Egypt as a Province

When the army of Cambyses took Memphis, Egypt became a province of an empire for the first time in its history (see the Conquest of Egypt by Cambyses). In the Old Persian lists of the king's lands it appears as Mudrāya;^[11] in Herodotus's fiscal geography it forms the sixth tribute district; in the Egyptian king-lists the Persian rulers were absorbed, as every ruler of Egypt had to be, into the sequence of dynasties, as the Twenty-seventh.^[6][12] Each frame carries a claim: to the Persians Egypt was one land among many, to the Greeks a tax district, to the Egyptians a dynasty like any other, with the pharaoh's titles held by a king who lived at Susa.

Assessing what that rule was like has been unusually difficult, and the difficulty is itself part of the subject. Henry Colburn identifies two inherited views: "the common view that Egypt was largely unaffected by Achaemenid rule" and "the view that Achaemenid rule was necessarily oppressive and harsh, resulting in frequent revolts". Both, he argues, rest on the same foundation, "the perceived lack of material culture dating to the 27th Dynasty", and that lack is largely an artefact of scholarly habit: David Aston has shown that objects and tombs are assigned to the Persian period only when epigraphy forces the date, everything else defaulting to the native dynasties on either side.^[3] The province has to be reconstructed instead from what it wrote and built, and that record is fuller than the old picture of a documentary void suggests.

The capital of Persian Egypt was the old capital. Memphis, in Colburn's description, "was the administrative hub of Egypt, and whoever controlled it controlled access to the Nile Delta from the rest of Egypt and vice versa"; its ancient name Mekhat tawy meant "the balance of the Two Lands", it was the home of the creator god Ptah, and it was where pharaohs were crowned. Under the Twenty-seventh Dynasty "it served as the seat of the satrap, the Great King's representative and proxy", connected "to a network of other imperial centres, Persepolis and Susa included", and it held "an imperial garrison, and ... a bureaucratic apparatus that served the needs of the empire as well as those of the satrapy".^[13]

The apparatus can be named in some detail. The satrap's chancery issued documents in Aramaic, the empire's administrative language, and in demotic Egyptian; beneath him the country kept its old division into large districts, each under a governor called in the Aramaic documents a frataraka, with lower governors in the towns; the state treasury, "the house of the king", stood at Memphis under the patronage of Ptah, with treasurers and scribes in the districts; garrisons held the frontier posts, Daphnae and Marea facing Asia and Libya and Elephantine at the First Cataract, as well as the White Wall, the citadel of Memphis itself.^[12] The satraps at the top of this structure were Persians of the highest rank: Aryandes under Cambyses and the early Darius, Pherendates under Darius, Xerxes' own brother Achaemenes, and later the imperial prince Arshama, whose leather letter-file opens the satrapal estate world of the later fifth century. Aryandes ended on the execution block, on a charge remembered, probably wrongly, as coining silver in the royal manner (see Darius I).

Beneath the Persian summit, the officialdom was mixed, and how deeply mixed is one of the live questions of the field. Pierre Briant's influential model of an ethno-classe dominante held that the empire was run by a closed caste of ethnic Persians who kept their identity, their bloodlines and the real levers of power to themselves, leaving Egyptians the religious offices.^[14] The documented careers sit awkwardly with that scheme. Udjahorresnet of Sais was chief physician, palace administrator and "sole companion" of Cambyses and Darius. Horwedja held the office of senti, "usually translated as 'finance minister' or 'planner'", answerable to king or satrap; Ptahhotep was overseer of the treasury and bore ḳppš, "a Persian title that was reserved for the most eminent officials and administrators"; Ahmose was a general, and Khnemibre directed the stone-works of the Wadi Hammamat.^[14][15] Colburn observes that such men are conventionally called "collaborators", a label he rejects as "anachronistic and pejorative", built on the unexamined assumption that Egyptians in high imperial office must have been rare; he sets them instead beside Ezra, Themistocles and Belshunu among the non-Persians who reached high imperial office; Briant himself has acknowledged such counterexamples.^[14]

