Ptolemaic Governance, by Joseph G. Manning
In Egypt there never existed a highly developed formal structure or stable administration that distinguished between public and private spheres
Joseph G. Manning wrote:
CHAPTER SEVEN
The Ptolemaic Governmental Branches and the Role of Temples and Elite Groups
The terms “branches” and “governmental” used in the title of this chapter might be too strong to describe how the Ptolemies governed their territory, since they imply a kind of highly developed formal structure, or at least a stable administration that distinguished between public and private spheres – a distinction that never really existed. And while the term generally used for the hierarchic official control of the institutions of governance, “bureaucracy,” is also perhaps anachronistic, I will not replace it here.
1. Performance of Ptolemaic Governance
How, then, should we think about the institutions of Ptolemaic governance? Often, earlier studies have assumed that the basic structure was simply inherited from ancient Egypt. But that is too simple. Throughout the first millennium BC, Egypt was governed by many outside political forces, each of which brought new things. To be sure, an important part of establishing a political order in all phases of Egypt’s history was the creation of an administrative hierarchy of state officials that linked villages and towns to regional centers and ultimately to the political center(s). Whatever the connection between the New Kingdom bureaucracy and later historical development elsewhere, one case where the New Kingdom surely served as a model was in the Ptolemaic system that appeared some one millennium later in Egypt. In both historical cases, Egypt formed the core of an empire, warfare was endemic, and civil and military bureaucracies reached their greatest extent. At the same time, we cannot simply skip over the 700 years between the New Kingdom and the Ptolemaic Period. Saite and Persian administration of Egypt also influenced Ptolemaic structure and practice.
[It is argued] that there was a certain fluidity in the system, and that the use of titles was a real reflection of the actual exigencies of Ptolemaic rule: attention was paid to titles as rank or status indicators, rather than as designators of territorial or portfolio responsibility. This was not, despite appearances to the contrary, a “rigid” system, as [some have] described it – perhaps due to a probable lack of Greek‐speaking officials to fill what remained theoretical “vacancies” throughout the country. I have adopted Crone’s term “capstone government” to describe the basic dynamic of the Ptolemaic bureaucratic system (if it is fair to call it that), which was “built to control” by “policing rather than organizing”. There was thus no radical transformation of the patterns of governance, and very little need to fundamentally change what was historically a diverse system. If the number of state officials at all levels was greater than before, this was a function of a large population and the employment function of the state. To be sure, the Ptolemaic system was driven by Greek initiative and state needs, and although it was a bilingual system, Greek became the main language of the bureaucracy.
It is important to stress, as many scholars have, that while it must have taken a significant amount of time for the Ptolemaic “system” to become functional – to make the link between the Greek language of the court and the Egyptian language of local areas, or between the political center at Alexandria and agricultural production throughout Egypt – we know that Cleomenes was able to mobilize Egyptian agricultural resources without any Ptolemaic “bureaucracy” in place. What mattered for Cleomenes’ “monopoly” power, and for the later performance of the Ptolemaic state, were the social networks and the partnerships created by them, through which commodi- ties flowed. Sources remain scant for the reign of Ptolemy I, a time when the initial system of governance was established, but we may presume that there were no drastic changes. Ptolemy II’s reign looms large over the whole Ptolemaic system. The degree to which this king was responsible for the design of the entire system can be debated. Nevertheless, it is during this period that documentation for the system is at its clearest, and there are many reasons to think that the Ptolemaic system as we know it took time to set up. It seems clear that the bureaucratic system evolved under the pressures of war over the course of the third and early second centuries BC. After the major revolt of 206–186 BC, tighter administrative control – with the establishment of new garrisons – was enacted in Upper Egypt.
