The role and status of the Egyptians in the army of Hellenistic Egypt (323–30 b.c.) has been a debated question that goes back to the position within Late Period Egyptian society (664–332 b.c.) of the Egyptian warriors described by Herodotus as machimoi. Until a few decades ago, Ptolemaic military institutions were perceived as truly Greco-Macedonian and the presence of Egyptians in the army during the first century of Ptolemaic rule was contested. The Egyptians were thought of as being unfit to be good soldiers. Egyptians would have been hired only as late as 217 b.c. to fight against the Seleucid king Antiochus III in Raphia.Footnote 2 The Ptolemaic victory (in fact rather a status quo) was made possible thanks to the addition of twenty thousand Egyptians to reinforce the Greek army. For a long time the subsequent role of Egyptians in the Ptolemaic army in the second and first centuries b.c. did not attract much attention. One usually assumed that they were ‘second-rate soldiers’ called machimoi. In recent decades, the scholarship on Ptolemaic Egypt, notably Demotic studies, reasserted the role of Egyptians in the Ptolemaic army from the late fourth century onwards.
My particular interest in the Egyptian warriors stems from the confusion about the machimoi and whether this term has the same meaning in Hellenistic documents as in Herodotus' narrative of the earliest years of Late Period Egypt.Footnote 3 In fact, the papyrological and epigraphic material does not allow us directly to connect the Ptolemaic machimoi to the so-called machimoi of the Late Period as is usually done. In this study, I propose a new interpretation of Herodotus' passage concerning the machimoi and the organization of Egyptian society in seven classes (2.164–7). Then I present the evidence that suggests that there is no straightforward continuity but rather a loose connection between the Late Period Egypt military system described inaccurately by Herodotus and the Egyptians in the Ptolemaic army. Moreover, throughout the Ptolemaic period, the machimoi seem to have played an increasing role in the Ptolemaic army and represented an ever-larger share of it. Finally, I argue that the Ptolemaic machimoi were not at the bottom of the social ladder as is commonly thought.
THE MACHIMOI OF HERODOTUS
Herodotus was the first to use the Greek word machimoi (μάχιμοι) in order to qualify Egyptian warriors but he also employed it for the troops coming from Asia during the Persian wars (Hdt. 7.185).Footnote 4 Other Greek authors such as Plato used it simply for describing ‘fighting men’.Footnote 5 In the middle of his narrative of the war between two kings of the 26th dynasty (662–525 b.c.), king Apries and the king-to-be Amasis, Herodotus introduces a short description of Egyptian society in seven categories. He gives some details about one of them, the machimoi, usually translated as warriors. They are divided in two categories, the kalasiries (καλασίριες) and the hermotybies (ἑρμοτύβιες).Footnote 6 These two groups are mentioned again in his account of the Persian troops at the battle of Plataea in 479 b.c. (Hdt. 9.32).
According to Herodotus (2.165–6), the hermotybies were 160,000 at some point during the 26th dynasty and came from five and a half nomes of the western and central Delta. The kalasiries were 250,000 and came from eleven nomes of the eastern and southern Delta and from the Thebaid.Footnote 8 Both groups were ‘forbidden to practise any craft, but engage only in military pursuits, and their sons inherit this status directly from their fathers …, 2.166)’.Footnote 9 Each machimos received twelve arourai of tax-exempt land (2.168).
Herodotus' statements are usually taken at face value but there are at least two major problems. First, Herodotus perceives the machimoi as a caste and reports that all warriors were divided in only two categories that distinguished the provenance of the soldiers. Second, he provides very high numbers for the machimoi and the amount of land granted to them.
