ere likewise displaced: "Egyptian officials were probably to be found, certainly in any numbers, only at the lowest level of the administration, in the villages." In the military, the Ptolemies recruited career soldiers and mercenaries from Greece and Macedonia. The career soldiers were awarded allotments of land in exchange for their military service. The Egyptian soldiers that remained in military service were relegated to transport and police functions and were prohibited from engaging in actual combat.
Alexandria, a thoroughly Greek city, replaced Memphis as the capital of the Ptolemaic kingdom of Egypt. The composition of Alexandria reflects the province of Egypt as a whole. A notable feature of the city was its division into ethnic enclaves. Due to the abundance of trade and commerce in the new city, Alexandria became a magnet for immigrants and its population of approximately half a million residents by the middle of the first century BC was multicultural. Of the five "quarters" into which the city was divided, two were devoted to an important Jewish population, native Egyptians resided in the western quarter, and the remaining residential areas were the domain of Greeks or the hellenized population. Only about 300,000 of Alexandria's population were considered "free residents," who enjoyed certain privileges reserved for Greeks and other hellenized people. Thus the Greeks were unsuccessful in establishing a unified city-state. Grant refers to the royal capital as a "variegated kingdom."
Throughout the Ptolemaic period, the Egyptians persisted in their efforts to preserve their native culture. Egyptian folktales and romances survived in both demotic and Greek versions. Much of the native tradition of Egypt attracted Greek interest. Manetho, the Egyptian priest, compiled three volumes on Egyptian history and religion, written in Greek. This work was commissioned by Ptolemy I: "It may indeed be said tha...