7

THE EGYPTIAN ELITE IN
THE EARLY PTOLEMAIC PERIOD:
SOME HIEROGLYPHIC EVIDENCE

Alan B. Lloyd

For many years the administration of early Ptolemaic Egypt has been characterized as a highly centralized organization in which power was resolutely and systematically confined to the Graeco-Macedonian elite whilst the indigenous ruling classes were firmly subordinated to their foreign masters. This concept was undoubtedly to some degree influenced by nineteenth- and twentieth-century European models and experience of colonialism but was powerfully reinforced by an undue concentration on Greek papyri from a very atypical area, i.e. the Fayûm, taking little account of the demotic evidence and even less of the hieroglyphic material. This has meant that conditions in Upper Egypt and the Delta have generally been regarded as replicating the situation in the Fayûm. Manning¹ has recently demonstrated very clearly how a careful reading of demotic material from Upper Egypt leads to a very different picture. He writes:

The tension between ‘state’ and local authority is a theme which runs through Egyptian history, and it became an increasingly thorny issue in the hellenistic period with the political centre even further removed from the Nile Valley in the new city of Alexandria.²

He summarizes his conclusions on Ptolemaic attempts to resolve, or, at least, make tractable this tension in the following terms:

… the system of control under the Ptolemies was informal rather than centralized and regionally variable rather than uniform throughout Egypt. The Ptolemies adapted in a practical manner to the realities of Egypt.³

In the present paper I propose to look at some examples of the neglected hieroglyphic material for the early Ptolemaic period all of which, in the nature of things, refers to members of the Egyptian elite, and some of which derives from the Delta on which the papyri are largely silent. First, however, let me define what I mean by ‘the Egyptian elite’.

In a recent publication I characterize the workings of Egyptian internal politics during the last period of Egyptian independence in the following terms:

Greek sources … paint a convincing picture of a period dominated by two recurrent issues: instability at home and the ever-present spectre of aggressive Persian power abroad. The grizzly panorama of intra- and interfamilial strife between aspirants to the throne emerges with stark clarity in the case of the XXIXth and XXXth Dynasties. In the murky history of these two families we are confronted with a situation which we can only suspect for earlier Egyptian history but which, we can be confident, was not infrequently lurking behind the ideological mirage projected by Pharaonic inscriptional evidence. Classical commentators, writing from quite a different perspective, reveal without compunction the complex interaction of individual ambition untrammelled by loyalty or ideological factors in which ambitious political figures seize any opportunity for advancement provided by the sectional interests of the native Egyptian warrior class, Greek mercenary captains, and, less obviously, the Egyptian priesthood. For the XXIXth Dynasty our evidence is far from full, but it demonstrates unequivocally that almost every ruler had a short reign and suggests that all of them, with the exception of Hakor, may have been deposed, sometimes probably worse. The classical sources are particularly revealing for the succeeding dynasty. The founder, Nectanebo I, a general and apparently a member of a military family, almost certainly came to the throne as the result of a military coup, and we are unlikely to be guessing badly if we suspect that this experience motivated him in establishing his successor Teos as co-regent before his own death in order to strengthen the chances of a smooth family succession … ⁴

The conquest of Egypt by Alexander saw changes in the rulers of Egypt, but the Egyptian elite families will have continued to exist in most, if not all, cases, and we can be absolutely confident that their aspirations will have remained as powerful as ever, even if they had to take account of the new political and even social environment created by foreign conquest. What was the basis of their power and influence? The lengthy biographical inscription of Udjahorresnet dating to the Twenty-seventh Dynasty (525–404), but also referring to the Twenty-sixth (664–525), gives a very clear picture of the nature of the power of the Egyptian elite during the last centuries of Pharaonic civilization.⁵ One of the title-sequences reads:

The one revered by Neith, the great one, mother of the god, and the gods of Sais, the hereditary lord and count, chancellor of the King of Lower Egypt, sole companion, the true acquaintance of the king, beloved of him, the scribe, the inspector of scribes in the tribunal, the overseer of scribes of the great prison (or harîm), the controller of the palace, the admiral of the kbnt-ships under the King of Upper and Lower Egypt Khnum-ib-re, the admiral of the kbnt-ships under the King of Upper and Lower Egypt Ankh-ka-re Udjahorresnet, born of the controller of the mansions, kheri-pe-priest, renp-priest, hepet-wadjet-priest, god’s-servant of Neith Peftauawyneith.

(ll. 7–10)

Elsewhere in the text he is described as ‘Chief Physician’ (ll. 2–3, 12, 17, 24, 28, 31, 37, 43, 46, 48) and ‘God’s servant’ (l. 43), and there is much emphasis on service to the king (‘I was one honoured by all his masters … and they gave me adornments of gold, doing for me all manner of beneficial things’ l. 46); he looked after the interests of his family, who benefited from the enthusiastic application of the old Egyptian principle of nepotism (‘I was one honoured by my father, praised by my mother, the favourite of my brothers, having established for them the offices of god’s servant, and having given to them lands according to the command of His Majesty in the course of eternity’ ll. 37–9); and he showed a keen devotion to the service of the local but major goddess Neith.

