Egypts Specificity and Impact on Roman History

Research for this contribution was carried out in the context of the author’s fellowship no. UMO2016/23/P/HS3/04141 of the National Science Centre, Poland. This project has received funding from the European Union’s Horizon 2020 research and innovation programme under the Marie SkłodowskaCurie grant agreement No 665778.

Historians have long ranked the Roman takeover of Ptolemaic Egypt both as a major and far‐reaching event in contemporary geopolitical power relations and as a pivotal moment in Egyptian and Roman history and culture. At the same time, however, as a Roman province, they also considered the former Ptolemaic kingdom to have fundamentally differed from all other Roman provinces. The degree to which the Roman takeover of the Nile Valley entailed continuity or change is evidently an important factor when attempting to define the specificity of Egypt as a Roman province. On the whole, it appears that “the changes introduced by the Romans were at least as important as the continuities”. Egypt was the origin of many remarkable products and developments that swept through the Roman Empire, including the dissemination of popular deities like Isis and Sarapis and of romantic notions of a bucolic lifestyle set in Nilotic landscapes.