How much was the ancient Egyptian population when Egypt was under the Roman occupation?

Question

Please give me an approximation and the ground on which you based your answer.

Answer 1

Can you clarify this question? How much what?

Answer 2

Nobody really knows. I'm not being glib, we just don't have definite information because we neither found records left by folks in that day--if they had bothered to do a serious census--nor do we have a full picture of the world at that time (or that part of the world, that is).

I've seen people make guesses based on estimates of the extent of cultivated land and multiplying that by guesses of crop yields, then applying minimal dietary estimates and concluding that this place or that could sustain a population of so many. It is simplistic guesswork. In the ruins of Ebla (northern Syria) there were records for the king of the king's livestock in the various administrative districts, but if there was a census of the population it wasn't found, identified, or very well published. Such hordes of records, however, are scrutinized for indications of daily life features which include the density of the population. Archaeologists count the ruins of houses, guess at how many others might have been there at some time, then guess at how full those houses might have been, and then multiply that by the numbers of other settlements like this they think may have been around at the time. It is not exactly pulling a number out of the air, but it is still guesswork.