Two other texts, which cannot be located more precisely than somewhere in the period Thirtieth Dynasty–early Ptolemaic Period (late fourth century), yield a similar picture. The inscriptions on the statuette of the eldest son of Nekhthorheb (Nectanebo II),⁶ whose name is not preserved, describe the prince as:

[Hereditary lord] and count, sweet of love in the heart of the ruler, the pupil of the king who cleaves to his instruction, he who is loyal to his master … honoured by his city god, beloved of his father, praised of his mother, agreeable to his associates … who does that which god favours every day, the eldest son of the king whom he loves, the commander-in-chief of the army of His Majesty …

(ll. 1–2)

The biographical material on the inscribed sarcophagus of Nekhtnebef, the great nephew of Pharaoh Nekhtnebef (Nectanebo I), belongs somewhere in the same time-span and runs in similar vein.⁷ He describes himself as:

Hereditary Lord and Count in Tjel,⁸ ruler of foreign lands in the Khent-iab-Nome (XIVth)⁹ … commander-in-chief of His Majesty, chief of chiefs, Nekhtnebef justified ¹⁰ … Hereditary Lord and Count in the Imet-Nome (XIXth) and in the Sebennytic Nome (XIIth) ¹¹ … he who subdues foreign lands for the lord of the two lands … the god’s servant of Ptah who dwells in Punt ¹² …

We are subsequently informed that his father was an ‘hereditary lord and count’ and a senior general and that his mother was the daughter of an hereditary lord and count in the Sebennytic Nome and general. Her mother, in turn, was the sister of Nekhtnebef.

These texts, like so many others, illustrate that, at the highest level, power and status were generated by a number of interlocking factors: immediate and consistent access to the king, high office, visible honours (including honorific titles), ancestry, and priestly office (which has an important economic dimension). That power, in turn, is consolidated by meritorious service to the crown, tangible instances of religious devotion, and the strengthening of the position of one’s own family, wherever that is possible. In a word, they operated very much like the rural notables of nineteenth-century AD Egypt, keeping a watchful eye to maintain or improve their prestige and economic status whilst availing themselves of any political opportunities which presented themselves either in a provincial or metropolitan context.¹³ In what follows I want to demonstrate that this mindset of the Egyptian elite and the behavioural pattern that goes with it can be identified in hieroglyphic texts throughout the early Ptolemaic period whilst at the same time those texts provide a revealing and sometimes startling index of the status and aspirations of this group.¹⁴ However, I want to make it clear that, whilst on this occasion I am confining my remarks mainly to the period down to the reign of Ptolemy IV Philopator (c. 244-205 BC), I am not in any way suggesting that the results of this enquiry apply exclusively to that time-span. Indeed, I am convinced that quite the opposite is the case, but I propose to leave the discussion of the period as a whole to a monograph which I am planning to write on the subject.

From the Macedonian conquest down to the end of the Ptolemaic period we have a large number of hieroglyphic texts which to some degree or another are biographical and relevant to this discussion. Unfortunately, dating them precisely is often a major problem. Chevereau in his Prosopographie des cadres militaires égyptiens de la Basse Epoque lists only three securely dated to the fourth–third centuries, and two of those belong to the reign of Ptolemy IV.¹⁵ On the other hand, he feels able to attribute seven to the third century. In the second and first centuries he identifies 25 of which only 3 are securely assigned to a particular reign. There are texts of non-military figures which improve the position slightly, but these statistics highlight one of the major problems in trying to establish an accurate graph of the fortunes of Egyptian elite families during the period, i.e. the problem of getting a firm chronological fix on the data.

We shall begin with a text securely dated to the reign of Philip Arrhidaeus (323–317). This document occurs on the fragment of a clepsydra in the British Museum which bears an image of the king and also contains the name of a certain Nakhtsopdu who rejoices in the title ἰmy-r mš, ‘general’.¹⁶ If we are mesmerised by Polybius on Raphia,¹⁷ we might be inclined to regard this title as a meaningless survival from the Ptolemaic period, but that would be unnecessarily sceptical. Diodorus Siculus describes in some detail the army deployed by Ptolemy, son of Lagus, atGaza in 312, i.e. after the murder of Arrhidaeus, and states that it included ‘a large number of Egyptians, some carrying ammunition and the other forms of equipment and others armed and useful for battle’ (19.80.4). Turner¹⁸ took this to mean that they were ‘for the hoplite phalanx’, but, if a phalanx had been at issue, it would certainly not have been of the hoplite variety but a Macedonian phalanx which was equipped and functioned in a very different way. In any case, he makes a very large assumption in this comment since it is not even clear whether the Egyptian combat troops were infantry, cavalry, or both. Intriguingly, Diodorus does not mention their involvement in his elaborate description of the battle itself, despite the fact that these troops were not simply ‘fetching and carrying’ but equipped for and capable of combat duties. Whatever their function, we must surely be confronted with members of the class so often mentioned in our classical sources, and the Nakhtsopdu fragment powerfully supports the intrinsic probability that they were commanded, at least at brigade level, by Egyptian generals, quite possibly ancestors in some cases of the λαάρχοι who appear in later texts.¹⁹

