In the first post in this series, I considered the development of Greek and Roman cosmopolitanism. In the second, I considered the development of a Near Eastern/Southwest and Central Asian model of cosmopolitanism in the Assyrian and Persian empires. In this post and the next one, I turn southward towards Egypt and Africa before progressing eastward to South, Southeast, and East Asia. I will contend that what we find in Egyptian history and culture already prior to the Achaemenid conquest a tradition of intercultural exchange and hospitality, together with universalistic kinds of thinking about what it is to be human, though the advent of Persian, Greek, and Roman rule certainly transformed Egypt into a place of signature international importance and multicultural idealism.
Egypt has been consistently inhabited from 5500 BCE onwards. Its cultural origins surely owe quite a bit to the larger history of Africa to which it is connected, though many scholars and popular commentators often try to disconnect Egypt from Africa, historically and today.1 Its heyday was the Bronze Age world of the fourth, third, and second millennia BCE, when it was connected by trade to Minoan and Mycenaean Greece to the West and Mesopotamia, Elam, Bactria, and the Indus Valley to the east. The geography of Egypt (Kemet, as its ancient inhabitants called it) is divided into Lower and Upper: paradoxically to modern map-readers, the “Lower” regions around the Nile Delta that spills out into the Mediterranean Sea, which is in the north, and the “Upper” regions further south towards ancient Nubia and Kush (roughly, modern Sudan and Ethiopia). Egypt’s emergence as a single civilization spanning both regions is in large part the product of a conscious effort at cultural fusion between these two regions (albeit one that required a good bit of violence). Menes, or Narmer (possibly but probably not Hor-Aha), is remembered in Egyptian tradition and by modern scholars as responsible for this unification around the year 3150 BCE. Numerous long-lasting symbols of Egyptian culture signify the synthesis of Upper and Lower Egypt: the unification of the hedjet, the White Crown of Upper Egypt, with the deshret, the Red Crown of Lower Egypt; woven reed and papyrus plants; the Sedge and Bee, afterwards an honorific of the pharaoh of both regions. I have written before here and here about the royal mythology of the pharaohs and the functions they played in Egyptian society; it might just be worth pointing out additionally that the office of pharaoh itself was in large part the living symbol of the unification, and dynastic disputes, competition, and interregna often coincide with contests between Lower and Upper for control of the Two Lands, political, economic, and religious. The historical unification may also lay behind the mythical and ritual unification of Horus and Set in the primordial past and in the pharaoh’s own person.
“Ancient Egypt” itself, then, is the product of a cosmopolitan synthesis rather than a pure assimilation or absorption by one culture of another. Egypt, over its long history, went through several periods of dominance by either north or south, and sometimes by foreigners to the East (like the Hyksos) or to the South (like the Nubians). But while the unification provided a common grammar of culture and cosmos to ordinary Egyptians, it did not produce uniformity or absolute, inalienable consistency in matters of cultural praxis throughout the land. This is why it is notoriously difficult to reconstruct Egyptian myth and religion with complete certainty, for instance: every local temple in Egypt had its own rendition of the relevant gods, myths, and status of sacred sites, and the myths themselves imply the cyclical, repetitive, anacyclotic character of sacred history at macrocosmic and microcosmic levels, such that while all Egyptians may have been using the same names and words to talk about their deities and may have enjoined similar practices to relate to the world of gods, magic, and demons, they did not employ them all in the same way, with the same understanding. This is why there was not one commonly agreed but many competing sites of, say, Osiris’ tomb or holy cities whose hieratic status was claimed to be ultimate, like Thebes or Memphis. An immediate observation that we can draw about cosmopolitanism from this fact is that while cosmopolitan projects do effect new unities that become basic elements of a society’s vocabulary and grammar, sometimes joining and replacing previous pluralism, cosmopolitanism itself does not guarantee the annihilation of local distinctiveness or the imposition of clean, artificial standards on a culture. Just as we saw that the cultural and political resources of Assyrian and Persian cosmopolitanism encouraged multiculturalism, Egyptian cosmopolitanism was built on the idea of an intracultural pluralism: within certain commonalities and continuities, and within basically the same boundaries of the Black Land (black because of the fecundity of the soil around the Nile) throughout its history, there were in fact many Ancient Egypts, each intelligible to the others without being reducible to them.
