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The Study of the Ancient Near East in the Twenty-First Century, 378–382. The Nubian Kushite overlords of Egypt in the 25th dynasty articulated their rule according to the archaizing, legitimizing Egyptian templates of the Old Kingdom: O’Connor, D. ‘Egypt’s views of ‘others’’, in Tait, ‘Never Had the Like Occurred’, 176–178. 29 and Plutarch (Isis and Osiris 44, cf. 31) Kambyses killed the Apis bull, but the Apis stele of Year 6 of his reign shows him personally dedicating the bull’s sarcophagus: Thompson, Memphis, 106 n.

Aramaic document ‘archives’ of the Jewish greeks and egyptians 27 The Persian empire, based overseas, had utilized local forms of government and key elites backed up by military power, not always with complete success. In contrast, the Ptolemaic period saw Greek settlers form a large part of a significantly different governmental and socioeconomic elite; the distinguishing characteristic of which was the capacity to operate within Greek linguistic and administrative contexts. The majority of Egyptians were agrarian, illiterate, and at the wrong end of a stratified hierarchy of power, but the small elite and sub-elites of Egyptian society were to a large degree incorporated within this new governing class and helped to form its ideological and governmental program.

76 At all events there is no extant evidence for the catastrophic morbidity of a highly infectious disease encountering a population group with no immunity to it. An argument from silence would suggest that the large-scale immigration in itself did not result in high profile epidemics among either immigrant Greeks or their host population. 73 Benson, ‘Health’, 19–24. T. (1980). ‘New information on nutrition in ancient Greece’, Klio 62, 317–319. 75 A bubonic plague outbreak in Hellenistic Egypt and Syria is described by Rufus of Ephesos: Sallares, Ecology, 266.