Dionysius

Ptolemaic Dynasty

Dionysius, the son of Kephalas, was a man of modest status who straddled the Egyptian and the Greek worlds. A marvelous worm's eye view comes from an archive of his papers. He lived in a village called Akoris in Middle Egypt towards the end of the second century B.C. The archive contains documents in demotic and Greek and gives information about his family, which includes many of both Egyptian and Greek names, like Dionysius, whose Egyptian name was Plenis. His Greek name, Dionysius was probably adopted to bring him into the Greek world. At the same time he also appears in some documents under a third, demotic name, which indicates a particular religious office connected to a local deity, probably in the ibis-cult, which was popular in the Hermopolite Nome where he lived.

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Last Updated: June 20th, 2011