Egypt was also an external point of attraction for non-Egyptians throughout the Bronze Age. A more or less reliably fertile and therefore nutritious land, nomadic wanderers of the Bronze Age world often found themselves there, sometimes ruling, sometimes enslaved, as the Hebrew Bible seems to distantly remember in its legendary accounts of the Israelite patriarchs and the later fortunes of their descendants in Genesis and Exodus. Naval trade with the Minoans resulted in the osmosis of Egyptian palatial culture to Crete, but also, in return, the services of Minoan fresco painters in places like Tell el-Dab’a, and the export of Minoan and Mycenaean pottery to Egypt, from which Egyptian potters afterwards adopted their style. Commerce, warfare, migration, and more brought many peoples to Egyptian lands. By the New Kingdom period, Toby Wilkinson writes:
The Nile Valley had always been a melting pot of peoples and cultures, Mediterranean and African influences coexisting and cross-pollinating. From prehistoric times Egypt had welcomed immigrants from other lands, as long as they thoroughly integrated themselves and adopted Egyptian customs. Even at the height of the Pyramid Age, when Egyptian chauvinism and self-confidence had known no bounds, a native citizen of Memphis might have rubbed shoulders with a shipwright from Kebny or a mercenary form Nubia, albeit bearing adopted Egyptian names. But the influx of foreigners prompted by Thutmose III’s campaigns was on an altogether different scale. Egyptian towns and cities found themselves home to significant foreign populations, and the migrants were quick to make the most of their new opportunities.2
New Kingdom supremacy and expansion meant that the royal children of Southwest Asian vassals made their way to the New Kingdom court for education, such that “[t]he future Amenhotep II and his friends would therefore have come into contact with Nubian and Asiatic princes, which would have given them a much more cosmopolitan outlook than their forebears. Perhaps this explains why Egypt and Mittani, at war for decades, only finally concluded a peace treaty in the reign of Amenhotep II. As Egypt attempted to reeducate its neighbors, the neighbors in turn had an equally profound influence on the host country.”3 Above and beyond was the city of Per-Ramesses: “a cosmopolitan city,” boasting “a temple to an Asiatic deity,” “overseas legations and entire quarters for foreign mercenaries,” “merchants from throughout the eastern Mediterranean,” a city that was “a magnet for immigrants seeking a better life,” and also the inspiration for the biblical Pithom and Raamses of Exodus 1:11.4 By the time that Ancient Israel and Judah became monarchies in the tenth century BCE, and by the time therefore that the earliest biblical literature was composed (922-722 BCE), this world was already long gone, but the memory of Egypt’s anchor status in the Bronze Age global community still loomed large in the Levant and elsewhere.
It also loomed large in Egypt, both propelling its imperial superpower competition with Assyria and Babylon (the latter of which it succumbed to) and encouraging its further sponsorship of foreign commercial enterprises on Egyptian soil and of foreign residents living on Egyptian shores. Under Ahmose II, the city of Naukratis—ten miles from the royal city of Sais—invited Greek trade, and “swiftly became the busiest port in Egypt,” “an extraordinary cosmopolitan city, where Cypriots and Phoenicians rubbed shoulders with Milesians, Samians, and Chians. Several Greek communities had their own temples—the Chians reverenced Aphrodite, while the Samians preferred Hera—and there was even an ecumenical ‘Hellenion,’ where the different communities could come together to worship ‘the gods of the Greeks.’”5 And all of this before the conquests of the Iron, Hellenistic, and Roman eras. The stereotype of the Ancient Egyptians as an exotic and insular culture is largely unearned.
