This chapter deals with the internal economic history of the Ptolemaic dynasty in Egypt, the longest lived of the Hellenistic successor states. It addresses the question of the extent to which the Ptolemaic state effected economic development, and to what extent was development driven by demographic change. The foundation and growth of urban centers, the development of roads out to the Red Sea, and the reclamation of new land in the Fayyum, are enough to suggest that the early Ptolemaic period experienced aggregate economic growth, and the increased farming of wheat (at least in some areas) resulted in greater agricultural productivity. The chapter focuses on money and prices, the taxation system, the role of social status, and state revenue. Ptolemaic institutions were a mixture of old and new. The taxation policy above all gradually shifted emphasis away from traditional Egyptian social hierarchies toward the new realities of urban, Greek life.

From one point of view, the provincial administration can be analysed in terms of the complex of coexisting relationships between the different elements, the emperor, the provincial governor and his subordinate officials, the province, the provincial communities as a group, the individual community and finally the individual subject. The functioning of the administrative system in the provinces depended upon a superstructure of military and civil officials, appointed to their positions by the central government and directly responsible to it. In contrast to the relative formality of the bureaucratic structure, an attempt to describe how provincial administration worked in practice must take account of the flexibility which the structure permitted and observe the patterns and relationships which developed in the early imperial period. The conduct of the provincial census was fundamental to the taxation system and to the general management of the controls applied to the population by fiscal means.