Ptolemaic Egypt

After Alexander’s death in 323 BC his general Ptolemy son of Lagos took Egypt, declared himself king in 305 BC, and founded a Greek dynasty that ruled the country for nearly three centuries. Alexandria, the new capital Alexander had laid out on the Mediterranean coast, became the largest city of the Hellenistic world: home to the Lighthouse, the Library and the Museum, the great Jewish community of the Diaspora, and, traditionally about 250 BC under Ptolemy II Philadelphus, the seventy translators (LXX) who turned the Hebrew Scriptures into Greek. For the first century after Alexander, Judea was a Ptolemaic possession; the high priest in Jerusalem paid tribute to Alexandria. In 200 BC the Seleucid king Antiochus III defeated Ptolemy V at Panium and transferred Judea to Syrian rule. The Ptolemaic dynasty grew weaker through dynastic civil wars; the last of the line, Cleopatra VII (r. 51–30 BC), allied first with Julius Caesar and then with Mark Antony, lost the war with Octavian at Actium in 31 BC, and committed suicide a year later. Egypt then became a Roman imperial province. The Jewish community at Alexandria, however, continued; it produced Philo and the framework into which the apostolic gospel later entered.