This paper takes as a starting point that the same sort of negotiation occurred between kings and priests in Egypt and in Babylonia, because in both places their temples fulfilled similar economic, social, and religious roles. While the Ptolemies were integrated into the religious rituals from the time of Ptolemy I on, this also implied that they were responsible for maintaining stability. Pfeiffer assesses how the king negotiated situations where his legitimacy was at risk, such as Nile failures or unrest. Focusing on the trilingual decrees, he shows how Ptolemy in Egyptian documents acts perfectly according to Egyptian royal ideology. Only the priests had sufficient knowledge of it to conceive such a narrative. Yet this was not the doing of a homogenous priestly group, but mainly of the Memphite priests. Turning to Seleucid Babylonia, Klinkott examines moments of interaction between kings and priests, such as temple rituals performed by Alexander and the Seleucid temple-rebuilding program. He sheds light on the process of negotiations between the Seleucid kings and the priests, who possibly gathered in a synod, and on the adoption of older Babylonian traditions by the Seleucids.

This chapter focuses on Babylon and Egypt and offers a systematic comparison of the role of the local elites in the temple administration within the Seleucid and Ptolemaic governmental structures. While in both regions temples were the “centers of public life” before the Macedonian conquest, the traditional religious role of the king offered to the Ptolemies in Egyptian temples granted them a unique position that was not paralleled by the Seleucids in Babylonia. Moreover, the authors emphasize that the temple’s elite were representative of the local elite in Egypt, but that it was not the case in Babylonia. Therefore, these different traditions, notably the conception of the Egyptian king as a high priest superior to all the other priests, may explain why the administrative functions of the temples in Egypt, as well as the priestly elites, were largely integrated into the state structures of power, and why this did not happen in Babylonia. There, Seleucid kings could not play this role through the existing temple institutions and instead founded poleis as tools of governance of local communities.

In the scholarly literature on the oases, we find a variety of assertions about the cities of the Kharga and Dakhla oases: that one was the capital at a particular period, that one did or did not have civic status at some date. On close examination, most of these statements turn out to be based on slender or no evidence, and in many cases we find that we know much less than has been supposed about the administrative organization of the Great Oasis. In what follows, we look more closely at the available evidence for both Kharga and Dakhla, tracing the history of Hibis – often supposed to be the capital of the whole oasis – and then of the two major towns of the Dakhla Oasis, Mothis (modern-day Mut) and Trimithis. We will try as well to see what we can of their interrelationship and of the overall administrative structure.

More than thirty years of excavations in Kharga Oasis yielded a large amount of Demotic ostraca providing information about the tax systems in place in this remote area of the Egyptian Western Desert. In this chapter I propose an overview of the Demotic fiscal documentation emanating from various settlements of the Great Oasis considered (part 1). These texts provide insights on the multiple tax systems set up by state as well as by local temples in the longue durée of the second part of first millennium BC. The king seems to have levied taxes at the district and the village levels while the temples took an amount from the harvests of their tenants. In this context, the temple of Amun of Hibis of Kharga appears as the religious institution that owned the most land in the whole oasis (part 2). It helps also to know the nature of the taxes - in cereal, in oil for lighting - and attests to the existence of a form of banalité required for the use of a mill (part 3).