Coinage as 'Code' in Ptolemaic Egypt

In this paper I survey the use of money in Ptolemaic Egypt with a particular focus on the introduction of coinage by the Ptolemies. I draw connections between monetization of the economy with other institutional reforms, especially as they concern the legal reforms of Ptolemy II.


Introduction
In this paper I discuss the use of money in Ptolemaic Egypt in relationship to the development of the state. My aim here is to summarize some recent work and to set the process of monetization into a broader context of state development. The topic of money and coinage in the ancient world is enormously complex and work is ongoing on several fronts. 1  have concentrated on the use of coinage in private transactions or its role in economic growth. In this paper I set the monetization of the economy into the larger process of asserting sovereignty over Egyptian institutions that is also reflected in the encapsulation of Egyptian law and Egyptian temples within the new state structure. All of the available evidence points to Ptolemy II Philadelphus as the key driver in the process, in part a reflection of the lag between the takeover by Alexander and the political processes of gaining control of the country, a country which went from a largely unmonetized economy to a largely monetized one during the course of the third century BC.
Coinage, of course, was of fundamental importance to the finance of Hellenistic states, but an examination of the process of monetizing the taxation mechanisms in Egypt illustrates one of the best reasons why the Ptolemies were so successful. By the end of the third century BC, for example, there was an independent bronze coinage, a fact that coincides well with the stronger Ptolemaic institutional control throughout Egypt. 4 I draw a distinction between cash transactions within the fiscal system (monetary accounting, tax payments) and private cash transactions, which were largely undocumented and are therefore more difficult to study in absolute terms, although it is clear that the Ptolemaic insistence on coinage in taxation and the use of coinage as a unit of account had profound effects, as Sitta von Reden argues (forthcoming, further below).
The use of coinage is one of the key features of Hellenistic economies, and, because of its rich documentation, Ptolemaic Egypt holds a special place in monetary history, although it has not been treated as such by economic historians. Primarily thanks to the documentary papyri, and increasingly the tax receipt ostraca, Ptolemaic Egypt offers us the best ancient material to study the impact of Greek economic institutions on a new region. Even before the Ptolemies, Egypt offers important material evidence for the history of monetization. Like so much else in Hellenistic economic structure and organization, strong institutional continuities existed with both Persian imperial practice and the fourth century Greek experience, both connected by the theoretical concerns of Xenophon, Aristotle and his students. The well-known text of ps.-Aristotle, Oikonomika, Book 2, for example, most of it composed, probably, at the end of the fourth century BC reveals much about the mentalité and the taxation policy of Hellenistic states, whether the Seleukid kingdom is the specific subject of the treatise or not. 5 It has generally been assumed that the use of coinage had profound effects, but it is important to bear in mind that Egypt had been partially monetized for quite some time before the Ptolemies, Egypt being a crucial point of contact between the Greek world and the Persian empire. It was certainly, therefore, well connected to the eastern Mediterranean economy before Alexander. The joining of the Greek 'stock of knowledge' to the ancient Egyptian agrarian economy and its social structure centered around the basin irrigation system makes the study of money in the Ptolemaic period, despite its many remaining technical problems, particularly with the bronze coinage, so interesting Money in the form of coinage existed in Egypt since at least the seventh century BC. 6 This is important in understanding the mentalité of Egyptians in the new world that was the Ptolemaic economy. What was new was the process of monetization, the increased demand for coin through taxation and, probably, the increased use of coin in private transactions. 7 But there is an important caveat. The documentary evidence is far from clear enough to be certain that there was extensive use of coinage in small transactions, and it likely that there existed in Egypt as elsewhere in the Hellenistic world a gap between urban areas that were more monetized and rural areas that remained "zones of low monetization." 8

History of 'Money' in Egypt
Metals and grain were used as media of exchange, a store of value, and a means of payment for more than a millennium before coins. Gold rings and copper blades as well as grain were well known in New Kingdom transactions, and a nominal exchange rate between copper and silver was fixed at 1:60. 9 An important Ramesside period letter shows, for example, that the harvest tax collected on private land was paid in 'gold into the treasury of Pharaoh.' 10 The term 'gold' in this text is susceptible to several interpretations but it is at least plausible that the term refers in a general sense to 'money' and that taxes in grain were conceived of in monetary terms. A silver standard was in place by the end of the New Kingdom.
