According to the later Greek writer Arrian, whose history of Alexander’s conquests uses Ptolemy I’s own account and reflects its perspectives, Alexander the Great divided the civil administration of Egypt between two Egyptians, Doloaspis and Petisis, as nomarchs, but, when Petisis declined the office, Doloaspis (whose name is actually Persian rather than Egyptian) held sole charge. Various Macedonians and Greeks were put in command of the military forces, and Kleomenes, a Greek from Naukratis in the Delta, obtained financial authority and later overall governorship of Egypt (with the Persian title ‘‘satrap’’: Holbl 2001: 12), under instructions to ‘‘allow the nomarchs to govern their own districts in accordance with ancient tradition’’ while handing the tax revenues to Kleomenes (Arrian 3.5). This careful disposition soon foundered on Kleomenes’ rapacity and Alexander’s sudden death, but its basic principles survived when Ptolemy established his own rule (quickly eliminating the unpopular Kleomenes), notably the division of civil, financial and military authority, the partial continuity with earlier administrative practice, and the inclusion of both native and immigrant personnel into the system of government.
As in the other Hellenistic kingdoms, the ‘‘central government’’ essentially consisted of a small group of personally chosen ‘‘friends’’ (philoi) of the King, who acted collectively as an advisory council and individually in capacities such as generals, admirals, ambassadors, and secretaries for private correspondence (the epistologra-phos) and official memoranda (the hypomnematographos). These men were by origin overwhelmingly Greek or Macedonian (although a few Egyptians are now being identified), and, while some are known from the papyri to have been granted doreai (gift estates) in the Egyptian countryside, the main focus of their activities lay in maintaining Alexandria’s relations with the Greek world (Rowlandson 2007b). Even Apollonius, the dioiketes, head of the internal administration under Ptolemy II, about whom we are relatively well informed thanks to the survival of his agent Zenon’s vast archive (Edgar 1931: 5-26; see ch. 9), in addition to his tours ofinspection of Egypt also wielded great influence in the overseas territories (e. g. Sel. Pap. II 267: Calynda in Caria; P. Lond. VII 1948: his estate in Palestine). Alexandria was governed by its own city magistrates, supervised by a royal official, and inevitably the presence of the royal court overshadowed its independence (Fraser 1972: 93-131).
Ptolemy I’s decision to found only one further Greek polis in Egypt (Ptolemais in the Thebaid), instead establishing his military and other immigrant settlers mainly in rural communities in close proximity to the Egyptian population, had consequences for the administrative system as profound as it had for the development of Ptolemaic society in general (cf. Ch. 9). The military character of the early settlement introduced elements of military organization into the civil administration of the nomes, most notably the office of strategos (‘‘general’’), whose competence soon expanded from responsibility over the kleruchs (soldier-settlers) to matters also concerning the civilian population, both Greek and Egyptian. In some of the earliest Ptolemaic papyri from the Herakleopolite nome, we find him acting as a judge in a civilian context (P. Hibeh I 92, 93, from 263/2 and c.250 Bc), and from 222-218 bc there survives a large group of around one hundred petitions, all addressed to the King but handled in practice by the strategos of the Arsinoite nome, Diophanes (Lewis 1986: 56-68 introduces and translates a selection). By the late third century the strategos had become the head of the nome administration in Middle and Lower Egypt (see below on the Thebaid), a position which persisted for over five centuries to the third century AD. This rapid expansion of the effective competence of the strategos was probably less the result of deliberate policy than of the inevitable influence wielded by a figure backed by military authority and with direct access to the King (the later judicial role of Roman centurions is a partial parallel; see below).
Papyrological evidence for administration is almost entirely lacking, especially in Greek, until the 260s bc. This reflects less the chances of survival (private documents and tax receipts in Demotic survive in fair numbers) than the transitional nature of the first two generations of Ptolemaic rule in Egypt. There are two aspects to this. Firstly, the major development of the Fayum, the area which supplies most of our Greek evidence, is a phenomenon of the middle, rather than the early, third century; the same is probably true of the kleruchic settlement of the adjacent Herakleopolite and Oxyrhynchite nomes. Secondly, the early Ptolemaic regime was seriously short of administrative personnel capable of writing Greek. Papyrologists can detect from the use of a rush rather than the normal Greek reed pen (as well as from characteristic idiosyncrasies of spelling and grammar) when a Greek document has been written by an Egyptian scribe, a phenomenon which suggests the systematic retraining of the Egyptian scribal class to operate also in Greek (Clarysse 1993; Thompson 1992a, 1992b). This incidentally brought them, as well as their teachers, the tax privileges of ‘‘Hellenic’’ status, like the scribe Petechonsis, son of Imouthes, who probably served as a topogrammateus, a district administrator (Clarysse and Thompson 2006: II 144).
