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Beyond the Pyramids: The People of Roman Egypt
From: Columbia University
| By:
Roger Bagnall |
EDITOR'S INTRODUCTION |
The Egypt that tourists encounter is mostly the Egypt of the pharaohs, the kings who built conspicuous monuments such as the pyramids and the great temples and tombs of Luxor. But there are other Egypts that have left behind their own remarkable buildings, art works and documents. One such Egypt is Roman Egypt (30 BCE to 284 CE), which marked the dawn of the first millennium and is the source of the very human mummy portraits in "Ancient Faces," an exhibit at the Metropolitan Museum of Art in spring 2000. Historians have argued for generations about how different Roman Egypt was from previous periods, and what changes the Romans brought to Egypt's complicated culture when they rushed into Egypt on the eve of Cleopatra's death in 30 BCE, as seen in this timeline. Cleopatra herself was the last of the Ptolemies, the Macedonian rulers of Egypt who came to power after Alexander the Great's entry in 332 BCE. Roger Bagnall (above), professor of classics and history at Columbia University, takes the occasion of this exhibit to uncover a society--its family, city and village life--that was at the same time Egyptian, Greek and Roman. |
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| Entrance pylon of the Temple of Luxor. | |
 here is a common problem with talking about ancient Egypt. "Eternal Egypt," as moderns have often loved to call it, does not display historical change as readily as some lands. This is not entirely a matter of chance. To the Egyptians, the past and its forms were prestigious symbols of legitimate authority, and they used them to good effect. |
At the entry of the Romans into Egypt in 30 BCE the great New Kingdom temples, dating from more than 1,000 years earlier (16th-13th centuries BCE), still stood proudly in the landscape.
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| Entrance to the Temple of Hathor at Dendera. | |
The Ptolemies, from the 4th-1st century BCE, had built temples in the same architectural tradition. The temples of the Roman period remain faithful to this same tradition. Ptolemies and Romans alike wrapped themselves in the symbols of the pharaohs, and the priesthoods generally collaborated in this masquerade of continuity. |
The balancing of change and continuity is a staple of the historian's craft, but talking about the people of Roman Egypt offers a particular challenge: in what way were they different from the people of Ptolemaic Egypt, or from people of other periods before and after? Certainly the difference was not a mass settlement of Romans in Egypt--that didn't happen. Only a relative handful of Roman administrators, soldiers and businessmen enriched the already complex soup of Egypt's population. |
Family life
That soup is difficult to describe, and descriptions of it have always been controversial. One can start by looking at something that probably didn't change very much with the coming of the Romans--the basic facts of birth, reproduction and death. |
Infant mortality was horrendous as in most premodern populations, with something like a third dying by the age of 1, and only a little more than half making it to age 5. After that, one's chances increased substantially, and a 10-year-old had about a 50 percent chance of making it to the mid-forties. A 20-year-old had almost a two-thirds chance of living long enough to raise a family. Overall, however, it was a young population, with an average age of about 26, and only 5.7 percent of the population over the age of 60. |
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| Mummy portrait of Eutyches. | |
When we see the young faces in many mummy portraits, we must keep in mind that most of them did in fact commemorate people who died at ages we would consider young. The adjective "aoros" ("untimely") appears in many grave inscriptions for a reason. It took a lot of babies to keep up with the Grim Reaper; on average, a woman who was married throughout her adult life would have had to produce six live births for the population to remain stable. |
We know these things mainly from the census declarations of the Roman period, but it is unlikely that the situation was much different from that in preceding centuries. The one change, perhaps, was an increased tendency of urban families to expose unwanted infants, particularly surplus girls. |
There were two important results. First, Roman Egypt seems to have had a high ratio of males to females, something seen also in some modern societies where exposure or its high-tech equivalent, sex-selective abortion, is practiced. Second, a majority of the slaves were women and girls. |
Building cities and government
The Roman period was an era of cities. Although it is by no means true that pharaonic Egypt was lacking in cities, as modern writers have sometimes claimed, it is undoubtedly the case that the Egypt that Alexander the Great took over in 332 BCE from the Persians (525-332 BCE) was less urbanized than many other parts of the Mediterranean world, such as Greece, Syria and Asia Minor. |
The Ptolemies, succeeding Alexander in 323 BCE, did little to change this situation. They neither founded cities on a large scale the way the Seleucids did nor took steps to develop the chief towns of the Egyptian nomes (districts) into what a Greek would consider real cities. |
We do not know if the Romans had any deliberate plan to urbanize Egypt, but starting already with Augustus' reign (30 BCE-14 CE) they took a series of administrative steps that led the capitals of nomes to develop into substantial cities with at least a public face resembling that of other cities of the Eastern provinces of the Roman Empire. |
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| The "Odeon" of Alexandria, a typical cultural institution of a Greek city. | |
None of these cities has ever been fully excavated; most are either completely destroyed or lie under modern towns. It is really only in Alexandria that even a few of the characteristic physical manifestations of the cities can still be seen. |
Most of all, Romans set out to get rid of the Ptolemies' bureaucrats and to devolve responsibility for local government onto a propertied elite, an elite that increasingly focused its existence on the offices, both honorific and burdensome, of the cities, and on the social life centered on the world of the gymnasium and its festivals. |
This process of urbanization took more than two centuries to complete, and these two centuries mark a long tug-of-war for the presence of these gentry between the villages, where they had their estates, and the cities, where they increasingly played out their lives and identities. |
Most of them long maintained dual residences, but there can be little doubt that they spent more and more of their time and resources in the cities, as they developed the normal public life of a Greco-Roman city, with all of its competition for prestige through oratory, athletics, poetry and lavish public spending. |