What difference, then, did the fully developed Ptolemaic system make? It is difficult to assess actual performance over the long run, although the balance of our evidence would suggest that it was a reasonably successful system for its day. What is clearer – and more important than simply describing the structure of Ptolemaic governance – is the role of Greek and Egyptian elite groups, and of Greek and Egyptian institutions, in the co‐evolution of Ptolemaic society. Ancient bureaucratic systems are often viewed as corrupt, slow, abusive, and purely rent‐seeking, embedded in patrimonial social structures, not always loyal to the state, and isolated from society by despotic kings who tolerated a bureaucratic elite but cared little for anyone else ([like] the basic problem of rent‐seeking in a modern context). This was essentially [the] view, expressed in [an] influential treatment of the Ptolemaic bureaucracy. What started out in the third century BC as an efficient system “administered by men superior to the common failings of humanity” devolved “under the weaker kings of the second century” to utter administrative chaos. To be sure, there were many problems in the Ptolemaic bureaucracy, probably from the very beginning – although this is not as well documented as the problems of the second century BC highlighted in the royal decrees of 118 BC (P.Tebt. I 5), for example.
What was a particular person’s function, rather than his or her ethnicity, was an important distinction. A separation of Greek and Egyptian “functions” in the system remained, where the “Greek” functions belonged to the royal economy, and the “Egyptian” functions to Egyptian temple institutions. The complexities of the interactions of Greeks and Egyptians have been widely explored in the literature. The names of many Greek offices were transliterated, rather than translated, into Demotic – a sign of their “foreign” nature from the point of view of Egyptian practice. For example, the eisagogeus (Demotic 3ysws), who seems to have represented the state at Egyptian courts, and the epistates (Demotic 3pystytys) are two Ptolemaic officials found in Demotic documents. Nevertheless, Egyptians, provided they knew Greek to some extent, could function at most levels of the system, in part due to the small number of Greeks in Egypt, estimated between at 5 and 10% of the population. The scribal function, and Egyptian scribal families, remained vital to the Ptolemaic system. Thus, the system can rightly be described as bilingual, since many of the scribes who functioned in the state system were Egyptians who learned Greek (to varying degrees).
The Ptolemaic governance of Egypt was overwhelmingly concerned with the fiscal system and the collection of tax revenue. This primarily involved agriculture and animal husbandry – a fact well attested in the surviving administrative papyri dedicated to these concerns. The structure of this system is at its most elaborate and articulated in one of the best known documents of the period, the so‐called Revenue Laws [references]. It is probably the case that this text cannot be used, as has occasionally been done, as a guide to the historical structure or the development of statewide governance. It is certainly true that the Revenue Laws – not a single text, but in fact a collection of several – do not provide evidence for a planned economy, as was once thought. Of related concern were the administration of law, the temples, and the external possessions of the Ptolemies. Administrative structures were dictated by the basic political topography, which was shaped in turn by historical practice and contemporary need: the two new Greek urban areas of Alexandria and Ptolemais in the south, ancient temple economy systems (some of them, as the Edfu Donation text) informs us, with extensive land holdings and personnel), and above everything else, in the third century BC especially, the requirements of mobilizing military power. We know very little about building in the new urban centers, or about the supply of food and water to them, but they must have entailed considerable expense and organizational capacity. The military, to be sure, commanded a very large portion of the state expenditure, particularly during the years of the Syrian Wars.
There is now a large literature on Ptolemaic institutions of governance, and their much‐vaunted bureaucratic system. A full historical analysis of the Ptolemaic administrative system and its evolution over time remains to be written: “Beyond the fragmentation of evidence that precludes certainty or systematic analysis across the three centuries for the whole of Egypt, we would do well to remember that in any kind of analysis we are dealing with a premodern state and therefore measures of ‘efficiency,’ performance, logical structure, and so on should be relative” ([references] on bureaucratic control as a generally relatively more “efficient” system than other kinds of agency).