The officials' own monuments show how differently the same position could be worn. Horwedja had himself carved kneeling with a shrine of Ptah, in a plain pleated kilt, a wholly Egyptian image with no visible trace of the empire his titles served. His contemporary Ptahhotep chose the opposite: his statue wears the sleeved Persian court garment and an Achaemenid torque with ibex heads, very likely a royal gift, above a pectoral showing pharaoh offering to Ptah.^[15] One treasury official presented himself as if the Persians did not exist; another advertised the king's favour on an Egyptian statue in an Egyptian temple. Both readings of service were possible, and both were Egyptian.

The province's legal order rests on a single remarkable text. On the back of a papyrus now in Paris, the Demotic Chronicle, a much later scribe copied what is presented as an order of Darius:

Darius made [the chiefs?] of the whole earth obey him because of his greatness of heart. He wrote (to) his satrap in Egypt in Year 3, saying: 'Have them bring to me the scholars [...] among the soldiers, priests and scribes of Egypt [...]. They are to write the law of Egypt from olden days until Year 44 of Pharaoh – life, prosperity, health – Amasis – life, prosperity, health! The law ... [...] of the temples and the people, have them brought here ... a papyrus until Year 19 [...] Egypt.' ... They wrote a copy on papyrus in Assyrian writing and in documentary writing.

The Demotic Chronicle verso, 'Order of Darius I', trans. Kuhrt^[4]

The closing formula insists on completeness: "It was completed before him. They wrote in his presence; nothing was left out."^[4] Read institutionally, the text is precise. The order went through the satrap, in the king's third year (519); the commission was drawn from the three literate estates, soldiers, priests and scribes; the law to be recorded was the native law entire, down to the last full year of Amasis, the final great Saite king, pointedly ignoring the intervening conquest; the work ran some sixteen years, to Year 19; and the result was issued in "Assyrian writing", that is Aramaic, the chancery language, and "documentary writing", demotic. The crown fixed Egyptian law in the province's own language for Egyptian use and in the imperial language for its own officials at one stroke.^[4][16]

The carrier demands caution. The Demotic Chronicle is a papyrus of the later third century, a treatise on good kingship with sentiments hostile to the Persians, and the decrees on its verso are copied next to regulations about temple priests, so the compilation's interest may have been priestly rather than constitutional.^[16] Nor was this a legal code in the Greek sense, although hellenistic tradition remembered it as one. Diodorus reports that Darius was "said to have been the sixth to concern himself with the laws of the Egyptians", that "he was outraged by the legal transgressions his predecessor Cambyses had inflicted on the Egyptian temples", that his study with the priests won him divine address while he still lived, and that at his death "he was given the same honours as the ancient kings who had ruled in accordance with Egyptian laws".^[17]

The lawgiver is a Greek category, drawn by Diodorus from Hecataeus of Abdera. In Egyptian conception legitimate kings ruled in accordance with maat, "no legal code existed, and law emanated from the divine sphere"; what the Persian king actually sponsored, in Kuhrt's formulation, was "an act of law-gathering", a recording and validation of existing rules, temple regulations and royal decrees useful to the new regime.^[18] Whether such registration amounted to a standing imperial mechanism of authorising local law is the Reichsautorisation debate (see Darius I).

The same papyrus preserves the other face of temple policy, a decree of Cambyses on the temples' incomes. It works through the crown's standing deliveries category by category, beginning with the building wood, firewood, flax and shrubs that the sanctuaries had received in Amasis's day, and in every clause it exempts three named houses, the temple of Memphis, the temple of Wn-khm and the temple of Perapis. For all the rest, "Cambyses ordered the following: 'Do not permit that one gives them as much as (?)'"; instead the sanctuaries were assigned "a place in the copse of the Southern Land", from which "it shall be permitted that building wood and firewood come from there and that they bring it to the gods!"^[19]