Under the Persians, the treasury of Ptah in Memphis was the guarantor of a silver bullion standard, and this standard may have been more widely accepted than in earlier times. 11 In the so-called Third Intermediate Period (1069-664 BC), some taxes were clearly monetized. A ten per cent transfer tax is known in a few documents. 12 Increased monetization seems to be associated with a higher volume of trade with Greece beginning in the seventh century BC, at the same time as the Greek trading colony at Naukratis in the western Delta was established. 13 It is therefore not surprising to see an increase in coin hoards in the sixth century BC. If Kim's suggestion is correct, the use of small change in the Greek world speaks to a deeply embedded institution across the range of the social hierarchy and, as a Greek institution, would have been familiar to Greek immigrants in Egypt. 14 As Muhs rightly argues though, monetized transactions were still limited to a small elite circle, preponderantly soldiers, and coinage was used mainly as bullion. 15 By the fourth century BC, the evidence for the use of bronze coins in small transactions increases. Persian imperial practice of demanding some taxes in silver must have had an affect in monetizing private transactions, although the extent of it can hardly be estimated.  (and) any year] that they will be with me, while interest (will) bear as interest against me (5) again, and also this interest which is (mentioned) above, till whatever ever they would reach; and I will give then [ to you and also their interests]. This(?) money which is (mentioned) above and also their interests [will] befall on me (6) (and) on my children, Four witnesses sign on the verso of the contract. 18 There are only a handful of pre-Ptolemaic money loan contracts, and caution must be exercised in drawing conclusions about the extent of private lending of money. 19 While we have no comparable evidence from Egypt of monetary theory to rival Xenophon or Aristotle, it seems difficult to believe that the trends in Greek thought in the fourth century would not have at least been observed in the fourth century economy of Egypt. The imitation owl coins minted in Egypt in this period may reflect a link between Greek theory and Egyptian practice before the Ptolemies, and the enormous quantity of precious metal from the Persian treasury circulated as coin as the result of Alexander's campaigns must surely have affected early Ptolemaic Egypt. 20

The Ptolemaic Economy
The rather famous and oft-quoted passage in Saint Jerome's Commentary on the Book of Daniel (XI.5) stating that the annual revenue of Ptolemy II amounted to 14,800 talents of silver and 1.5 million artabae of wheat, whether we believe the figures or not, tells us a good deal about the scale of the Ptolemaic royal economy and the sources of revenue: direct taxation of agricultural production, some of which, fodder crops for example, were converted into coin, and the taxation in cash of persons and private transactions. 21 The agricultural sector was of course dominant, but if Jerome's figures are to be considered meaningful in any way, the amount of cash in the annual revenue is the more impressive figure. There were, obviously, good reasons to keep revenue in grain. Neither wheat nor silver was new with Ptolemy I, but Greek fiscal institutions probably allowed for a greater (and more efficient?) capture of revenue than at any time in previous Egyptian history. It was under the Ptolemies that Greek fiscal institutions, coinage, banks and tax farming, were first introduced in Egypt. The subsequent monetization of the traditional agricultural economy marks a turning point, somewhat earlier than usually posited, in the rise of the 'mercantile state'. 22 It is now, I believe, communis opinio that the Ptolemaic transition in the early third century BC was marked more by continuity with Persian rule than discontinuity. The fact that Ptolemy acted at first as a satrap is only the most obvious and public signal that Ptolemaic rule in The economic policy of the early Ptolemaic kings, and I think 'policy' is a fair term to use, was, mainly based on the reading of P. Rev., predictability, stability, insulation from risk (at least in theory), and, above all else, revenue capture by, in theory, taxing anything that moved, including animals. 24 Change came in economic intensification-increased urbanization, increased long-distance trade, and increased monetization, especially in the realm of taxation, and in structure-intensified agrarian production, royal banks, and royal granaries. Along with this change came rural unrest that, on one occasion (207-186 BC), led to the secession of most of the Thebaid from the Ptolemaic state, and consequently a loss of tax revenue. 25 The increased presence of Greeks and their role in the bureaucratic hierarchy, in military service and in other economic activity, altered the structure of social power in terms of language (the increased use of Greek in the villages) and in terms of access to rents (i.e. income). Above everything else, however, stands the Ptolemaic closed currency system that on one hand set off Egypt and the Ptolemaic imperial possessions from other Hellenistic states, and on the other established as a universal fiscal institution within Egypt.
