This is an exciting question, and the answer is, it depends. There would likely be a great variation between regions like you suggest, and even between individuals. I am break this into two parts, and deal first with the kind of information that existed about ancient Egypt, before addressing what an Egyptian bureaucrat’s relationship to Rome might be.

There is a question as to just who this hypothetical bureaucrat is, but we can start making conjectures about his role, his background, and his activities in the second part, since it is not important to the first.

#Egyptian historical traditions by the Roman era

When it comes to the actual historical knowledge that a well educated Egyptian bureaucrat might have about ancient Egypt, it gets a bit trickier. For the purposes of this question I am going to assume that our hypothetical bureaucrat was interested in history and had a teacher who was interested in it as well. I am making a few other assumptions which are not in any way guaranteed. I am assuming that their first and primary language is Greek rather than Demotic Egyptian, and am mostly assuming their education would have been in Greek. This leaves out the very real possibility that they would have had a bilingual education, possibly associated with Egyptian temples. Given the lack of any comprehensive studies of Demotic education in Roman Egypt, I am focusing on Hellenistic educations. This omission is unfortunate, but unavoidable.

Greek was the administrative language of Roman Egypt, with Latin being used only occasionally in political and military contexts. As such, it is safest to assume that our bureaucrat has a working knowledge of Greek, and has bilingual underlings who could translate documents into two or three languages. The education of a bog average Egyptian elite probably would not have gone into any depth with history. As I mention in this older answer on education in Hellenistic Egypt, young aristocratic boys (and some girls) were expected to study grammar, rhetoric and basic numeracy, other subjects were generally not taught or were studied only briefly.

Graeco-Roman era Egyptian histories were actually surprisingly deep, if not always accurate. One of the most influential histories from the Ptolemaic period was written in Greek by an Egyptian priest named Manetho. Manetho chronicled the reigns of Egypt’s pharaohs from the unification of Egypt under King Narmer to the conquest of Egypt by Alexander.

Manetho was in turn working within an established Egyptian tradition of recording the reigns of kings. For example, the Palermo Stone recorded the reigns of kings from the first five Egyptian dynasties, while the Turin Royal Canon records the Egyptian kings and dynasties down to the reign of Ramesses I, in whose reign it was probably created. Later Egyptian histories, the kind that would have been in circulation c. 100 CE, drew heavily from Manetho’s royal history.

Both Manetho’s history and the Turin Canon group pharaohs into dynasties, marked by important reigns. Texts like these are still key to understanding Egyptian chronology today, and the basic outline laid out by ancient Egyptian chronologies is the framework of ancient Egyptian chronological dating. However, modern Egyptologists have identified significant overlaps in the reigns of many kings and dynasties, overlaps which are not mentioned in these ancient lists. It is possible that these overlaps were not really understood in later periods of Egyptian history, and this brings us to the point that there was approximately accurate knowledge of Egypt’s rulers, the accepted information about how ancient Egypt was and how many millennia its history encompassed was wildly inaccurate.

Greek and Roman historians tended to dramatically overestimate the antiquity of Egypt, to the tune of tens of thousands of years. To the Greeks especially, the older something was the better. There were even historical traditions which traced the origins of Greek deities, laws and customs back to Egypt because of course these must be traced to the dawn of time.

Ancient Egyptian texts rarely attempt to reconstruct history prior to the unification of Egypt, and when they do it is typically vague. Much of what we now consider to be Egyptian pre-history (the period when humans began to settle the Nile Valley) was attributed to the era when the earth was ruled directly by the gods. In ancient Egyptian cosmology, the creation of the universe and its ordering were chronicled, but there were no fixed dates on them. This historical tradition can be traced through Egyptian mythological cycles and references in other texts. Classical texts which mention may have been at least partly influenced by Greek ideas about a primeval age when the earth was ruled by the gods.

Other histories and lore which explained the origins of Egypt’s customs tended to vary considerably in their accuracy. It is generally assumed that many later textual traditions, such those preserved in Late Period and Demotic texts, drew on oral traditions and literary traditions which are no longer extant. As early as the 5th Century BCE, the Greek historian Herodotus reported numerous folktales about the origins of Egyptian religious customs and practices in his history of Egypt which he claimed were reported by Egyptian priests. Many of these later historical pseudo -historical traditions are only vaguely situated in time and are not really attached to a particular era, rather than being firmly attributed to a specific time, reign, or date.

During the Ptolemaic period (roughly 323 – 30 BCE) and the Roman period, there was a tradition of “Hermetic Literature” which dealt with topics such as history, religion, philosophy, alchemy, astronomy & astrology, and magic (which it may not surprise you to know were all intertwined in Greek and Egyptian traditions). This Hermetic corpus was ultimately attributed to the Graeco-Egyptian god Hermes Trismegistus, a syncretic god who combined Hermes and the Egyptian god Thoth. The actual authors varied in their origin and the sources which were available to them, but they combined some probably authentic Egyptian, Babylonian, and Greek sources with elaborate additions of their own.

Plutarch, a Graeco-Roman historian active in the 1st Century CE, wrote extensively on the subject of Egyptian philosophy and religion, with his treatise On Isis and Osiris being a good example.

So it is safe to say that there was a lot of information around about ancient Egypt, but this might not have been so familiar to the average bureaucrat. Generally, these king lists were preserved by priests in temple contexts which placed an emphasis on Egyptian tradition. Histories and other literature written in Greek which preserved historical traditions from authors like Manetho were mainly produced, criticised, and consumed by scholars.

#The relationship between Roman provincial officials and Rome in the 2nd Century CE

The answer to this question is a bit more time specific than the last, because it changed a lot more over the centuries.

First of all, your bureaucrat is living at one of the high points of Roman Egypt if he is active in 100 CE. Economic, social, and political changes set into motion by Augustus’ conquest of Egypt in 30 BCE have led to more extensive trade, relative stability, and an overall increase in building and urban expansion. Egypt is rapidly urbanising, and is economically prosperous. It would not always be this way, in the 3rd Century CE civil wars would threaten the empire, plagues would spread, famines would strike, the economy would suffer, and banditry would cause villages to shrink in the later part of the Roman period.

But since he has no way of knowing that his great-grandchildren are going to live in a harder world, things are probably looking bright for him. There was some recent turmoil, including conflicts between Jews and Greeks in Alexandria a few decades prior which resulted in a brutal crackdown by the Roman Praefect, but the next major Jewish Revolt is not for another 15 years.

The Praefect was the governor of Egypt and the commander of the legions garrisoned there. Appointed by the Emperor himself, the Praefect would typically be a career politician who had served in various provinces already. The Praefect’s staff and immediate underlings were also Roman officials, although local lawyers and bureaucrats were called upon to help them understand local laws and conditions. There were the governors of the nomes, little provinces that Rome was divided into, and then there was a hierarchy of mostly Hellenised Egyptians. I am not going to dive into the banal web of officials that handled issues like shipments of grain, law enforcment, civil disputes, property law, taxation, and countless other tasks. Suffice to say that the further up the ladder our bureaucrat rose, the closer he would come to Roman officials.

The aggressive, militaristic aspect of Roman rule is present, but overall the relationship between Egyptian bureaucrats and Roman governors is fairly amicable. The nome governors and city officials that revolted in the years following the death of Cleopatra are long gone, and there is by now a sense of permanence to Roman rule. Cities did occasionally revolt throughout the Roman period however, and it is hard to say what the overall loyalty of the average Egyptian bureaucrat might be. Later generations would deal with these kinds of conflicts, just as our bureaucrats predecessors had since they were unlucky enough to live in less peaceful times.

Part 1/2