(1) The absence of an Egyptian concept of ‘caste’ or ‘class’ of warriors sheds light on the difficulty of using Herodotus' machimoi for understanding the organization of the Egyptian army in the Late Period. Egyptian inscriptions indicate that military officers could also be priests and there were overlaps between the members of the different groups forming the elite (priests, officers and royal officials).Footnote 10 A system of seven ‘castes’ according to profession did not exist.Footnote 11 Such a schematization of Egyptian society was plausibly influenced by Herodotus' (and his successors') enthusiasm for social theorizing, by the fascination for the apparent stability of Egyptian society and by illusory similarities between Sparta and Egypt.Footnote 12 In addition, the supposed homogeneity of the ‘class’ of warriors is problematic. It would be surprising if different ranks in the army received plots of land of equal size.Footnote 13 Moreover, there was no ethnic homogeneity since many of the soldiers were the descendants of Libyan mercenaries settled in the Delta during the New Kingdom.Footnote 14 There were also Nubian soldiers.Footnote 15
However, Egyptologists trying to match Herodotus' terminology with some Egyptian terms have identified phonetic equivalents of hermotybies and kalasiries in Demotic Egyptian, respectively rmt-ḏm.w and gl-šr.w (or gr-šr.w). Many conjectural etymologies have been debated for the hermotybies Footnote 16 but a consensus has now been reached among demotists thanks to Thissen and Vittmann's work.Footnote 17 In P.Rylands 9, the long petition written by Peteesi, a priest of Herakleopolis in the late sixth century b.c., a rmt-ḏm accompanied Peteesi in order to bring a letter to the general 
of Herakleopolis.Footnote 18 In a letter between two high officials dated to c. 521 b.c., three hermotybies were allotted ‘30 arourai of land (at) 44 (sacks of) emmer (for) one person (each)’ in the Herakleopolite nome (P.Ashmolean 1984.87). As Vittmann explains in the re-edition of the text, 44 sacks correspond to a tax rate of four or five artabas per aroura, which challenges Herodotus' statement about tax-free land given to soldiers (2.168).Footnote 19 Moreover the tax rate was higher than that on cleruchic land in the Ptolemaic period (see below). Finally, some rmt-ḏm.w appear in the dossier of the gooseherds of Hou, dating to the early fifth century. They were involved in donkey and cattle sales and could be military men involved in foraging.Footnote 20 The first papyrus implies that they could be soldiers and/or policemen while the other documents suggest that the hermotybies received grants of land. In view of the rare usage of the word rmt-ḏm, it was probably a title held by a group of soldiers but not by half of the army, as Herodotus assumed.
Our knowledge concerning the kalasiries is more extensive. The term gl-šr seems originally to have meant ‘young soldier’ or ‘brave man’ and then ‘soldier, warrior’.Footnote 21 The Egyptian word is already attested in the 20th dynasty.Footnote 22 They had military and police functions from the 26th dynasty until the Roman period. The level of their rank and socio-economic status is, however, difficult to establish. For Lloyd the Egyptian sources attest the rather high status of the kalasiries as officers in charge of troops or as police officers, which contradicts Herodotus' description of a numerous class.Footnote 23 Winnicki assumes that they were not always of the highest rank. In P.Rylands 9, for example, the ‘Chief of the Ma’ (chief of the police) summons the gr-šr.w n T#-qḥj, that is, the kalasiries of a village called T#-qḥj, with their shields and spears.Footnote 24 The 2,200 gl-šr.w mentioned in a fourth-century b.c. papyrus as ‘registered for food in the nome’ also shows that they were not holding the highest functions in the army and the police.Footnote 25 However, it suggests they were organized by nome, as Herodotus told us (2.165–6). The rest of our sources attest nome kalasiries (gr-šr.w (n p#) tš) and kalasiries of the temple (of Amun) (gr-šr.w n pr-(Imn)) involved in business transactions concerning cattle, such as P.Loeb 41 (485 b.c.) where two nome kalasiries are co-owners of a red cow.Footnote 26 This at least indicates that they belong to socio-economic groups who owned cattle and probably houses and tombs.Footnote 27 Winnicki has argued on the basis of documents from the Thebaid that the function of kalasiris lost its importance over time but the evidence is too vague for such an interpretation.Footnote 28
To sum up, the two sub-categories of machimoi described by Herodotus reflect some Egyptian realities but only imperfectly. These Egyptian terms were not used to designate all the categories of soldiers in the Late Period army. However, there was a literary word in Demotic Egyptian, rmṯ-qnqn, that meant ‘fighting man, warrior’ and was employed in Egyptian narratives of the Late Period.Footnote 29 It was used once in the petition of the priest Peteesi, a text with a literary overtone, as a synonym of gr-šr.w.Footnote 30 Herodotus' informers plausibly told him about some of these stories and he translated this concept by the Greek word machimos. He amalgamated this word with technical Egyptian terms that he heard from oral sources, as in the petition of Peteesi, and he transliterated them as hermotybies and kalasiries. Like them, rmṯ-qnqn could apply to armed men with guard duties, as the absence of such men to guard the grain is the object of the complaint of an Egyptian official to the Persian commander of Syene in the early fifth century b.c. (P.Loeb 1.).Footnote 31 Even if this may explain the confusion about the different terms, the inaccuracies in Herodotus' account warn us against the tendency to take his description of the Egyptian warriors at face value.