If the foregoing reasoning is correct, it suggests that we should reformulate the standard view of Ptolemaic military history which is well illustrated by a comment of Koenen: ‘Although in the third century the number of Egyptians in the Ptolemaic army was apparently low, they became a dominant factor in the second century.’²⁰ The situation must rather have been that the Egyptian Machimoi were part of the country’s military establishment, retaining their old status, training regime, organization, and command structure, but that they were not employed as part of the main field army until Raphia in 217 because they were neither trained nor equipped to fight in Macedonian tactical formations, above all the phalanx. As long as the Ptolemies were able to get access to good-quality Graeco-Macedonian infantry there was no incentive for them to train up the locals whose soldierly qualities were far from negligible, as emerges from Diodorus’ description of their excellent performance in skirmishing operations during the fourth century.²¹ Their non-appearance in the field action at Gaza will certainly reflect their inability to fight in phalanx, but the isolated reference of Diodorus does let slip that, even so, they had their uses, and we must allow for the possibility that the Gaza campaign was not an isolated case of the recognition of the fact. This analysis, in turn, places a large question-mark over Goudriaan’s recent attempt to deny a connection between the Machimoi of the Late Period and those of the Ptolemies.²² To argue that thesis would involve postulating that this large group, which must have survived into the post-conquest period, then ceased to exist, bereft not only of its status but also, and far more seriously,stripped of its economic assets, only to be subsequently resurrected in a new form with the same name. This is hardly an attractive hypothesis. A much more plausible scenario would be that they did survive as a discrete and identifiable group which was customized, supplemented, and modified to satisfy the Ptolemies’ requirements as they thought fit, and that, when we encounter Egyptian officers and troops in the texts which follow, it is largely current members of this ancient class who are involved. This is not, of course, to deny Goudriaan’s central point that, when Machimoi appear in the Ptolemaic period, we should not treat the term as though it were an ethnic designating Egyptians to the exclusion of all others.

Fig. 1. The Coptos inscription of Senenshepsu.

The next figure whom I should like to discuss features in two documents of quite extraordinary interest which, apart from isolated references, have been largely ignored. The most important of these documents was first published by Petrie and Griffith at the end of the nineteenth century.²³ It was found in the Ptolemaic rebuild of the temple of Min and Isis at Coptos in Upper Egypt and consists of a well-cut but damaged hieroglyphic text inscribed on a basalt slab which formed part of a statue honouring the person to whom the text refers (see Fig. 1). The contents date it firmly to the reign of Ptolemy II (285–246) who was responsible for initiating the reconstruction of this important shrine. The owner’s name has been problematic. Since the reading is not relevant to the argument I wish to develop, I shall not discuss the matter in detail, but I am now confident that the correct rendering is Senenshepsu.²⁴ The text, which, like many Ptolemaic hieroglyphic inscriptions, is not without its linguistic and orthographical problems, describes in considerable detail the work which Senenshepsu conducted on and in the temple and includes much self-laudatory material which is explicitly designed to gain the good will of the living and the divine. The passages which are important for our purposes run as follows:

I did that which her (i.e. Isis’) heart loved in every efficient work in the sandstone district. I erected statues of the King of Upper and Lower Egypt, Lord of the Two Lands, Userkaremeryamun, son of Re, Lord of Diadems, Ptolemy, may he live for ever, together with statues of the king’s wife. The like of this was not done save for my master in this land, the reward from my lady Isis being many heb-sed festivals for the Lord of the Two Lands Userkaremeryamun, son of Re, Lord of Diadems, Ptolemy, may he live for ever.

(Petrie, Koptos, pl. XX, right, col. 1)²⁵

Elsewhere Senenshepsu describes himself as:

Overseer of the royal harîm of the Great King’s Wife of the King of Upper and Lower Egypt, Lord of the Two Lands, Userkaremeryamun, son of Re, Lord of Diadems, Ptolemy, may he live for ever, (whose name is) Arsinoe.

(loc. cit., col. 3)

And:

… the hereditary lord and count, chancellor of the King of Lower Egypt, sole companion, Senenshepsu.

