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Beyond the Pyramids: Ethnicity and Nationality in Roman Egypt
From: Columbia University | By: Roger Bagnall

EDITOR'S INTRODUCTION | Bagnall

The Egypt that tourists encounter is mostly the Egypt of the pharaohs, the kings who built the pyramids and the great temples and tombs of Luxor. But Egypt is not only layered archaeologically; over hundreds of years different peoples commingled in the ebb and flow of conquest and settlement.

One such period is Roman Egypt (30 BCE to 284 CE) at the dawn of the first millennium, inaugurated by Octavian (later known as Augustus Caesar) in his expansion of the Roman Empire. Historians have argued for generations about how different Roman Egypt was from previous periods, and about what changes the Romans brought to Egypt's culture, which was already complicated in terms of ethnic and national identity.

As you can see in this timeline, Roman rule replaced the Hellenistic rule of the Ptolemies, who had ruled Egypt for 13 generations after Alexander the Great's conquest in 332 BCE. Under the Ptolemies, many Greeks settled in Egypt's cities and countryside and influenced Egyptian culture, literature and writing. What happened to Egyptian culture and these Greek influences when the Roman Empire brought Egypt into its orbit?

Roger Bagnall (above), professor of classics and history at Columbia University, examines the vexed questions of ethnicity and nationality in a society that was at the same time Egyptian, Greek and Roman, questions of particular interest for those with some familiarity with Egyptian history.

he Roman emperors brought many changes to the economy and society of Egypt. The most striking were the development of old Egyptian towns into Greek-style cities, with a ruling class based on land holdings in the surrounding countryside. As this elite became ever more prosperous and autonomous, it focused its life on the city and not on the country villages where its estates were located and where for generations these descendants of Greek military settlers had had their homes.

In this society, questions of ethnicity and nationality were much trickier than one might imagine. The ancients had no real counterpart to modern nationalism, however much modern scholars have tried to foist it upon them. But they did have a notion of peoples, even though the character of this notion is surprisingly hard to tease out of the ancient sources.

A major difficulty must be faced squarely: The documents we have that mention nationality mainly come from legal and official contexts, where this kind of information is given for purposes of formal, legal identification. As such, these identifiers are very informative about how governments classified people, but not very helpful for the question of how far their own self-identification coincided with their official classification--in other words, how people saw themselves.

This was true already under the Ptolemies, descended from one of the Macedonian generals of Alexander the Great, who divided the population into Greeks and non-Greeks. Almost anyone with an origin outside Egypt could qualify as a Greek, including a variety of Balkan and Syro-Palestinian groups. Thracians were Greeks, Carians were Greeks, and Jews were Greek. If an Egyptian woman married a man with Greek status, she became a Greek. Whole families, rather than individuals, were Greek or non-Greek. The artificial character of these administrative categories becomes apparent.

Even more: If an Egyptian entered a Macedonian-style unit of the Ptolemaic army, he became a Greek. This is a phenomenon of the second half of the Hellenistic period, but by the time the Romans arrived, there was well more than a century of this kind of systemic confusion in place.

For all its peculiarity, however, this system was not without its virtues. The most salient is that it accepts the fundamental truth that Hellenism was in fact porous; there were no racial boundaries keeping outsiders from becoming Greek.

Being Greek was largely a matter of culture, and those who entered royal service or married Greeks did in fact at least start to blur the lines of their cultural identity, operating usually in two languages and more than just one role. Social identity and legal identity diverge precisely because legal identity was an all-or-nothing affair, where social identity must have been infinitely more complicated and fluid.

Roman system of classification

The Romans were not impressed with the Ptolemaic system. They liked nice, clear legal categories and cared nothing for the culture of Ptolemaic Egypt. For them, the situation was fairly simple: there were three categories.