Yet Egyptian cosmopolitanism was permanently touched by the Persian and Greek traditions of humanistic universalism, standing as it did as a fundamental way point in the Bronze Age and later Mediterranean-Near Eastern trade networks of classical antiquity, and therefore being a highly sought-after prize in the militant contests of the first millennium BCE. As a result, we see the cosmopolitanisms of those cultural traditions at play in their respective layers of Egyptian history, albeit with specifically Egyptian flavors. “It was yet another sign of the cosmopolitan character of Persian Egypt,” writes Wilkinson, that it was “a land where people married across the religious and cultural divide; where reliefs in Egyptian temples could depict strange winged creatures from Zoroastrian mythology; and where second-generation Persian immigrants could adopt Egyptian nicknames.”6 Elsewhere in Egypt were made “a pair of over-life-size statues of Darius which were erected in the temple of Re in Heliopolis…sculpted in a traditional Egyptian style,” though “Darius is shown wearing Persian dress.”7 The folded garments have “incised inscriptions in Old Persian, Elamite, and Akkadian,” and read: “‘This is the statue of stone, which Darius the king ordered to be made in Egypt, so that whoever sees it in time to come will know that the Persian man holds Egypt. I am Darius, Great King, King of Kings, King of Countries, King on this Great Earth, son of Hystaspes, an Achaemenid[.]’”8 On the bottom of the statue are “pharaonic emblems representing the unity of Upper and Lower Egypt, and depictions of all the peoples of the empire who were subject to Persia”; the “hieroglyphic inscriptions declare Darius to be both a pious warrior pharaoh and a foreign conqueror king,” calling him, among other things, “he whose power has conquered each of the Two Lands and who acts in accordance with divine orders, son of Re who has placed him on his throne in order to complete what he has begun here below.”9 In addition to building a famous canal connecting the Nile to the Persian gulf, Darius also sponsored Egyptian scholars to come and write them for him in his presence a collection of Egyptian religious and secular law. (Persian penchant for doing this has encouraged some scholars to consider whether the formation of the Mosaic Pentateuch as an anthology in the Second Temple period under Persian rule did not have similar impetus, though more recent scholars are doubtful about the evidence for this as a consistent policy of the Achaemenids.) Memphis was the seat of Egypt’s Achaemenid satrap, and it was connected by a highway through Jerusalem and Damascus to Persepolis.10 Indeed, just like elsewhere in the Achaemenid Empire at the time, “Egypt under Darius I was a dynamic melting pot of peoples and traditions, a place of cultural innovation, a prosperous trading nation, and a tolerant multiethnic community. But it was not to last.”11 The later Achaemenids mismanaged and struggled to keep hold on Egypt, which likely made its conquest by Alexander in the year 332 BCE feel like a liberation more than a subjugation. When Alexander died in 323, one of his generals, Ptolemy, assumed the kingship that Alexander himself had claimed as Pharaoh and took more or less the traditional boundaries of Egypt, together with Judea, as his holdings from Alexander’s empire.
It should be observed that both the Persians and the Greeks felt that the conquest of Egypt was a major accomplishment and a sign of their own imperial legitimacy. Darius, Alexander, and Ptolemy all felt that the claim to be pharaoh boosted their eminence as dominators of the Near East, and constituted a major component of their claim to have united the world’s peoples into a common polity. And the Egypt that resulted was indeed a sometimes volatile, but always vibrantly rich, mixture of cultures: indigenous Egyptians, speaking a language that was gradually on its way to becoming later Coptic; Judeans, who had lived in bulk along the Nile for centuries from the time of the Babylonian Exile in 586 BCE onwards, who had their own Temples at Elephantine and Leontopolis, and proseuchai, or “prayer houses,” scattered throughout the Egyptian landscape and cities; and Greeks. These populations often disliked each other intensely, frequently rioted and fought with one another, but they enjoyed punctuated moments, institutions, and personages in whom their capacity for mutuality was realized. The city of Alexandria and its various institutions are easily the most significant examples here: with the city’s foundation, there was “a great increase in [sea] traffic” from Greece to Egypt, “with most of it being channeled onto a single route, the passage from Alexandria itself to Rhodes at the southast corner of the Aegean. The