The following clauses run through the rest of the standing royal deliveries. Cattle: "Their share is what they are given." Birds: "They shall not be given them! The priests will obtain them (for the sanctuaries) and they will give them to the gods." The combined deliveries of silver, cattle, birds and cereal were stopped outright, the decree registering their value in figures running to the hundreds of thousands.^[19] The three exempted sanctuaries kept their receipts "as before": Memphis, the satrapal capital and coronation cult of Ptah, and two lesser houses usually identified as Letopolis and Nilopolis.^[16]

This is a real fiscal squeeze, and it is the likeliest documentary kernel behind the priestly hatred of Cambyses that Herodotus's stories elaborate. It is also selective and administrative rather than destructive: the politically central cults kept full support, the rest were moved from crown deliveries to self-provisioning, with a state woodland assigned for the purpose. Kuhrt notes that "the precise implications of Cambyses' orders about temple incomes are unclear", since "for some items, alternative sources for provision are specified, while the quantities of others are restricted", and records Damien Agut-Labordère's case for reading the measures positively, as rational revenue reform.^[16] Later tradition, followed by Diodorus and by Bresciani's Iranica survey, held that Darius revoked or softened his predecessor's decree to win back the priesthood; the Chronicle itself does not say so, and the claim remains a reading of the tradition rather than a documented act.^[17][12]

How far the crown's hand reached into a temple's own administration is shown by three demotic letters from Elephantine, of 493–492. The wab-priests of the ram-god Khnum wrote to the satrap that "the time for selecting a successor to the lesonis" had come round:

We replaced Petikhnum, son of Haaibre, who was lesonis. We had Eskhnumpemet, son of Horkheb, follow him as lesonis. We are in agreement [to make him] lesonis.

The wab-priests of Khnum to Pherendates, 493 BCE^[20]

The new man, the priests add, "will cause burnt-offerings to be made before Khnum".^[20] The lesonis was the temple's chief administrator, and the office appears to have been filled, or refilled, every year; the satrap's oversight was therefore a recurring annual control, and Pherendates' reply, rejecting unfit candidates against the standard of "that which Darius (the) Pharaoh has ordered", is the type-case of satrapal chancery procedure (see the satrapy system).^[5] Two details belong here. The satrap's demotic letter was composed in Aramaic by one Egyptian secretary and translated into demotic by another, the imperial chancery working into an Upper Egyptian sanctuary in two languages; and on Michel Chauveau's reading Pherendates was rebuking priests who had merely informed him of their choice, "expecting it to be rubber-stamped", where "the due process must be gone through".^[5] The relationship was fiscal as well as procedural: a demotic record shows that appointments to priesthoods were taxed, and the third letter of the dossier concerns silver paid in connection with the new lesonis's installation.^[6][20] The crown vetted the temple's officers, taxed their appointment, and answered their letters through a bilingual secretariat.

The crown could also give. The fullest statement of temple patronage as an act of government comes from the statue of Udjahorresnet, in the section describing his commission under Darius. The king, then in Elam, ordered the old priest of Sais back to his country from the court, the statue records, with a stated purpose:

... in order to set to rights the office of the House of Life [...] and of the physicians, after it had collapsed. ... I furnished them with their personnel, each the son of a (notable) man; the son of a wretch was not among them. I placed a scholar at their head [...] for all their work. His majesty ordered that they be given all good things, so that they could carry out their work. ... His majesty did this because he knew the usefulness of this art, for preserving the life of all the sick, for preserving the names of all the gods and their temples, their offerings and their rituals forever.