First came Roman citizens, of whom there were not many in the province: some were there as soldiers, perhaps temporarily; some were there as administrators, even more briefly; and a few were there probably more permanently, for commercial reasons. Second came the citizens of the three Greek cities, Alexandria, Naucratis, and Ptolemais, who had a status equivalent to that of the citizens of Greek cities throughout the eastern empire--Ephesos, Pergamon, Antioch and all the others. The rest were all Egyptians.

This sudden downward change of status must have come as a rude shock to the Greeks of the Egyptian countryside, who were used to a privileged status, not to speak of the Jews, who were accustomed to Greek status but at the same time were accustomed to a considerable measure of independence through their community institutions. All of a sudden they were all on the wrong side of the line between Greeks and Egyptians.

It has been suggested that friends of Octavian (the Roman leader) in Alexandria may have been at the root of this downward mobility for their country cousins, but this may not be a necessary hypothesis; what Octavian did in Egypt is not really out of line with Roman dispositions elsewhere in the East. Still, as we shall see, some Alexandrians were keen to use the new arrangements for their own political purposes.

The relative scarcity of documents from the reign of Augustus, the first of the Roman emperors to control Egypt, makes it hard to see what happened next, but the Roman government ultimately wound up recognizing that their arrangements were a bit too simple and accepting a differentiation within this population of Egyptians.

In Oxyrhynchos, a status of "belonging to the gymnasium" was established; in the Fayyum, the corresponding group was called "Greek settlers." We do not know quite when these concessions were granted. The likelihood is that the early censuses under Augustus, probably within two decades of the conquest, laid the foundations for the identification of those who could show their Greek ancestral status to the satisfaction of the authorities. Many of these were Greeks living in villages rather than in the nome (district) capital, at least in the first century of Roman rule.

We have much less information about parts of Egypt other than the Fayyum or Oxyrhynchos during this period, but the Romans certainly set out to create a cadre of civic officials in all parts of the country, and it is likely that privileged groups recognized as Hellenic--but not Greek citizens, still legally Egyptians--were delineated in each nome.

The Jewish population

Now, let's consider what this situation looked like from the point of view of an extreme case, the Jewish population of Egypt. They might, in different contexts, be thought of in three different categories.

Legally they were Egyptians; this is pointed out with force by an Alexandrian named Isidoros in one of the so-called Acts of the Pagan Martyrs (an odd genre of fictional trial scenes before the emperor, in which Alexandrian notables talked back to their master). Speaking to the emperor Claudius, he says of the Alexandrian Jews, "They are not of the same temperament as the Alexandrians [i.e., real Greeks], but live rather after the fashion of the Egyptians. Are they not on a level with those who pay the poll-tax?"

Isidoros thus glides effortlessly from their legal status, reflected here in their subjection to the poll tax, to way of life, or perceived ethnicity, in quite a nasty fashion. But his remarks show one way in which the status of the Jews could be described, tendentiously but not quite inaccurately. (To be sure, Isidoros was rude to the emperor and lost his head for his pains.)

But the same Jewish population could also be thought of as Greek, as it certainly was in many cultural respects: Greek-speaking, Greek-writing, at home in Greek literature, fully integrated into the international Greek economy. They were far too Greek for the liking of many in Palestine, in fact, for whom even the translation of the Hebrew scriptures into Greek, the Septuaginth, was not a good thing.

And yet the Jews were not simply Greeks, either, as the anti-Semitic Isidoros is intent to point out. They had a whole set of distinct institutions, both religious and more broadly of the community, which were not shared with either their fellow Alexandrians or the rest of the population of Egypt. The Jews of the countryside of Egypt similarly operated with multiple identities.

The complexity of status and culture that I have described in the case of the Jewish population, where it is most salient, is more generally true of the population of Roman Egypt, even if not quite to the same degree.

We cannot always describe people in either-or terms, however ready the Roman authorities were to do so. At the ends of the spectrum, things will have seemed clearer. Greeks of the three cities (Alexandria, Naucratis and Ptolemais) may have had only relatively weak attachments to Egypt as a place, although even that is questionable; at all events, they were in no doubt that they were Greeks.