Many succinct overviews have been given of the structure of Ptolemaic governance (inter alia …the detailed studies in Moreno García). The basic structure was ancient, but there were important additions and changes in the Ptolemaic system. A tension existed between the king’s ability to appoint nome officials and the patrimonial power inherent in Egyptian social structure that resulted in the hereditary tendency of local families to control official functions. That was an ancient problem. The Ptolemies attempted to control it by the sale of certain offices, with limited success; the Ptolemaic system, as earlier in Egypt, remained dominated by the patrimonial power of local families. The so‐called “nome strategoi,” to contrast the civil office with the former military one, seem to have been a direct appointment of the king. Royal control may also have been asserted – although we do not know too much about this beyond its mention in a handful of texts – by the demand of physical presence at the royal court. Priests appear to have been required to visit the capital annually (remitted in the Memphis Decree), and we learn from the Menches archive, dated to the late second century BC, that the royal scribe of the nome and the village scribes were also required, apparently, to have their books inspected there by the dioiketes or “minister of finances”.
2. The Ideology of Centralization
The king was at the center of governance, but it is all too easy to overestimate royal power. Samuel [reference] is right to stress that the key to the mobilization of resources was the individuals in bureaucratic and temple posts. The famous priestly decrees, such as the Memphis Decree preserved on the Rosetta Stone, illustrate very well, at a moment of crisis, that the king (the very young Ptolemy V), ritually embedded in the public ceremonies of kingship, with the expectations of royal piety toward the gods, and expressing the traditional royal function in establishing order, was only one actor in a larger political drama. The king as “source” of political power, of legal order, of wise counsel, and as heroic military commander harkens back to ancient Egyptian literary forms – in other words, to the ancient expectations of royal ideology [references].
Official control was undergirded by an ancient ideology of hierarchy and a principle of centralizing authority, but also by patronage and “personal ties” [reference]. This is not very well documented, but there are hints of it. [One author] has highlighted the relationship between Menches, the village scribe of Kerkeosiris, and Dorion, a high‐ranking official in Alexandria who may have had personal economic interests resulting from the local connection. Official letters of instruction from the period have parallels in earlier instruction literature. Two papyri are of outstanding importance for giving us the structure of the early Ptolemaic system. The first, the Revenue Laws papyrus (P.Rev.) gives us the basic hierarchy of the administrative offices in a nome concerned with crown revenue. The second, P.Tebt. III 703 (c. 210 BC), generally thought of as a memorandum from a dioiketes – the head of the state fiscal administration – to an oikonomos in a nome (in any case, to a subordinate official in a nome), provides important insights into the mentality of the system, and its reliance on the proper behavior of officials. As I have stressed elsewhere (Manning 2011):
The establishment of loyal agents throughout the state, who monitored activities and resources, and the creation of links between state institutions and key local nodes represented by Egyptian temples and their priesthoods and scribes, was, of course, a key for generating free‐floating resources for the state as well as for market transactions.
P.Tebt. III 703 details the duties of the oikonomos, which include paying careful attention to irrigation canals, the condition of crops and animals (and the adjudication of complaints in these areas), and transportation, especially of grain to the city of Alexandria – always of central importance to the kings, particularly in periods of crisis. The auditing of the revenues generated in the nome was another prime concern.
On the protection of the food supply to Alexandria, the dioiketes urged in the memorandum P.Tebt. III 703, 3.70‐87:
Take care that the grain in the nomes, with the exception of that expended on the spot for seed and of that which cannot be transported by water, be brought down – It will thus be [easy] to load the grain on the first [ships] presenting themselves; and devote yourself to such business in no cursory fashion – Take care also that the prescribed supplies of grain, of which I send you a list, are brought down to Alexandria punctually, not only correct in amount but also tested and fit for use.
The reward for good behavior was the promise of promotion to a higher office, although it is difficult to know how embedded this custom was. The expectation for careful control and for officials monitoring other officials was extensive, and the text as we have it is perhaps a standard text issued widely throughout the kingdom.