The statue of Udjahorresnet, section (j), trans. Kuhrt^[21]

The House of Life (per ankh) was the temple institution of sacred learning, in Kuhrt's gloss "all the learning, study, copying and teaching of the corpus of ancient knowledge and wisdom, activities connected to Egyptian temples and cults", including medicine.^[22] The passage shows the mechanism of restoration from the inside: a summons issued from the court in Elam, probably Susa, around 519; a journey home under official escort, very likely on the imperial travel-warrant system; recruitment confined to the sons of notables; royal provisioning; and a stated royal motive that joins practical medicine to the perpetuation of the gods' names, offerings and rituals. For Kuhrt the inscription is first-rank evidence on two counts at once: it preserves the techniques by which the conquerors worked to make their kingship over Egypt legitimate in Egyptian eyes, and it shows an Egyptian grandee arranging his accommodation with them.^[22] Whether the man himself is best called collaborator, patriot or survivor is a debate in its own right (see Udjahorresnet); institutionally, the episode shows the crown rebuilding a damaged native institution through a native grandee, and advertising the fact.

The kings did not only fund Egyptian religion; they performed it. At Hibis in the Kharga Oasis stands a substantial temple of Amun whose decoration shows the king as pharaoh making offerings to the gods of Egypt; at Qasr el-Ghuweida nearby, the earliest datable material is two cartouches of Darius I, one accompanying a relief of "the pharaoh facing left and presenting the goddess Maat to the Theban triad of Amun, Mut and Khons", and the sanctuary seems to have been expanded into a full temple under Persian rule.^[23] A small stela from the Fayum, now in Berlin, goes further still and shows the dedicator kneeling before the falcon god Horus, named in the cartouche as "The good god, lord of the two lands, Darius": the Persian king worshipped as an Egyptian god-king.^[24]

The temples also carry the seam between the two royal identities. At Hibis, a cryptographic inscription at the forecourt doorway ends: "there is not another sovereign like Pharaoh, king of Egypt, Lord of the Two Lands, Darius, great ruler of all the rulers and of all foreign lands". Colburn notes that this last title "is not a normal Egyptian royal title", paralleled only on the statue of Darius from Susa, yet "it closely resembles one of the Great King's more common epithets, 'king of kings'".^[7] An unusual relief on the temple's original façade shows Seth, the god of foreigners, in his one wholly positive role, spearing the chaos-serpent Apep; Colburn, following Melanie Wasmuth, suggests the foreign god in his best guise "may in fact be a reference to the foreign king who commissioned the temple", Achaemenid rule "recast in terms of Egyptian cosmology".^[7] The attribution of the Hibis decoration is contested: Colburn defends Darius I, while Joachim Quack observes that "most cartouches in the inner parts of that temple are left blank" and that Darius II cannot be excluded.^[7][8]

The same double address governs the monuments treated with Darius's reign, the Suez canal stelae and the Susa statue: in Quack's summary the Egyptian faces present the king as "beloved son of the Egyptian goddess Neïth" or "as son of the god Atum", while the Old Persian texts declare that a Persian seized Egypt from Persia.^[8] Speaking as pharaoh to the temple public and as conqueror to the imperial elite was a standing technique of provincial rule, and the temples of the western oases are where it can still be seen working.

The most sensitive of all Egyptian cults prospered under the same kings whom Greek tradition accused of killing its god. The epigraphy of the Memphite animal cults shows, in Colburn's judgement, "no disruption in cult practices here as a result of Achaemenid rule"; rather "the cult flourished along traditional lines", with at least seven burials of the Mother of Apis attested across the fifth century.^[25] The most concrete witness is a stone embalming basin from the House of Apis at Memphis, inscribed "King of Upper and Lower Egypt, Darius, beloved of the living Apis" and dated to year 34, that is 484, matching the burial of an Apis bull in that year. "Its addition to the temple's ritual equipment as an item worthy of pharaonic dedication demonstrates active royal engagement with the cult."^[25] Deep into the reign, the Persian pharaoh was equipping the Apis cult in his own titulary. Cambyses' own Serapeum burial for an Apis, and the disputed question of a harmed calf behind Herodotus's story, are part of the conquest's history (see the Conquest of Egypt by Cambyses).

