The City in Roman and Byzantine Egypt

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Some of the previous offices and names of offices under the Hellenistic Ptolemaic rule were kept, some were changed, and some names would have remained but the function and administration would have changed. The Romans introduced important changes in the administrative system, aimed at achieving a high level of efficiency and maximizing revenue.

The duties of the prefect of Aegyptus combined responsibility for military security through command of the legions and cohorts , for the organization of finance and taxation, and for the administration of justice. The reforms of the early 4th century had established the basis for another years of comparative prosperity in Aegyptus , at a cost of perhaps greater rigidity and more oppressive state control. Aegyptus was subdivided for administrative purposes into a number of smaller provinces, and separate civil and military officials were established; the praeses and the dux.

The province was under the supervision of the count of the Orient i. Emperor Justinian abolished the diocese of Egypt in and re-combined civil and military power in the hands of the dux with a civil deputy the praeses as a counterweight to the power of the church authorities. All pretense of local autonomy had by then vanished. The presence of the soldiery was more noticeable, its power and influence more pervasive in the routine of town and village life.

The economic resources that this imperial government existed to exploit had not changed since the Ptolemaic period , but the development of a much more complex and sophisticated taxation system was a hallmark of Roman rule. Taxes in both cash and kind were assessed on land, and a bewildering variety of small taxes in cash, as well as customs dues and the like, was collected by appointed officials.

A massive amount of Aegyptus's grain was shipped downriver north both to feed the population of Alexandria and for export to the Roman capital. There were frequent complaints of oppression and extortion from the taxpayers. The Roman government had actively encouraged the privatization of land and the increase of private enterprise in manufacture, commerce, and trade, and low tax rates favored private owners and entrepreneurs.

The poorer people gained their livelihood as tenants of state-owned land or of property belonging to the emperor or to wealthy private landlords, and they were relatively much more heavily burdened by rentals, which tended to remain at a fairly high level. Overall, the degree of monetization and complexity in the economy, even at the village level, was intense. Goods were moved around and exchanged through the medium of coin on a large scale and, in the towns and the larger villages, a high level of industrial and commercial activity developed in close conjunction with the exploitation of the predominant agricultural base.

The volume of trade, both internal and external, reached its peak in the 1st and 2nd centuries. By the end of the 3rd century, major problems were evident. A series of debasements of the imperial currency had undermined confidence in the coinage, [4] and even the government itself was contributing to this by demanding more and more irregular tax payments in kind, which it channeled directly to the main consumers, the army personnel. Local administration by the councils was careless, recalcitrant, and inefficient; the evident need for firm and purposeful reform had to be squarely faced in the reigns of Diocletian and Constantine I.

This wealthiest of provinces could be held militarily by a very small force; and the threat implicit in an embargo on the export of grain supplies, vital to the provisioning of the city of Rome and its populace, was obvious. Internal security was guaranteed by the presence of three Roman legions later reduced to two, then one Legio II Traiana stationed at the grand capital Alexandria.

Each of these numbered around strong, and several units of auxiliaries. In the first decade of Roman rule the spirit of Augustan imperialism looked farther afield, attempting expansion to the east and to the south. Most of the early Roman troops stationed there were Greco-Macedonians and native Egyptians once part of the dissolved Ptolemaic army finding service for Rome. Eventually Romans or Romanized people were a majority.

The social structure in Aegyptus under the Romans was both unique and complicated. On the one hand, the Romans continued to use many of the same organizational tactics that were in place under the leaders of the Ptolemaic period.

The City in Roman and Byzantine Egypt [Paperback]

The Romans began a system of social hierarchy that revolved around ethnicity and place of residence. Other than Roman citizens, a Greek citizen of one of the Greek cities had the highest status, and a rural Egyptian would be in the lowest class. Gaining citizenship and moving up in ranks was very difficult and there were not many available options for ascendancy. One of the routes that many followed to ascend to another caste was through enlistment in the army.