(loc. cit., col. 4)

And:

… the official at the head of the Egyptians, the one great in his office, mighty in his dignity, pre-eminent of place in the palace, the king having elevated him because of his eloquence … the official who stands on the right hand … one in accordance with whom plans were made in the palace … overseer of the great royal harîm, the head one of His Majesty in accompanying the hereditary lady, great of favours, mistress of Upper and Lower Egypt, joyful in kindliness, sweet of love, beautiful of appearances … who fills the palace with her beauty, the Great King’s Wife, she who satisfies the heart of the King of Upper and Lower Egypt, Lord of the Two Lands, Userkaremeryamun, son of Re, Lord of Diadems, Ptolemy, may he live (for ever), (who is called) Arsinoe.

(Petrie, pl. XX, left, ll. 4–11, as completed by Sethe, 63, 6)

The status of this official is of crucial importance. Sethe describes him as a nomarch,²⁶ i.e. provincial governor, obviously on the basis of the title sequence but it is clear that, although provincial governors frequently bear this sequence of titles, its presence does not in itself prove that the person held such an office.²⁷ At this period, and indeed much earlier, it is a ranking sequence indicating that the individual in question is of the highest status and prestige in a given area, but it does not in itself prove that he was its governor. However, he also describes himself as ‘the protector of the Coptite Nome, the wall around the administrative districts’ (Petrie, op. cit., pl. XX, left 7), and those comments certainly make him look like a traditional provincial governor. Indeed, that an Egyptian should hold such a position at this date should cause no surprise since there is evidence of tenants of this office bearing Egyptian names from the late 260s onwards.²⁸

A further issue is the question of the precise historical context of the text. Petrie and Griffith argued that Senenshepsu was working within the context of the exile of Arsinoe I to Coptos²⁹ which is described in a scholion to the XVIIth Idyll of Theocritus:³⁰

Ptolemy Philadelphus was first married to Arsinoe, daughter of Lysimachus, by whom he also sired his children Ptolemy, Lysimachus, and Berenice. Having found this woman conspiring against him, and with her Amyntas and Chrysippus, the Rhodian doctor, he executed the latter, and her he sent off to Coptos in the Thebaid, and married his own sister Arsinoe, and he got her to adopt the children who had been born to him by the earlier Arsinoe. For Philadelphus herself died without issue.

Griffiths, therefore, regarded Senenshepsu as nothing more than the overseer of the harîm of an exiled queen in a provincial backwater.³¹ I believe this interpretation to be completely unsustainable. The text speaks unequivocally of the setting up of statues of Ptolemy Philadelphus and Arsinoe which surely could not be statues of the king and an exiled queen at a time when Arsinoe II was very firmly in the driving seat. It should further be borne in mind that, although we now have about sixty monuments of various kinds unequivocally dedicated to Arsinoe II, there is not one which can be ascribed beyond doubt to Arsinoe I.³² It should further be remembered that temple cults for Ptolemaic kings and queens appear to have been initiated in the reign of Ptolemy II and Arsinoe II, our text almost certainly being evidence of precisely that phenomenon. Finally, it should be noted that a fragment of a statue of a Ptolemaic queen from the relevant temple at Coptos, almost certainly one of those erected by Senenshepsu,³³ bears the titles nsw snt nsw ḥmt nsw wrt, ‘daughter of the king, sister of the king, the Great King’s Wife’, titles which could not possibly have been borne by Arsinoe I. All the signs are, therefore, that the text is referring to statues of Philadelphus and Arsinoe II.

In addition to this text we also possess a very high-quality basalt statue of the same man, acquired by the British Museum in 1918 (see Figs. 2–4).³⁴ It has no known provenance, but the probability must be that it emanated from Coptos. The copious inscriptions confirm the status and titles of this individual as well as repeating his achievements, particularly the reconstruction of the temple. They do, however, add the details that his father was named Neyesney and his mother Pemu,³⁵ names which have never been identified previously in the hieroglyphic onomastic corpus.

If our interpretation of these data is correct, it is probable that Senenshepsu was ‘overseer of the harîm’ at the court of Alexandria rather than at Coptos, and that would fit extremely well with the Egyptian court titles and epithets which occur elsewhere in the text insisting on his close relations with the king. What, in practice, this would mean in terms of an official function within the royal household must remain an open question. Mooren does not identify any such court title,³⁶ but his corpus does not contain titles relating to the household at all, and there is no doubt, though the evidence is not plentiful, that hellenistic palaces had a gynaikōnitis, i.e. ‘women’s quarters’.³⁷ Indeed, the non-appearance of the title in Greek documentation may mean no more than that the title was rarely bestowed in the Ptolemaic period and, when it was, the function was never held by any Greek or Macedonian.