3. Administrative Control of Egypt
The papyri provide a lot of information on the administrative organization, although one has to reconstruct the overall picture from hundreds of individual cases, and we do not have full information across the whole of Egypt, or its external possessions. Ostraca illuminate the lower levels of fiscal administration. Much remains unknown for Ptolemy I’s reign, and it is presumed that there was some time lag between the state’s formal founding and its subsequent administrative or bureaucratic structure. It appears to have taken at least a couple of generations to gain administrative control of Upper Egypt. The Fayum received special attention during the first half of the third century BC, because of the land reclamation and settlement projects.
The basic structure of Ptolemaic governance followed ancient lines, connecting villages to nomes and from nome metropoleis to regional centers, thence to the capital at Alexandria. There were two basic bureaucracies with parallel structures, as in the New Kingdom: one civil/fiscal, the other military.
3.1 Civil/Fiscal Administrative Structure
The Greek cities of Alexandria, Ptolemais, and Naucratis remained set apart in terms of governance, having their own set of institutions and laws; although we do not know for certain if early Ptolemaic Alexandria had a boule, Alexandria did have other organs of a polis. Ptolemais, the southern capital founded by Ptolemy I, served as a counterpart to Alexandria, and did have many of the political organs of a Greek polis.
Royal correspondence was coordinated from the capital, whence came responses of various kinds, laws, regulations, and instructions from the king (e.g. prostagmata). The epistolographos or “head of royal correspondence” and the hypomnematographos or “king’s chancellor,” in charge of the royal records, led the respective departments of the royal chancellery, but we lack details about the central administration in Alexandria.
The area outside of the territories of the Greek cities was called the chora or “countryside.” The two basic physical subdivisions of Egyptian administration in the chora were Upper and Lower Egypt – a distinction that went back to pre‐dynastic times. Alexander himself appointed two (Egyptian) “nomarchs” to govern Egypt, reflecting ancient practice. Administrative control of Egypt was further divided into subunits called “nomes” (for a detailed account of the history and the development of administration up through the Saite Period, see Moreno García …). The number of nomes was notionally fixed at 42, but the actual number fluctuated throughout Egyptian history, as did the ability of the king to control local administrative officials. Governance in some regions was structured uniquely, as in the Fayum and the Thebaid.
It is not easy to give a brief overview of the Ptolemaic offices in the chora, as some continued old practices, others were newly introduced, responsibilities shifted in the course of the period, some were combined, some (e.g. the sitologos, “head of the public granary”) are found on several levels (nome, district, village) simultaneously, and the role of officials of the same level is complicated. Military, police, financial/economic, administrative, and judicial responsibilities were not strictly separated. On the basis of the Greek verbal roots of the offices’ names, [one author] suggests a separation of spheres — (leading … in strategos), managing (arch‐), recording (graph‐), and supervising (oik‐) the state’s household); in the course of time, the differences became blurred, and thus, for instance, the recording officials (e.g. the komogrammateis) assumed managing tasks (of e.g. the komarchs) (Table 7.1).
Some officials were in charge of a larger territory, among them the high officials in Alexandria, in charge – in theory – of the entire state system, and of Ptolemais, where the administration of Upper Egypt was situated. The dioiketes was probably an ancient office dating back at least to the Persian Period and called snty or “manager” in Hieroglyphic and Demotic sources; he came to be in charge mainly of the country’s financial and economic matters. The offices of vice‐dioiketes (hypodioiketes) and local dioiketes also existed. A separate account, the idios logos, for non‐recurring income from, say, confiscated property, was established after the Great Revolt of 206–186 BC (P.Erbstreit 1), but just a century later it came under the authority of a newly installed official (the pros toi idioi logoi, eventually simply called idios logos). An epistrategos governed a large territory, probably the entire chora, as for instance Komanos, the general who had defeated the rebels in the south in 186 BC, and Boethos, who supervised at least some areas in Middle Egypt and the entire Thebaid.
