5 - Ptolemaic Egypt

Summary

PRELIMINARY NOTE ON THE PAPYRUS SOURCES

This note is intended to issue two warnings. The first is that the historian of Ptolemaic Egypt cannot call at will on written sources contemporary with the period he is describing. From the time of Ptolemy I Soter at the moment of writing this note (January 1980) I know of only two certainly dated Greek papyri, and some six scraps, to which should be added some thirty private documents in demotic Egyptian. The first ten years of Ptolemy II are also blank. A trickle of texts commences in the late 270s B.C.; from about 259 B.C. it becomes a flood which lasts down to about 215 B.C. Thereafter there is comparative poverty till the middle of the second century. The end of this century is well documented for the Fayyûm villages, and there exist a few papyri of the first century B.C. Chronological continuity is assured by the Greek and Demotic ostraca (normally stereotyped tax receipts), not by papyri. Yet only part of the stage which is Egypt is thus flood-lit: above all the Fayyûm, the area most recently won from the desert, the first to revert to desert and in consequence to conserve its archives over twenty-three centuries. But no documents survive from the Delta, the richest and most populous area of Egypt; from Alexandria only such texts as were fortuitously carried up-country. In Middle Egypt Memphis (through its necropolis at Saqqara), el-Hiba, Heracleopolis, Hermopolis, Oxyrhynchus, Lycopolis intermittently offer finds containing thinly spread and discontinuous information. The Thebaid moves in and out of the gloom, for the most part shrouded in darkness, except for its tax receipts on potsherd.