Alexandria has profited from the demise of Phoenician power after Alexander’s sack of Tyre in 332 and from Europe's growing trade with the East via the Nile and the canal that currently links it with the Red Sea.

The details of Ptolemy's participation in the economic exploitation of Egypt cannot be determined because of the lack of firsthand information.

It is certain, however, that discrimination against the Egyptians takes place during his reign.

Ptolemais in Upper Egypt is the only town he founds.

He probably places Macedonian military commanders alongside the Egyptian provincial administrators and intervenes unobtrusively in legal and financial affairs.

In order to regulate the latter, he has introduced coinage, which until this time has been unknown in Egypt.

Ptolemy has also founded the Museum (Mouseion), a common workplace for scholars and artists, and established the famous library at Alexandria.

Besides being a patron of the arts and sciences, he is a writer himself.

Ptolemy in the last few years of his life writes a history, thought to be generally reliable, of Alexander's campaigns. (Although it is now lost, it can be largely reconstructed through the extensive use made of it later by the historian Arrian.)