Roman Egypt

Annexed personally by Augustus in 30 BCE after his victory over Antony and Cleopatra at Actium, then governed uniquely as the emperor's own domain -- senators needed his express permission even to visit, since Egypt's grain fleets fed the city of Rome itself. Passed to the Eastern Roman Empire at the 395 CE partition and remained Byzantine until the Arab conquest of 641. Augustus's decision to rule Egypt as a personal possession rather than a normal senatorial or imperial province reflected both its immense wealth and the lingering fear that whoever controlled Egypt's grain supply could starve or feed Rome at will -- exactly the leverage Cleopatra and Antony had wielded against Octavian himself. Alexandria remained one of the largest and most cosmopolitan cities in the ancient world under Roman rule, home to the famous Library and Musaeum (though both had already begun their long decline), a large Greek-speaking population, and one of the largest Jewish communities outside Judea, whose sometimes violent tensions with the city's Greek population punctuated the province's history. Roman engineers maintained and extended Egypt's irrigation system, keeping grain yields high enough that Egypt alone is estimated to have supplied roughly a third of Rome's total grain needs. The province also became an early and important center of Christianity, producing towering theological figures and, later, a distinctively Egyptian (Coptic) Christian identity that would persist for centuries after the Arab conquest finally ended nearly seven hundred years of Greco-Roman rule.

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