Only by the middle decades of the century was the Ptolemaic administration fully taking shape. The famous ‘‘Karnak ostrakon,’’ a Demotic version of a royal order for a comprehensive audit, nome by nome, of Egypt’s land and its produce and tax yield, dates from 258 bc; how novel this was is unclear on present evidence (Clarysse and Thompson 2006: II16, on Bresciani 1983; English trans. Burstein 1985 no. 97), but from around the same date comes our earliest evidence for the salt-tax (a form of poll tax) and the census procedures on which it was based, as well as royal orders for the registration of livestock and slaves in the overseas territories of Syria and Phoenicia (Clarysse and Thompson, ibid.). This looks like an attempt at greater systematization of government more than just the chance survival of evidence.
Much of the Greek administrative evidence from this period consists of informal correspondence between officials (often identified by name rather than by the offices they held), from which it is easier to detect their practical day-to-day concerns, notably maintaining order and facilitating agricultural production and government revenue, than to fit the various elements together into a coherent bureaucratic system. One surprising feature to emerge from the census records is the large number of policemen, who composed on average over 3% of the adult population (Thompson 1997; the proportion in modern England is 0.7%), a prominence borne out by the administrative correspondence.
Especially in the initial phases, the administration was more pragmatic than rigidly hierarchical; what counted most was personal influence with the King and his ministers, and influence remained a crucial lubricant of the system even when it had matured and acquired greater homogeneity. One attempt to make sense of the system is Falivene’s (1991) division of some of the numerous offices into three groups, based respectively on the Greek linguistic roots arch - (govern),graph/gramm - (write), and oik - (house) (see table 13.1). Of these groups, the first two were adapted from
Source: Developed from Falivene 1991
Egyptian precedents, and were still perceived as ‘‘Egyptian’’ through the Ptolemaic Period; their holders predominantly had Egyptian names (whatever their actual ethnic ancestry; Clarysse 1985). The last group, by contrast, were seen as strongly Greek, being concerned with managing Egypt as the King’s private estate or household (oikos), and precedents for the terms can be found in earlier Greek contexts. However, although scholars no longer see the dioiketes as derived from the earlier vizier ( tjaty; see Chapter 12), the use of senti as the Egyptian equivalent shows that the office also had a Late Period Egyptian precedent (Yoyotte 1989).
A particular source of confusion for scholars is the title ‘‘nomarch,’’ which was demonstrably used for officials at very different levels. In addition to the two nomarchs mentioned by Arrian, who were each responsible for half of Egypt, we also find nomarchs in charge ofwhole nomes, while others dealt with sub-divisions of nomes, called ‘‘nomarchies.’’ In the Fayum these district nomarchs were entirely superseded by toparchs after 230 bc (to reappear in the Roman Period, with purely fiscal responsibilities), but elsewhere they are found throughout the Ptolemaic Period. Perhaps influenced by Greek literary usage, and uncertainty over whether to trace its etymology to ‘‘nome’’ or to the verb nemein (‘‘distribute’’), ‘‘nomarch’’ thus appears as an all-purpose term which could refer to officials with different Egyptian titles and functions (Falivene 1991; Derda 2006: 63-70 usefully summarizes the issues).
A major task for the royal administration was the regulation of agricultural production and taxation. The role of officials in supervising economic activity and revenues emerges clearly from the so-called Revenue Laws of Ptolemy II, a text which inter alia regulated the manufacture of oils and the apomoira tax on vine and orchard produce. The instructions for the apomoira were addressed by the King to all the ‘‘strategoi, [hipparchs (= cavalry commanders)], officers, nomarchs, [toparchs], oikonomoi, antigrapheis, basilikogrammateis (= royal scribes), Libyarchs and chiefs of police’’ (col. 37, trans. Austin 1981: no. 235; cf. 236; Bingen 2007: 157-205; see ch. 17). Characteristically, we see the royal administration using a range of military, civilian, and police personnel in combination. The oikonomoi and antigrapheis (checking-clerks) who closely supervised the farmers and private-enterprise tax contractors also kept an eye on one another, while lists of the land and its produce were drawn up separately by the royal scribes.
Another key text for understanding the nature of Ptolemaic administration is a lengthy set of instructions probably from a dioiketes to an oikonomos (P. Tebt. III 703, dating from the 240s or later; tr. Austin 1981: no. 256).