Senenshepsu is not the only example of an ‘overseer of the harîm’ from the Ptolemaic period. We also know of an Usermaatre, son of Djedkhonsuiuefankh, whose black granite sarcophagus of superlative quality was discovered at Saqqara during the Mameluk Period. This has been dated on stylistic grounds to the early Ptolemaic.³⁸ Like Senenshepsu he bears the titles ‘hereditary lord and count, chancellor of the king of Lower Egypt, sole companion’, and he also boasts a string of priestly titles which are frequently of obscure significance as well as the administrative titles ‘overseer of the house of silver and the house of gold’ and ‘overseer of the great house’, the first clearly relating to the treasury and the second to a position in the palace. However, unlike Senenshepsu, he can boast a military title as ‘overseer of infantry’. Here also, therefore, we are dealing with an official of high status, and in this case we are confronted with someone who has, in addition to his civil functions, an important military office to discharge as well.

Fig. 2. The statue of Senenshepsu (front) (EA 1668). Courtesy Trustees of the British Museum.

Fig. 3. The statue of Senenshepsu (back).

Fig. 4. The statue of Senenshepsu (left).

Fig. 5. The statue of Djedhor (CG700). Courtesy the Cairo Museum.

At all events, Senenshepsu’s close personal relationship to the king which the harîm office implies could well explain why Arsinoe I was sent to Coptos, i.e. there was, or had been, at court a known and trusted official from that area on whom the king could rely to keep an eye on her. At the same time he could be given the task of implementing a royal decision to restore and embellish with statues and inscriptions the temple of Min and Isis at Coptos, a royal action which was itself not without its significance since Philadelphus had a great interest in expanding trade, and the Coptos road to the Red Sea was a major trade route which was regarded from time immemorial as being under the protection of the great god Min himself.³⁹

If all this is correct, we should already be very much in the world of the second-century Egyptian courtier Dionysius Petosarapis whose position is described by Diodorus in the following terms:

Dionysius called Petosarapis, one of the ‘friends’ of Ptolemy, sought to seize power for himself and so caused great danger to the kingdom. For, as he was the most influential man at court and surpassed all the Egyptians on the field of battle, he despised both of the kings because of their youth and lack of experience.

(XXXI, 15a)

So much for the detail. At a more general level it should be noted that Senenshepsu’s self-perception differs not one jot from that of comparable figures in the pre-Ptolemaic Period: the insistence on relations with and dependence on the king, the catalogue of official duties, the concept of balanced reciprocity in relation to the gods,⁴⁰ and paternalistic benevolence to underlings are all very much in evidence.⁴¹

The next piece which I should like to discuss is the statue of Djedhor (CG700) which was discovered at Tanis in the late nineteenth century (see Fig. 5).⁴² This black granite sculpture consists of a conventional theophoric statue, over life-size (2m 40), which bears inscriptions on the dorsal pillar. It is dated by Chevereau to the last years of Egyptian independence or the early Ptolemaic period,⁴³ but his bibliography indicates that he had not taken into account the work of art historians on this sculpture. There is, in fact, a strong case to be made for a date in the early Ptolemaic period, and some commentators even venture to place it before the reign of Ptolemy III. The arguments are: the highly individual portrait features which must shift it into the Ptolemaic period; the treatment of the eyes which is a common third-century feature; the double fold under the right eye which is not known to appear outside the early Ptolemaic period; the representation of the long overgarment without the roll at the top or the flap which is, at the very least, extremely improbable before the Ptolemaic period; the indications that large-scale sculpture in the Ptolemaic period is primarily of the time of Ptolemy II; and the fact that the inscriptions do not show markedly Ptolemaic features in their orthography, a feature suggesting that they should be located early in that period. Whilst it must be conceded that not all of these arguments are of equal force, they constitute an adequate basis for the view that the statue should be dated to the middle of the third century BC.⁴⁴

If we accept the dating of the statue for which I have just argued, the inscriptions become extraordinarily interesting. Djedhor’s father is stated to be ‘the god’s servant’ Wennefer and his mother is given as Nebe(t)tawy without any titles. If that was his father’s only distinction of significance, the son well outstripped him, but it may be that, within this religious context, Djedhor was content simply to emphasize his father’s priestly rank. That this could well be the case is indicated by the fact that, although the text is damaged at the critical point, it would appear that his forefathers had preceded him in high office within his city. It should also be noted that there is an earlier statue from this site which bears the name of Djedhor, son of Apries and Mutirdis, who lays claim to similar titles, and it has been very plausibly suggested that this man is an ancestor of our Djedhor.⁴⁵ There is, therefore, a very distinct possibility that we are dealing with a member of a family which had held high office in this area, both secular and priestly, for some considerable time.

If we consider titles and narrative, we find Djedhor described in secular contexts as ‘the great general’, ‘the hereditary lord and count’, ‘the hereditary lord’ (or ‘mayor’), ‘the sole companion’, ‘the one great of love in the heart of the king’, ‘the one great of favour in the palace’, ‘the controller of the affairs of his city’, ‘the great controller of imposts in his province’, and ‘the witness (?) of the business of his cities’. We are also informed that ‘His Majesty had appointed him to be installed … his city … the place of his forefathers, and endowed him with fields and all things’, that ‘the officials were watchful of his comings and goings’, that he guaranteed ‘water <to> his city when the two lands were dry’, that he was one ‘who gave life to the hungry in his nome’, that he ‘caused all things to prosper’, that he was one ‘who repaired ruins, filled breeches, and made great monuments in his temple’.

