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Actually though, the general imperial policy, like that of the Greeks, was religious tolerance. As long as the natives included the Emperor in their pantheon of Gods, they could go on believing in any Gods they wanted to. Polytheistic religions always had room for another god, and in Egypt, emperor‑worship was merely the newest extension of pharaoh‑worship. Papyrus records support that Egyptians enthusiastically extended emperor‑worship to the worship of members of the Imperial family, celebrating with great fervor not just the emperor's birthday and the anniversary of his ascension to the throne, but also birthdays of his wife, sister, nephew, etc. Thus, Germanicus, nephew to Emperor Tiberius, lamented that he would have to limit his public appearances to avoid excessive adoration.
However, while the Romans did not suppress the old Egyptian religion and its newer related cults by law, even more than the Greeks, they refused to embrace native Egyptians as equal and tried to suppress all means by which they could get ahead economically and politically. A key reason why was they viewed Egypt as the breadbasket for the Imperial capital and for the vast legions carrying out their sacred mission of expansion.
In Greek society, Egyptian aristocrats could still hold high class status. Now only Romans and Greeks could become citizens. The Romans withdrew all the hereditary privileges established under the Ptolemies. Even marriage to a Greek or Roman woman did not guarantee a grant of citizenship without having a special petition signed by the Emperor's especially appointed Privy Purse. A lengthy papyrus roll now displayed in Berlin's Egyptian Museum includes the following stipulations:
"38. Those born of an Egyptian remain Egyptian but inherit from both parents.
39. If a Roman man or woman is joined in marriage with an urban Greek or an Egyptian, their children follow the inferior status.
43. If Egyptians after a father's death record their father as a Roman, a fourth is confiscated."
And Egyptians, but not Greeks, were excluded from the standard entrance into citizenship offered to all other non‑Romans in the empire, 26 years of military service.
Non-access to citizenship meant being barred from desirable jobs in the civil service, your children could not be educated in the Greek gymnasiums, and that you were not exempt from the laographia, a hefty new poll tax started by Emperor Augustus in 24 BC. Egyptians were not eligible for Roman citizenship until AD 212, over 200 years after the takeover, when an imperial edict granted citizenship to everyone in the empire. And even then, other restrictions remained.
Under the Ptolemies, as had been traditionally under the pharaohs, a large quantity of land was state-owned. The Romans decided to place much of it on the open market. In theory, such land could be purchased by anyone, even Egyptian and Semitic elites, but Roman economic and political policies handicapped the ability of everyone except Romans and Greeks to draw profits from their new investment. With privatization of land ownership, state revenues had to be supplemented by among other things, greater taxation, one form of which was the poll tax. This policy hurt both the native landowner and the peasant, as well as being seen as a humiliation. Additional economic strain came from the Roman introduction of the "liturgy" in the first century, which basically amounted to requirements of public work. Included was the stipulation that any “losses or deficiencies” accrued while holding the job must be reimbursed from one's own pocket, all of which was especially problematic for the person assigned as tax‑gatherer.
Two legions, nearly 18,000 soldiers, plus a substantial naval faction, were stationed in Egypt to enforce the new Roman laws. What all this meant was the creation of a group of people, both Egyptians and urban Jews (who made up as much as 10‑15 percent of the population of Alexandria in the first century) who could be classified high social status but not high social class.
That resentment culminated in the Jewish Revolt in Alexandria, A.D. 115‑117, and the almost total massacre of the Jews in the city. The “Alexandrian mob” had already taken its aggression out on the Jews in a series of riots, jealous of the preferential treatment they perceived the Jews were receiving from the Romans. After the Jewish revolt, other nationalistic uprisings by native Egyptians followed. One particularly large revolt around AD 152 lasted over a year and is reported to have endangered Rome's food supply. A priest of the old religion led another revolt in the Boukolia marshes of the Nile Delta, around AD 172‑173.