8 THE GREAT EGYPTIAN REVOLUTION. 
administration of India is there (as well as in the whole country) much greater than that of the 
Egyptian population was under the Ptolemaic rule. Alexandria was a piece of Greece trans- 
ferred to the mouth of the Nile, keeping zealously its un-Egyptian character; the rich finds 
preserved in the modern museum of Alexandria show that only small separate quarters of 
native Egyptians can have existed there.t Yet this Greek city absorbed all the wealth of the 
country with few returns. The kings emphasized their Macedonian blood,’ and it seems to 
have been quite an exception that the unusually gifted last queen, Cleopatra, as Plutarch tells 
us, understood the barbarous tongue of her subjects, or at least something of it. Inscriptions 
and papyri conceal, of course, the fact that a wide gulf existed between everything Greek and 
the Egyptian element, but we must not be deceived on this account. The best analogy is again 
the relation between Englishman and Hindu. ‘The brown native in ancient Egypt often used 
a Greek name and imitated the dress and manners of the ruling class;* at the same time his 
religion taught him that those aristocrats were ceremonially unclean barbarians, so that for a 
long time the contempt of the Greeks for the strange, barbarian subjects must have been recipro- 
cated. While from the inscriptions and papyri we are apt sometimes to mistake a man using 
Greek writing and a Greek name for a member of the privileged nationality, the contemporaries 
seem for a long time to have drawn the “‘color-line”’ rather strictly, and it may be said that in 
reality Egyptian and Greek mixed like oil and water.* This fact has been set forth very plainly 
by Th. Mommsen (Rémische Geschichte, V, p. 561), who correctly observed that in Egypt the 
legal superiority of the Greek race over the subjected natives was emphasized in a way un- 
paralleled in any Hellenistic country. If under the Roman rule the theoretical inferiority of 
the Egyptians to the Greeks was maintained even in the different mode of corporal punishment 
for both nationalities, we may conclude that this distinction of the two nationalities must have 
been far more rigid and more oppressive at the time when the Greeks themselves ruled in Egypt 
under the dynasty of the Lagides. The most characteristic testimony on this sharp distinction 
is the passage of the second Philze decree 10 f (page 72), which reports that Greek and Egyptian 
troops kept guard side by side “as though they belonged to the same race.”’ ‘This is mentioned 
as a new and wonderful fact. The demotic contracts state, in the case of Egyptians, their 
profession when this is different from the ordinary native occupation as farmer. With the 
foreigners, on the other hand, we find only the designation “the Greek”’ replacing the men- 
tion of the occupation. A representative of the privileged people is expected to live on a 
pension from the government under one or another pretext. 
1 For this reason Alexandria seems designated as a “fortress” (Philz decree II, line 4; see also the Buto-Stela, line 4). This seems 
to refer more to the exclusive character of the city than to her walls. 
2 Therefore, after the annexation of Egypt by the Romans, a priest of Memphis, during the first years of Augustus, mentions 
the past dynasty as mere foreigners, 7. e., as ‘the Greek kings who were on the shore of the sea towards the west, in the city ; 
whose name is Ra‘-godi’’ (i. e., Rakotis, Egyptian name for Alexandria; cp. Buto-Stela, line 4, Strabo 792, etc.). See Harris Stela, 
Reinisch, Chrestomathie, 21,1. 9. The older “‘Chronicle’’ papyrus of Paris, which speaks of ‘‘the Greeks”’ in a similar way, will be 
discussed farther down. 
’ This is believed by Mahaffy (The Empire of the Ptolemies, 396) to have become frequent only at a later period; see the follow- 
ing note. I have no gathered data on this question, which is not quite identical with that of the real assimilation of both races. 
4 F. Preisigke, in Schriften der wissenschaftlichen Gesellschaft in Strassburg, 19, p. 26, uses the above expression. ‘The fusion of both 
races progressed very rapidly only when Christianity spread in Egypt; it may have begun on a smaller scale under the later Ptolemies. 
Mahaffy (Empire of the Ptol.) tries to trace its beginnings to Ptolemy VII (p. 359 foll.), whom he believes to have favored the natives, 
and its progress under Ptolemy IX (p. 396). See the note above. Below we shall trace it to a slightly earlier time. For the first 
150 years of Greek dominion, however, the above characterization may be fully accepted. 