Clearly we have some of the traditional ranking titles⁴⁶ here as well as epithets which emphasize the closeness of Djedhor’s relationship to the king and his benefactions to his city, but we equally clearly have more than that. He uses the title which, unlike the sequence could easily refer to actual functions discharged, and the subsequent narrative of what he did strongly suggests that he may well, in practical terms, have done exactly what a Pharaonic provincial governor would be expected to have done.

When we turn to the priestly titles, we are confronted with a very long list:

The god’s servant of Amun, the warrior, the lord of justification, god’s servant of Neith, god’s servant of Amon-re, lord of the thrones of the two lands, the god’s servant of Horus Lord of Mesen, god’s servant of Khonsupakhered, god’s servant of Khonsu in Thebes, Nefer-hetep, god’s servant of the Baboon, god’s servant of Osiris the Baboon who stands before Mesen, god’s servant of Osiris Hemag, Lord of the Great City (Tanis), god’s servant of Sokar-Osiris, Lord of the Great City, god’s servant of Isis of the district of Busiris, god’s servant of the divine ennead, great in the house of Per-Khonsu, web-priest of Sekhmet, scribe, god’s servant of Amun-Ramesses of Per-Ramesses, Amon-re, the helper, the god’s servant of the gods who do not have one, the overseer of god’s servants.

(ll. 1–7, upper part of back pillar)

These titles relate to cults of a large segment of the eastern Delta, though whether Djedhor is referring to guest cults which he served in Tanis or to priestly functions which he held in the relevant cities cannot be ascertained. He also describes his religious commitments and devotion in rather more general terms as:

the overseer of god’s servants … champion (?) … inspector (?) of god’s servants, the image of the god of his city, the great one in the Mansion of Khonsu, Maat(?) being his cleansing, Horus being his protection, Iunmutef being his purification, the one who opened the doors of Nut, the one who saw that which was in it, the one who concealed secrets behind his heart, the ruler of an estate in his temple.

(ll. 1–2, main text)

Overall, this description of Djedhor’s career really does look like that of a traditional Egyptian nomarch with wide-ranging military, administrative, and priestly functions, all of which will have conferred substantial resources on his personal exchequer and guaranteed a high level of wealth, and many of which will have been hereditary. We are also confronted with precisely the same conceptualization of his function as we find in the inscription of Senenshepsu.

Let us now turn to the statue of Amonpayom in Cleveland Museum. This damaged but still impressive piece unearthed at Mendes represents a figure of major importance who is described as ‘hereditary lord and count, sole companion, brother of the king, great commander of the army in the district of Mendes’ and also as ‘the god’s servant, overseer of an army, overseer of cavalry … son of the overseer of an army Paimyroihu’. The date of the sculpture has excited fierce debate. Ranke thought that it should be placed towards the end of the second century on the grounds that the title ‘great commander of an army’ was equivalent to the Greek title στρατηγός, which is only known to have been conferred on Egyptians in late Ptolemaic times, and the appearance in the text of the title sn nsw which is claimed to have been identical with the Greek title συγγενής, which again is only known to have been conferred on Egyptians from about 120 BC.⁴⁷ However, both equivalences are highly questionable,⁴⁸ so that nothing should be built on them. Bothmer and De Meulenaere, on the other hand, were convinced on epigraphic grounds that the piece should be dated to the reign of Ptolemy II.⁴⁹ Yoyotte subsequently argued for a return to the later date⁵⁰ and has been recently supported by Berman.⁵¹ It seems to me that the weight of the arguments is equally balanced, and that, in the present state of our knowledge of Ptolemaic sculpture, we must concede that we cannot be sure whether the piece dates to the reign of Philadelphus or not. The most we can say is that, if it does, we have yet another example of an Egyptian of very elevated rank holding very high military titles during the early Ptolemaic period.

Let us conclude by looking at an inscribed statue from the reign of Ptolemy IV Philopator, i.e the reign which is generally and rightly regarded as a watershed in the history of relations between Greek and Egyptian in the kingdom. The piece was found at Tell el-Balamun (Diospolis Inferior) in the XVIIth Lower Egyptian nome and is now in the collection at Turin (3062).⁵² The name of the owner is lost, but a hieroglyphic inscription appears on the back pillar which contains a series of titles of a figure of some considerable importance. These include the military titles ‘commander-in-chief’ and ‘commandant’ supplemented by a string of civil titles most of which are ranking titles identical with those already encountered: ‘hereditary lord and count, sole companion, the great one in the presence of the Egyptians’, though the title ‘scribe who does the business of the temple of Amun of Balamun’ presumably refers to functions actually discharged. In addition he held the priestly offices of ‘god’s servant of Amun-re, Lord of the Sea, god’s servant of Mut, Khonsu (i.e. the Theban triad), Osiris, and Harsiese, god’s servant of Amun in … ’

