All the male rulers of the dynasty took the name “Ptolemy”, while princesses and queens preferred the names Cleopatra and Berenice. Because the Ptolemaic kings adopted the Egyptian custom of marrying their sisters, many of the kings ruled jointly with their spouses, who were also of the royal house. This custom made Ptolemaic politics confusingly incestuous, and the later Ptolemies were increasingly feeble. The only Ptolemaic Queens to officially rule on their own were Berenice III and Berenice IV. Cleopatra V did co-rule, but it was with another female, Berenice IV. Cleopatra VII officially co-ruled with Ptolemy XIII Theos Philopator, Ptolemy XIV, and Ptolemy XV, but effectively, she ruled Egypt alone.

The early Ptolemies did not disturb the religion or the customs of the Egyptians, and indeed built magnificent new temples for the Egyptian gods and soon adopted the outward display of the Pharaohs of old. During the reign of Ptolemies II and III thousands of Greek veterans were rewarded with grants of farm lands, and Greeks were planted in colonies and garrisons or settled themselves in the villages throughout the country. Upper Egypt, farthest from the centre of government, was less immediately affected, though Ptolemy I established the Greek colony of Ptolemais Hermiou to be its capital, but within a century Greek influence had spread through the country and intermarriage had produced a large Greco-Egyptian educated class. Nevertheless, the Greeks always remained a privileged minority in Ptolemaic Egypt. They lived under Greek law, received a Greek education, were tried in Greek courts, and were citizens of Greek cities, just as they had been in Greece. The Egyptians were rarely admitted to the higher levels of Greek culture, in which most Egyptians were not in any case interested.

Family conflicts affected the later years of the dynasty when Ptolemy VIII Euergetes II fought his brother Ptolemy VI Philometor and briefly seized the throne. The struggle was continued by his sister and niece (who both became his wives) until they finally issued an Amnesty Decree in 118 BC.

All the Greek dialects of the Greek world gradually became asimilated in the Koine Greek dialect which was the common language of the Hellenistic world. Generally the Greeks of the Ptolemaic Egypt felt like a representative of a higher civilization yet were curious over the native culture of Egypt.

Sir Flinders Petrie refers to a Jewish tomb, opposite Oxyrhyncus, discovered in 1922, with a long Aramaic inscription, belonging to the middle of the 5th century. In any case, when Palestine had been united to their kingdom by the Ptolemies, a fresh stream of immigration from Judaea to Egypt naturally followed. It was not only voluntary immigration. Regarding the Jews as good material for his army, Ptolemy I had transported masses of them to Egypt — 100,000, according to Pseudo-Aristeas, who says that he put 30,000 of them “in the garrisons” — settled them, we may perhaps understand, like the Greeks and Macedonians, on the land. Inscriptions and papyri give us traces of this Jewish population in the country towns of Egypt throughout the Ptolemaic period.

The language of the Egyptian Jews was Greek; after a generation or two immigrants from Palestine forgot their Semitic speech. Their Hebrew scriptures they knew only in the Greek translation, which we column the Septuagint because, according to the legend, the translation had been made by the Seventy Translators under Ptolemy II. Since the Seventy Translators were held to have been themselves miraculously inspired, there was no need for the Egyptian Jews to concern themselves with the original Hebrew. As a matter of fact, the translation of the Old Testament was made, bit by bit, in Egypt during the last three centuries before the Christian era. According to the first form of the legend, it was not the Old Testament as a whole, but only the five books of the Law which were translated by the Seventy, and it is likely that a Greek version of the Law really was required by the Egyptian Jews as early as the reign of Ptolemy II. In the latter times of the dynasty it made an important difference to any one who ruled Egypt, or aspired to rule it, if he had the Jews on his side.

Whether the Jews at Alexandria were, or were not, included in the citizen-body of Alexandrines is, as has been said, a debated question.71 It seems really to resolve itself into a question of terms — what is meant by “citizenship” — the Jews plainly had certain peculiar privileges, on the strength of which they might claim to count as Alexandrine citizens, whilst they lacked other ordinary characteristics of citizenship, the absence of which might justify the Greek Alexandrines in denying them the name. As a community in Alexandria, they had a measure of self-government not conceded to any other community within a Greek city-state. Their chief in early Roman times (and perhaps in Ptolemaic times) had the title of genarches or ethnarches. In Roman times the government of the community was vested in a senate (gerusia), and this, too, may go back to the earlier period. The archontes seem to have been a committee of the senate. But the only title for the rulers of the community for which we have documentary evidence in the Ptolemaic period is that of Elders.

There were naturally a number of synagogues in Alexandria for a community so large. The principal synagogue p114was in Roman times one of the most impressive in the Empire, a magnificent building in the style of a Greek basilica, described with pride in the Talmud, so large that the voice of the officiating minister could not reach the more distant part of the congregation, and a man had to be stationed half-way down the building with a flag, to signal the moments for saying Amen. But we have in Ptolemaic times the mention of synagogues at Alexandria — one built on behalf of the famous Cleopatra and Ptolemy Caesar “to the Great God who heareth”, by a certain Alypus, a rich member, no doubt, of the Jewish community

In his lifetime Strabo made extensive travels to among others Egypt and Ethiopia.