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Ptolemaic Egypt, along with the other Hellenistic states outside of the Greek mainland after Alexander the Great, had its armies based on the Macedonian phalanx and featured Macedonian and native troops fighting side by side. The Ptolemaic military was filled with diverse peoples from across their territories. At first most of the military was made up of a pool of Greek settlers who, in exchange for military service, were given land grants. These made up the majority of the army. With the many wars the Ptolemies were involved in, their pool of Macedonian troops dwindled and there was little Greek immigration from the mainland so they were kept in the royal bodyguard and as generals and officers. Native troops were looked down upon and distrusted due to their disloyalty and frequent tendency to aid local revolts. However, with the decline of royal power, they gained influence and became common in the military. The Ptolemies used the great wealth of Egypt to their advantage by hiring vast amounts of mercenaries from across the known world. Black Ethiopians are also known to have served in the military along with the Galatians, Mysians and others. With their vast amount of territory spread along the Eastern Mediterranean such as Cyprus, Crete, the islands of the Aegean and even Thrace, the Ptolemies required a large navy to defend these far-flung strongholds from enemies like the Seleucids and Macedonians. Cities Whiling ruling Egypt, the Ptolemaic Dynasty built many Greek settlements throughout their Empire, either Hellenize new conquered peoples or reinforce the area. Egypt had only three main Greek cities—Alexandria, Naucratis, and Ptolemais. Naucratis Of the three Greek cities, Naucratis, although its commercial importance was reduced with the founding of Alexandria, continued in a quiet way its life as a Greek city-state. During the interval between the death of Alexander and Ptolemy's assumption of the style of king, it even issued an autonomous coinage. And the number of Greek men of letters during the Ptolemaic and Roman period, who were citizens of Naucratis, proves that in the sphere of Hellenic culture Naucratis held to its traditions. Ptolemy II bestowed his care upon Naucratis. He built a large structure of limestone, about 330 feet (100 m) long and 60 feet (18 m) wide, to fill up the broken entrance to the great Temenos; he strengthened the great block of chambers in the Temenos, and re-established them. At the time when Sir Flinders Petrie wrote the words just quoted the great Temenos was identified with p91the Hellenion. But Mr. Edgar has recently pointed out that the building connected with it was an Egyptian temple, not a Greek building. Naucratis, therefore, in spite of its general Hellenic character, had an Egyptian element. That the city flourished in Ptolemaic times "we may see by the quantity of imported amphorae, of which the handles stamped at Rhodes and elsewhere are found so abundantly. "The Zeno papyri show that it was the chief port of call on the inland voyage from Memphis to Alexandria, as well as a stopping-place on the land-route from Pelusium to the capital. It was attached, in the administrative system, to the Saïte nome. Alexandria Main article: Alexandria A major Mediterranean port of Egypt, in ancient times and still today, Alexandria was founded in 331 BC by Alexander the Great, one of the many Eastern Macedonian cities that he established. Located 20 miles (32 km) west of the Nile's westernmost mouth, the city was immune to the silt deposits that persistently choked harbors along the river. Alexandria became the capital of the Hellenized Egypt of King Ptolemy (1) I (reigned 323—283 BC). Under the wealthy Ptolemy dynasty, the city soon surpassed Athens as the cultural center of the Greek world. Laid out on a grid pattern, Alexandria occupied a stretch of land between the sea to the north and Lake Mareotis to the south; a man-made causeway, over three-quarters of a mile long, extended north to the sheltering island of Pharos, thus forming a double harbor, east and west. On the east was the main harbor, called the Great Harbor; it faced the city's chief buildings, including the royal palace and the famous Library and Museum. At the Great Harbor's mouth, on an outcropping of Pharos, stood the lighthouse, built ca. 280 BC. Now vanished, the lighthouse was reckoned as one of the Seven Wonders of the World for its unsurpassed height (perhaps 460 feet); it was a square, fenestrated tower, topped with a metal fire basket and a statue of Zeus the Savior. The Library, at that time the largest in the world, contained several hundred thousand volumes and housed and employed scholars and poets. A similar scholarly complex was the Museum (Mouseion, "hall of the Muses"). During Alexandria's brief literary golden period, ca. 280–240 BC, the Library subsidized three poets—Callimachus, Apollonius, and Theocritus—whose work now represents the best of Hellenistic literature. Among other thinkers associated with the Library or other Alexandrian patronage were the mathematician Euclid (ca. 300 BC), the inventor Archimedes (287 BC – c. 212 BC), and the polymath Eratosthenes (ca. 225 BC).[14] Cosmopolitan and flourishing, Alexandria possessed a varied population of Macedonians,Greeks and Orientals, including a sizable minority of Jews, who had their own city quarter. Periodic conflicts occurred between Jews and ethnic Greeks. The city enjoyed a calm political history under the Ptolemies. It passed, with the rest of Egypt, into Roman hands in 30 BC, and became the second city of the Roman Empire. Ptolemais Main article: Ptolemais Hermiou The second Greek city founded after the conquest in Egypt was Ptolemais, 400 miles (640 km) up the Nile, where there was a native village called Psoï, in the nome called after the ancient Egyptian city of Thinis. If Alexandria perpetuated the name and cult of the great Alexander, Ptolemais was to perpetuate the name and cult of the founder of the Ptolemaic time. Framed in by the barren hills of the Nile Valley and the Egyptian sky, here a Greek city arose, with its public buildings and temples and theatre, no doubt exhibiting the regular architectural forms associated with Greek culture, with a citizen-body Greek in blood, and the institutions of a Greek city. If there is some doubt whether Alexandria possessed a council and assembly, there is none in regard to Ptolemais. It was more possible for the kings to allow a measure of self-government to a people removed at that distance from the ordinary residence