(2) Herodotus made other problematic statements concerning the number of soldiers and the huge amount of land that they cultivated, which are still taken for granted.Footnote 32 According to him (2.165–6), the machimoi reached the highest number of 410,000 during the Saite period, that is six per cent of the population (or seventeen per cent of the adult male population) if one believes the evaluation given by Diodorus of Sicily for the total population in Pharaonic Egypt (seven million, see 1.31.6). A similar figure is later used by Josephus (7.5 million without Alexandria) for the Egyptian population in the first century a.d. (BJ 2.385). Such a percentage of soldiers within a population is rather high, as I explain below. However, the population size suggested by ancient authors has been challenged by modern historians such as Rathbone and Butzer, who have supported far lower numbers.Footnote 33 For this reason I have evaluated the population of Egypt in the first millenium b.c. at three million. In this case Herodotus' number of soldiers becomes even more difficult to interpret, as soldiers would have represented 17% of the Egyptian population (or 41% of the adult male population). In addition, if each machimos received twelve arourai,Footnote 34 the total amount of land in the hands of the soldiers would have been 13,530 km2,Footnote 35 while the maximum of cultivable land can hardly have reached 20,000 km2 at that time.Footnote 36
Such a population structure and land distribution are highly implausible.Footnote 37 No empire ever employed more than one third of the total male population as professional soldiers. Even under Augustus, approximately 6% of the adult male population in Italy belonged to the army – a rather high proportion.Footnote 38 Herodotus' highly exaggerated numbers might have their raison d'être in the historian's account of the fight between the future king Amasis and king Apries. Indeed, by interrupting his narrative in order to describe the machimoi he emphasizes how Amasis' Egyptian soldiers outnumbered the 30,000 Greek mercenaries supporting Apries. Herodotus might have been trying to justify in this way why the latter were defeated. Nevertheless, two contradictions arise from Herodotus' account. First the high number of machimoi goes against the idea that they were part of a very privileged group. Second, the large amount of land in soldiers' hands is not easily reconcilable with their exclusive devotion to military service.
Egyptian evidence allows us to suggest that Herodotus merged two types of soldiers. On the one hand, officers whose military career was their main occupation – although they could also accumulate priestly and administrative functionsFootnote 39 – and who leased out their plots. On the other hand, a larger group of farmer-soldiers with smaller plots mobilized in turn or when needed to form a militia.Footnote 40 The stela of year nine of Psamtek I, the founder of the 26th dynasty, shows that Egyptian towns mobilized a militia for their protection and had to provide men to the pharaoh when needed, in this case because of a Libyan threat.Footnote 41 Similarly, in P.Rylands 9, the chief of the police summoned kalasiries for a specific task. In terms of land grants, not all soldiers and officers would receive the same amount of land. Egyptian texts from the New Kingdom recording land ownership show that many soldiers were granted plots of three or five arourai (one could live on the net produce of two arourai) in contrast to the twelve arourai claimed by Herodotus.Footnote 42 On the other hand, the three hermotybies mentioned above received thirty arourai each at the beginning of the Persian period (P.Ashmolean 1984.87) and members of the military elite could receive plots larger than one hundred arourai.Footnote 43
A reconstruction of the structure of the Egyptian army is proposed below in order to refine Herodotus' statements. Diodorus' narrative of the military events in the fourth century b.c. offers a more plausible upper limit of 80,000 for the total number of Egyptian soldiers, who were reinforced by foreign mercenaries.Footnote 44 This represents eight men out of one hundred Egyptian adult males, which is obviously high but gives space to include descendants of soldiers who inherited their land but no longer served in the army as well as different categories of policemen and guards. This number can be roughly divided into two groups:Footnote 45
a) The professional core was composed of high commanders belonging to the highest strata of the society and of lower officers in the infantry, cavalry and navy. I estimate the percentage of ‘high officers’ at around one per cent on the basis of the hierarchy attested in the New Kingdom.Footnote 46 However, the army became gradually top-heavyFootnote 47 and that might have occurred again in the Late Period in light of the many titles recorded in Chevereau's prosopography.Footnote 48 One can add the cavalry who represented perhaps 5% of the army.Footnote 49 They certainly were granted larger plots than those attested in P.Wilbour or than the twelve arourai mentioned by Herodotus. They leased them out to share-cropping tenants.
