We may readily suppose that the native Egyptians regarded all the foreign invaders with scarcely discriminating hatred. In most cases, when Greeks and Jews dwelt in the nomes, they were both exempt from local dues, and both paid the same special tax. What the attitude of the Egyptians was to their Greek and Macedonian masters, we have no need to conjecture.[114] As under Persian rule, they rose in bloody riots; and after a century of Greek domination, they were so far successful that a complete change in the policy of the Ptolemies was effected. The house had very rapidly degenerated—a process perhaps hastened by the Egyptian custom of brother and sister marriage, which they adopted. From the weaker kings of the close of the third century B.C.E., the Egyptian priests received a complete surrender. Continuity with the Pharaohs was consciously sought. The ancient titles in a modified form were adopted in Greek as well as Egyptian for the rulers. The hieroglyphics represented Ptolemy as the living god, sprung from Ra, just as they had done for Amen-hem-et thousands of years before.[115] But a Hellenizing process had gone on as well as an Egyptizing process. The irresistible attractions of Greek culture had converted even the fiercest nationalists into Greeks outwardly, and in the horde of Greek names that the papyri exhibit we have sometimes far to seek, if we wish to discover unmistakably Greek stock. Intermarriage and concubinage must have given Egypt a large mixed-blood population, which no doubt called itself Greek. Evidences of Greek aloofness on the subject of marriage have been sought in the denial of connubium by the city of Ptolemais to foreigners.[116] But that applied to foreign Greeks as well, and was a common regulation in most Greek cities. The Hellenizing process affected the Jews even more. In Alexandria the Jewish community had begun to show signs of the most active intellectual growth, and the results of that growth, naturally enough, wore a Greek dress. But that process had been active in Palestine as well, where the consequences were somewhat more important. It is there that we shall turn for a study of the first conflicts between Judaism and Hellenism. ------------------------------------------------------------------------ CHAPTER IX THE STRUGGLE AGAINST GREEK CULTURE IN PALESTINE While Palestine was a Greco-Egyptian province, the influences at work over the whole Levant had been as effectually operative there. In the matter of government no change had been made that was at all noticeable. The internal autonomy of Persian times had been maintained; the claims of the tax-collector and recruiting sergeant were dealt with by the whole community, not by the individual.