At the nome level, there were three basic offices: nomarch, oikonomos (“steward”), and basilikos grammateus (“royal scribe”), responsible, respectively, for agrarian production, taxation, and record‐keeping, primarily with conditions of land and land tenure. The “checking scribe” (antigrapheus) assisted the oikonomos and was responsible for accurate record‐keeping. The ancient office of nomarch was replaced in the third century BC by a strategos: originally, as the name implies, a military title, but by the late third century BC a civil official who was the superior of all other nome officials. The military functions of strategoi remained, but their important duties concerned public revenues; hence, they became “supervisors of revenues” at the expense of the epimeletes. The oikonomoi eventually disappeared from the record as an office; their financial responsibilities were taken over by colleague‐officials. Below these nome officials were those in charge of a smaller territorial unit; the district or toparchy (mȝʿ/ ʿ.wy.w), and the village or kome (tmy). The toparch and komarch were the subordinate of the nomarch, while the work of the district and village scribes was supervised by the royal scribe; in the later Ptolemaic Period, the offices of district and village scribe become the more prominent. We learn a good deal about the latter official from the Menches archive of the late second century BC at Kerkeosiris, a small village in the Fayum. This archive provides the most detailed information for the administration of a village for the entire period. The village scribe, the komogrammateus, was the backbone of the Ptolemaic control of resources, under the supervision of the royal scribe, who functioned as the link between villages and the state apparatus [good reference here]. Alongside the komarch and komogrammateus, a village epistates was appointed, who had police and administrative responsibilities.
The structure of the nome administration is laid out in detail in a letter as follows (P.Gen. III 132.1–5, of the second century BC; there are many parallels to this kind of address to nome officials:
To the strategos of the Herakleopolite nome, to the chief of the garrison, to the one in charge of the police, to the nomarch, to the one responsible for the revenues, to the steward, to the royal scribe, to the controller, to the toparchs, to the district scribes, to the komarchs, to the village scribes, to the chief of police, to the police, to the farmers and to other personnel concerned with royal business…
Administration thus followed two kinds of boundary: physical and social. As earlier in Egyptian history, local networks of governance supervised agricultural production and social relations.
The Fayum, a special area of concern for the Ptolemies, and called the Arsinoite nome after the death of Ptolemy II’s sister/wife, had a different structure. At first, the region was divided into two parts by a central canal, the Henet of Moeris, but after a successful reclamation project instituted by the Ptolemies and the foundation of new settlements, the administration reorganized the enlarged region into three merides – the Herakleides, Polemon, and Themistos – led by a meridarch (an office that is poorly attested). Alongside the nomarch on the nome level, the Fayum had “lesser” nomarchs, who had control of smaller districts (nomarchies) that would be replaced by toparchies in the 230s BC. A recently discovered milepost marker found at Bir ’Iayyan in the desert east of Edfu, however, shows us that a tripartite structure – in this specific case inferred by the title “toparch of the three?” – also existed in the Edfu region in the third century BC.
The Greek polis of Ptolemais served as the administrative center for all of Upper Egypt, called the Thebaid. This new city functioned as a counterpart to the influence and dominance of the ancient city of Thebes and its great temple of Amun at Karnak. Greek in origin, it gradually recruited its elite locally, and thus contributed considerably to the development of an Upper Egyptian aristocracy. The strategos of the Thebaid, an official responsible for the fiscal system of the south and the administration of law, was based in Ptolemais, as were others in charge of legal administration. The large area of the Thebaid (Greek Thebais, Demotic pȝ tš n Nỉwt) was initially administered as a single nome with one strategos, one royal scribe, one steward, and so forth, and was further divided into “sub”‐nomes with their own administrations, reflecting the Late Period structure of the area. More administrative control of the Thebaid was established in the wake of a period of sometimes violent social unrest. This tighter control included the installation of new military camps, public granaries and banks, and Greek notarial offices, and the appointment of civil strategoi in charge of a group of Thebaid nomes. Eventually, the Thebaid administration was brought into line with the rest of the country: the governors (epistatai) who had been in charge of a single Thebaid nome were all upgraded to strategoi.