Rural and agricultural life
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| An Egyptian wheat field in the Fayyum. | |
The village links did not disappear, however. Above all, the urban elites depended on their rural properties for the wealth that sustained their private and public existences. They owned many acres of fields of wheat and barley across the countryside. |
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| Grape arbor in the Fayyum. | |
Increasingly, they also found it profitable to invest in the development of land not inundated by the Nile, which required expensive artificial irrigation but also made it possible to produce crops like olives and grapes, essential to a proper Mediterranean way of life, with olive oil and wine to accompany the staple bread. |
These gardens occupied various bits of high ground, but they were most densely concentrated around Alexandria and in the Fayyum, an area in north central Egypt, where the Nile's flow was regulated and a higher proportion of land was devoted to gardens than elsewhere. |
With such properties, town and country were tied together in a complex economic relationship. It was not simply a matter of exploitation, of extracting a surplus; rather, it was the urban demand for oil and wine that led to the more profitable uses of the land and to the surplus. |
Getting to know the elites
It is not by chance that we know so much about the elites. First, they are the people who have left us most of the evidence, particularly that of the Greek papyri. They generated the property transactions, the letters and the interactions with the government from which most of the texts flowed. And most of the literate people belonged to the elite anyway. |
For the poor, we tend to have a scarcer, more formal documentation, consisting largely of things like tax receipts and other official texts written for them by someone else. We must realize, however, that this elite is not the narrow group of aristocrats from which comes most of our knowledge of the Greek and Roman world by way of ancient authors. With the Roman Senate we are talking about perhaps 600 or 1,000 men in an empire of 50 or 60 million--one or two thousandths of a percent of the population. It is probably more like the top 15 or 20 percent of society who generated the bulk of our papyrus documents: not exactly the ordinary peasant, but hardly a narrow clique, either. |
No one in antiquity would have doubted that the top fifth of society deserved the front-row seats I am awarding them. But in case you are still a little doubtful, let me point out that painted portraits were not cheap, and it is virtually certain that all of the portraits that form the subject of "Ancient Faces," an exhibition at the Metropolitan Museum of Art, were commissioned by these families in the top fifth of the social and economic hierarchy. |
In the first two centuries or so of Roman rule, this upper stratum was not exclusively urban, nor even entirely composed of those with dual residences. Much of it was based in the villages of the Egyptian countryside, where the Ptolemies had first settled their military veterans on allotments of land. Their descendants were in many cases still there, long since having come to treat the land as private property rather than as a revocable grant from the king. |
City and village temples
We have seen how little is really known of the archaeology of the cities of Egypt--other than Alexandria--in the Roman period. In fact, the archaeology of Roman Egypt is to a large extent a village archaeology, a curious twist of fate given the urbanization that the Romans set in motion. Most of the sites that are not villages belong to that remarkable imperial development of the Eastern Desert, with its quarries, roads and forts. |
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| The front of the Ptolemaic temple at Dionysias in the Fayyum. | |
Above all, we know Roman Egypt from the villages around the perimeter of the Fayyum. For that reason, what we know about the religious life of the elites is heavily village-bound, drawn from the mummies, the gravestones, the terra-cottas and statuettes, the texts and the temples. |
These temples were thoroughly Egyptian in architecture and decoration. Every village that has seen serious excavations has turned out to have at least one substantial temple, sometimes more than one; and from documentary evidence we know that these villages had many smaller shrines as well. The Ptolemaic temple at Dionysias is the best preserved in the Fayyum. |
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| Remains of the temple at Narmouthis (Fayyum). | |
The temple at Narmouthis, once built on a grand scale, is still impressive, even if the sands keep threatening to take it back. |
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| A crocodile niche in the South Temple at Karanis in the Fayyum. | |
At Karanis, two temples have been partially reconstructed, both devoted to forms of the crocodile god of the Fayyum. Some of these temples were of considerable antiquity, because the villages dated back to before Alexander the Great. But most of the Fayyum villages were creations of the Ptolemaic period (4th-1st century BCE), named after Macedonian ancestors, like Karanis, or ancestral gods, like Dionysias, or members of the royal house, like Philadelphia. |
Despite their being built in many cases on Greek-style grid plans, and occupied in part by Macedonian and Greek settlers, their dominant religious structures were purely Egyptian. There is much evidence even under the Ptolemies that the Greek settlers patronized these cults--that is, that Greeks were helping to pay for the substantial costs of building and maintaining these temples and their operations. Presumably, they did this because these cults mattered to them, not out of some disinterested philanthropy. |
No Greek ever saw devotion to an Egyptian god--or, for that matter, a Syrian or Anatolian god or goddess--as in any way incompatible with being Greek. Indeed, the Greeks were notable for their ready acceptance of the gods of places they settled or even just visited, and for their tendency to identify them with gods they already knew. In the early centuries of Roman rule, these habits continued. Village temples remained active centers, maintaining the specialized knowledge of Egyptian scripts, which was otherwise disappearing already in the first century of our era. |
Their priests included many who accumulated books in hieratic and demotic (both forms of Egyptian writing), but these literate priests were also at home in Greek, and they tended to read at least some Greek technical literature that was of interest to them. At least a few, it seems, went beyond this to read the standard Greek literary authors. The largely Greek-speaking elites of the villages saw no contradiction in contributing to the upkeep of these very Egyptian centers. The temples thus formed one of the major binding forces in society, where everyone had a stake. |
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