Although only Roman citizens could serve in the legions, many Greeks found their way in. The native Egyptians could join the auxiliary forces and attain citizenship upon discharge. The Greeks were exempt from the poll tax , while Hellenized inhabitants of the nome capitals were taxed at a lower rate than the native Egyptians, who could not enter the army, and paid the full poll tax. The social structure in Aegyptus is very closely linked to the governing administration. Elements of centralized rule that were derived from the Ptolemaic period lasted into the 4th century.

Boulai , or town councils, in Egypt were only formally constituted by Septimius Severus. It was only under Diocletian later in the 3rd century that these boulai and their officers acquired important administrative responsibilities for their nomes. The Augustan takeover introduced a system of compulsory public service, which was based on poros property or income qualification , which was wholly based on social status and power.

The Romans also introduced the poll tax which was similar to tax rates that the Ptolemies levied, but the Romans gave special low rates to citizens of metropolises. This city, along with Alexandria, shows the diverse set-up of various institutions that the Romans continued to use after their takeover of Egypt.

The City In Roman and Byzantine Egypt

Just as under the Ptolemies, Alexandria and its citizens had their own special designations. The capital city enjoyed a higher status and more privileges than the rest of Egypt. Just as it was under the Ptolemies, the primary way of becoming a citizen of Roman Alexandria was through showing when registering for a deme that both parents were Alexandrian citizens. Alexandrians were the only Egyptians that could obtain Roman citizenship. If a common Egyptian wanted to become a Roman citizen he would first have to become an Alexandrian citizen.

These landowning elites were put in a position of privilege and power and had more self-administration than the Egyptian population. Within the citizenry, there were gymnasiums that Greek citizens could enter if they showed that both parents were members of the gymnasium based on a list that was compiled by the government in 4—5 AD. The candidate for the gymnasium would then be let into the ephebus.

There was also the council of elders known as the gerousia. This council of elders did not have a boulai to answer to. All of this Greek organization was a vital part of the metropolis and the Greek institutions provided an elite group of citizens.


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The Romans looked to these elites to provide municipal officers and well-educated administrators. It is well documented that Alexandrians in particular were able to enjoy lower tax-rates on land. These privileges even extended to corporal punishments. Romans were protected from this type of punishment while native Egyptians were whipped.

Alexandrians, on the other hand, had the privilege of merely being beaten with a rod. The Gnomon of the Idios Logos shows the connection between law and status. It lays out the revenues it deals with, mainly fines and confiscation of property, to which only a few groups were apt. The Gnomon demonstrates the social controls that the Romans had in place through monetary means based on status and property. The Patriarchate of Alexandria is held to be founded by Mark the Evangelist around The ancient religion of Egypt put up surprisingly little resistance to the spread of Christianity.

Possibly its long history of collaboration with the Greek and Roman rulers of Egypt had robbed its religious leaders of authority. Alternatively, the life-affirming native religion may have begun to lose its appeal among the lower classes as a burden of taxation and liturgical services instituted by the Roman emperors reduced the quality of life. In a religious system which views earthly life as eternal, when earthly life becomes strained and miserable, the desire for such an everlasting life loses its appeal. Thus, the focus on poverty and meekness found a vacuum among the Egyptian population.

In addition, many Christian tenets such as the concept of the trinity, a resurrection of deity and union with the deity after death had close similarities with the native religion of ancient Egypt. By it is clear that Alexandria was one of the great Christian centres.

The Christian apologists Clement of Alexandria and Origen both lived part or all of their lives in that city, where they wrote, taught, and debated. Over the course of the 5th century, paganism was suppressed and lost its following, as the poet Palladius bitterly noted. It lingered underground for many decades: Many Egyptian Jews also became Christians, but many others refused to do so, leaving them as the only sizable religious minority in a Christian country. No sooner had the Egyptian Church achieved freedom and supremacy than it became subject to a schism and prolonged conflict which at times descended into civil war.

