and Jewish embassies, but they also led to the creation of a difficult and problematic literature, the Acta Alexandrinorum, a body of literary texts masquerading as legal documents and claiming to demonstrate the bravery of the Alexandrian ambassadors who end up confronting the emperor and being put to death.25 At the same time, there is reason to place this discrete episode of violence in a broader historical context. Historical events, no matter how violent, do not automatically lead to particular stereotypes; there has to be reason to read them in particular ways. I would suggest that the historical context for this reading of Egyptian violence is to be found in political and conceptual sea-changes in the nature of imperial government and society.26
The dynastic watersheds of the late first century marked a series of changes in the ways in which the Romans began to think of the imperial project, and the role of discrete peoples within the project. While the Flavian dynasty had begun a process of installing a new aristocracy and marking off conquered peoples from Rome as a whole, these processes of reinterpreting the provinces come to a different sort of fruition under the Antonines.27 These cosmopolitan emperors took an increasing interest in the provinces in a different sense: first, in the promotion of a common urban culture within the provinces;28 second, by analogy, by marking off distinct and homogenous “urban” cultures from their native surroundings (such being the case, for instance, with Hadrian’s foundation of Antinoopolis).29 It should be added that this urban culture—or at least an idealized version of it—frowned on lower-order people taking their cases to court, preferring that these people stay in what the imperial powers imagined to be their proper places in the social hierarchy.30 At the same time, it is reasonable to suspect that this transformation of provincial culture took place against a complex backdrop of social mobility in the Empire, of the sort that was emphasized in a seminal article by Greg Woolf on the “epigraphic habit” in the western provinces. For my argument, the most important of Woolf’s points come in his emphasis on provincial agency: provincial participation in the epigraphic “culture” of the Roman world, he emphasized, was not simply a matter of provincials copying metropolitan practices. It was instead a means of asserting a stable identity in a rapidly shifting world.31
Woolf’s argument can be expanded, mutatis mutandis, and used to explain the complex dialectic that I suggest led to the crystallization of these Roman literary stereotypes in the high empire. Ammianus provides the clue by making the link between violence and litigiousness, which is then racialized through the description of the Egyptians’ bodies as skinny, dark, dry, and prone to overheating. Even if we reject Ammianus’ judgment that litigiousness is a sign of a violent character, his emphasis is interesting, and seems to correspond to certain realities in the province itself. If we track the number of petitions submitted in Egypt over the first three centuries A.D. (for Ammianus an index of litigiousness, and therefore ungovernability) we see a significant uptick in the late first century. (We similarly see strategies for keeping people out of the courts run by imperial powers: the introduction of new systems of local jurisdiction in the form of “The Law of the Egyptians,” for example.32) The charts below give a sense of the concentration of legal activity across time: the first is the total count of petitions from the first three and a half centuries of Roman rule in Egypt from the appendix of the recent monograph of Benjamin Kelly. The second counts the petitions in the first twenty volumes of the Sammelbuch griechischer Urkunden aus Aegypten. The Sammelbuch (SB) collects documents published internationally in unindexed journals; it is presented here in order to correct for editorial biases that might have gone into forming a particular collection represented in the aggregate count, or for “clumps” of relevant data that emerge from counting a particular archive (such as the large archive of petitions from firstcentury Euhemeria). The data have been “smoothed” in one important way: for petitions that are datable only on the basis of paleography, the “middle” date has been entered into the database (so for a papyrus of the third century, a date of 250 has been entered; for a papyrus of the second or third century, 200). The third chart is an aggregate count of published documents of all sorts that have been entered into the Heidelberger Gesamtverzeichnis der Griechischen Papyruskunden Ägyptens, a comprehensive database of papyrological sources.
Table 1. Petitions by Year—Sammelbuch
| Year | Number of petitions |
| 30 B.C.–1 B.C. | 5 |
| 1 A.D.–50 A.D. | 12 |
| 51 A.D.–100 A.D. | 12 |
| 101 A.D.–150 A.D. | 16 |
| 151 A.D.–200 A.D. | 27 |
| 201 A.D.–250 A.D. | 26 |
| 251 A.D.–300 A.D. | 3 |
Table 2. Petitions by Year—Kelly 2011
| Year | Number of petitions |
| 30 B.C.–1 B.C. | 20 |
| A.D.1–50 A.D. | 103 |
| 51 A.D.–100 A.D. | 45 |
| 101 A.D.–150 A.D. | 129 |
| 151 A.D.–200 A.D. | 143 |
| 201 A.D.–250 A.D. | 96 |
| 251 A.D.–300 A.D. | 31 |
Table 3. Documents by Year—HGV
| Year | Sum of quantity of documents |
| 50 B.C.–1 B.C. | 579 |
| 1 A.D.–50 A.D. | 1,334 |
| 51 A.D.–100 A.D. | 1,982 |
| 101 A.D.–150 A.D. | 5,099 |
| 151 A.D.–200 A.D. | 4,355 |
| 201 A.D.–250 A.D. | 2,326 |
| 251 A.D.–300 A.D. | 1,655 |
Charts like these, of course, are clumsy instruments. In many ways they compare apples to oranges: the HGV count includes not only papyri, but also ostraca. They cannot represent geographical distribution. The relative quantities of material in the three charts are radically different. They cannot account for generic variation in the aggregate data (the HGV count). They cannot account for subjective changes in the quality of the documentation—differences in the tone of a petition, for example. But in spite of these flaws they give some sense of how the quantity of petitions varies according to the quantity of our published material as a whole. The uptick in petitions in the second century would seem to have some significance in light of the shifts in the discourse about Egypt among elite Roman authors.
The stereotype of lawless, violent Egyptians, it appears, was being generated at roughly the same time (late first and early second centuries A.D.) as the inhabitants of Egypt began using the courts regularly, that is, when they began to integrate themselves into the Empire by refusing to settle their own problems privately. The claims of a violent Egypt are therefore more plausibly a reaction to the solidification
