Book contents
- Frontmatter
- Contents
- Original Sources of Chapters
- List of illustrations
- Glossary
- Maps
- Foreword
- Introduction: Jean Bingen and the currents of Ptolemaic history
- Part I The Monarchy
- Part II The Greeks
- 6 The Thracians in Ptolemaic Egypt
- 7 Ptolemaic papyri and the Achaean diaspora in Hellenistic Egypt
- 8 Greek presence and the Ptolemaic rural setting
- 9 The urban milieu in the Egyptian countryside during the Ptolemaic period
- 10 Kerkeosiris and its Greeks in the second century
- 11 The cavalry settlers of the Herakleopolite in the first century
- 12 Two royal ordinances of the first century and the Alexandrians
- Part III The Royal Economy
- Part IV Greeks and Egyptians
- Conclusion
- Bibliography
- General index
- Index of passages discussed
- HELLENISTIC CULTURE AND SOCIETY
10 - Kerkeosiris and its Greeks in the second century
from Part II - The Greeks
- Frontmatter
- Contents
- Original Sources of Chapters
- List of illustrations
- Glossary
- Maps
- Foreword
- Introduction: Jean Bingen and the currents of Ptolemaic history
- Part I The Monarchy
- Part II The Greeks
- 6 The Thracians in Ptolemaic Egypt
- 7 Ptolemaic papyri and the Achaean diaspora in Hellenistic Egypt
- 8 Greek presence and the Ptolemaic rural setting
- 9 The urban milieu in the Egyptian countryside during the Ptolemaic period
- 10 Kerkeosiris and its Greeks in the second century
- 11 The cavalry settlers of the Herakleopolite in the first century
- 12 Two royal ordinances of the first century and the Alexandrians
- Part III The Royal Economy
- Part IV Greeks and Egyptians
- Conclusion
- Bibliography
- General index
- Index of passages discussed
- HELLENISTIC CULTURE AND SOCIETY
Summary
Two themes of research which seem to me important for any structural analysis of the population in Ptolemaic Egypt have particularly preoccupied me. The first developed the hypothesis that Greeks, the driving element and protagonist of our documentation (a documentation which is predominantly Greek and rural), seem often to be in fact, in the agricultural environment, ‘absentees’ or ‘passers-by’ even though they are absentees or passers-by whose actions influence this rural environment. A second hypothesis, which is correlative with the first, was that this tendency of the Greek population of Egypt (it is a tendency, and not a rule) to settle in a more or less urbanised milieu already brought, during the Ptolemaic period, a relative density to the urban character of the nome metropolis.
For my first investigations on the Greek presence in the rural environment, I made use largely of papyri found at Tebtynis. Certainly, this site produced a documentation unique in papyrology, because it supplies rich series of papyri for various periods, illustrating the third century bc, then the second and the beginning of the first bc, and finally the Roman period. There is, however, no coherence among these dossiers from the point of view of onomastics, or from that of the occupation of the soil between the Ptolemaic village and later Tebtynis. Part of my argumentation in Chapter 8 is based on the ‘archive’ of the komogrammateus Menches, one of the loveliest finds of Ptolemaic papyri.
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- Information
- Hellenistic EgyptMonarchy, Society, Economy, Culture, pp. 122 - 131Publisher: Edinburgh University PressPrint publication year: 2007