I suggest that this first group constituted about 10% of the army:
• 800 high officers with 200 arourai = 800 × 0.56 km2 = 448 km2
• 8,000 individuals with military ranks and cavalrymen with 100 arourai = 8,000 × 0.28 km2 = 2,240 km2
b) The second group was the militia composed of farmers whose family received small plots to cultivate in exchange for military service or policing by the male member(s). Some probably served part-time and others only when needed, if at all.
• 70,000 soldiers with five arourai = 70,000 × 0.014 km2 = 965 km2
Among them were certainly the Egyptian soldiers who fought on the Persian side at Plataea (479 b.c.) and whom Herodotus calls hermotubies and kalasiries (9.32).Footnote 50 He portrays them as sabre-bearers (μαχαιροφόροι) belonging to the infantry on ships (ἐπιβάτας) who had disembarked earlier at Phaleron. The historian (7.89) describes in more detail the equipment of ‘Egyptians’ – he does not use any specific term – present on 200 ships on Xerxes's side: ‘on their heads they wore knitted helmets; they carried hollow shields with broad rims, naval spears and large battle-axes. The majority of them wore breastplates and carried huge knives (μαχαίρας)’.Footnote 51 They might have composed the Egyptian phalanx.Footnote 52
These approximations suggest a maximum of 3,653 km2 for the total amount of land owned by soldiers, which could represent up to 18% of the 20,000 km2 of cultivated land.Footnote 53 If such an amount of land was also in the hands of the temples and the king, it would make c. 10,000 km2 in total.Footnote 54 In this case half of the land would be owned by perhaps 10–20% of the population, which is not unlikely. This only shows that we are dealing with a plausible order of magnitude but does not take into account such important questions as the existence of private property in Egypt and the extent of the land in the hands of the king and of the temples.Footnote 55
Nevertheless, beside Herodotus' description of the Egyptian equipment during the Persian period, some elements can be saved from his account when we compare it to the Egyptian sources. Indeed, the kalasiries-gl-šr.w and the hermotubies-rmt-ḏm.w had military or police functions and could have belonged to socio-economic strata above the average farmers by receiving land in exchange for their service. But these two categories represent a tiny part of the coercive institutions of the Late Period. There was a whole hierarchy and regimented structure for the different forces that Herodotus does not mention and that remains little known.Footnote 56
THE PTOLEMAIC MACHIMOI
One century after Herodotus travelled throughout Egypt, Alexander the Great conquered the Persian empire, which included Egypt at that time. After his death, one of his Macedonian generals, Ptolemy, secured Egypt for himself and organized his army. Greek papyri from the third century onward record machimoi. Most scholars tend to apply Herodotus' inaccurate description to these Ptolemaic machimoi and consider them as native Egyptian warriors. They assume that the Ptolemaic machimoi are the direct successors of the machimoi of Herodotus, although the term is used in a different historical context and in a different type of source (documentary rather than literary).Footnote 57 This view implies that Egyptian soldiers granted land before Alexander's conquest were registered as machimoi in the early Ptolemaic administration.Footnote 58 Such an assumption is problematic for three reasons:
1 First, though Greek literary sources attest that Egyptians were already employed in the Ptolemaic army in the late fourth and third centuries, they do not refer to these soldiers as machimoi.Footnote 59
2 Second, the Ptolemaic machimoi were not exclusively Egyptian.Footnote 60 For instance, two men with Greek names and patronymics are recorded in a list of machimoi pentarouroi (i.e. with five arourai) from the third century b.c. (DOC 13, see the table in the Appendix listing the documents attesting the Ptolemaic machimoi).
3 Third, the first evidence of a Ptolemaic machimos granted land appears only in the second half of the third century (DOCS 8, 9 and 13).Footnote 61
(1) The Ptolemies were never reluctant to hire Egyptians for fear that they would not be loyal or motivated enough.Footnote 62 For instance, according to the hieroglyphic Mendes stela, Ptolemy II chose some of his guards from among the sons of Egyptian military men.Footnote 63 Above all, the mention of Egyptian troops in the Ptolemaic army by the Greek authors certainly reflects the reality since by default they tended to omit to mention troops other than Greek ones, especially in case of victories like those at Gaza in 312 or Raphia in 217 b.c.Footnote 64
Diodorus makes clear that certain groups of Egyptians were fighting on Ptolemy's side at the battle of Gaza in 312 b.c. and were not simply carrying the baggage: ‘but a great number were Egyptian, of whom some carried the missiles and the other baggage but some were armed and serviceable for battle (πρὸς μάχην χρήσιμον)’.Footnote 65 Modern historians often interpret this expression as an allusion to the machimoi but Diodorus only uses the literary term machimoi in his narrative of the Late Period.Footnote 66 In fact, none of the ancient authors uses the word machimoi for the Egyptians fighting in the Ptolemaic army.