Some considerable advances in the understanding of Ptolemaic coinage have been made recently. 26 It is clear that Ptolemaic taxation policy that required some taxes to be collected, or at least calculated, in terms of money, and the creation of banks, played key roles in monetization. 27 There may have been a regional difference in the process, influenced by where Greeks settled. On the basis of the scanty evidence, commodity prices appear to have remained relatively stable. 28 New fiscal measures were taken in the production, manufacture and sale of key items such as flax, salt, beer, and for certain oil crops. Here the Ptolemaic state utilized competitive bids and labor contracts that fixed workers in a specific place over the length of the contract, often supplied raw materials and tools, and granted state licenses for the sale of the finished product (the so-called Ptolemaic 'monopolies,' although they scarcely were). The aim here, as throughout the Ptolemaic fiscal system, was to secure labor, and to produce predictable income for the state. 29 There was initially a tri-metallic coin system, although gold was hardly circulated. The silver and bronze coins were linked through a fixed exchange mechanism, adjusted at the end of the third century BC. The taxation policy of the Ptolemies that required some payments to be made in coin, and the control of 'monopoly' industries, accelerated the circulation of coin (bronze) throughout Egypt. The spread of banks from urban centers to (some) Egyptian villages was the crucial process in linking not only taxpayers to taxation collection but was also an important nexus between cash and kind in rural areas where the circulation of coinage may have been limited. 30 The paucity of price data preserved in the papyri is a serious barrier to understanding the long-term performance of the Ptolemaic economy.
References to items in the papyri can be frustratingly obscure, small items such as hoes are rarely given values, we are not always sure whether a price is reckoned in silver or bronze, and there are significant gaps in our information (e.g. for the price of wheat from the mid-third century BC to 209 BC). 31 The data derived from penalty clauses in contracts can mislead.
The explanation for the long-term history of commodity prices is exacerbated by our lack of knowledge about the amount of money in circulation and the velocity of circulation. 32 The supposed price inflation that occurred in the reign of Ptolemy IV Philopator has received extensive comment and various explanations. 33 Earlier analyses have focused on the reduction in precious metal of the silver coins, in a new bookkeeping system, or in a reduction of the weight of the bronze drachma and the consequent increase in the value of coin in circulation. 34 Much of the socalled price inflation, however, is derived not from a single new bronze accounting standard but from multiple re-tariffings of the bronze coins against silver and gold. 35 An independent bronze standard was introduced at the end of the third century BC.
The Egyptian rural economy was long used to monetized exchange (usually reckoned in grain against fixed values), and grain and wine continued to be used as such into the Roman period. 36 While it is clear that the Ptolemies were increasingly interested in generated revenue in coin, the continued use of grain as a medium of taxation limited Ptolemaic ability to monetize completely the rural economy. 37 But that, of course, was not the aim of the Ptolemaic fiscal system. Contract wage labor, in the agricultural sphere as well as for short-term building projects, canal building and the like, was common, with daily or monthly payment being done in kind as well as cash. 38 Like so much else with the Ptolemies, what is characteristic was the intensification of trends seen in the Saite and Persian periods (664-332 BC) --increased urbanization, increased long-distance trade, and increased monetization. This last was significantly aided by the Greek institution of banking. 39 We can add one more concept to the definition of 'monetization', and that is that valuations are given in terms of money (i.e. the Ptolemaic coinage system added a new element of numeracy to accounting methods), and wrongs are adjudicated in terms of money. Here the legacy of Rome that Hicks discussed 40 should be understood as resting on a Ptolemaic foundation. The use of coinage, then, was part of a larger state project to establish new standards and increase stable revenue.

Coin as 'Code' in Ptolemaic Egypt
The use of coined money in the taxation system, as payment in wage labor and in small transactions was a new feature of the Egyptian economy under the Ptolemies, and it is Ptolemy II who appears as a major reformer.
