Syria, substantially already in the pre-Roman and entirely in the Roman epoch, came under the government of the land only after an indirect manner; it was broken up, partly into principalities, partly into autonomous urban districts, and was administered, in the first instance, by the rulers of the land or municipal authorities. In Egypt,[201] on the other hand, there were neither native princes nor imperial cities after the Greek fashion. The two spheres of administration into which Egypt was divided--the “land” (ἡ χώρα) of the Egyptians, with its originally thirty-six districts (νομοί), and the two Greek cities, Alexandria in lower and Ptolemais in upper Egypt[202]--were rigidly separated and sharply opposed to each other, and yet in a strict sense hardly different. The rural, like the urban, district was not merely marked off territorially, but the former as well as the latter was a home-district; the belonging to each was independent of dwelling-place and hereditary. The Egyptian from the Chemmitic nome belonged to it with his dependents, just as much when he had his abode in Alexandria as the Alexandrian dwelling in Chemmis belonged to the burgess-body of Alexandria. The land-district had for its centre always an urban settlement, the Chemmitic, for example, the town of Panopolis, which grew up round the temple of Chemmis or of Pan, or, as this is expressed in the Greek mode of conception, each nome had its metropolis; so far each land-district may be regarded also as a town-district. Like the cities, the nomes also became in the Christian epoch the basis of the episcopal dioceses. The land-districts were based on the arrangements for worship which dominated everything in Egypt; the centre for each one is the sanctuary of a definite deity, and usually it bears the name of this deity or of the animal sacred to the same; thus the Chemmitic district is called after the god Chemmis, or, according to Greek equivalent, Pan; other districts after the dog, the lion, the crocodile. But, on the other hand, the town-districts are not without their religious centre; the protecting god of Alexandria is Alexander, the protecting god of Ptolemais the first Ptolemy, and the priests, who are installed in the one place as in the other for this worship and that of their successors, are the Eponymi for both cities. The land-district is quite destitute of autonomy: administration, taxation, justice, are placed in the hands of the royal officials,[203] and the collegiate system, the Palladium of the Greek as of the Roman commonwealth, was here in all stages absolutely excluded. But in the two Greek cities it was not much otherwise. There was doubtless a body of burgesses divided into phylae and demes, but no common council;[204] the officials were doubtless different and differently named from those of the nomes, but were also throughout officials of royal nomination and likewise without collegiate arrangement. Hadrian was the first to