Besides conciliating the priesthood, Ptolemy planted garrisons of Greeks in several parts of the country. Bodies of veterans colonised the Fayyûm, and Ptolemais, now Menshîyeh, in Upper Egypt, was a Greek city modelled in all respects upon Alexandria. The public accounts were kept in Greek, and though the clerks and tax-gatherers were usually natives who had received a Greek education, many of them were Greeks by birth and even Jews. “Ostraka,” or inscribed potsherds, have been found at Thebes, which show that in the days of Ptolemy Physkôn, a Jew, Simon, the son of Eleazar, farmed the taxes there for the temple of Amon. As he did not himself know Greek, his receipts were written for him by one of his sons. After his death he was succeeded in his office by his son Philoklês. The name is noticeable, as it shows how rapidly the Jews of Egypt could become wholly Greek. The religion of his forefathers was not likely to sit heavily on the shoulders of the tax-gatherer of a heathen temple, and we need not wonder at the Hellenisation of his family. Simon was a sample of many of his brethren: in adopting Greek culture the Jews of Egypt began to forget that they were Jews. It required the shock of persecution at Jerusalem, and the Maccabean war of independence to recall them to a recollection of their past history and a sense of the mission of their race. With the rise of the Greek kingdom in Egypt, the canonical books of the Old Testament come to an end. Jaddua, the last high-priest recorded in the Book of Nehemiah (xii. 7, 22), met Alexander the Great at Mizpeh, and if Josephus is to be trusted, obtained from him a recognition of the ancient privileges of the Jews and their exemption from taxation every Sabbatical year. The First Book of Chronicles (iii. 23) seems to bring the genealogy of the descendants of Zorobabel down to an even later date. But where the canonical books break off, the books of the Apocrypha begin. Jesus the son of Sirach, in his prologue to the Book of Ecclesiasticus, tells us that he had translated it in Egypt from Hebrew into Greek, when Euergetês, the third Ptolemy, was king, and thirty-eight years after its compilation by his grandfather Jesus. Like most of the apocryphal books, it thus had a Palestinian origin, but its translation into Greek indicates the intercourse that was going on between the Jews of Palestine and those of Egypt, as well as the general adoption of the Greek language by the Egyptian Jews.