30 Facts About Roman Egypt

Roman Egypt came to serve as a major producer of grain for the empire and had a highly developed urban economy.

Three Roman legions garrisoned Egypt in the early Roman imperial period, with the garrison later reduced to two, alongside auxilia formations of the Roman army.

The metropoleis were governed by magistrates drawn from the liturgy system; these magistrates, as in other Roman Egypt cities, practised euergetism and built public buildings.

Inhabitants of Roman Egypt were divided by social class along ethnic and cultural lines.

The division between the rural life of the villages, where the Egyptian language was spoken, and the metropolis, where the citizens spoke Koine Greek and frequented the Hellenistic gymnasia, was the most significant cultural division in Roman Egypt, and was not dissolved by the Constitutio Antoniniana of 212, which made all free Egyptians Roman citizens.

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Constantine's currency reforms, including the introduction of the gold solidus, stabilized the economy and ensured Roman Egypt remained a monetized system, even in the rural economy.

The effect of the Roman conquest was at first to strengthen the position of the Greeks and of Hellenism against Egyptian influences.

Roman Egypt was the only Roman province whose governor was of equestrian rank in the Roman social order; all others were of the senatorial class and served as Roman senators, including former Roman consuls, but the prefect of Egypt had more or less equivalent civil and military powers to a proconsul, since a Roman law granted him "proconsular imperium" .

Roman Egypt was unique in that its garrison was commanded by the praefectus Aegypti, an official of the equestrian order, rather than, as in other provinces, a governor of the senatorial class.

Besides the main garrison at Alexandrian Nicopolis and the southern border force, the disposition of the rest of the Army of Roman Egypt is not clear, though many soldiers are known to have been stationed at various outposts, including those defending roads and remote natural resources from attack.

An increasing proportion of the Army of Roman Egypt was of local origin in the reign of the Flavian dynasty, with an even higher proportion – as many as three quarters of legionaries – under the Severan dynasty.

Auxilia from the Balkans, who served throughout the Roman army, served in Egypt: many Dacian names are known from ostraca in the Trajanic period, perhaps connected with the recruitment of Dacians during and after Trajan's Dacian Wars; they are predominantly cavalrymen's names, with some infantrymen's.

Thracians, common in the army in other Roman provinces, were present, and an auxiliary diploma from the Egyptian garrison has been found in Thracia.

Boulai, or town councils, in Roman Egypt were only formally constituted by Septimius Severus.

Just as it was under the Ptolemies, the primary way of becoming a citizen of Roman Egypt Alexandria was through showing when registering for a deme that both parents were Alexandrian citizens.

Land management and tenure, the Ptolemaic state had retained much of the categorization of land as under the earlier pharaohs, but the Roman Egypt Empire introduced a distinction between private and public lands – the earlier system had categorized little land as private property – and a complex arrangement was developed consisting of dozens of types of land-holding.

Roman Egypt 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.

In most cases, these have not survived and evidence of them is rare, but it is probable that most were built in the classical architecture of the Graeco-Roman Egypt world, employing the classical orders in stone buildings.

Besides a few individual stone blocks in some metropoleis, substantial remains of Roman architecture are known in particular from three of the metropoleis – Heracleopolis Magna, Oxyrhynchus, and Hermopolis Magna – as well as from Antinoopolis, a city founded c by the emperor Hadrian .

Imperially-appointed archiereus for Alexandria and All Egypt was responsible for the administrative management of the temples, beyond those of the imperial cult, dedicated to Graeco-Roman deities and the ancient Egyptian gods.

Roman Egypt controlled access to the priesthoods of the Egyptian cults: the ritual circumcision of candidates was subject to his approval and he mediated disputes involving temples, wielding some judicial powers.

When temples came into conflict with authorities, then mainly with lower administrative officials, who belonged to the local population themselves; the Roman Egypt procurators intervened in these conflicts, if at all, then in a moderating manner.

Caracalla's successor was Macrinus, whose patronage is recorded only at Kom Ombo; evidence of his successor Elagabalus in Roman Egypt has not survived, and neither is the patronage of Severus Alexander recorded.

At Tahta in Middle Egypt, the cartouche of Maximinus Daza was added to a since-ruined temple, along with other additions; he is the last Roman emperor known to have been recorded in official hieroglyphic script.

Roman Egypt had an ancient tradition of religious speculation, enabling a variety of controversial religious views to thrive there.

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Roman Egypt exported monasticism to the rest of the Christian world.

Roman Egypt ceded the Dodekaschoinos, upstream of the First Cataract in Lower Nubia, to the Noba people, who were subsidized by the Romans to defend the frontier, now at Syene, from attack by the Blemmyes.

In 330, the Christian monastic Macarius of Roman Egypt established his monastery at Scetis in the Nitrian Desert.

Roman 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.

Roman Egypt was thus in a state of both religious and political alienation from the Empire when a new invader appeared.