Introduction

Over the course of three centuries, two successive conquests profoundly altered Egyptian society. The introduction of a new ethnic group into the country resulting from the Macedonian conquest in 332 seems not to have brought about major changes. Greco-Macedonians and Egyptians coexisted without great conflict. And Egypt in the hands of the Ptolemies remained, at least up until the second century BCE, an independent and prosperous kingdom. But in integrating Egypt into a vast empire of which it was only one province among many, the Roman conquest of 30 BCE far more profoundly transformed its institutions, administrative and economic organization, and Egyptian society as a whole. (See Map 4.) Henceforth, the practice of the traditional religion of Egypt occurred within the framework of a nation subject to “foreign occupiers,” but under very different circumstances.

The religious policy of the rulers

The new regimes did not demonstrate any hostility to the native Egyptian religion. What interested the conquering powers was the domination and exploitation of the territory, not the diffusion of their own religious cults in the vanquished nation. Because they resided in Egypt, the Lagids found it necessary to heed the reactions of a people obviously committed to its traditional forms of worship. This was far less the case for the emperors; barring rare exceptions, they did not set foot in a country that for them was basically, in the words of Tiberius, “sheep for shearing” (see Cassius Dio 57.10).