Friday

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Although the Demotic documents we have do not represent all parts of Egypt, yet they uncover many aspect of social, religious and economic life in the greatest Ancient Egyptian city and in its neighboring villages. In fact, we now have among these documents what tells us about rental and selling of land and houses. We have also obtained documents about mortgages, wills, dispute cases, tax receipts, offerings, jobs, marriage and divorce documents and documents about establishing religious entities as well as insurance documents for real estate and individuals.

These documents have indirectly revealed to us the crafts, clergy and government jobs present in Ancient Egypt at that time. We have been able to reach such information through what we came to know about the owners of these documents ant their jobs. In addition to this, proper names present in these documents were all intermixed with names of gods which enabled us to know which gods had been prominently worshipped in these cities.

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Egypt in this era kept sliding towards chaos due to revolts made by Egyptian people. Matters kept getting worse till the Romans came and easily grabbed control of the Egyptian land.

That was from the political Hellenic side. As from the side of the Egyptian people themselves, except for the revolting group, they had been living a harsh life working all day in the fields, at their work or serving the occupiers doing low class jobs for them. No wonder then that all artifacts found for them do not indicate any participation in the matters of the government neither the interior nor the foreign ones. All what Egyptians have left us from written artifacts in this period are a group of Demotic documents that provide us with a clear idea about dealings that had been taking place between Egyptians and themselves and some times between Egyptians and members of the occupying Hellenics, all of which were confined to local social matters. Unfortunately, such documents have not been found at several places across the Egyptian land, rather most of them were found in specific known locations, especially at Thebes which is considered the main source of Demotic document sin the Ptolemaic age. It is worth noticing that no Demotic documents from this age have been found in the North of Egypt till now. The reason behind this may have been that the weather there is not suitable for preserving such documents due to its high level of humidity. In Fayoum, a large number of papyrus papers have been also found which have revealed important facts about this period of the Ptolemaic rule.

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Français
It is astonishing that despite the immoral lifestyle of Ptolemy IV he had good traits that cannot be ignored. After his return from the Syrian land, we find him giving a lot to the clergy and the Egyptian temples. He also kept erecting temples all over the country in a noticeable way to please the Egyptians. We also find that he glamorized the worship of the god Dionysus specially that on one side he was the god of wine and on the other he approximated the god Osiris for Egyptians. In addition to this, during his reign, the power of the clergy kept increasing to the extent that they mandated the use of the Egyptian language in writing official documents and translating them into Greek, something which had never been done before in the official documents of the Greeek. Finally, we find that Ptolemy IV annually recruited clergy for worshiping Ptolemy I and made him an official god as well as his wife Berenice in a similar fashion to what was being done for Ptolemy II and his wife Arsinoe II. Moreover, Ptolemy IV was a writer and poet. He has written fiction and poetry which he dedicated to Homer, the father of Greek poets. In any case, history stands puzzled towards the conflicting stories that have reached us about this ruler. In conclusion, he has combined an immoral lifestyle together with one full of religion, science and art.

In any case, his age is considered to be a turning point in the history of Egypt. For it was in his age that patriotic emotions came to life in the souls of the Egyptian people whom rejected being controlled all along their history except in cases of falling under extreme pressure.