From the Ptolemies to the Romaris. Political and Economic Change in Egypt

In an address at the Twelfth International Congress of Papyrology in 1968, the late Naphtali Lewis famously rejected the terrn·”Greco-Roman", specifically as used in studies of Ptolemaic and Roman Egypt. To support his position, one based, so he claimed, on substance not mere linguistic fussiness, he presented arguments against the then prevailing orthodoxy that the Roman replacement of the Ptolemies was characterized by ,essential continuity". Instead, according to Lewis, the changes wrought by the Romans were themselves ,more fundamental and sweeping" than previously thought. He returned to the same theme fifteen years later in Naples in his presidential address to the XVII Congresso Internazionale di Papirologia, a specific complement to the earlier talk, with an express qualification that the issue was ,not a simple (or simplistic) question of continuity or change; both are in evidence, and the problem is to evaluate the relative importance of each."