The population of a temple village like Soknopaiou Nesos, on the north side of the lake in the Fayyum, with almost 100 percent Egyptian names and very limited signs of Greek culture, is as close to entirely Egyptian as one can come. Even there, however, most of the documents were written in Greek, and there is enough evidence to allow us to suppose that a Greek school operated in the village.

Moving from these extremes toward the center, however, we find it much harder to be categorical. The big villages like Karanis, Tebtunis, Theadelphia and Bacchias have produced extensive finds of Greek literary papyri--not on a scale with a city like Oxyrhynchos, to be sure, but hardly to be sneezed at. There were in the early Roman period--down to the beginning of the third century of our era, anyway--plenty of people in these villages whose culture was largely Greek. But hardly ever can we really say anything about their ancestry.

Language and naming

One sign of their self-image is the way they named their children. When I described Soknopaiou Nesos as an essentially Egyptian village, it was partly because its population overwhelmingly bore Egyptian names--that is, names with an Egyptian etymology, even when they are written in Greek characters and with Greek grammatical endings.

Petesouchos, "the one given by the crocodile god Sobek," is an example, constructed out of the Egyptian definite article, the verb "to give" and the name of the god. At the other end of the scale, the males who are members of the privileged group of Greek settlers in the Fayyum tend to have Greek names, some of them distinctively Macedonian.

But in the category of Greek names we also find a more ambivalent group. A characteristic example is Isidoros, the name borne by the Alexandrian depicted in the passage I read above as arguing that the Jews were on the level of the Egyptians. It is a Greek name by derivation, meaning "gift of Isis." Isis, of course, is an Egyptian goddess. So the name is on one level an assertion of Greekness--"I give my son a Greek name"--but on another a thanksgiving to an Egyptian goddess, to whom perhaps the parents had prayed for a son. The parental self-identification is thus both Greek and Egyptian, but in different respects.

And things become more complicated still. When a name like Hermias is encountered, we see at once that it is derived from the Greek god Hermes. But why was this name chosen? It may have been picked by parents who valued their association with the gymnasium, the gods of which were Herakles and Hermes. But it is also possible that it contains homage instead to the Egyptian god Thoth, who was equated with Hermes. If we encounter the name in Hermopolis, where Thoth was the tutelary divinity, this Egyptianizing interpretation becomes almost inescapable. Then, once again, we have a dual self-identification at work: Greek name, Egyptian god named by his Greek equivalent. But in the Fayyum, where Thoth was less important, that interpretation does not impose itself.

And then there is another tricky category. Take Sokrates, for example. A nice classical name, no? You have all heard of him, the philosopher forced to drink the hemlock by his fellow citizens. But why on earth is this name so popular at Karanis? Could it be that its phonetic similarity to the name of the crocodile god, Sobek (which sounds like "Sok" in compounds), made it attractive to those who wanted to have a Greek-sounding name but still pay homage to the god?

Or Maron, a nice Greek name that means "sparkler," but which just happens to remind one of Marres, an Egyptian name common in the Fayyum (meaning "Re [the sun god] is truthful")? With these names also, one achieves a kind of dual identity, saying--at least to the discerning--"I am naming my child so as to claim good Greek status, but also so as to affirm my loyalty to the gods of this place where I live."

As time goes on, Egypt's name repertory also includes Roman names. Some of these belonged to Roman citizens, particularly legionary soldiers, retired auxiliary soldiers, Alexandrian citizens who received Roman citizenship, and the freed slaves of Roman citizens. But others were used by noncitizens, just as if they were a Greek name. A Roman might find it peculiar to discover names like Gaius or Marcus, which in his eyes were only first names out of three, used alone as if they were Greek names, but it happened.