Alexandria became the centre of the first great split in the Christian world, between the Arians , named for the Alexandrian priest Arius , and their opponents, represented by Athanasius , who became Archbishop of Alexandria in after the First Council of Nicaea rejected Arius's views.

The Arian controversy caused years of riots and rebellions throughout most of the 4th century. In the course of one of these, the great temple of Serapis , the stronghold of paganism, was destroyed. Athanasius was alternately expelled from Alexandria and reinstated as its Archbishop between five and seven times. Egypt had an ancient tradition of religious speculation, enabling a variety of controversial religious views to thrive there. Not only did Arianism flourish, but other doctrines, such as Gnosticism and Manichaeism , either native or imported, found many followers.

Another religious development in Egypt was the monasticism of the Desert Fathers , who renounced the material world in order to live a life of poverty in devotion to the Church. Egyptian Christians took up monasticism with such enthusiasm that the Emperor Valens had to restrict the number of men who could become monks. Egypt exported monasticism to the rest of the Christian world. Another development of this period was the development of Coptic , a form of the Ancient Egyptian language written with the Greek alphabet supplemented by several signs to represent sounds present in Egyptian which were not present in Greek.

It was invented to ensure the correct pronunciation of magical words and names in pagan texts, the so-called Greek Magical Papyri. Coptic was soon adopted by early Christians to spread the word of the gospel to native Egyptians and it became the liturgical language of Egyptian Christianity and remains so to this day. Christianity was quickly accepted by the people who were oppressed in first-century Roman Egypt.

Christianity eventually spread out west to the Berbers. The Coptic Church was established in Egypt. Donatist Christianity blended with local African religious practices and beliefs. Donatus and some other African bishops stepped out of line according to the Romans and the Romans persecuted the Christians in Northern Africa. Since Christianity blended it with local traditions it never truly united the people against Arabian forces in the seventh and eight centuries. Later on in the seventh and eighth centuries, Christianity spread out to Nubia. The reign of Constantine also saw the founding of Constantinople as a new capital for the Roman Empire, and in the course of the 4th century the Empire was divided in two, with Egypt finding itself in the Eastern Empire with its capital at Constantinople.

Latin, never well established in Egypt, would play a declining role with Greek continuing to be the dominant language of government and scholarship. During the 5th and 6th centuries the Eastern Roman Empire, today known as the Byzantine Empire , gradually transformed itself into a thoroughly Christian state whose culture differed significantly from its pagan past.

The fall of the Western Empire in the 5th century further isolated the Egyptian Romans from Rome's culture and hastened the growth of Christianity. The triumph of Christianity led to a virtual abandonment of pharaonic traditions: The Greek system of local government by citizens had now entirely disappeared. Offices, with new Byzantine names, were almost hereditary in the wealthy land-owning families.

Alexandria, the second city of the empire, continued to be a centre of religious controversy and violence. Cyril , the patriarch of Alexandria , convinced the city's governor to expel the Jews from the city in with the aid of the mob, in response to the Jews' alleged nighttime massacre of many Christians. The new religious controversy was over the nature of Jesus of Nazareth. The issue was whether he had two natures, human and divine, or a combined one hypostatic union from His humanity and divinity.

This may seem an arcane distinction, but in an intensely religious age it was enough to divide an empire. The Miaphysite controversy arose after the First Council of Constantinople in and continued until the Council of Chalcedon in , which ruled in favour of the position that Jesus was "In two natures" due to confusing Miaphytism combined with Monophystism single.

The Monophysite belief was not held by the miaphysites as they stated that Jesus was out of two natures in one nature called, the "Incarnate Logos of God". Many of the miaphysites claimed that they were misunderstood, that there was really no difference between their position and the Chalcedonian position, and that the Council of Chalcedon ruled against them because of political motivations alone. The Church of Alexandria split from the Churches of Rome and Constantinople over this issue, creating what would become the Coptic Orthodox Church of Alexandria, which remains a major force in Egyptian religious life today.

