The title of this chapter might be misleading in its breadth; it is actually aimed at developing some methodological considerations and summary conclusions. Any effort to describe the constituents and socio-economic structures of the population of the chôra during the Ptolemaic period is impeded first of all by the deficiencies of the sources. Inscriptions are scarce. Papyri sometimes offer very rich series of data, but they are intermittent in time and space, ignore certain periods and regions, and reflect unevenly the various population groups living in the chôra. Dorothy Crawford (1971) was able to give a very sophisticated image of the village of Kerkeosiris for a period of some decades; we know almost nothing about it for the two preceding centuries. And how far are we allowed to generalise from the picture of this village the author gives to us? The loss is especially considerable for the nome metropoleis. For none of these do we have, even for a brief period, a documentation with any consistency. And this condemns us to work with extremely narrow samplings.

In Chapter 8, studying an aspect of the structures of the Ptolemaic rural society, I observed that, in the countryside and its villages, Greeks, and more specially the cleruchs, are much less present than the sources would suggest. In our papyri Greeks are often an element passing through, or merely the names of absentees, even though new installations of cleruchs and new arrivals of immigrants would tend at first sight to strengthen the idea of dense Greek settlements in some parts of the chôra.