We cannot take a time machine back to the moment of the naming of any of these people and hear what the parents were saying about their reasons for choosing names. With any given individual, various possibilities can be entertained. The resolution of our camera is not good enough to see the individual clearly. But when we look at an entire population, the situation comes into sharper focus, and we see the cultural complexity of naming practices much more clearly.

We see, too, how much these things varied from one part of Egypt to another. The Fayyum has Greek names in common use that do not appear in Oxyrhynchos, and vice versa. These distinctive local traits probably go back to families of settlers, centuries before, who tenaciously handed down family names across the generations. Egyptian names are also in many cases locally distinctive, based on the gods particularly venerated in that part of Egypt. They speak specifically to the sense of belonging to a particular place.

Integration of cultures

All this has been aimed at evoking, however imperfectly, a sense of the complex layering that went into the creation of the society of Roman Egypt. When Alexander arrived in Egypt, it was already multilayered. Egypt had seen both waves and trickles of immigration over the centuries, from Palestine and Syria, from the Libyan desert and from Nubia. Greeks had come as mercenary soldiers in the pay of the late Egyptian kings. Undoubtedly there were some Persians as well, settlers during the period when Persian kings ruled the country.

Egypt's culture exercised a powerful gravitational force, and for the most part these peoples had assimilated into Egyptian society with little difficulty. At the same time, Egyptian culture was strong enough to absorb influences from these settlers without losing its own identity. With the arrival of Greek rule, the same forces went into operation. But this time the numbers were large enough, and the rule by the foreigners durable enough, to complicate matters considerably.

The Greeks did not for the most part get swallowed up in Egyptian society. Eventually, however, despite all attempts to preserve a Hellenic identity, they came to see themselves as Greeks of Egypt, not simply Greeks or Macedonians. And many Egyptians learned Greek, no doubt in most cases for practical advantage. But Greek civilization too was a powerful magnet, and Egyptians who took on roles in the army and administration of the Ptolemies are unlikely to have been unchanged by their experiences. No wonder the Romans found it difficult to figure out who was who.

The Romans added in their turn another layer to this sediment. In their case, it was not an influx of population but the attraction of a hegemonic, metropolitan civilization. Egypt did not need to learn Latin to find Roman culture of compelling interest, and the Romans ran Egypt, like their other eastern provinces, in Greek rather than Latin.

Particularly for the elites, who enthusiastically bought into the Roman concept of an empire mostly run by local elites loyal to Rome, imitating Rome and Romans helped them feel part of the power structures of the empire. Roman names are a part of this, but so are the Roman styles of hairdressing and adornment found in the portraits. It was possible to think of oneself as simultaneously Greek in culture, Roman in allegiance and Egyptian in home and religion--not only possible, but normal.

Such questions of simultaneous multiple cultures have become fashionable in our own American society in the past few decades. In some respects, however, Americans are in the worst possible position to appreciate what a society like that of Roman Egypt was really like. We are the metropolitan power with the imperialistic culture, spreading its reach globally; like the British in the nineteenth century, who tended to think of themselves as modern Romans. Today Americans are the Romans.

The complicated combinations of enthusiastic embrace of some aspects of American culture, rejection of others, and local pride that can be seen in much of the world today gives one a better sense of the ways in which a resident of Egypt might have seen the Roman world. No doubt there was a considerable correlation between status and cultural involvement in Romanity, but it would be a mistake to think that cultural layering in Roman Egypt was only a matter of wealth or social class.

Women's cultural identity

Something must, however, be said about the likelihood that the workings of this cultural layering were not the same for men and women. This is an extremely difficult question, because we have very little direct access to what women thought, and not even a great deal of knowledge of what they really did most of the time.

We do have more than 200 letters in Greek written by women--and I include in the word "written" the act of dictating--which tell us quite a bit of important information. These certainly come mainly from women of this top fifth of society, and they do not suggest to us any significant differences in outlook between these women and the men of the same classes, from whom we have 10 times as many letters.

