Introduction

The many thousands of papyri and ostraca surviving from this period, which are predominantly of routine administrative or legal content, allow us insight into the detailed working of the administrative and legal systems of Ptolemaic and Roman Egypt unparalleled by comparison both with earlier Egyptian history and with other parts of the Hellenistic and Roman world. During the Ptolemaic Period, both Demotic and Greek were regularly used for administrative and legal documents, although the Demotic texts are only recently being accorded their full weight alongside the Greek in historical studies (Manning 2003; Clarysse and Thompson 2006). The tendency for Greek to gain ground at the expense of Demotic for documentary use, already noticeable by the later Ptolemaic Period, accelerated sharply under Roman rule, so that our evidence for administration and law in the Roman Period is very largely written in Greek.

It is, however, not easy to form a balanced overall picture of how the administration and law operated, because the evidence is so patchy, being intensively concentrated (often in the form of ‘‘archives’’ or dossiers) in a few locations, and even there documenting only some specific procedures over a short time-span. Most of our evidence comes from the Fayum (named the Arsinoite nome from 257 bc) and parts of what the Roman administration termed the ‘‘Heptanomia,’’ the Nile valley nomes from the Hermopolite northwards. The Thebaid is reasonably well documented for the Ptolemaic Period (Manning 2003), much less so for the Roman and Late Roman Period, while the Delta, because of its high water table, has yielded only a few carbonized papyri. In particular, little papyrological evidence directly relates to Alexandria, which throughout the period under discussion here was the center of government, as well as much the largest city in Egypt. Our perspective on the central government and administration is, therefore, necessarily somewhat tangential and indirect.

Both the Ptolemies and Romans, like the Persians before them, in many respects maintained and worked with the pre-existing administrative and legal framework, progressively adapting it and introducing new elements as they perceived the need. Egypt’s distinctive geography and hydrology, unfamiliar to both Greeks and Romans, encouraged continuity and also suggested solutions which, even when not directly derived from earlier precedent, ran along similar lines. The continued tension between Egypt as a unitary state and the tendency for north and south to be split under different administrations (see Chapter 12 above) is a case in point: throughout our period the Thebaid formed a distinct administrative region, and in Late Antiquity it became a separate province. Greek penetration and settlement of this area initially made much less impact than further north, and the Ptolemaic state only slowly (in response to rebellion; Chapter 9 above?) assimilated its government to that of Middle Egypt and the Delta (Manning 2003: esp. 65-98).

However, the superficial continuities or similarities between many administrative offices and those of earlier periods hide fundamental shifts in overall conception and objective. Ptolemaic Egypt was part of a maritime empire which in its heyday stretched from Cyrene to encompass the Aegean, the Anatolian coast, Cyprus, Syria, and Phoenicia, governed from a Greek city, Alexandria, which lay at the extreme fringe of Egypt itself but occupied a central place within that hegemony, to which the horizons of the kings and their chief administrators were primarily orientated. The smooth and effective administration of Egypt was directed towards supplying the resources to facilitate their military, political and cultural competition with their rivals on this Mediterranean stage. While the Romans were no less concerned than their predecessors to tap Egypt’s vast wealth, their preferred methods for achieving this, to devolve much of the responsibility for both production and local administration onto an urban, Hellenized, landowning class based in the nome capitals, produced a much sharper break with Egypt’s past and greater assimilation to Rome’s other eastern provinces than scholars used to believe (see Chapter 10 above). The reforms of Diocletian and his successors around the turn of the third to fourth century AD at one level mark the culmination of this process of assimilation, but also, in fundamentally revamping the governmental and administrative system of the entire empire, introduces a further major turning point into the administrative history of Egypt.

It makes best sense, therefore, to divide this chapter chronologically (in contrast to Chapter 12), into sections on the Ptolemaic, early Roman, and late Roman periods. While the lack of clear differentiation between the administrative and judicial spheres noted in Chapter 12 remains true throughout the period covered here, and some discussion of law is integrated with that of administration, separate sections focusing on law follow the corresponding period of administration.