This king did two important things with respect to coinage: (1) Reform of the taxation system, mostly importantly in the institution of the capitation tax known as the salt tax 41 and (2) Institution of the tax farming system supported by a public auction for the bidding of tax collection contracts. The salt tax was the major new institution in the process of monetizing the economy and a key source of state control; indeed it is the monetization of taxes, and the bureaucratic infrastructure that revolved around it, that stands out as the single most important aspect of the internal history of Egypt in the last three centuries BC. The payment of taxes in the Ptolemaic period was divided into two types: those collected (or at least calculated) in terms of grain, and those taxes that were demanded in coin. Certain taxes on agricultural production were also required to be paid in coin. The most important of these were the apomoira, a tax on vineyards, the tax on fruit trees, and a fodder tax. Surely by the second century BC, and probably before, Egyptian temples were fully involved in the cash game. Recently published texts from Edfu, for example, suggest that temples were involved in the marketing of wine. 42 Other forms of business, beekeeping for example, were cash businesses in which the state normally received cash rents. 43  found not only in the demand for taxes and the fixing of the value of coins but also in the power of the king to assigned tenure to land, to survey fields, to establish nome boundaries, to conduct censuses of men and animals, to guarantee justice, to establish weights and standards and so on. 46  Greek polis, 49 and it did not involve as much of a threat against the local elite that undermined traditional society. 50 In the context of post-Saite and Persian rule, when I believe more serious adjustments to centralized rule occurred, the imposition of coinage was more a matter of contract between the king and the elites that exchanged rents and the acceptance of sovereignty for justice. That is not to say, however, that priests never found themselves in trouble with respect to Ptolemaic fiscal demands, as the Milon archive discussed below shows. But coinage is only part of a larger story of reform, which involved not only coercive pressure from above but also acceptance from below. It is tempting to associate the writing of this text with other efforts at early Ptolemaic state reorganization. Evidence is clear enough to show that the efforts of the early Ptolemaic kings to reorganize Egypt was systematic.
The 'text' that provides us with the most important information about the nature of the Ptolemaic state survives only by way of references in other documents, where it is referred to simply as 'the legislation' (Greek to diagramma). 57 Whether it occurred on one occasion, or over the course of several years, references to different sections of the 'legislation' suggests that the effort was a comprehensive one. Among other issues, it empowered courts to decide the law assigned to it, it established rules for selecting judges, and it promulgated maximum interest rates on loans. Bocchoris' reforms in the eighth century BC limited the maximum interest rate (Diod. Sic. I. 79), but a 100 per cent rate on a money loan is recorded in the fifth century BC. 58  Modrzejewski has recently suggested that we understand the writing of the Septuagint in the third century BC in the same light, i.e. as a confirmation of pre-existing Jewish law now in codified, Greek form. 60 That the efforts of Ptolemy II reached villages in Upper Egypt as well as in the Fayyum is shown in the resolution of disputes within the context of Egyptian law. 61 In his treatment of legal reforms, it is interesting to note that the Ptolemies are hardly given a mention by Diodorus other than to say that Egyptian institutions were changed by them: The system, then, of law used throughout the land was the work, they say, of the men just named, and gained a renown that spread among other peoples everywhere; but in later times, they say, many institutions which were regarded as good were changed, after the With Ptolemy II's reign we have much more documentation in Greek and Egyptian, and it is assumed that this increase reflects not merely an accident of preservation but an increase in state activity, and important changes in the taxation system including, importantly, the use of bronze coinage for certain tax payments. The well known Karnak Ostracon, for example, a demotic text usually dated to 258 BC, shows that a royal order to survey land, reached the south of the country and the important temple of Amun at Thebes. 63 Such an order emanated from the king himself, probably originally in the form of a prostagma, and was sent down the chain of the bureaucracy, and translated into demotic so that local priesthoods (or agents of the state) as well as farmers could be informed what was expected by the Ptolemaic authorities who were responsible for generating a budget for the king. This suggests that the orders were intended to go through the temple bureaucracy, not through a separate bureaucracy, a good indication that the temple structure was utilized by the early Ptolemies for such administrative purposes. The order also clearly shows that information on tenure and water conditions flowed from the villages up to the capital and not the reverse. This is in any case the theory, and the text at hand is good evidence that the order penetrated deep into the Egyptian countryside to at least the powerful priesthood of the temple of Amun at Karnak. Two important texts from the reigns of Ptolemy II and III show us the ideal of the bureaucracy, and the operation of the new fiscal system. 64 The first text, P. Tebt. 703, dating to the early part of the reign of Ptolemy III Euergetes, is thought to contain a series of instructions from the chief financial official in Alexandria (dioikêtês) to an official in charge of nome finances (oikonomos). Its literary connections to earlier Egyptian instruction (of the Pharaoh establishing the proper code of conduct for officials and a sense of 'justice' between the state and its subjects) should be taken seriously, although the mention of difficult times suggests that the text was a specific attempt at restoring order after a period of civil unrest linked to a war and, perhaps, poor Nile flooding. 65 The allusion to soldiers who have abandoned their duties reinforces this view. The long text covers many aspects of the royal economy from the maintenance of canals, to sowing, to the registration and care of cattle. The shipment of grain to the capital and the production of fruit trees are also given prominence. The text gives us a (static) picture of the bureaucracy and the central state's expectations of compliance and reporting.