Egypt paid for its government, and paid well. In Herodotus's assessment the province owed 700 talents of silver a year, with the revenue of the Lake Moeris fishery above it and a great levy of grain (fuller treatment at tribute and taxation). The institutional point is where the grain went: in Kuhrt's summary, "the king received additional income from fisheries and substantial quantities of grain were levied to feed the Persian administrators and soldiers in Memphis".^[6] The province's render maintained the occupation's own apparatus on the spot, garrison and bureaucracy eating the harvest they governed. In the money economy, Aramaic documents reckon in karsh, shekels and hallurin on the royal weight standard, coined silver circulating beside weighed metal.^[12]

The crown also worked Egypt's stone. The greywacke quarries of the Wadi Hammamat, in the eastern desert on the Red Sea road, were exploited throughout the period, and their rock inscriptions name the responsible officials. Eleven expeditions were recorded by the director of works Khnemibre. His inscription of Darius's twenty-seventh regnal year, 1 April 495, dated by the king's full pharaonic titulary, styles him "chief of works in the quarries of the mountains of foreign lands" and "he who directs works in the whole land, chief of works of southern and northern Egypt, Khnemibre", the son of a chief of works under the Saites, Ahmose-sa-Neith, and "born of the lady Sanefertum, daughter of the divine father of Memphis, Psamtek".^[26]

Khnemibre's earliest expedition dates from the last year of Amasis; the rest served Darius. An Egyptian hereditary office, passed from father to son, carried straight across the conquest into imperial service.^[26] The stone itself travelled the other way: the statue of Darius found at Susa was carved from Wadi Hammamat greywacke, Egyptian material and workmanship standing in the heart of the empire.^[6]

Acculturation ran in both directions. The stela of Djedherbes from Saqqara "is a distinctly Egyptian form of funerary monument that features a distinctly Egyptian scene, namely the embalming of the deceased in the presence of Anubis", yet its lower register holds a seated figure in "the Persian 'court garb' depicted in the reliefs from Persepolis"; the inscription gives Djedherbes a Persian-named father, Artam, and an Egyptian-named mother, Tanofrether. Colburn reads the monument as the choice of a man expressing "the complexity both of his relationship to the Achaemenid Empire and of the larger social environment in Memphis", and the roughly 750 demotic and 200 Aramaic papyri from the Sacred Animal Necropolis at Saqqara attest the same mingled name-stock in the capital's daily records.^[27]

Persian officials made the same crossing from the other side. In the Wadi Hammamat, a hieroglyphic inscription opens to "Min of Koptos, lord of the chapel Sehent" and is dated "Year 5 of the king of Upper and Lower Egypt, lord of the two lands, Artaxerxes – may he live for ever – beloved of the gods", that is 461. Its maker is a Persian, Ariyawrata, "son of Artames, born of the lady Qandjou", and his prayer is Egyptian: "that he may live before Min, Horus, and Isis" of Koptos.^[28]

A Persian official with a Persian father and an Egyptian mother commissions an Egyptian prayer to the gods of Koptos, under the pharaonic titulary of Artaxerxes I; Kuhrt notes the family as an instance of "the process of Persian acculturation in the provinces". The date falls squarely within the great Inaros revolt, showing a provincial officer discharging routine duties while the Delta burned.^[28] His brother Atiyawahy's inscriptions at the same quarries carry a Persian title first transcribed and later translated into Egyptian, the rulers' own style slowly Egyptianising.^[12] The Persian-style bracelets on Udjahorresnet's statue and the torque on Ptahhotep's belong to the same exchange, royal gifts in Achaemenid form worn on Egyptian monuments.^[15]

Two documentary windows show the province beneath its elite. The Petition of Petiese, a long demotic narrative from el-Hiba composed about 513, has an elderly priest recount "the abuses he suffered at the hands of his fellow priests and the failure of the royal court at Memphis to intercede on his behalf", events set a generation earlier, under native Saite rule. By the time of writing, the court he hoped to move was "a satrapal court with an Achaemenid governor in charge", and the text's premise is that an Egyptian priest could plausibly expect the Persian administration to right wrongs the native one had not. Colburn draws the wider moral: the petition "demonstrates very effectively that foreign imperialism was not at all necessary to oppression or violence".^[29]

