الفهرس 
Chapter I :Classes of the Egyptian communityOnly 14 pages are availabe for public view
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Abstract
In 332 BC Alexander the great conquered Egypt without difficulty. The Nile Delta and even the Nile valley were well known to the Greeks, who had long traversed them as mercenaries or landed as merchants. Some permanents settlements, like the city of Naukratis or the Greek quarter of Memphis, certainly helped the Macedonian’s invasion along with - no doubt - the Egyptians` dislike of their common enemy; the Persian.
When he set off again, Alexander left behind him both a Graeco-Macedonian army of occupation and a new city, Alexandria, which was destined to grow beyond all expectation. Alexandria, the city of Sarapis, which from the beginning and for a thousand years to come, lived with double destiny: Hellenism and the rule of Egypt. A generation or two later, Egypt had become a Macedonian kingdom in which Egyptians and Greeks lived with some other less numerous ethnic groups.
The relations between the dominant Greeks and the native Egyptians took different forms in various socio-cultural levels or professional activities. No doubt that after Egypt become Macedonian kingdom the political and economic conditions of Egypt had changed greatly.
Egyptian majority used a certain cultural solidarity to resist its own incapacity to compete with the Graeco-Macedonian minority. We find that many Egyptian refused to be Hellenized, on contrary they keep their pharonic traditions and customs, trying to survive their culture in many
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fields, like medicine, magic and wisdom literature. They even were refusing to learn Greek.
There were some changes had been occurred to the Egyptian community, the social pyramid had been watched some main changes; as the Egyptian aristocracy loosed many of its benefits and advantages. The Pharonic nobles and the warriors’ classes approximately disappeared, scribal class get back to hold lower position in the social pyramid, in spite of many of them were learning Greek and became very skillful in the new methods and techniques. The priests class was consider the luckiest of the old Egyptian classes, in spite of the restrictions which had been imposed over them by the Ptolemies. The Ptolemies were carrying about keeping good relations with the priests, because they know that the priests had effective impression over the native subjects, the priests also could legitimate the ruling of the kings.
The Ptolemies prefered to be presented as a new dynasty of Pharaohs. They are represented on their monuments as wearing the traditional Pharaonic regalia, and given the traditional Pharaonic titular in vernacular inscriptions. The Ptolemies also patronized the indigenous religion, making substantial gifts to existing temples and building new temples for the Egyptian gods.
The indigenous priesthood was maintained, but its political subservience was secured by royal control of administration of the temple lands, the king transmitting the revenues from these lands to the temples rather than allowing the priests to exploit them directly. The Ptolemies also recruit Greek official to administrate the temple, in order to control the economic sources and lands which were connected to the temples. We
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can say the Ptolemies want to guarantee that no source of profit would escape from the royal safe.
Outside the priesthood, the Ptolemies abandoned the policy of Alexander of retaining Egyptians in positions of authority. The upper levels of the Egyptian administration under the early Ptolemies were filled entirely by Greeks, and Greek replaced Egyptian as the official language of the Egyptian bureaucracy. At local level, the native nomarchs, the hereditary governors of the nomes or provinces of Egypt, were now displaced authority over each nome passing to a Greek official with the title strategos. The nomarch became a minor financial subordinate to the strategos, and seem also to have been normally a Greek. But the Geeks also obliged to recruit native Egyptian in the bureaucracy to be as mediators between the government and the native subject.
This new economic socio-political structures imposed on the native Egyptians, particularly on the less wealthy classes. Egyptian officials were probably to be found, certainly in any numbers, only at the lowest level of the administration, in the villages. Many Egyptian were Hellenized in order to obtain good opportunity in the bureaucracy, they learned Greek and some of them had double name; one Egyptian and the other was Greek.
The Ptolemaic military system also depended on Greeks rather than on Egyptians, they were afraid from recruit the natives because they thought that the Egyptian wouldn’t be loyal to them and they might revolt. But this was not true as the native Egyptian recruited in Alexander army and his successor Ptolemy I, the Egyptian also participated in the battle of.