(2) Second, the term machimoi was not coined by the Ptolemies to designate exclusively soldiers of Egyptian origin.Footnote 67 We mentioned above that already in the third century Greeks could belong to the machimoi (DOC 13). Another machimos with a Greek name, Dionysios, is found in a grain account of the late third century (DOC 15) though such a name was commonly adopted by Egyptians in the following centuries. In any case, most of the machimoi carried Egyptian names and in one third-century document the machimos Paris is explicitly described as an Egyptian (DOC 5). In the second century the onomastic criterion is no longer reliable unless it is combined with other types of information. The machimos Dionysios son of Akousilaos (DOC 28), a machimos hired for an agricultural survey in Kerkeosiris, was probably of Greco-Egyptian or Egyptian origin as were the other machimoi in the village. Similarily, we could go beyond the inconclusive debate about the ethnicity of the second-century machimoi stationed outside Egypt by accepting they could be a mix of soldiers of Greek, Greco-Egyptian and Egyptian origin.Footnote 68 In Kerkeosiris in the first century b.c., the cleruchic administration distinguished between Greek, Egyptian and other machimoi in at least two accounts dated to the first century (DOC 30–31). It supports the hypothesis that the term machimos was not automatically a marker of ethnicity. Rather, it was a category related to the type of land allotment or perhaps to the military function of the soldiers.
(3) The grants of land to machimoi might indicate when the machimoi were incorporated into the army, since it was a typical way for the Ptolemies to pay soldiers but not to pay guards, at least in the third century. The first evidence of a pentarouros, the technical term for a machimos granted five arourai, also found as machimos pentarouros in the papyri, is dated to 229/8 b.c., under Ptolemy III (DOC 8).Footnote 69 Consequently, there is no evidence for the continuity of a ‘category’ of machimoi between the Late Period and the last decades of the third century. What mattered above all to the cleruchic administration was the number of arourai rather than the term machimos, as machimoi could receive five, seven or ten arourai and more rarely twenty when they were cavalrymen. For instance, in a land survey from the Edfu nome dated to 119/118 b.c., the soldiers who were allotted ten arourai were called dekarouroi andres (ten-aroura men) and were presumably the equivalent of dekarouroi machimoi found elsewhere.Footnote 70 The best-known group of machimoi belonged to the laarchy of Chomenis and were allotted land by Ptolemy VIII in Kerkeosiris in the Fayyum (DOC 25).Footnote 71 As the infantrymen received seven arourai and the cavalrymen received twenty arourai, the former were more often called heptarouroi (seven-aroura men) and the latter machimoi hippeis (cavalrymen) in the land surveys.Footnote 72 The 63 machimoi represented two-thirds of the cleruchs in Kerkeosiris.Footnote 73
Such a percentage reveals the extensive reliance on machimoi from the second part of the second century b.c. As we know nothing about their equipment or fighting technique, there is no reason to believe that they could not fight in a phalanx as the Egyptians did in Raphia (Polyb. 5.69.9). In fact, it seems that the machimoi, of Egyptian and Greco-Egyptian origin, began to constitute a large part of the infantry from the time of Ptolemy V on, because there is little evidence of other cleruchs belonging to the infantry.Footnote 74 They were mobilized to reinforce infantry troops drawn from professional soldiers mainly recruited in Egypt at that time and also of Egyptian and Greco-Egyptian origin. These were called misthophoroi in Greek and rmt iw = f šp ḥbs (‘man receiving pay’) in Egyptian, which meant that they did not receive grants of land, as for instance the soldiers garrisoned in Pathyris and Akôris.Footnote 75
***
While the three points presented above stress a rupture with the previous period, the fact that many machimoi in the third century b.c. had guard duties rather than clear army duties can be interpreted either as rupture or continuity. Herodotus insists on the status of machimoi as warriors in Late Period Egypt but the inclusion of machimoi in the Ptolemaic system of land grants to soldiers (the cleruchic system) can only be dated to Ptolemy III. The scarcity of papyrological sources for the first decades of Ptolemaic rule prevents us from knowing how, when and for what purpose the Ptolemies created the category of machimoi. The first use of the word machimoi in the Ptolemaic documentation refers to guards serving officials in the Oxyrhynchite nome under Ptolemy II (DOC 1, 261 b.c) and their army functions become well attested from the reign of Ptolemy V on (204–180 b.c.).Footnote 76 For the first time the machimoi appear to be organized in military units called laarchies (λαάρχιαι): two officers, the brothers Horos and Tearoôs, describe themselves as laarchai and hêgemοnes of the elite troops of machimoi at the court in Alexandria (τῶν περὶ αὐ(λ)ὴν ἐπιλέκτων μαχίμων, DOC 17).Footnote 77 Previously, only the general term ‘officer’ (hêgemôn) was associated with