Two themes of research which seem to me important for any structural analysis of the population in Ptolemaic Egypt have particularly preoccupied me. The first developed the hypothesis that Greeks, the driving element and protagonist of our documentation (a documentation which is predominantly Greek and rural), seem often to be in fact, in the agricultural environment, ‘absentees’ or ‘passers-by’ even though they are absentees or passers-by whose actions influence this rural environment. A second hypothesis, which is correlative with the first, was that this tendency of the Greek population of Egypt (it is a tendency, and not a rule) to settle in a more or less urbanised milieu already brought, during the Ptolemaic period, a relative density to the urban character of the nome metropolis.

For my first investigations on the Greek presence in the rural environment, I made use largely of papyri found at Tebtynis. Certainly, this site produced a documentation unique in papyrology, because it supplies rich series of papyri for various periods, illustrating the third century bc, then the second and the beginning of the first bc, and finally the Roman period. There is, however, no coherence among these dossiers from the point of view of onomastics, or from that of the occupation of the soil between the Ptolemaic village and later Tebtynis. Part of my argumentation in Chapter 8 is based on the ‘archive’ of the komogrammateus Menches, one of the loveliest finds of Ptolemaic papyri.