extracting the maximum profit from his new land, encouraged Egypt-wide settlement by rewarding his loyal soldiers and senior civil servants with plots of land in the countryside (
chora
), spread throughout the valley, the Delta and the fertile Faiyum Oasis, which he gave either at a nominal rent or rent-free. This
tradition was continued until as many as 100,000 ex- and serving soldiers, plus unknown numbers of male civilians and accompanying women, were settled in the Egyptian countryside and in the reclaimed agricultural lands of the Faiyum (now known as the Arsinoite nome), where there was a thriving Greek culture.
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This system, superficially generous, ensured a maximum return from the land. The settlers enjoyed the right to cultivate their own fields; the state then levied a heavy tax on their produce and Egypt’s granaries filled with the wheat that underpinned the economy. Taxes – paid by everyone in Ptolemaic Egypt, be they producer, consumer or importer – were invariably high, and a constant cause of complaint. So much so that Ptolemy II had been forced to issue a decree forbidding lawyers to represent clients disputing their tax bill.
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Meanwhile, hand in hand with the development of a punitive tax regime went the development of state monopolies in the textile, papyrus and oil industries, the development of a centralised banking system and the development of a specific Egyptian coinage that replaced the traditional barter system and allowed the Ptolemies to make a profit on every foreign coin exchange. While most taxes were still collected in kind, those who offered services rather than goods could now look forward to paying monetary taxes on their income.
Mixed Greek-Egyptian marriages were forbidden in the Greek cities. But there were no restrictions in the
chora
and, as time went by, Greek settler families started to intermarry with the local Egyptians. Graeco-Egyptian families experienced a fusion of cultures: marriages were conducted along either Greek or Egyptian lines (often utilising a comfortable mixture of the two), and parents were happy to give their children a seemingly random mixture of names, making it almost impossible for modern Egyptologists to judge ethnicity on the basis of a personal name alone. Indeed, many Egyptians found it convenient to have two names, an Egyptian name that they used at home and a Greek name that they used at work. We now find some astute Greek
women making absolutely sure of their rights by employing the more ‘liberated’ Egyptian legal system, which allowed them all the privileges and responsibilities accorded to Egyptian women.