them. Even if the number of machimoi is unknown, this terminology suggests a turning point in the organization of the Ptolemaic army in the second century b.c. where the role of soldiers of Egyptian or mixed origin became pre-eminent. The term hêgemôn continued to be used in units of machimoi as we find an officer of the machimoi petitioning the stratêgos in the first century Delta (DOC 34). The last evidence of a dispatch of Ptolemaic troops before the coming of the Roman armies concerns pentarouroi, thus presumably machimoi (DOC 35), while nothing is known about the military service of other types of cleruchs.Footnote 78 From the point of view of land redistribution and military duties there is a rupture between Egyptian soldiers granted land before Alexander and soldiers given small allotments several decades later within the Ptolemaic army structure.
From another angle, the ambiguous role as both guards and soldiers of the gl-šr.w (Herodotus' kalasiries) and the rmt-ḏm.w (Herodotus' hermotubies), as they appear in the Egyptian documents of the Late Period, is found again in that of the machimoi in the third century. For instance, in 254 b.c. the toparch Harimouthes, at the head of a district in the Herakleopolite nome, was ordered to send some machimoi under the officer (hêgemôn) Bithelminis, as well as reapers (DOC 3). It was not clear whether they were guards – perhaps in charge of controlling the harvest – or soldiers, since they were attached to an officer but they exercised coercive power. The ambiguity between guards and soldiers also appears in the Fayyum, in the Zenon archive (DOC 4, a + e), where in a letter to Zenon, the estate's agent of the first minister (dioikêtês) Apollonios, a machimos was sent together with a policeman (phylakitês); in a petition to the king, though, the petitioner seems to have been locked up by the three machimoi of the sitologos, which rather suggests guard duties. However, Oates's hypothesis that machimoi were ‘Egyptians conscripted for labour of a rather menial sort’, without any connection with the army and the police, conflicts with the evidence.Footnote 79 Some machimoi were still employed as guards serving officials in the late second and early first century b.c. in the Fayyum, notably for the survey of agricultural production (DOC 24; 28; 32). Their duties as guards for the agricultural survey also echoes that of the rmṯ-qnqn, the armed men who should have been hired to protect the grain collected for the Persian commander of Syene (P.Loeb 1, 486 b.c.). But this is the only documentary papyrus from the Late Period attesting this Egyptian literary word for ‘warrior’, as the petition of Peteesi cannot really be considered as a documentary text. The connection between rmṯ-qnqn and machimoi appears later in one single document of the Ptolemaic period, the sacerdotal decree of Memphis inscribed on the famous Rosetta stone (DOC 18, 196 b.c.). It records that Ptolemy V offered an amnesty to ‘the fighting men (rmṯ-qnqn) and the rest of the people who had gone astray’Footnote 80 by having their possessions restored to them. The priests, who probably composed both the Demotic and the Greek versions of the text,Footnote 81 chose rmṯ-qnqn and machimoi as equivalent to express the general concept of warrior,Footnote 82 perhaps as Herodotus had done before them. Both words certainly better fitted the literary style of the decree where generic terms for the army were used rather than the technical terms found in the Ptolemaic papyri.Footnote 83 Two ostraca of the Ptolemaic period where the word rmṯ-qnqn is used, a school exercise by a rather advanced student and the record of a dream by an Egyptian priest, also confirm its literary overtones.Footnote 84
Finally, there is only one connection between the technical terms found in the Late Period and Ptolemaic documents but this concerns the gl-šr.w rather than the machimoi. The gl-šr.w had military or police functions in the Late Period and were still found in the Ptolemaic period.Footnote 85 The equivalence between gl-šr and the Greek word for policeman, phylakitês, is found in a bilingual surety bond dated to the second part of the third century b.c., where the gl-šr was called phylakitês on the back of the document.Footnote 86 In the third century, phylakitai were recorded in the Greek census lists and gl-šr.w were found in the Demotic lists, the latter all carrying Egyptian names.Footnote 87 Because the same individuals never appear in Greek and Demotic lists, we cannot be sure that their functions were always similar. However, the surety bond reveals that they were at least sometimes equivalent. The Ptolemies incorporated the Egyptian gl-šr.w in their police system but the senior officers were usually Greek in the third century.Footnote 88 Later, in the first century b.c., gl-šr was translated once by the Greek word for soldier, stratiôtês.Footnote 89 This can be interpreted as a generalization of the meaning of gl-šr as someone belonging to the state coercive system. But it is noticeable that gl-šr was never translated by the Greek word machimos in the Ptolemaic papyri, which challenges once again the direct connection between the kalasiries of Herodotus and the Ptolemaic machimoi.