3.2 Fiscal System
The fiscal interest of the state, the so‐called “Économie royale”, concerned with taxation and its administration, was – together with military mobilization and protection of the cities – the main concern of Ptolemaic administration. Many of the previously mentioned civil officials were at some level responsible for fiscal matters. In the course of the period, their responsibilities shifted on the nome level, to the advantage of the royal scribe. The Ptolemaic fiscal system relied on the registration of people and their livestock and on the local recording and reporting of information on land tenure, land conditions, and crops grown. Household and occupation were used as the basic organizing principle in the census lists, while land types (royal, cleruchic, temple land, etc.) dominated the land surveys. The village scribe played the key role in compiling these lists, with responsibility for local reports, meeting with district scribes and the royal scribe in the nome capital, and having village accounts vetted by the dioiketes in Alexandria and the latter’s immediate subordinate the eklogistes or chief “accountant”.
The registration of persons, livestock, and property was a feature of Ptolemaic administration reaching back to pharaonic times, although the papyri bias our viewpoint toward rural villages rather than the cities. The census was linked to the collection of the salt tax, the main head tax (paid in coin) of the period, although the connection between the census and “the fiscal activities that followed” is not well known. The military had a separate census. A new calendar, known as the “financial year”, was an innovation of the Ptolemaic system (although it did not survive long), but there is no evidence to suggest that there was a periodic census, as there was under Roman rule. The census of persons and animals, and the documentation of property, were perhaps operations that occurred irregularly, with annual updates. A more “systematic” requirement to register property connected to the imposition of a 2% tax was imposed in the reign of Ptolemy III.
Most Ptolemaic taxes were, as before, paid in kind (mainly wheat) to the local granary under the supervision of a sitologos. Money taxes were newly introduced and were farmed out. Tax farming was probably derived from Athenian practice, although there are some parallels to earlier Persian traditions. The terminology is Athenian as well, but the Ptolemaic system is different in that the tax farmer (telones), a private person who was awarded the contract with the highest bid, was controlled by a state official (logeutes), who assisted in the collection. Telonai, backed up by sureties, could farm one or several taxes in one or several districts, or one tax could be farmed by a chief farmer and his partners (metochoi). The basic administrative unit for tax collection was the district (topos or toparchy); for example, the Edfu nome, called the Apollonopolite, had in the Late Ptolemaic Period four tax districts: the lower (kato) and upper (ano) toparchy, the Arabia (the east bank of the nome), and the metropolis area (Apollonopolis Magna). The oikonomos (and later the royal scribe) supervised the tax collection on the nome level, while a praktor acted as bailiff: an official who would become a tax collector himself in Roman times.
3.3 Military Administration
Military power throughout Ptolemaic history was of central importance to governance, and its organizational capacity had profound effects on local society. Here, too, settlement of soldiers in garrisons and cleruchs in the Egyptian chora was a strategy of royal control of territory. The Ptolemaic military had its own administrative hierarchy, including “army scribes”. The military structure was reorganized in the 160s BC, a period of considerable socioeconomic stress. Cleruchs were controlled by strategoi, while eponymous commanders controlled military units. Elite troops had their own organization. As in the military, there was a hierarchy of police.
3.4 A Bureaucratic Organization
An emphasis on writing, through the use of written orders and circular letters, is clear, as is the reaction of officials in response to flow in the opposite direction: petitions from wronged parties. Although petitions could be addressed to high officials, the resolution of complaints was handled at the local level. The most important text, and certainly the most interesting for the later Ptolemaic bureaucracy, records a petition and the administrative response to it. This petition, by Ptolemy the Recluse in the Serapeum at Memphis, asking the visiting king and queen to enroll his brother in the army, provides good evidence of the bureaucratic papyrus trail that it generated. The response took five months, and generated at least another 32 documents, illustrating the intersection of royal and military bureaucracies. P.Hib. I 110 verso also gives a hint at the two‐way flow and the control of correspondence between the king and the dioiketes in Alexandria and officials in the provinces. It is noteworthy that the hour of delivery is also recorded in this daybook. Overall, the impression of the Ptolemaic system suggests at least the pretense of tight control, and the generation of a great deal of paperwork. To a certain extent, a new bureaucratic language was developed.
