The study of ancient states brings a historical perspective to the creation of official identities. By looking at legal and fiscal documents preserved on papyri from Hellenistic and Early Roman Egypt (323 BCE to c. 70 CE), this study compares how the Ptolemies and then the Romans established official identities, that is, what priorities they gave to occupation, social status, citizenship, and/or ethnicity in order to construct legal and fiscal identities. It explores how these different priorities created overlaps between the categories, for instance, by an occupation permitting some flexibility with ethnicity, in order to include those in service of the state into privileged official categories. First, it shows that the fiscal and cleruchic policies of the Ptolemies partially reshaped societies so that social status became preeminent and ethnicity did no longer matter to the state already before the Roman annexation. Second, it compares how the demographic and social configuration in Egypt at the time of each conquest stimulated slightly different priorities when constructing official identities.

对古代国家的研究为官方身份的创建提供了历史视角。通过查看保存在古希腊和早期罗马埃及的纸莎草纸上的法律和财政文件（公元前323年至公元70年左右）），本研究比较了托勒密人和后来的罗马人如何建立官方身份，即他们为建立法律和财政身份而对职业，社会地位，公民身份和/或种族给予了什么优先考虑。它探讨了这些不同的优先级如何在类别之间重叠，例如，通过允许种族具有一定灵活性的职业，以便将那些服务于国家的人员纳入特权官方类别。首先，它表明，托勒密部分重塑社会的财政和cleruchic政策，使社会地位成为卓越和种族已经做了不再重要的状态之前，罗马吞并。其次，它比较了每次征服时埃及的人口和社会结构如何在构建官方身份时激发了稍有不同的优先事项。