By contrast, the three cities of Ptolemaic Egypt, Alexandria,
Ptolemais, and Naucratis, had more in common with the cities of
old Greece in matters of marriage, citizenship, and bastardy. Most
of the evidence relates to Alexandria, but scraps of evidence will
permit us to extrapolate some of the conclusions we come to about
Alexandria to the other cities. ¹

As in early days in the chora, Alexandria used a system of double
documentation for marriages, but the Alexandrian system differed
importantly from the enchoric one, it seems, in that one contract
documented the marriage privately and the other documented it
publicly, with the city-state taking a traditional interest in the lines
of descent. The few surviving Alexandrian marriage contracts,
known as synchōrēseis ( BGU 1059-2 and 1098- 1101), all derive
from the Augustan period, but by this stage the Ptolemaic marital
system is unlikely to have been drastically altered. The Roman
system which was to take over from the Greek was very different
from it, as can be seen from the marital provisions of the Roman
Gnomon of the Idios Logos, and was dependent upon the census,
but the earliest Roman census of Egypt did not occur until AD
10/20 or possibly even AD 33/4. ²

In these contracts the husband and wife formally acknowledge
before an offical called a prōtarchos or 'chief official' that they have
come together for a joint life. It is clear that the cohabitation has
begun before the making of the contract from the use of the

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