SOCIO-ECONOMIC STATUS OF THE PTOLEMAIC MACHIMOI
The belief, held for a long time, that ethnicity was the main criterion for belonging to the machimoi reinforced the consensus about their very low socio-economic status. Cases of desertions also strengthened the idea of their poor economic situation. However, only two mentions of desertions of machimoi survived and they occurred in a period of unrest at the turn of the second century b.c. (DOC 14 and 18). Moreover, the machimoi were not the only group that deserted and that was offered an amnesty by the king after a period of crisis, as we learn from the Rosetta stone (DOC 18).Footnote 90 The most valid argument advanced for their poverty was the small number of arourai granted to them in comparison with the 70 or 100 arourai given to the Greek cavalry cleruchs. However, a new examination of the main evidence, the machimoi's complaints in a petition sent from Alexandria to the first minister (dioikêtês, DOC 21) and a group of texts from the village of Kerkeosiris (DOC 25), suggests that their socio-economic status was probably better than usually thought. It was higher than that of the average farmer even if they received less land than the cavalry cleruchs. In fact, the machimoi represented the lower strata of the military, not of the whole population.
Both pieces of evidence for the so-called misery of the machimoi stem from periods of crises that affected the entire population, first the years following Antiochus IV's invasion of Egypt (170–168 b.c.) and the revolt of Dionysios Petosarapis (c. 168/7 b.c.), and second the dynastic war between Ptolemy VIII and Kleopatra II (132–118 b.c.).Footnote 91 A generalization of this situation to the entire Ptolemaic period is thus inaccurate. In the petition to the dioikêtês written by the machimoi in 164 b.c., they complained that their families, who remained in their villages, could not undertake the additional cultivation required by a new royal decree while they themselves were stationed in Alexandria (DOC 21). They introduced themselves as the ‘picked troops (epilektoi) among the machimoi, the seven- and five-aroura men (heptarouroi and pentarouroi machimoi), and machimoi serving in the navy (nauklêromachimoi) on guard ships in garrison in Alexandria’.Footnote 92 By petitioning as a group, they aimed at securing the privileges they obtained for themselves through their position in the army, in this case the exemption from additional land to cultivate, as other groups of soldiers did during the same troubled period.Footnote 93 In other cases they obtained the confirmation of the ownership of the land granted to them by the king.Footnote 94 In response to the machimoi's petition of 164 b.c., the dioikêtês explained to his subordinates that the decree did not apply to tax farmers handling the royal monopolies, or to poor villagers, mercenaries and machimoi. His mention of the unreliability of the machimoi to pay back seed loans (DOC 21, lines 94–115) in order to gain the sympathy of his subordinates contrasts with a later section where he associated the machimoi with groups who had rather a good living standard (such as the professional soldiers, the stratêgoi, the high officials) and were all at that time the victims of cattle requisition (DOC 21, lines 172–8). The inflated style of the dioikêtês sounds like a rhetorical tool to support the machimoi in order to avoid desertions or riots on their part when they were badly needed in Alexandria.