Nonetheless, there are a couple of interesting straws in the wind. One is that women are, within a given family, far more likely than men to be given Egyptian names. That is, the sons were given mainly Greek and Roman names, but the women were given Egyptian names. I speak statistically here; there are plenty of Greek women's names to be found in the papyri. But the mixture is very different than it is with men.

Secondly, there is a curious anomaly in the letters of which I have spoken. In late antiquity, from the fifth century on, Greek letters from women practically disappear, while letters from men continue. But letters from women written in Coptic (the late form of Egyptian, written mainly in Greek letters) become fairly numerous, and it looks as if Coptic may have pretty much replaced Greek as a means of written communication for women. During the first three centuries of the Roman Empire, by contrast, there was no widely available means of writing Egyptian, as the use of the Demotic script became largely restricted to the temples. Once it became possible to write Egyptian, women used it.

It is thus worth speculating that for women the mixture of Greek and Egyptian was not the same as for men. Their lives focused more on the household, less on public life. The men used Greek in public, but the women spoke Egyptian at home. This is much too simple a formulation, of course. But again Americans are peculiarly at a disadvantage in dealing with a question like this, because we are mostly monoglot, unused to the social and family behavior patterns produced in a multilingual situation.

It is not difficult to find parallels to the kind of bilingualism that I am suggesting; a colleague who grew up in a southern Italian village where Albanian was spoken points out to me that it was mainly the women who spoke Albanian, in the home, while Italian was the language of public life. Even though the men understood Albanian, they did not use it as much as women did.

Palmyra

Ancient and modern, Egypt has always given the impression of being distinctive. And of course it was, an original civilization with its own flavor. But it should not be seen as somehow unique in the Roman world, a place where the normal ways in which the Empire operated were suspended in favor of an altogether different type of existence. The multilayered culture that I have tried to describe can also be found in other parts of the Roman East.

I shall close by talking briefly about one of them and how it may help us to understand Roman Egypt. The civilization in question is that of Palmyra, the queen city of the Syrian desert, which captured the Roman imagination in the third century BCE because of the exploits of Queen Zenobia, and which no modern visitor is likely to forget.

Palmyra offers us an enormous advantage because, unlike the cities of Roman Egypt, it is well preserved. Its public face is largely that of the standard buildings and public structures found throughout the eastern provinces, with their long, impressively colonnaded streets, their tetrastyla used to articulate intersections, and their Graeco-Roman houses with peristyle courtyards.

But you do not have to look too far beneath this surface to see that a distinctive local culture, with its own traits, was present. Take, for example, the projections from many columns along the avenue and on the Temple of Baal Shamin, with variously Greek, Palmyrene or bilingual inscriptions commemorating major donors. These people were no amateurs at fund-raising. Baal-Shamin doesn't sound very Greek or Roman, and just as in Egypt we find that the cults are mainly the indigenous ones, with their own forms of art.

In the realm of funerary practices, we find distinctive traits, too, like the tower tombs with their hundreds of loculi for sarcophagi. The extraordinary sculpted sarcophagi themselves, not without their similarities to Roman productions, are so individual that one can hardly help but recognize that we are in the presence of a powerful local culture.

It is not an either-or situation. We are not asked to categorize the people of Roman Egypt, a well-off selection of whom we see in mummy portraits, as Greeks or Egyptians, or for that matter as Romans. Rather, we see in them a population at home with the religion and funerary customs of Egypt, speaking and in many cases writing Greek but alert to the reality of Roman power and thinking of themselves as part of the Roman world. With Artemidoros, you have an almost perfect encapsulation of this population: a Greek name formed from a goddess, Artemis, who might be the Hellenic version of an Egyptian goddess (Bastet, most likely); an accompanying woman's mummy with an Egyptian name, Thermoutharion; an Egyptian mummy and ritual--but a Roman portrait with a tunic, a bit of a red stripe, a Greek gold wreath of leaves and berries, a Trajanic hairstyle, a Greek inscription in a Roman frame.



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