of the court. We have still, inscribed on stone, decrees passed in the assembly of the people of Ptolemais, couched in the regular forms of Greek political tradition: It seemed good to the boule and to the demos: Hermas son of Doreon, of the deme Megisteus, was the proposer: Whereas the prytaneis who were colleagues with Dionysius the son of Musaeus in the 8th year, etc. Demographics The Ptolemaic kingdom was diverse in the people who settled and made Egypt their home on this time. During this period, Macedonian troops under Ptolemy I Soter were given land grants and brought their families encouraging tens of thousands of Greeks to settle the country making themselves the new ruling class. Native Egyptians continued having a role, yet a small one in the Ptolemaic government mostly in lower posts and outnumbered the foreigners. During the reign of the Ptolemaic Pharaohs, many Jews were imported from neighboring Judea by the thousands for being renowned fighters and established an important presence there. Other foreign groups settled during this time and even Galatian mercenaries were invited. Of the aliens who had come to settle in Egypt, the ruling race,Greeks, were the most important element. They were partly spread as allotment-holders over the country, forming social groups, in the country towns and villages, side by side with the native population, partly gathered in the three Greek cities — the old Naucratis, founded before 600 BC (in the interval of Egyptian independence after the expulsion of the Assyrians and before the coming of the Persians), and the two new cities, Alexandria by the sea, and Ptolemais in Upper Egypt. Alexander and his Seleucid successors were great as the founders of Greek cities all over their dominions. Macedonian and Greek culture was so much bound up with the life of the city-state that any king who wanted to present himself to the world as a genuine champion of Hellenism had to do something in this direction, but the king of Egypt, whilst as ambitious as any to shine as a Hellene, would find Greek cities, with their republican tradition and aspirations to independence, inconvenient elements in a country that lent itself, as no other did, to bureaucratic centralization. The Ptolemies therefore limited the number of Greek city-states in Egypt to Alexandria, Ptolemais, and Naucratis. Outside of Egypt, they had Greek cities under their dominion—including the old Greek cities in the Cyrenaica, in Cyprus, on the coasts and islands of the Aegean— but they were smaller than the three big ones in Egypt. There were indeed country towns with names such as Ptolemais, Arsinoe, and Berenice, in which Greek communities existed with a certain social life; there were similar groups of Greeks in many of the old Egyptian towns, but they were not communities with the political forms of a city-state. Yet if they had no place of political assembly, they would have their gymnasium, the essential sign of Hellenism, serving something of the purpose of a university for the young men. Far up the Nile at Ombi was found in 136–135 B.C. a gymnasium of the local Greeks, which passes resolutions and corresponds with the king. And in 123 B.C., when there is trouble in Upper Egypt between the towns of Crocodilopolis and Hermonthis, the negotiators sent from Crocodilopolis are the young men attached to the gymnasium, who, according to the Greek tradition, eat bread and salt with the negotiators from the other town. All Greek dialects of the Greek world gradually became assimilated in the Koine Greek dialect that was the common language of the Hellenistic world. Generally the Greeks of the Ptolemaic Egypt felt like a representative of a higher civilization yet were curious about the native culture of Egypt. Arabs under the Ptolemies Arab nomads of the eastern desert penetrated in small bodies into the cultivated land of the Nile, as they do today. The Greeks called all the land on the eastern side of the Nile "Arabia", and villages were to be found here and there with a population of Arabs who had exchanged the life of tent-dwellers for that of settled agriculturists. Apollonius tells of one such village, Poïs, in the Memphite nome, two of whose inhabitants send a letter on September 20, 152 B.C. The letter is in Greek; it had to be written for the two Arabs by the young Macedonian Apollonius, the Arabs being unable apparently to write. Apollonius writes their names as Myrullas and Chalbas, the first probably, and the second certainly, Semitic. A century earlier Arabs farther west, in the Fayûm, organized under a leader of their own, and working mainly as herdsmen on the dorea of Apollonius the dioiketes; but these Arabs bear Greek and Egyptian names. In 1990, more than 2,000 papyri written by Zeno of Caunus from the time of Ptolemy II Philadelphus were discovered, which contained at least 19 references to Arabs in the area between the Nile and the Red Sea, and mentioned their jobs as police officers in charge of "ten person units", while some others were mentioned as shepherds.[15] Arabs in Ptolemaic kingdom had provided camel convoys to the armies of some Ptolemaic leaders during their invasions, but they didn't have allegiance towards any of the kingdoms of Egypt or Syria, and also managed to raid and attack both sides of the conflict between Ptolemaic Kingdom and its enemies. [16] [17] Jews under the Ptolemies The Jews who lived in Egypt had originally immigrated from Israel. The Jews absorbed Greek, the dominant language of Egypt at the time, while heavily mixing it with Hebrew[18] It was during this period that the Septuagint, the Greek translation of the Jewish scriptures, appeared. Jewish legend has it that the Septuagint was written by Seventy Jewish Translators under royal compulsion during Ptolemy II's reign.[19] However, the translation of the Old Testament was more probably written over time in Egypt during the last three centuries before the Christian era. Agriculture The early Ptolemies increased cultivatable land through irrigation and introduced crops such as cotton and better wine-producing grapes. They also increased the availability of luxury goods through foreign trade. They enriched themselves and absorbed Egyptian culture. Ptolemy and his descendants adopted Egyptian royal trappings and added Egypt's religion to their own, worshiping Egyptian gods and building temples to them, and even being mummified and buried in sarcophagi covered with hieroglyphs. In his lifetime Strabo made extensive travels to among others Egypt and Ethiopia. |
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