economic and political connections between the two cities became very close and only started to fade towards the end of the Hellenistic era, the period when the Levant was ruled by Alexander’s successors.”12 All such merchants were welcomed by the famous Pharos, the lighthouse on Pharos Island, the city’s “symbol…featured on its coins,” and occasionally in its “mosaics and intaglios.”13 The Library and Mouseion, or Temple of the Muses, were the academic centers of the Mediterranean and Near Eastern worlds: not content to contain only all the relevant literature of older Greek antiquity, the Library with the Ptolemies’ money also sponsored grand translation projects of Near Eastern literature into Greek, the total catalogue of the Library at its height existing in 120 volumes and numbering well over 500,000 books. It is probably from here that, as the Letter of Ps.-Aristeas recounts in legendary fashion, the translation of the Hebrew Bible into Greek, ultimately coming to be what we know as the Septuagint, began and was primarily conducted.14
It is tempting to see these accomplishments as purely Greek in character, but one must consider the context in which they were achieved: Alexandria, a Greek city on Egyptian soil that was rapidly becoming more Egyptian and more Jewish over the course of its existence; the Ptolemies who, though Macedonian, Hellenic monarchs, claimed the role of pharaoh, participated in Egyptian cult and culture, and sponsored ongoing Egyptian religion; and the overall fusion of Greek and Egyptian culture going on in cities, especially religious culture, where interpretatio Graeca allowed Greeks to understand Egyptian deities as Greek ones, thereby opening them to Greek ritual practice and to philosophical reflection, and thereby metamorphosed Egyptian cults into forms that attracted foreigners and helped to keep temples and their personnel sustained. This is also the context that gave the world Cleopatra VII Thea Philopator, Cleopatra for short, last of the Ptolemies, savvy politican, and brilliant polymath, speaker not only of Koine Greek but of Egyptian (first and only Ptolemy known to do so to boot), Ethiopian, Hebrew (and/or Aramaic), Arabic, Median, Parthian, and Latin, trained orator, astronomer, and philosopher, one-time lover of Julius Caesar and mother of his son Caesarion.15 Far from reducible to her ill-fated affair with Marc Antony and their loss in the Civil War to Gaius Octavius Caesar, later Augustus, at the Battle of Actium in 31 BCE, Cleopatra was a living representative of the possibilities of Hellenized Egypt, a cosmopolitan kingdom in which the cult, myth, and wisdom, the societies and customs, the people and purposes of many nations converged.
Egypt was formalized as a Roman province after Octavius’ victory; throughout the pax Romana of Augustus’ reign and later life, Egyptians thought of him and of his successors as pharaohs, though Roman emperors almost never went to Egypt; the first one to visit after Augustus himself was Vespasian, who was, like Alexander, declared son of Zeus-Ammon ahead of his assumption of the throne in the aftermath of the Year of the Four Emperors in 69 CE. But still later emperors received these honors in Egyptian society for quite awhile: Caracalla (r. 211-217 CE), the emperor that extended citizenship to all free adult men in the Roman provinces, is depicted as pharaoh on a relief in the Temple of Kom Ombo, for instance. The memory of the pharaohs was surely behind the evolving institution of the Patriarchate of Alexandria in its ecclesiastical and theological disputes with the Christian East as well: it appears in anti-Alexandrian polemic as an insult to patriarchs like Dioscorus deemed heretical, but it also, surely, informed the way the patriarchate itself had functioned throughout the fourth and fifth centuries.16 Egyptian cosmopolitanism also surely fed the emerging identity of Christianity, and especially Christian monasticism, in Egypt: like Philo before them, Alexandria also produced the minds of Clement, Origen, and Plotinus, while the countryside became home to hermits and small coenobitic communities as Christianity became a major force in Roman society. Much, in fact, of what is considered Christianity by virtually all Christians alive today is owed to Egypt, despite the fact that the indigenous and ancient church of Egypt, the Coptic Church, is much smaller than it once was. Egypt remained a primary cultural center under Arabic rule, a melting pot and catalyst chamber for many forms of Islam, a key trading hub, and was in fact, all the way until the 20th century, a major destination for tourists from all around the world (often to the chagrin of Egyptians themselves), just as it had been in antiquity (also to the chagrin of Egyptians).
