Abstract

Indigenous Egyptian elites who held titles in the late Ptolemaic court hierarchy offer a counterpoint to the typical model of Hellenistic court society as a culturally and ethnically exclusive social space. Though underrepresented in standard accounts, several Egyptians held the honorific title of "kinsman" of the king. Statues of these men wearing the mitra of the syngenes in the forecourts of temples, together with Greek and Egyptian epigraphic evidence, show that indigenous elites who circulated between Alexandria and Upper Egypt contributed to the creation of a transcultural space that was critical for maintaining the power of the Ptolemaic state in the Egyptian chora during the troubled conditions of the second and first centuries B.C.E.