In terms of land granted in exchange for military service, the difference in plot sizes between those of machimoi and those of cavalry cleruchs decreased in the second and first centuries b.c. as the cavalry cleruchs tended to receive only 40 or 50 arourai. In a series of land surveys from Kerkeosiris (120–115 b.c.) the machimoi had to lease out their plots when mobilized for long period of time, which could be damaging to their income if they had only a few arourai (DOC 25).Footnote 95 But if five arourai were sufficient for a family to live on, then with seven arourai the machimoi's families could probably afford to hire a wage labourer when the head of the household was away.Footnote 96 Moreover, the machimoi received better land than the other cleruchs, benefited from low flat-rate taxes (three-quarters of an artaba of grain per aroura), and often had other (royal) land adjacent to the cleruchic allotments that they cultivated in addition.Footnote 97
Like the other cleruchs, they also received wheat rations during campaigns or when garrisoned. Often the information concerning the machimoi's wages is too fragmentary to calculate their daily or monthly wages.Footnote 98 The scarce evidence suggests improvement over time. In the third century, they were paid for guard duties one (silver) obol a day, a wage similar to that of labourers or local policemen (phylakitai), or two obols per day.Footnote 99 They were probably only paid for days when they worked as guards and had other incomes from the cultivation of land rented from the king. Their wages as soldiers seem very decent. Two documents from the 60s b.c. record the monthly payment to 408 machimoi pentarouroi (DOC 35): two artabas of wheat and 3,000 copper drachmas per month at a time when one artaba cost around 1,000 copper drachmas and was enough to feed a man.Footnote 100 If converted into copper drachmas per day (5,000 divided by 30), it made a daily wage of 160, which was double the daily wage of a dyke worker in the late second century.Footnote 101 In addition, they had land and with such a wage, they could comfortably hire a man to work on their land when they were away. To sum up, even if the machimoi belonged to the category of cleruchs with the smaller plots, access to this status was some way up the social ladder and was more within reach than holding a scribal office, a function that remained within the same Egyptian or Greco-Egyptian local families. On the whole, their socio-economic situation improved throughout the second century b.c.
CONCLUSION
Our examination of the sources has tried to deconstruct the misconceptions commonly held about the machimoi and to illuminate their complex role and status in Ptolemaic Egypt. First, even if Herodotus' narrative is informative, it cannot be taken at face value, especially for the number of warriors and the structure of the army in Late Period Egypt. Comparisons with Egyptian papyri of that period and contextualization of Herodotus' claims allowed us to refine our knowledge of the Egyptian warriors and to reconstruct how the Greek historian might have amalgamated literary and technical terms under the heading machimoi.
Second, the Ptolemaic machimoi were not directly related to the so-called machimoi of the Late Period, as the connections are more complex than usually assumed. Three reasons were presented: (1) the term machimoi is only found in Greek literary texts describing Egypt in the Late Period but is never used in Greek literary texts describing the Ptolemaic army. It suggests that Greek historians did not use the technical terms adopted by the Ptolemies. They do not provide evidence for an (institutional) continuity between the Egyptian soldiers in Late Period Egypt and those hired by the Ptolemies; (2) the non-exclusive ethnic character of the machimoi; (3) the late land grant to machimoi connected with military service. However, the ambiguous functions of the machimoi as guards and soldiers in the third-century b.c. papyri are similar to those of the gl-šr.w (Herodotus' kalasiries) and the rmt-ḏm.w (Herodotus' hermotubies) of the Late Period papyri and can be perceived either as rupture or continuity.
Over time the increasing reliance on machimoi, who were most often of Egyptian origin, as infantrymen and to a smaller extent as cavalrymen (machimoi hippeis) sheds light on the integration of Egyptians into the Ptolemaic army. They were not ‘second-rate’ soldiers but, as foot soldiers mobilized when needed, were low in the military hierarchy, presumably with distinctions according to the size of their plots. The machimoi were not exclusively Egyptian but the reverse is also true: Egyptian and Greco-Egyptian soldiers were not exclusively enrolled as machimoi. They were also hired in the second century as professional soldiers (misthophoroi). Finally, the machimoi did not belong to the lowest strata of the population and their socio-economic position even improved throughout the Ptolemaic period.
APPENDIX: DOCUMENTS ATTESTING MACHIMOI IN THE PTOLEMAIC PERIOD
Mainly based on Kiessling (n. 3), Winnicki (n. 22 [1986]) and Goudriaan (n. 57). For further documents, see the footnotes.Footnote 102
Editions of papyri according to the Checklist of Editions of Greek, Latin, Demotic and Coptic Papyri, Ostraka and Tablets (web edition 2011: http://library.duke.edu/rubenstein/scriptorium/papyrus/texts/clist_papyri.html).
w-ḏj; see P.Rylands 9, nn. 18 and 29 above.