The format and conceptual world which these texts present has not changed one iota from that of the late Pharaonic period. Whatever the political realities of the situation may have been, the Egyptian elite continue to locate themselves in the old Egyptian universe and see themselves as performing the same functions, working towards the same goals, and responding to the same imperatives. We have found good reason to question the standard view that, before Philopator, the Egyptian elite had to confine its highest aspirations to priestly activities. As far as the Egyptians were concerned, an Egyptian army continued to exist, even if it was not employed as a major force in the field until the late third century. Even our Balamun example may reflect this, but sadly we cannot establish whether this monument predates the Raphia crisis or not. Be that as it may, we have enough here to suspect that, when Philopator took his momentous step of bringing the Egyptians into his Macedonian-style phalanx, he was essentially converting part of his current military establishment from an under-used but still organized militia into heavy infantry who could play at push-of-pike with the best of the Graeco-Macedonian infantry which he could no longer get in sufficient quantity. We have probably identified two cases where we can see Egyptians performing all the principal administrative functions of a Pharaonic nomarch at a time when some, at least, of our text books tell us this sort of thing was not happening.⁵³ They may have had στρατηγοί sitting beside them, but it does look as though the Egyptians did everything that mattered. Most intriguing of all, we are confronted with the case of Senenshepsu of Coptos who may well have been a close associate of Philadelphus before 270 enjoying a titled position in the court at Alexandria over a hundred years before Dionysius Petosarapis. His case suggests that our Greek sources may be even more skewed than we are inclined to suspect and that the Egyptian elite may have occupied more positions in the palace than our Greek and Roman sources allow us to detect. It could well be that nothing had changed since the beginning of the Ptolemaic period except that members of the elite may not have had such ready access to the highest civil and military functions in Alexandria itself, and many would have been able to find ample consolation playing the local pasha in ancient provincial cities where their families had been lording it for generations.

Acknowledgement

I am most grateful to Dr Penny Wilson for reading an earlier draft of this paper and making a number of valuable suggestions. Any errors, however, are entirely my responsibility.

Notes

¹ Manning 1999.

² Manning 1999, 84.

³ Manning 1999, 101.

⁴ Lloyd 2000, 385.

⁵ Posener 1936, 1 ff.

⁶ Clère 1951. Sadly we can date this piece no more accurately than the time of Alexander or the early Ptolemies (cf. Huss 1994, 116 n. 25).

⁷ Sethe 1904, 24–6. This monument is in Berlin. Like Sethe, Eric Turner begs a large question in dating it without compunction to the Ptolemaic period (Turner 1984, 126). Neither stylistic considerations nor content permit a precise fix. The best we can do is to assign it to the Late Pharaonic–Early Ptolemaic time range.

⁸ The modern Tell Abu Sêfah on the extreme eastern frontier of the Delta.

⁹ Sethe 1904, 24.

¹⁰ Sethe 1904, 25.

¹¹ Sethe 1904, 25.

¹² Sethe 1904, 25–6.

¹³ Cuno 1999, 305, 327.

¹⁴ Sadly we can no longer invoke the existence of an Egyptian queen called Ptolemais as a wife of Ptolemy II (Sethe 1904, 27; Huss 1994). Kuhlmann 1998 has demonstrated conclusively that this reading of the text is incorrect. The queen in question is probably Arsinoe II.

¹⁵ Chevereau 1985, 187 ff.

¹⁶ Chevereau 1985, 187.

¹⁷ V, 65, where Polybius presents Ptolemy IV’s arming of the Egyptians to fight in his war against Antiochus III as a completely novel departure. Their success at the Battle of Raphia is alleged to have encouraged them to throw off the foreign yoke.

¹⁸ Turner 1984, 124.

¹⁹ On these interesting and important figures Mooren 1977, 166.

²⁰ Koenen 1993, 32 n. 20.

²¹ XV, 43.

²² Goudriaan 1988, 121 ff.

²³ Petrie 1896, 19–21 with pl. XX.

²⁴ I strongly suspect that the first group in the name should be read snn and is a Ptolemaic writing of the word snn meaning ‘statue’ (Erman and Grapow 1926–53, III, 460, 6–17, where it is noted that the nn can be written at that period with the three pots: cf. Clère 1951, 147, n. D). Griffith (apud Petrie 1896, 19–21) was inclined to read the seated-child hieroglyph after the snn group as šrἰ. It is almost certainly nothing of the kind. It has probably crept in by association of the nn with the word which in the Ptolemaic Period had the value nn (Fairman 1943, 204, 16 with n. iii), and it should be noted that the word snn does occur with the two n’s written using the seated-child sign as a phonetic for n. The šps-sign has been regarded by some (e.g. Quaegebeur 1978, 249) as a determinative. However, Griffith insisted that the reading of the name on the third column of the right-hand fragment of the inscription on his pl. XX shows an s-sign after the šps-sign, and that is what appears in his facsimile. (This example is the only case on the monument where the end of the name is not destroyed.) If that sign is really there, then the šps-sign must be phonetic, and we must read the name as snn-šps(w), which may be anglicized as Senenshepsu, and translated something like ‘The (divine) statue is august’ (cf. Montet 1961, 80, who renders ‘Sennouchepsy’). The s does appear clearly in the version of the name used in BM1668 (see n. 34 below).

