54 Chapter 3A large and efficient bureaucracy managed royal mo-
nopolies in essential goods and collected more than
two hundred different taxes. The most important of
these monopolies was in grain. Royal officials distrib-
uted seed to the peasants in return for a substantial per-
centage of their yields. The grain was then stored and
released to the export market when prices were high.
Grain was Egypt’s leading export, and the profits from
this trade were immense. The crown also held a com-
plete monopoly on the production of vegetable oils,
which it protected with a 50 percent duty on imported
olive oil, and partial monopolies on virtually every
other commodity from meat to papyrus. Policy was
based on extracting the maximum amount of wealth
from the country. By the middle of the second century
B.C.many peasants were desperate. But being in a nar-
row valley surrounded by desert, they had nowhere to
flee. The Ptolemies continued to pile up a great trea-
sury until the fall of the dynasty in 30 B.C.
Much of that wealth was lavished on their capital
at Alexandria. The city had been founded on the shores
of the Mediterranean by Alexander. The narrow off-
shore island of Pharos was connected to the mainland
by a causeway forming two spacious harbors, one of
which was linked to Lake Mareotis by a canal. A sec-
ond canal connected the lake with the western branch
of the Nile. This enormous port soon formed the nu-
cleus of the Mediterranean’s largest city. Under the first
and second Ptolemies, the population of Alexandria
grew to nearly 500,000 Greeks, Macedonians, Egyp-
tians, and Jews. Its people drew their water supply from
vast cisterns built beneath the city, and a lighthouse,
said to have been more than four hundred feet in
height, was constructed on Pharos.
The cosmopolitan nature of its population and the
patronage of the Ptolemies made Alexandria the cul-
tural and intellectual center of the Hellenistic world. Its
center was the Museum, which was a kind of research
institute, and a library that collected materials from
every literate culture known to the Greeks. The crown
used some of its vast revenues to subsidize these institu-
tions as well as the scholars who attended them, and
the learned flocked to Alexandria from all over the
Mediterranean basin.
Hellenistic Science, Philosophy, and Religion
The encouragement of the Ptolemies and the intellec-
tual foundations laid down by Aristotle made the third
century B.C.a period of extraordinary achievement in
science, mathematics, engineering, and navigation.Nothing like it would be seen again until the scientific
revolution of the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries.
Some of the work done at Alexandria was scholar-
ship—the compilation and transmission of earlier ideas.
Euclid’s Elements of Geometry,composed early in the cen-
tury, contained little that was completely new but be-
came the basis of geometric instruction until the
present day. Hellenistic speculations on cosmography
and physics were more original. Aristarchus of Samos
(c. 310–230 B.C.) disputed Aristotle’s theory that the
Earth was the center of the universe. He reasoned,
without benefit of telescopes or other instruments, that
the Sun was larger than the Earth and that the planets
were far more distant from one another than Aristotle
had imagined. The Sun was therefore the center around
which the Earth and planets revolved. Eratosthenes of
Cyrene (c. 276–c. 194 B.C.), a mathematician who
spent most of his life as head of the Library at Alexan-
dria, founded mathematical geography. Among other
things, he calculated the circumference of the Earth to
within fifty miles of modern estimates and devised a
calendar that used leap years.
Like much of Hellenistic science, these theories
bore little fruit until they were revived by scholars in
the sixteenth century. The authority of Aristotle was
too great to permit their acceptance without indepen-
dent proof, and the telescopes and navigational instru-
ments needed to support them were not yet invented.
In physics, the work of Archimedes of Syracuse
(c. 287–c. 212 B.C.) encountered no such resistance.
Archimedes, who studied at Alexandria and was a
friend of Eratosthenes, spent most of his life in his na-
tive city. A close associate and perhaps a relative of the
ruling dynasty, he was valued for his work on catapults;
compound pulleys; and the screw of Archimedes, a he-
lical device for lifting water out of wells, mineshafts,
and the hulls of ships. Most of these devices had both
military and civilian applications, but Archimedes re-
garded them as little better than toys. He is best known
for his work On Plane Equilibriums,which describes the
basic principle of levers, and for his discovery that
solids can be weighed by measuring the amount of liq-
uid they displace. These achievements stand at the be-
ginning of modern physics. In physics, cosmology, and
biology, where Theophrastus (d. c. 287 B.C.) used the
methods of Aristotle to classify plants and animals dis-
covered in the east, the inspiration of Hellenistic sci-
ence was largely Greek. In medicine, however, two
ancient traditions merged. The Greek Hippocratic tra-
dition was based on the teachings of Hippocrates, a
semimythical figure who is supposed to have lived on