The second text is known as the 'Revenue Laws Papyrus' (P. Rev.) and dates to the reign of Ptolemy II. The best-preserved section of the text deals with the production, the organization and the pricing of oil crops-sesame, castor, safflower among others (olive oil was not included in the regulations contained in P. Rev). On the basis of early translations of this text, it was thought that the entire process, from seed loans to survey of the fields, to tax collection, to the setting of the price of the raw material, and its delivery to state factories was centrally planned and controlled. The careful analysis by Bingen has shown, however, 66 that the text is not, in fact, a systematic treatment of the collection of the royal revenues at all but, rather, a compendium of seven separate 'laws' (nomoi) issued by Ptolemy II Philadelphus governing a range of topics concerned with royal revenue, from tax farming, to the oil crops and other key industries. The connection between the principles in the text, and the rural economy is far more tenuous, and the ability of the state to plan the economy was far less than some earlier interpretations have suggested. Be that as it may, the demand for cash payments in bronze that P. Rev. suggests was important to the monetizing process.
In summation, Ptolemaic governance involved massive and systematic reform. Pharaonic ideology was combined with new signals, new fiscal institutions, and bargaining. In all of this coinage played a key role.

Money and the Ptolemaic State
Ptolemaic fiscal control of Egypt differed from earlier states in its demand for cash, but it took some time, presumably, for coinage and the idea of coinage to take hold in the chora. Yet Egyptians switched to the new system almost, so it seems, without a flinch 67 even if the circulation of coinage fell short of the nominal amount of the taxes in money demanded by the Ptolemaic fiscal system. 68 The Ptolemaic state's demand for tax payments in coin was the principal engine of Ptolemaic monetization. The single most important tax, known in early Ptolemaic demotic sources as the yoke tax and subsequently as the salt tax, was assessed per capita. Every person, with notable exemptions for certain professions, was liable for this tax and the assessment of the tax meant that everyone was implicated in the economy in coin. The apomoira tax on vineyards raised money for temples as well as for the cult of Arsinoe II. 69  To be sure, the acceptance of coinage by Egyptians involved not only the Ptolemaic requirement that certain taxes be collected in coin, it also entailed the active willingness of the population to put faith in coins as a medium of exchange. 72 The availability of coinage for tax payments and in private transactions, of course, depended on circulation, a technical problem that I cannot not tackle here. 73 The accounting system was monetized, although payments could be rendered in kind. Certain taxes were calculated in terms of coin, but often they, and wages, were paid in kind. 74 The Ptolemaic monetization of the economy allowed for an easier conversion of crops into cash, and the inter-convertibility of different crops for the payment of rent.

Egyptian Practice
The question of Egyptian practice, or the adaptation of coinage not only in taxation and also in small private transactions, is really a matter of assessing the degree to which the royal economy had penetrated into village and household economies. Samuel has stressed the traditional peasant mentality that clung to barter transactions, with little resort to market or 'public' transactions, and thus little use for coinage. 75 Two levels were in place, even during the second century when bronze coins were used for small transactions. On one hand the Ptolemaic coinage system was fully embedded in practice as a unit of account. On the other hand, Egyptian peasants were more engaged with social relationships in their village that used barter to establish relative value of goods to be exchanged when needed.