4. The Administration of External Territories
The Ptolemies controlled an extensive territory outside of Egypt. These territories were not governed in any uniform way. Regional governors, military commanders by and large, called strategoi, represented the Ptolemaic state. Other officials with “regional name + ‐archos” titles also appear in our sources. In the League of Islanders, a strategy developed by Ptolemy II to control the Aegean islands, a nesiarch was appointed. An oikonomos was, in general, in charge of the economic administration of a province. Flexibility of the system is the overall impression of the control of external possessions, which served both as a “defensive fence”, to quote Polybius (5.34.2–9), and a resource endowment for the Ptolemies.
5. Law, Legal Order, and the Administration of Justice
The entire system of justice may have been administered from Alexandria by the archidikastes, about whom not much is known. The administration of justice was complex. Disputes, as in ancient times, could be resolved by local officials, but also in the court system. The nome strategos was the key state official, who often delegated cases to the proper authorities. In one important court record written in Demotic, a dispute over land ownership began with a petition to the strategos, who referred it to the local Egyptian court (the laokritai) presided over by priests attached to the temple in whose domain the land sat. It has been assumed that Ptolemaic state building did not substantially change the underlying Egyptian legal system, but merely added to it by accommodating Greek‐language legal instruments and Greek courts.
Texts such as the Hermopolis Legal Code ([references] on types of Egyptian codes), a kind of form book offering hypothetical legal cases for a wide range of Demotic legal texts dated to the third century BC, but reflecting also to some extent ancient traditions, show us that Egyptian legal practice was maintained. The hundreds of Demotic private contracts reinforce this. But there were also, probably, subtle changes to the Egyptian system, at least in terms of procedure, as well as the state monitoring of the system. An eisagogeus, a Ptolemaic official who introduced the case before the judges, acted as an official representative of the state. Royal “decrees” or “ordinances” (prostagmata) continued an ancient tradition of royal legislation.
Egyptian law was adjudicated through priestly tribunals, laokritai, and through petitions to officials. A new feature of the administration of justice was the dikasteria: courts appointed in the nomes to hear disputes between Greeks, primarily soldiers. The chrema-tistai was another newly introduced court of judges, appointed by the crown to try fiscal and civic cases over all population groups. The intricate connection between Ptolemaic civil and Egyptian legal authority is well displayed by the Asyut family dispute, where we can see that local Ptolemaic officials responded to private petitions and referred the dispute back to the jurisdiction of the local temple in whose estate the disputed land was located. A state official (the eisagogeus) was also present at this trial. The Erbstreit papyri recording an inheritance dispute between three parties show the different ways in which people in the chora could go to court: the village epistates first tried to settle the lawsuit amicably, but the case was successively dealt with by the strategos, the council of the epistrategos, the epistrategos himself, and finally the court of the chrematistai, after which no new appeal was possible.
6. The Role of Temple and Local Elites in Administration
The elite in the period consisted of military officers – cavalry being the most important – and higher levels of the priesthoods in the many temples throughout Egypt; local scribal families, who were the backbone of the entire system; and others such as the Theban banking families. The fundamental continuity in scribal practice, and the control of scribal offices through families, is seen both in the important role played by temple notaries in the issuance of Demotic legal agreements and in the new office of the Greek notary scribes, the ago-ranomoi, in some towns in Upper Egypt, held in the main by Egyptians.