Egypt nevertheless continued to be an important economic center for the Empire supplying much of its agriculture and manufacturing needs as well as continuing to be an important center of scholarship. It would supply the needs of the Byzantine Empire and the Mediterranean as a whole.

The two made quite different demands, and the ultimate result was a social, political, and cultural gulf between Alexandria and the rest of Egypt and between Hellenism and native Egyptian culture, which found a powerful new means of expression in Coptic Christianity. The gulf was made more emphatic after the Council of Chalcedon in established the official doctrine that Christ was to be seen as existing in two natures, inseparably united.

Despite the debilitating effect of internal quarrels between rival churchmen, and despite the threats posed by the hostile tribes of Blemmyes and Nubade in the south until their conversion to Christianity in the mid-6th century , emperors of Byzantium still could be threatened by the strength of Egypt if it were properly harnessed. The last striking example is the case of the emperor Phocas , a tyrant who was brought down in or The difficulty of defending Egypt from a power base in Constantinople was forcefully illustrated during the last three decades of Byzantine rule.

First, the old enemy, the Persians, advanced to the Nile delta and captured Alexandria. Their occupation was completed early in and continued until , when Persia and Byzantium agreed to a peace treaty and the Persians withdrew. This had been a decade of violent hostility to the Egyptian Coptic Christians; among other oppressive measures, the Persians are said to have refused to allow the normal ordination of bishops and to have massacred hundreds of monks in their cave monasteries.

The Persian withdrawal hardly heralded the return of peace to Egypt. In Arabia events were taking place that would soon bring momentous changes for Egypt. These were triggered by the flight of the Prophet Muhammad from Mecca to Medina and by his declaration in ce of a holy war against Byzantium. The invasion itself had been preceded by several years of vicious persecution of Coptic Christians by Cyrus, the Chalcedonian patriarch of Alexandria, and it was he who is said to have betrayed Egypt to the forces of Islam.

The Islamic conquest was not bloodless.

Egypt as a province of Rome

By September 14 Cyrus, who had been recalled from Egypt 10 months earlier by the emperor Heraclius, was back with authority to conclude a peace. Byzantium signed Egypt away on November 8, , with provision for an month armistice to allow ratification of the treaty of surrender by the emperor and the caliph. The new domination by the theocratic Islamic caliphate was strikingly different from anything that had happened in Egypt since the arrival of Alexander the Great almost a thousand years earlier. The reforms of the early 4th century had established the basis for another years of comparative prosperity in Egypt, at a cost of perhaps greater rigidity and more-oppressive state control.

Egypt was subdivided for administrative purposes into a number of smaller provinces, and separate civil and military officials were established the praeses and the dux , respectively. By the middle of the 6th century the emperor Justinian was eventually forced to recognize the failure of this policy and to combine civil and military power in the hands of the dux with a civil deputy the praeses as a counterweight to the power of the church authorities.

All pretense of local autonomy had by then vanished. The presence of the soldiery was more noticeable, its power and influence more pervasive in the routine of town and village life.

Administration and economy under Rome

Taxes were perhaps not heavier than they had been earlier, but they were collected ruthlessly, and strong measures were sanctioned against those who tried to escape from their fiscal or legal obligations. The wealthier landowners probably enjoyed increased prosperity, especially as a result of the opportunity to buy now state-owned land that had once been sold into private ownership in the early 4th century.

The great landlords were powerful enough to offer their peasant tenants a significant degree of collective fiscal protection against the agents of the state, the rapacious tax collector, the officious bureaucrat , or the brutal soldier. But, if the life of the average peasant did not change much, nevertheless the rich probably became richer, and the poor became poorer and more numerous as the moderate landholders were increasingly squeezed out of the picture.

The advance of Christianity had just as profound an effect on the social and cultural fabric of Byzantine Egypt as on the political power structure. It brought to the surface the identity of the native Egyptians in the Coptic church , which found a medium of expression in the development of the Coptic language —basically Egyptian written in Greek letters with the addition of a few characters. Coptic Christianity also developed its own distinctive art, much of it pervaded by the long-familiar motifs of Greek mythology.