While the introduction of silver currency in Egypt by the Ptolemies was a century old by the time our second-century texts were written, the practice of using silver as the standard of exchange had by no means overwhelmed the long-established practice of reckoning in kind, and indeed, may even have receded to some extent after the first influx of Greeks into the countryside. 76 Thus we may say that by the second century BC, coinage had penetrated into most Egyptian households, but coins never became a kind of multi-purpose money. It remained, rather, one means of payment, and it never fully replaced the natural economy. 77 Furthermore, many (perhaps even most) of Egyptian sales from the Ptolemaic period were probably not cash sales at all, but transfers of rights within families, and without, therefore, the need to draw up a written document. Many of the preserved written documents of sale were also not cash sales, but transfers of rights. 78 In other words, even though the language of these contracts expresses the fact that a satisfactory 'price' had been paid by the 'purchaser,' the documents could be used for a wide variety of transfers of property rights, from proper sales that involved a transfer of cash to intra-family transfers that conveyed rights without payment. On the other side of the coin, as it were, are undocumented cash sales. These would include, for example, the sale of animals that are extremely scarce in the surviving Ptolemaic record for reasons I have laid out elsewhere. 79 Egyptian marriage 'contracts' were also monetized, but they had been since the sixth century BC. 80 They express a cash sum that was payable to the woman upon divorce, and these marriage 'contracts' specified Lending at interest appears to have been an institution late in coming in Egypt, known ca. 900 BC, and thus documented far earlier in the Near East. 82 While this is strictly speaking true with respect to loan contracts, loans with interest are well known before this date from the New Kingdom village of Deir el-Medina. 83 Loan contracts in demotic Egyptian are known from the early Persian period, but their paucity cannot be used to assess how common written loan contracts were at the time. In general loans in kind and in cash are among the most common contract types in demotic, and loans in kind are still the majority of preserved loan contracts of the Ptolemaic period. The majority of these are from the Thebaid and dated to the second century BC but the distribution can in no way demonstrate secular trends in private lending, i.e. we cannot use the increase number of documented loans in the second century BC to suggest that private loans became more common in the later Ptolemaic period.
A group of demotic Egyptian papyri from Asyut now in the British

Museum that does provide valuable insights into an Egyptian village in
Upper Egypt preserves the oral transcript and supporting documentary evidence from a dispute between two half-brothers over the inheritance of two small plots of land that occurred in the early second century BC before judges in the temple of the local god. 84 During the course of the oral proceedings, a complete list of the property of the priestly family is listed.
All of this property is real property or shares of offices (priesthoods or scribes). Nothing in this reveals much about the new Ptolemaic economy in coin, and we can only guess if items such as revenue from local storehouses was generated in coin or in kind.
An important archive revealing much about lending in practice in the Egyptian countryside is the second century BC archive of Dionysios son of Kephalas. 85 Napthali Lewis has made a good case that Dionysios son of Kephalas, from a Greco-Egyptian military family, at the end of the second century BC, utilized his social connections within the military to lend money and grain. Far from being in a debt trap as was supposed, Dionysios was rather a 'master of sharp practice'. 86 Dionysios owned and rented land in the area around the garrison town at Akoris, but it is his role a lender that is the dominant feature of the papers that have come down to us. Two-thirds of the archive is devoted to his lending activities, and most of the loans were grain loans. In three cases, money loans were repayable in kind. Since the interest rate on loans in kind was traditionally set at fifty per cent of the loan, it seems there was incentive, intentional or not, to lend in kind rather than in cash, and convert the grain to cash when and if necessary. 87 In both the case of the Asyut priests and Dionysios, access to real assets either through the temple or the new royal economy that privileged soldiers and state officials allowed persons to convert hard assets to liquid ones. 88 It is obvious enough to say, and hardly surprising, that elites took advantage of economic opportunities as they presented themselves. Soldiers receiving salaries could be instruments of monetization, but as Bingen has shown, 89  The Ptolemies exacted a tax on property transfers. This transfer tax, known as the enkuklion in Greek documents, was in fact a continuation of an Egyptian tax on transfers that was in the control of local temples. The tax has been studied recently by Depauw in the publication of an early Ptolemaic demotic family archive from Thebes. 90 A complex document (much remains obscure) from Thebes dated to 291 BC hints that taxes, in this case funerary taxes, were already being farmed in Thebes in the very early Ptolemaic period. 91 If the current understanding of this text is correct, it provides important documentary evidence that either the Ptolemaic system was established quite early in the south, or, in my view more likely, the Ptolemaic system continued earlier economic institutions. The history of the transfer tax and related structures (banks, tax farmers, receipts) shows the mechanisms of Ptolemaic economic reform begun by Ptolemy II.