²⁵ Where Petrie and Sethe disagree on readings I have preferred those of Sethe.

²⁶ Sethe 1904, 55. In the Ptolemaic period we should use the term ‘nomarch’ with extreme care because it can easily create the impression that Ptolemaic officials holding the title were equivalent to Pharaonic nome-governors. This is quite clearly not the case (Héral 1990 and 1992). Since the Ptolemaic equivalent of the old nomarch was the στρατηγός, the nomarch being subordinate to him, I have avoided the use of the latter term when speaking of the Ptolemaic contexts and have preferred the term ‘provincial governor’.

²⁷ Ranke 1953, 196.

²⁸ Mooren et al. 1953, 395, 404–5.

²⁹ Petrie 1896, 21.

³⁰ Wendel 1914, 324–5.

³¹ He supported the theory that Arsinoe I was at issue by arguing that the peculiar spelling of Arsinoe within the inscription with an f was a device for distinguishing her from Arsinoe II, but it is clear that this spelling was also used for Arsinoe II (Quaegebeur 1971, 212, 21). The intrusive letter may have arisen from the influence of the divine name Arensnufis or may reflect a difficulty which some Egyptians had in pronouncing a Greek name with two final vowels.

³² Quaegebeur 1971, 249.

³³ Sethe 1904, 73.

³⁴ The name is spelt slightly differently in that the second element does not show the form but a seated man with one arm outstretched without a seat and followed by an s. This is not a known writing of šps, as far as I am aware, but this form of the seated man does occur on a throne with that value (Daumas 1988–, A1237), and the irrelevance of the seat can be paralleled in the Roman writing of ẖrd (Derchain-Urtel 1999, 355). The arm-position of this alternative figure may have been designed to evoke the idea of respect or reverence implicit in the word šps. Alternatively, the outstretched hand might, even at this early period, reflect the later use of the hand-sign to write this triliteral through the equation šps/sšp (for this development see Derchain-Urtel 1999, 230 ff.).

³⁵ The father’s name presents no problems. The spelling of the mother’s is inconsistent. The commonest writing suggests a reading Paynesu, but the alternative spelling which occurs on the front inscription at the bottom of the extreme left-hand column shows that the ns-sign should be read m (see Daumas, 1988–, 267, 275).

³⁶ Mooren 1975, 206 ff.

³⁷ Ogden 1999, 274 ff.

³⁸ Maspero and Gauthier 1939, 29309; Mooren 1975, 206 ff.

³⁹ Kees 1961, 121 ff.

⁴⁰ Sethe 1904, l. 21.

⁴¹ Sethe 1904, l. 9 ff.

⁴² Daressy, 1893, 154 ff. For a modern discussion of part of the texts see Zecchi 1996, 34 ff.

⁴³ Chevereau 1985, 166, Doc. 239.

⁴⁴ For discussion of the art-historical issue see Bothmer et al. 1960, 128–30, 149.

⁴⁵ Daressy, 1893, 151 ff, 156.

⁴⁶ Ranking titles are honorific and designed simply to indicate status. As such, they differ from official titles which bring with them a job description.

⁴⁷ Ranke 1953, 193–8.

⁴⁸ The title is an old one and need not have any reference to the Greek office of στρατηγός, though I should not want to deny that the Egyptian could have been used as an equivalent. Indeed, the Egyptians can render the Greek phonetically into Egyptian (De Meulenaere 1959, 2). The title sn nsw already occurs in the XXXth Dynasty (De Meulenaere 1959, 22 n. 2). It is possible that the term was recycled in the Ptolemaic period as the equivalent of συγγενής, but no Egyptian text provides proof of this, and Mooren (1975 33 ff.) flatly denies any connection.

⁴⁹ Von Bothmer 1960, 124.

⁵⁰ Yoyotte 1989.

⁵¹ Berman 1999, 460 ff.

⁵² Chevereau 1985, 187, Doc. 287.

⁵³ ‘The land of Egypt was administered in the manner traditional to the Pharaohs: the old-style royal offices of nomarch, royal scribe, village scribe or village officer (kōmogrammateus or komarch) continued in being; except for the first on the list, they were predominantly exercised by Egyptians’ (Turner 1984, 145, speaking of the administration under Ptolemy II and III).

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