Social and Cultural Developments

War, population mobility, and the changing political economies of the Seleucid and the Ptolemaic empires shaped and were shaped by the societies and cultures of the eastern Mediterranean and Near East.

The most obvious consequences of Alexander’s conquest and of empire forma­tion in the third century bce were high levels of migration. Several hundred thou­sand men and women left the Greek world for Egypt and the Near East—many of them soldiers, who were often accompanied by their families.^[494] In the third cen­tury, these migrants may have represented 5 percent of the Egyptian population (about four million people).^[495] To these, one must add perhaps two or three million inhabitants who stayed in the Aegean, but who were part of the Ptolemaic Empire. Migrants from the Greek world represented a somewhat lower percentage of the total population of the Seleucid empire (of about 15-20 million).^[496] The impact of these migrations varied greatly by region and also according to the type and number of immigrants.

One of the impacts that these empires had on daily life was that some Greeks and non-Greeks intermarried. However, such unions are not easy to identify in the sources, even in the extensive documentation from Egypt, because some Egyptians used Greek names.^[500] Onomastics is unreliable as a means of identifying ethnic origin. However, when additional information is known, such as filiation and occupation, cases of mixed marriages can be detected. Scholars acknowledge an increasing number of mixed marriages in Egypt from the second century on­ward. Moreover, the use of doubled Greek and Egyptian names by some individuals may point to their mixed background.^[501] Bilingualism was certainly prominent in such a group, and this largely overlapped with those among the local popula­tion involved in the Ptolemaic administration and the army.^[502] Tax lists from the third century Fayyum, which include lists of people living in the same household or their occupation, also provide unique information about the family structures of Greek migrants, whose households were on average larger than those of locals, since they often included several domestic slaves.^[503] Slavery in both empires was a phenomenon that increased throughout this period and was closely related to war as a means of supply.

Yet the interdependence between kings and cities, the latter being sources of revenues and difficult to besiege, should not be overlooked.^[510] No rebellion organ­ized by the cities themselves is attested in Asia Minor perhaps precisely because negotiations (about legal status, absence of garrison, or tax exemptions) between them and the kings could occur—that is, until Roman intervention in the east offered the possibility of taking sides, or not, against the king.^[511] In contrast, revolts that sometimes led to secession of parts of either empire or to smaller scale riots are attested in other regions.^[512] Social unrest was often caused by Greco-Macedonian governors and elites, but could also be triggered by dynastic conflicts.^[513] Attempts to extract more resources may have been one of the causes of the revolts of the second century, though one should also acknowledge the destabilization caused by successions of bad harvests: new climatic data seem to confirm the Nile failures that are already known from ancient evidence.^[514] Socioeconomic causes were entangled with religious and ethnic considerations in at least some of the revolts, such as the Great Revolt in Egypt and the troubles that led to the Maccabean Revolt in Judea, but their weight is debated among scholars.

These two main aristocratic networks shared privileged relationships with the king and shaped cultural developments at the court and beyond, even if, as most historians may be right to argue, the priestly elites did not have the status of Friends or of inner-court members. They would, however, be present at court for important events.^[516] Haubold has recently demonstrated the ways in which the Babylonian elite could guarantee dynastic continuities through his analysis of the Babyloniaca, a history of Babylon written in Greek by the local priest Berossus.^[517] The influ­ence of Berossus's text and of its Egyptian counterpart, the Aegyptiaca written by the priest Manetho, may have remained limited, but they illustrate attempts to ac­tively shape and translate non-Greek cultures in terms understandable to Greek elites and can be read as treatises on kingship.^[518] Translation of texts, in the narrow sense, was also one of the many intellectual activities occurring at the Alexandrian court, as illustrated by the romantic narrative of the Torah's translation into Greek (i.e., the Septuagint).^[519] Geographical and ethnographical inquiries proliferated, even if they often revealed more about the society that produced them than about the one under investigation. Scientific research flourished.^[520] Literary produc­tion by the Alexandrian court poets, most notably Theocritus, Callimachus, and Apollonius of Rhodes, was full of references to Greek culture but could also be un­derstood as alluding to some elements of Egyptian culture.^[521] Similarly, more and more Egyptian elements have been found in Alexandria.^[522] The overtone of both empires' culture was Hellenic—but Hellenic culture was not exclusive, at least in the Ptolemaic case.

This may suggest, in fact, a greater presence of elites of Egyptian or Greco-Egyptian origin at—or in closer relationship with—t he Ptolemaic court than is usually thought. This was at least the case from the second century on, the best example being that of the finance minister (dioiketes) Dioscourides, whose mother was an Egyptian priestess and father a man probably of Greek origin.^[523] Dozens of cases at different levels of the administrative and military hierarchies can be enumerated in Egypt and may be described as forming a transcultural elite.^[524] In contrast, Seleucid examples are rare. This may partially be due to the nature of the sources: Anu- uballit-Nicarchus and Anu-uballit-Kephalon, of Babylonian origin, were succes­sively governors of Uruk, and in the first case, Anu-uballit was granted his Greek name by King Antiochus II.^[525] The higher level of social and ethnic integration in Egypt may be explained by the pattern of settlement common there (i.e., fewer Greek-style city-states, in which mixed unions were discouraged), by a long tradi­tion of symbolism that resonated in both cultures, and even by the attraction of new arrivals to traditional Egyptian religion. This included, already in the mid-third century, the integration of royal and dynastic cults in the Egyptian temples. And this, as described by the priests in the famous trilingual decrees, facilitated trans- cultural events like festivals that incorporated all royal subjects.^[526] In the Seleucid Empire, the creation of the royal cult came far later (193 bce), and certainly imitated Ptolemaic cult.^[527] In both empires, though, the king was the unifying figure for all their subjects.

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