These motifs coexisted with representations of the Virgin and Child and with Christian parables and were expressed in decorative styles that owed a great deal to both Greek and Egyptian precedents. Although Christianity had made great inroads into the populace by the year in which the practice of the local polytheistic religions was officially made illegal , it is hardly possible to quantify it or to trace a neat and uniform progression. It engulfed its predecessors slowly and untidily. In the first half of the 5th century a polytheistic literary revival occurred, centred on the town of Panopolis, and there is evidence that fanatical monks in the area attacked non-Christian temples and stole statues and magical texts.

Outside the rarefied circles in which doctrinal disputes were discussed in philosophical terms, there was a great heterogeneous mass of commitment and belief. For example, both the gnostics , who believed in redemption through knowledge, and the Manichaeans, followers of the Persian prophet Mani , clearly thought of themselves as Christians. At the lower levels of society, magical practices remained ubiquitous and were simply transferred to a Christian context.

The origins of Antonian communities, named for the founding father of monasticism , St.

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Anthony of Egypt c. Other monasteries, called Pachomian—for Pachomius , the founder of cenobitic monasticism —were planned from the start as walled complexes with communal facilities. The provision of water cisterns, kitchens, bakeries, oil presses, workshops, stables, and cemeteries and the ownership and cultivation of land in the vicinity made these communities self-sufficient to a high degree, offering their residents peace and protection against the oppression of the tax collector and the brutality of the soldier.

But it does not follow that they were divorced from contact with nearby towns and villages. Indeed, many monastics were important local figures, and many monastery churches were probably open to the local public for worship. The economic and social power of the Christian church in the Nile River valley and delta is the outstanding development of the 5th and 6th centuries.

The City in Roman and Byzantine Egypt

By the time of the Arab invasion, in the mid-7th century, the uncomplicated message of Islam might have seemed attractive and drawn attention to the political and religious rifts that successive and rival patriarchs of the Christian church had so violently created and exploited. But the advent of Arab rule did not suppress Christianity in Egypt. Some areas remained heavily Christian for several more centuries.

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Please note that our editors may make some formatting changes or correct spelling or grammatical errors, and may also contact you if any clarifications are needed. Administration and economy under Rome The Romans introduced important changes in the administrative system, aimed at achieving a high level of efficiency and maximizing revenue.

Society, religion, and culture One of the more noticeable effects of Roman rule was the clearer tendency toward classification and social control of the populace. Previous page Macedonian and Ptolemaic Egypt —30 bce. Page 6 of 6. Learn More in these related Britannica articles: According to Hebrew tradition, a famine caused the migration to Egypt of the band of 12 Hebrew families that later made up a tribal league in the land of Israel. The schematic character of this tradition does not impair the historicity of a…. Egypt was taken without a struggle, an indication of the dislike the subject population felt toward Persia.

Even though Egypt had been reconquered by Persia hardly more than a decade before, it is possible that there had been yet another revolt since The introduction of writing in Egypt in the predynastic period c. By virtue of their writing skills, the scribes took on all the duties of a civil…. In Egypt, the first lists date from about the middle of the 3rd millennium bce and extend back another 1, years to a time when kings were thought to mingle with gods.

Entries were made year by year, making these lists among…. Origins of coins In coin: From Alexander the Great to the end of the Roman Republic, c. The Middle East epigraphic texts In historiography: Egypt and Mesopotamia importance to Afrocentrism In Afrocentrism: Beliefs labour In statute labour In history of the organization of work: The ancient world nome In nome police In police: Ancient policing View More. Articles from Britannica Encyclopedias for elementary and high school students. Help us improve this article! Contact our editors with your feedback. Introduction Introduction to ancient Egyptian civilization Life in ancient Egypt The king and ideology: You may find it helpful to search within the site to see how similar or related subjects are covered.

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