Much attention has been paid to the effect of the monetary economy on lower strata of society. Such is the case with the surety documents from the Fayyum in which small amounts of cash were paid to guarantee that work would be period in certain industries such as beer making. 92 Mummification was a cash business, and Egyptian temples also raised cash that is accounted for by the Ptolemaic official known as the praktor, a Ptolemaic official in charge of temple finances, and the lesonis, a temple priest internally charged with fiduciary responsible of the temple to the state.
If the third century BC archive of Milon from Edfu is any guide, industrial activities of Egyptian temples (inter alia beer making, the manufacturing of linen and papyrus) in general were vital generators of cash, with officials such as the lesonis personally liable for shortfalls in expected income. 93

Conclusions
The economic power of the state is historically the crucial element in the history of monetization and, as the Ptolemaic case shows, state power to demand taxes in coin and payments into state banks were keys to the process. Yet the agricultural sector, overwhelmingly the largest, remained by and large a commodity economy. The creation of the Greek urban centers of Alexandria and Ptolemaics, both minimally documented, must have played the key role in the increased monetization of the economy, as did the revitalization of the nome capitals within the Ptolemaic bureaucratic structure. Despite the new Greek fiscal institutions of the Ptolemies (banking, tax farming, public auctions), the very limited credit market outside of friendship cliques created a barrier to the circulation of coin. The cash mentalité reflected in Ptolemaic accounting was thorough, but the private use of coinage appears to have been, like much else in Ptolemaic Egypt, a matter of degree as well as a matter of taste, and was highly variable in time and in space. Indeed Ptolemaic banks operated in both coin and in kind. 94 Both Alan Samuel and Dominic Rathbone argued that the monetized economy did not affect the traditional rural economy. 95 Samuel concluded as follows: …the fundamentally non-coinage orientation of the vast majority peasant activity in Egypt made coin-oriented segments of the administration of lesser importance in the aggregate of official activity, and significant rather to that very small body of Greekspeaking members of the population who actually had to do with commerce. 96 There may well have been, for the third century BC especially, a regional difference between the newly exploited area of the Fayyum, and the Thebaid, which was still dominated by ancient temple estates. The types of taxes also varied regionally. 97 While we cannot be sure, the extensive documentary evidence for wine (not only in the Fayyum) and fruit tree production is, in my view, a good proxy measure of the reach of the Ptolemaic economy in coin into the countryside.
The history of coinage under the Ptolemies probably tracks rather closely the history of other Ptolemaic state institutions. 98 Given the elite and state-centered bias of the documents, this is perhaps no surprise. But the use of coinage highlights both the process of Ptolemaic state formation, a desire for homogeneity and predictability by the state, and the flip side of this, the variable adaptation of the new rules by the population. It does appear to be the case, as Samuel has argued, that on one hand elites (Greeks, Greekspeaking members of the bureaucracy, soldiers and Egyptian priests) were more likely to buy into the Ptolemaic system and its institutions than peasant farmers. But we must remember that this dichotomy was not one that distinguished Greeks from non-Greeks entirely. As we have seen in the Milon archive from third century BC Edfu, Egyptian priests in the south were fully involved in the cash economy. Temple building projects there, beginning with the great Horus temple at Edfu in 237 BC, may have stimulated, in conjunction with the new tax and bank system, increased circulation of coin through the cycle of wage payments. Whatever the extent of private cash transactions, however, the Ptolemaicization of Egypt, including the acceptance of coins as a medium of exchange, and its use in general accounting of state revenue and payments, was both successful and thorough by the end of the third century BC. The supply of coins ( we must always remember that there is no native silver mined in Egypt) lagged behind the use of coins a unit of account and as a symbol of royal sovereignty. The persistence of the natural economy may also have allowed many to disguise private economic activity, but we will never know the extent of it. The codification of coinage by the Ptolemaic state was, nevertheless, an important institutional shift in the economic history of Egypt, and the Ptolemaic case provides one more example that coinage was a "public symbol of political sovereignty." 99 1 I thank William Harris, Sitta von Reden and Andrew Monson for valuable comments on earlier drafts. The forthcoming work on Ptolemaic money by Sitta von Reden will be important, and will treat far more thoroughly than I the issues that I can only touch upon herein. I shall not treat herein the physical description of Ptolemaic coinage since Von Reden has treated this excellently in her forthcoming monograph. I am grateful to her for showing me a draft of the book and for allowing me to signal its appearance. Some of the issues were briefly addressed by von Reden in "Money and coinage in Ptolemaic Egypt. Some preliminary remarks," in Akten des 21.