During your tours of inspection, try as you go around to cheer each man up and make him in better spirits; and do this not only in word, but also, if any of them complain about the village scribes or komarchs concerning anything bearing on agriculture, investigate, and as far as possible put an end to such incidents. (lines 40-9)
Its moral and rhetorical tone places it in the tradition of earlier Egyptian instructions on the proper conduct of officials (Crawford 1978; cf. Ch. 12 above on the Duties of the Vizier), but the ruler’s role in providing justice and protection for the common man against the potential rapacity of intermediate officials was an element of both Egyptian and Hellenistic Greek kingship ideology. A conscientious oikonomos was a busy man; in addition to the duties specified in the Revenue Laws, this text instructs him to inspect canals and watercourses, oversee the crops from the sowing to the transport of the harvest to Alexandria, register all the cattle and inspect the calf-byres, inspect the production of linen, audit the revenues of every village, if possible, and pursue any deficits, oversee prices, take care that trees are planted correctly, report the condition of royal houses and gardens, restore order to the countryside, prevent extortion, steer clear of bad company, and avoid all evil collusion!
The series of rebellions and civil wars which afflicted Egypt from Ptolemy IV’s reign onwards undermined administrative efficiency and allowed malpractice to flourish. Among the measures to secure Ptolemaic control over the Thebaid after the great rebellion of 207-186 was the creation of a new office based at Ptolemais in Upper Egypt, the epistrategos, first certainly attested in 185, and later often held jointly with that of strategos of the Thebaid (Thomas 1975b). From the 130s there were probably two epistrategoi operating concurrently in the chora (i. e. Egypt excluding Alexandria), although their respective spheres are still disputed by scholars (Mooren 1984; Van’t Dack 1988). Eventually, by the first century, strategoi are found governing individual nomes in the Thebaid, as had long been the case further north. Some of these late Ptolemaic strategoi are well-known from statues and Greek and Egyptian inscriptions; they came from local Egyptian families, and the office was often passed down, in traditional Egyptian style, from father to son (e. g. the family of Pachom at Dendera: De Meulenaere 1959; compare Panemerit, governor of Tanis in the Delta: Zivie-Coche 2001). Thus by the end of the Ptolemaic Period the structure of the nome administration had become more or less homogeneous throughout Egypt. Another unifying development initiated in the crisis of the early second century was the system of court ranks, which embraced both internal and overseas royal officials in a single hierarchy (‘‘kinsmen,’’ ‘‘of the first friends,’’ etc.; Mooren 1975, 1977).
The Ptolemies issued royal edicts (diagrammata) and decrees (prostagmata) on a wide variety of topics, encompassing both administrative and judicial matters, such as billeting of troops, the Dionysiac rites, judicial procedures and penalties for various crimes, or thesupply of wheat to Alexandria (e. g. P. Hibeh II198, Sel. Pap. II207-209; all conveniently collected in C. Ord. Ptol. = Lenger 1980, 1990). In the aftermath of rebellion or civil war these took the form of royal indulgences (philanthropa) proclaiming amnesties for past offences and arrears and attempting to restore order for the future. The most famous is that issued jointly by Ptolemy VIII Euergetes II and his former and current wives, Kleopatras II and III in 118 bc, after their civil war; its catalogue of arrears and official abuses shows the sorry state to which the administration had sunk:
And they have decreed that the strategoi and the other officials shall not impress any of the residents in the countryside for private services, nor requisition their animals for any private purposes nor force them to feed calves or sacrificial animals nor force them to supply geese or fowl or wine or grain for a price or for the renewal of office, nor compel them to perform work for free on any pretext whatever.
And they remit to the policemen throughout the countryside the penalties entered against them with regard to [negligence in] royal inspections and for the produce they have mislaid and for the sums handed over to them for arrears or other reasons and which have disappeared, up to the 50th year (=121/0 bc). (P. Tebt. I 5 lines 178-92).
Our surviving text of this important decree is a private copy (full of errors) made by Menches, komogrammateus of Kerkeosiris in the Fayum during the 110s bc. The chance preservation of large numbers of Menches’ papers in the wrapping of mummified crocodiles sheds a uniquely detailed light on the activities of a local official, although his typicality is more difficult to assess (see especially Verhoogt 1998, 2005; cf. Crawford 1971; the texts are published in P. Tebt. vols. I and IV). Menches, from a partly Hellenized Egyptian family (he was also known by the Greek name Asklepiades), was an influential figure in the village and a key link in the chain of patronage which disseminated power from the center even to remote villages. As well as dealing with petitions, his main duties concerned the survey of land and agricultural production, which involved regular liaising with other officials of equivalent and higher status (Verhoogt 1998: 70-105). Surprisingly, Menches made annual visits not only to present his survey reports to the basilikogrammateus in the nome capital but also to Alexandria to report direct to the dioiketes (Verhoogt 1998: 142). A more shadowy Alexandrian contact was Dorion, who held the court rank ‘‘of the first friends,’’ and for reasons not entirely clear paid most of the fee for renewing Menches’ tenure of his office (Verhoogt 1998: 57-62). A close reading of Menches’ accounts has revealed in detail not only the duties and remuneration of the basiliko-grammateus and other officials and their respective staffs, but even the foodstuffs with which they were entertained while inspecting the village (Verhoogt 2005: especially 62-65).
World History