Temples were a vital part of local and regional economies and administrative centers, and were “centers of public life”, [reference], and thus an integral part of Ptolemaic governance. Nowhere is this clearer than in the close relationship between the Ptolemaic kings and the high priestly family in Memphis. The priests of Ptah at the ancient temple in Memphis were of particular importance to the Ptolemaic dynasty, and served as “a focus of relations between king and cult, between Ptolemy and temple” [reference]. The temple was a center for the royal cult and for some of the priestly synods, and a place the Ptolemies visited frequently. Its high priests could serve as liaisons between the state and temple finances; this was true in other important temples, as well. The priesthood at Memphis was loyal to the dynasty throughout the period.
The temple‐epistates was a royal appointee responsible for monitoring temple finances, but in fact most temples maintained their own affairs, albeit with state oversight. Ptolemaic administration integrated priests and temple into the state. State finance relied on elites, primarily Greek‐speaking, in the farming of money taxes and in banking. An elaborate court hierarchy that bound elites to the king was created in the reign of Ptolemy V (or arguably under his father’s reign) and further developed under his successors, ranging from the most prestigious title of “kins-man” (syngenes) to the least prestigious of “one of the successors” (diadochoi) or “one of the bodyguards” (somatophylakes). The attribution of a honorific title was not a personal favor, but was linked to the bearer’s office; hence, a higher ranking dioiketes, for instance, enjoyed a higher court title than his subordinate strategoi.
The role of soldiers in temple‐building has been highlighted [references]. Priests who were also soldiers are well known in Memphis and other places. Among the more striking material from the period is the often discussed stele of the military/priestly family from second‐century BC Edfu. The paired sets of Greek and Egyptian funerary stelae, one with poetry by Herodes, the other with pure Egyptian Hieroglyphic funerary inscriptions, show that members of the same family were both military officers and priests attached to the temple there.
7. A Broader View of Ptolemaic Governance
Even though our evidence does not permit us to write a detailed history of Ptolemaic administration over three centuries, we can be certain that there was considerable historical development. To be sure, the bureaucratic system in the second and first centuries BC differed from that of the third century. …There is no space here to treat even cursorily the role of war in Ptolemaic state‐building (for classic treatments, see the literature … [many references]).
A basic model in which war forced a more “efficient” bureaucracy and improved the technology of monitoring (e.g. better roads, a postal system, better record‐keeping) works well for Egypt.
The New Kingdom and the Ptolemaic states, the two phases of Egyptian history with the most extensive imperial territories, can both be understood in this context; both periods saw increased external war and the development of parallel civil and military bureaucracies. The New Kingdom bureaucracy may have remained “overwhelmingly patrimonial,” while the Ptolemaic system was perhaps less constrained by a landed aristocracy and thus able to recruit agents more readily (Finer 1997 [and others]).
The Ptolemaic bureaucratic system was unique, combining features of the ancient patrimonial system with new Hellenistic fiscal institutions and operating in two languages. The two famous texts that I discussed briefly (P.Rev. and P.Tebt. III 703) are suggestive both of the scale of the new system and of the bureaucratization process that resulted, among other things, in the administration of a legal system that appears to have been effective even at a time of severe internal crisis and external threat. The Ptolemaic administration, whether it impeded economic growth or not (impossible to measure in any case), and however more effective or efficient it was compared to earlier systems, should also be judged by its ability to maintain the internal equilibrium of society. The historic lessons for modern Egyptian reform should be clear [!]. There is no better case than Egypt for understanding the persistence of bureaucracy [!]. But along with “efficiency” and “economic growth,” any reformed civil‐service system should also consider its historic role in creating social stability and in instilling a strong sense of justice.
FURTHER READING
A good orientation for the structure and development of Egyptian administrative practices over the long run can be found in Moreno García … [then a dozen or so more references …]
[END]
The Source:
Joseph G. Manning, ‘The Ptolemaic Governmental Branches and the Role of Temples and Elite Groups’, in A Companion to Greco-Roman and Late Antique Egypt, edited by Katelijn Vandorpe, John Wiley & Son 2019
Evolutions of social order from the earliest humans to the present day and future machine age.