The third volume in the `Studies in Hellenistic Civilization' series contains eight essays arising from the second international conference organized by the Danish research project on the Hellenistic period in 1990. Contributors include: U Ostergard (What is national and ethnic identity?); D J Thompson (Language and literacy in early Hellenistic Egypt); J Blomquist (Alexandrian science: the case of Eratosthenes); K Goudriaan (Ethnical strategies in Graeco-Roman Egypt); A Kasher (The civic status of the Jews in Prolemaic Egypt); P Borgen (Philo and the Jews in Alexandria); C R Holladay (Jewish responses to Hellenistic culture); J P Sorensen (Native reactions to foreign rule and culture in religious literature).

Goudriaan, K. Ethnicity in Ptolemaic Egypt. 1988 This study takes as its starting point a complaint made by the late Claire Préaux with regard to Ptolemaic Egypt, that one does not know how to tell Greeks and Egyptians asunder. The author tries to find an answer to this question by making use of the concept of ethnicity developed in modern anthropology. He also deals with the problem whether or not the Ptolemaic administration took ethnicity into account. DMAHA 5 (1988), 185 p. - 32.00 EURO, ISBN: 9050630227

Hundreds of different ethnic terms occur in well over a thousand papyri, ostraca and inscriptions in Greek, Demotic and hieroglyphic Middle Egyptian in reference to around 3000 specific individuals. The precise meaning of ethnic terms is however often problematic. Ethnic terminology thus presents papyrologists, epigraphers, ancient historians and legal historians with some of the most puzzling problems of interpretation. In addition, ethnic terms are fundamental to a better understanding of a wide range of problems of social and cultural history, including immigration, ethnicity and social and cultural integration. The first ever comprehensive collection of ethnic terminology was published by the present author in his book Foreign Ethnics in Hellenistic Egypt in 2002. This volume represents an update of his original work, offering a critical collection of the sources that appeared since its publication, with an introductory study of ethnic terminology in the multilingual documentary evidence from Hellenistic and early Roman Egypt.0.

In Jewish Ethnic Identity and Relations in Hellenistic Egypt, Stewart Moore investigates the foundations of common assumptions about ethnicity. To maintain one’s identity in a strange land, was it always necessary to band tightly together with one’s coethnics? Sociologists and anthropologists who study ethnicity have given us a much wider view of the possible strategies of ethnic maintenance and interaction. The most important facet of Jewish ethnicity in Egypt which emerges from this study is the interaction over the Jewish-Egyptian boundary. Previous scholarship has assumed that this border was a Siegfried Line marked by mutual contempt. Yet Jews, Egyptians and also Greeks interacted in complicated ways in Ptolemaic Egypt, with positive relationships being at least as numerous as negative ones.

This book examines how the army developed as an engine of socio-economic and cultural integration in Egypt under Greco-Macedonian rule.

The first economic history of ancient Egypt employing a New Institutional Economics approach and covering the entire pharaonic period, 3000-30 BCE.

Under the Ptolemies thousands of Greek-speaking foreigners were resident in Egypt: they were active in the armed forces, in the administration, in commerce. In official and notarial documents they are identified by their ethnic, i.e. their real or fictive origin outside Egypt. The present work provides a complete inventory of the ethnics, which refer to Greek city-states (e.g. 'Athenian', 'Syracusan'), but also to regions in Greece (e.g. 'Cretan', 'Thessalian') or elsewhere (e.g. 'Thracian', 'Jew'). The data are incorporated in the database of the Prosopographia Ptolemaica and offer a diversified view of the Greek presence in Egypt between 323 and 30 BC.