Kingship, not Monarchy. Some New Directions in the Study of Hellenistic Kingship

The principal concern of Ptolemaic rule was the extraction of resources necessary for sustaining the court and especially for making war with the goal of acquiring further resources. To this end, kings acted as executives-in-chief overseeing a court bureaucracy largely responsible for formulating the edicts that negotiated the competing interests of many groups and institutions, some native, some naturalized. Factors beyond administrative control, such as drought, famine, and consequent internal unrest, stressed the image that prosperity flowed from the divine guidance of kings, requiring blame to be assigned to failures on the part of institutions that made up the Ptolemaic enterprise.