E. ), yet such restricted privileges certainly not indicated autonomy for the Jewish neighborhood. yet Hellenistic tradition encroached simply steadily and erratically in Palestine. The archaeological checklist from huge is still indicates powerful Greek impression at coastal websites resembling Dor, the place a Greek-style fortification was once brought for the period of Ptolemy II. Dor has additionally produced the earliest examples of indigenous pottery stamped with Greek letters. yet we must always no longer infer from Dor an excessive amount of approximately Palestine as a complete, for the reason that a few of the cities and villages have been thoroughly unaffected by means of Hellenism. in particular within the Judaean heartland, with Jerusalem at its heart, there's little facts for the encroachment of Greek tradition, whereas simply forty kilometers to the southwest a Sidonian colony used to be tested through the Ptolemies at Marissa in a only Greek format. Ptolemaic and Greek impact tended to be concentrated round the towns that had army or strategic significance or towns or websites that have been very important economically yet had simply small Jewish minority groups. there's one other small corpus of stamped jar handles from Yehud that are supposed to be pointed out during this connection; either are dated to the mid-third century B. C. E. and make clear the executive constitution that operated in Palestine prior to the Maccabean rebellion. a lot of them are stamped with YHD in paleo-Hebrew letters and endure quite a few symbols that seem to be a central authority seal. one other huge staff bears the letters YRŠLM (Jerusalem) among the axes of a five-pointed megastar, the logo of the excessive priest. those jar handles aspect to a really conventional repertoire of symbols in a time whilst many students assumed Hellenism to be making nice inroads. This quite small team of stamps with a constrained symbolic vocabulary demonstrates relatively essentially that Hellenistic tradition had now not but affected the center of Judaean tradition. That those stamps aspect to a centralized procedure of taxation, although, can't be doubted. 10 The corpus of stamped jar handles testifies to the fairly complicated procedure of taxation that was once brought by means of the monks. it really is rather transparent too from this proof that no longer all the priesthood shared within the new wealth; it used to be the Jerusalem priesthood and institution that benefited the main. the industrial upgrading of the Levant due to Ptolemaic rule and its mercantile practices had a tremendous impression on Judaean existence. The emergence of a Jewish heart type, retailers and bureaucrats, reworked society. whereas the Greek ethnic inhabitants remained within the powerful army bases one of the coastal towns, a few settled in Idumea to the southeast and Samaria to the north, therefore selling elevated mercantile task. because of this new foreign trade, there emerged in Ammon (or Transjordan) probably the most in demand Jewish households, most likely descended from the Tobiads pointed out within the prophets Isaiah and Zechariah. even if they have been good proven earlier than the Ptolemies, they turned concerned with the recent Ptolemaic infrastructure for tax assortment.