Administration
Ptolemaic Egypt was administered by a complicated bureaucratic structure. It is possible that much of the structure had already been developed in the reign of Ptolemy I, but evidence for it—chiefly in the form of documentary papyri—only exists from the reign of Ptolemy II. At the top of the hierarchy, in Alexandria, there was a small group of officials, drawn from the king's philoi ('friends'). These included the epistolographos ('letter-writer'), responsible for diplomacy; the hypomnematographos ('memo-writer'), the chief secretary; the epi ton prostagmaton ('in charge of commands'), who produced drafts of royal edicts; the key generals; and the dioiketes ('household manager'), responsible for taxation and provincial administration.
The dioiketes for most of Ptolemy II's reign was Apollonius (262–245 BC). The enormous archive of his personal secretary, Zenon of Kaunos, has survived. As a result, it is the administration of the countryside that is best known to modern scholarship.
The whole of Egypt was divided into thirty-nine districts, called nomes ('portions'), whose names and borders had remained roughly the same since early Pharaonic times. Within each nome, there were three officials: the nomarch (lit. 'nome-leader') who was in charge of agricultural production; the oikonomos ('household steward'), who was in charge of finances; and the basilikos grammateus ('royal secretary'), who was in charge of land surveying and record-keeping. All three of these officials answered to the dioiketes and held equal rank, the idea being that each would act as a check on the others, preventing officials from developing regional power bases that might threaten the king's power. Each village had a komarch (lit. 'village-leader') and a komogrammateus ('village-secretary'), who reported to the nomarch and the basilikos grammateus, respectively.
Through this system, a chain of command was created which ran from the king all the way down to each of the three thousand villages of Egypt. Each nome also had its own strategos ('general'), who was in charge of the troops settled in the nome and answered directly to the king.
A key goal of this administrative system was to extract as much wealth as possible from the land so it could be deployed for royal purposes, particularly for war. It achieved this goal with greatest efficiency under Ptolemy II.
Particular measures to increase efficiency and income have been in place since the start of the Second Syrian War. A decree, known as the Revenue Laws Papyrus, was issued in 259 BC to increase tax yields. It is one of our key pieces of evidence for the intended operation of the Ptolemaic tax system. The papyrus establishes a regime of tax farming (telonia) for wine, fruit, and castor oil.
Private individuals paid the king a lump sum up front for the right to oversee tax collection (though the actual collection was carried out by royal officials). The tax farmers received any excess from the collected taxes as profit.
This decree was followed in 258 BC by a "General Inventory" in which the whole of Egypt was surveyed to determine the quantities of different types of land, irrigation, canals, and forests within the kingdom, and the amount of income that could be levied from them. Efforts were made to increase the amount of arable land in Egypt, particularly by reclaiming large amounts of land from Lake Moeris in the Fayyum. Ptolemy distributed this land to the Ptolemaic soldiers as agricultural estates in 253 BC.
The Zenon papyri also record experiments by the dioiketes Apollonius to establish cash-crop regimes, particularly castor oil cultivation, with mixed success. In addition to these measures focused on agriculture, Ptolemy II also established extensive gold mining operations in Nubia at Wadi Allaqi and in the eastern desert at Abu Zawal.
