Official Identity and Ethnicity: Comparing Ptolemaic and Early Roman Egypt

Abstract

The study of ancient states brings a historical perspective to the creation of official identities. By looking at legal and fiscal documents preserved on papyri from Hellenistic and Early Roman Egypt (323 BCE to c. 70 CE), this study compares how the Ptolemies and then the Romans established official identities, that is, what priorities they gave to occupation, social status, citizenship, and/or ethnicity in order to construct legal and fiscal identities. It explores how these different priorities created overlaps between the categories, for instance, by an occupation permitting some flexibility with ethnicity, in order to include those in service of the state into privileged official categories. First, it shows that the fiscal and cleruchic policies of the Ptolemies partially reshaped societies so that social status became preeminent and ethnicity did no longer matter to the state already before the Roman annexation. Second, it compares how the demographic and social configuration in Egypt at the time of each conquest stimulated slightly different priorities when constructing official identities.