At Ayn Manawir in the Kharga Oasis, several hundred demotic ostraca from the temple-village of Osiris document a working irrigation economy: contracts "refer to the leasing of water rights for fixed periods of time in exchange for percentages of the harvest" from the underground qanat channels, dated by regnal years between 483 and 370, the earliest surviving water contract falling in 443.^[30] The qanat itself is an Iranian technology, and Colburn argues that its introduction, an undertaking of years per channel, must have been an imperial investment, engineers brought in and the finished water rights assigned to the local temple to manage.^[30] It is the strongest single glimpse of ordinary provincial life: crown capital, temple administration, and villagers leasing water under kings named in the dating formulas, decade after decade.

Egypt nonetheless revolted more persistently than any other satrapy. Fiscal pressure, the exclusion of the native elite from the highest offices and sheer distance from the centre all appear in modern explanations, but their relative weight remains disputed. The fiscal architecture bound the province's harvest to the occupation and its silver to the crown; when imperial ambition turned west against the Greeks, the demands rose. Stephen Ruzicka's structural reading is that control of Egypt made far-western expansion possible, while the cost of that expansion required exactions which endangered Egypt itself. "Persian kings' presentation of themselves as Egyptian kings" was not, he concludes, a sufficient foundation for holding the province "when the Persians were also making excessive demands on Egyptian resources to support far western operations".^[10] The pharaonic pose and the extractive reality pulled against each other. Distance did the rest: the Delta's marshes sheltered quasi-independent dynasts with their own soldiery, and the satrap's forces could not always reach them.^[10]

The revolts themselves, at the end of Darius's reign, under Inaros in the 450s, and finally a staggered secession between 405/4 and 400/399 that opened two generations of renewed independence, have their own narrative history (see the Egyptian Revolts and Reconquest).^[1] What belongs to the province's standing frame is the turn they produced in its government. After the first great rising, Herodotus says, Xerxes "laid Egypt under a much harder slavery than in the time of Darius" and set his brother Achaemenes over it;^[31] on Ruzicka's reconstruction the new policy meant Egyptians confined to subordinate offices, enlarged garrisons, and the end of the temple subsidies, the abandonment of "Cambyses and Darius' collaborative, Egyptianizing approach" in favour of direct control. After Xerxes, no Persian king is attested building at an Egyptian temple or styling himself in the old pharaonic manner.^[10] The accommodating province of Darius's reign was a policy, and the policy could be withdrawn.

The evidence supports neither caricature. Against the "hated occupation" stand the codified native law, the mixed officialdom, the restored House of Life, the flourishing Apis cult, the petitionable satrapal court and the quiet dated contracts of the oasis villages. Against the "working province" read too complacently stand the Cambyses revenue decree, the priesthood tax, the grain levy feeding the garrisons, the repeated revolts and the final secession. Colburn's verdict on the conquest generalises to the province. "It is critically important not to downplay the violence and trauma of the invasion of Cambyses": every occupation rested finally on force, and "there is no reason to believe that the Persian invasion of Egypt was exceptional". At the same time, "we cannot simply repeat the prejudices of previous scholarship, which depict Achaemenid imperialism as extraordinarily despotic and cruel", a portrait inherited rather than demonstrated.^[9]

The balance the documents suggest, on Ruzicka's reconstruction, is chronological. Under Cambyses and Darius the crown governed through Egyptian institutions and largely preserved them, at a real but managed fiscal price; after 486 the bargain hardened, and the hostile memory that dominates the Demotic Chronicle and the Greek tradition crystallised around the later, harsher province as much as the earlier one. The empire's richest western possession was held for a century and a quarter by a mixture of patronage, participation and extraction, and lost when the extraction outran the patronage.^[10][9]