Roman Egypt

The province the emperor owned personally, and the one that fed Rome. Egypt was annexed in 30 BC after Octavian defeated Antony and Cleopatra, and its status was unique from the start: it was governed by an equestrian prefect rather than a senator, and senators were forbidden to set foot in it without the emperor's permission. The reason was straightforward - whoever held Egypt held Rome's grain supply and could starve the capital. The Nile flood made the province the most productive agricultural land in the empire, and the annual grain fleet from Alexandria was a matter of state. Alexandria itself was the second city of the empire, with the Library, the Museum, a Greek-speaking elite and the largest Jewish community outside Judaea, and it was chronically riotous. Egypt kept its own administrative machinery, its own coinage and its own tax structure, inherited from the Ptolemies. It is the best-documented province in the empire because the dry climate preserved papyri - tax receipts, letters, contracts and school exercises that exist nowhere else. Christianity took root early and Alexandria became a principal patriarchate. Egyptian monasticism, beginning with Antony and Pachomius in the desert, invented the form and exported it to Europe. The province split from imperial orthodoxy over the nature of Christ after 451. Arab armies took it in 641 and it never returned to Roman rule. The Coptic church descends directly from it. Alexandria held several hundred thousand people. The province shipped on the order of 20 million modii of grain to Rome each year. Its capital was linked to the Nile by canal.

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