"Egypt" in A Companon to Greeks across the Ancient World (original) (raw)

2020, Blackwell Companion to Greeks Across the Ancient Worldd

Greeks, broadly defined, had a long historical relationship with Egypt (Map 3). That is already clear in the Ionian geographers' fascination with Egypt and the Nile River of which Herodotus's Histories Book 2 treatise on Egypt was a kind of summa (de Meulenaere 1951; Lloyd 1975-1988; Asheri, Lloyd, and Corcella 2007). Greek speculation that summer monsoonal rains in east Africa caused the annual flood was confirmed by explorers sent to east Africa by the Ptolemies (Malinowski 2014). It remained the best account of Egypt until the decipherment of Egyptian in the nineteenth century opened, for the first time, the understanding of Egypt in Egyptian terms. But the intimate and complex relationship between the Greek world and Egypt extends back a thousand years before that. "Thebes of a hundred gates" is already in Homer (Il. 9.383), but we can go deep into the Bronze Age to examine the intimate cultural and economic connections Egypt, especially the Delta, had with other cultures of the Mediterranean (Broodbank 2013). The famous Uluburun shipwreck reveals something of the very wide exchange network in the eastern Mediterranean basin in which Egypt was a part (Pulak 1997, 2008). Archaeological work at the Egyptian Delta site of Avaris has revealed Cretan connections; Greece borrowed from Egypt, never the other way around, according to Herodotus, although it is difficult to imagine, without needing to go as far as Bernal's Black Athena hypothesis, to suggest that the Egypt-Greece relationship was not to some extent reciprocal in the Bronze Age. With the emergence of the Iron Age, the relationship is clearer, and the presence of Greeks living in Egypt grew from perhaps a few thousand under the Saite kings of the seventh and sixth century BC to perhaps hundreds of thousands under the Ptolemies, amounting to something between 5 and 10% of an estimated 3.5 million. The Ptolemaic Egypt Joseph G. Manning CHAPTER SEVENTEEN