If in the Greco-Roman tradition of cosmopolitanism we find the ideal seen in individualist terms by focusing on the human being as microcosm and therefore as citizen of the kosmos, with certain moral obligations that constitute the rights and duties of citizenship above that of other allegiances, and in the Mesopotamian and Persian traditions we see a kind of imperial multiculturalism seeking to unite the world’s various peoples by common polity, what distinctive offering does Egypt make? After all, Egypt, too, attempted a kind of imperial dominance of the Near East (never making it farther than southern Canaan) and later hosting both Persians and Greeks with their respective impacts on the Egyptian ethos. Nor is Egypt’s sacral kingship, or focus on cult, unique in the ancient world: all ancient peoples were intensely religious, and all ancient cosmopolitan projects involved religion. What is distinctive about Egypt, though, is its experience of pluralism as both an internal and external negotiation of multiplicity in unity, of identity, continuity, and openness to change. The Greek tradition was allergic to change, seeing antiquity and consistency as signs of respectability; the Persian synthesis, too, was based on older and continuing models of governance in the Near East, through family, kingship, and religion, that legitimated the Achaemenids even though their dynasty was relatively young. Egypt, certainly, had its long consistencies in tradition across its millennia of existence, its cyclical myths repeating themselves in Egyptian consciousness and phenomenal experience. But Egypt also showcases a power of reinvention joined to that continuity, of borderline alchemical potency in combination with cultural others, that arguably few other ancient peoples in their vicinity could claim. Egypt showcases a kind of cosmopolitanism that, by inventing a common language of the sacred and of quotidian society, allowed for a descriptive rather than a prescriptive grammar of ideal social organization as Egyptian fortunes continued to change, with much less anxiety than other cultures around them (think about, for example, the comparative state of crisis Jewish authors under Persian, Greek, and Roman rule seem to espouse). I do not want to press the point too far: only to say that in Egyptian history we observe a cosmopolitan flexibility, maintaining and negotiating identity with a relatively peaceful agnosticism about that identity’s boundaries and future, based more on common patterns than on strict obligations, that we have not yet seen in the other traditions surveyed. But having encountered it here, we will find it more comprehensible, perhaps, as we turn our gaze further east.
See Christopher Ehret, Ancient Africa: A Global History, to 300 CE (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2023), 83-115.
Toby Wilkinson, The Rise and Fall of Ancient Egypt (New York: Random House, 2010), 305.
Wilkinson, The Rise and Fall of Ancient Egypt, 322.
Wilkinson, The Rise and Fall of Ancient Egypt, 422.
Wilkinson, The Rise and Fall of Ancient Egypt, 550.
Wilkinson, The Rise and Fall of Ancient Egypt, 561.
Lloyd Llewellyn-Jones, Persians: The Age of the Great Kings (New York: Basic Books, 2022), 153.
Llewellyn-Jones, Persians, 153.
Llewellyn-Jones, Persians, 153-154.
Llewellyn-Jones, Persians, 189.
Wilkinson, The Rise and Fall of Ancient Egypt, 561.
Colin McEvedy, Cities of the Classical World: An Atlas and Gazetteer of 120 Centres of Ancient Civilization (New York: Penguin, 2011), 1.
McEvedy, Cities of the Classical World, 4.
See Timothy Michael Law, When God Spoke Greek: The Septuagint and the Meaning of the Christian Bible (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2013), 9-42, 75-127.
See Francine Prose, Cleopatra: Her History, Her Myth (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2022) for the most recent, excellent treatment.
See, e.g., Philip Jenkins, Jesus Wars: How Four Patriarchs, Three Queens, and Two Emperors Decided What Christians Would Believe for the Next 1,500 Years (San Francisco: HarperCollins, 2010), 90-97; and Volker L. Menze, Patriarch Dioscorus of Alexandria: The Last Pharaoh and Ecclesiastical Politics in the Later Roman Empire (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2023).