The Wisdom of Egypt

Changing Visions Through the Ages

Peter J Ucko, Timothy Champion

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2016
• Print ISBN:
  9781138405141
• eBook ISBN:
  9781315416878
• Topic: History
• Subtopic: Egyptian Ancient History
• Index: History

The Wisdom of Egypt examines the sources of evidence about Ancient Egypt available to scholars, and the changing visions of Egypt and of Egypt's role in human history that they produced. Its scope extends from the Classical world, through Europe and the Arabic worlds in the Middle Ages, to writers of the Renaissance, to the work of scholars and scientists of Early Modern Europe.

Chapter 1
Introduction: Egypt Ancient and Modern

Timothy Champion and Peter Ucko

Fascinating Egypt

All the books in this series are, in some way or another, concerned with why and how Ancient Egypt has exercised such a fascination for other societies. They show how many societies from the ancient world to the present day have been inspired, or at times even obsessed, by Egypt. Some of the books examine how specific events triggered such enthusiasm, such as Bonaparte’s invasion of Egypt in 1798 or the discovery of Tutankhamun’s tomb in 1922, but, as the chapters in this book show, there has always been what must have appeared to those concerned as a long history of knowledge of and interest in Egypt. It is a particularly intriguing aspect of this history that in some ways it has been a more or less continuous history. This is not to suggest any kind of homogeneity of interest; indeed, this interest has many different manifestations: in visiting Egypt, in writing about Egypt and its culture, or in collecting or imitating its antiquities. It also, at different times, draws on very different sources of evidence about Egypt, from the contemporary knowledge of trading partners and resource-obtaining expeditions to the personal experiences of Greek and Roman historians and geographers, preserved in the classical tradition; to the pioneering discoveries of Renaissance scholars in Italy; to the first-hand experiences of travellers; and, later, to the discoveries of archaeologists. Though this fascination with Egypt has proved a durable feature of western and Islamic thought, it has persisted through many different social and intellectual contexts, and served many different ideological purposes. As the following chapters relate, Egypt has been many things to many people. Thus, for example, the Greek and Roman worlds, which frequently expressed a sense of amazement at the culture and wisdom of pharaonic Egypt, could vary their approach from emphasizing the strangeness or perversity of Egypt to seeing Egypt as the natural precursor of all later human developments and achievements – and these two strands were not mutually exclusive. Ancient Egypt also played a major role in the Judaeo-Christian biblical tradition. Though to some it was a place of oppression, it was again mostly seen as a source of civilization. Such interpretations of ‘Egypt’, however, were not socially or politically innocent, but were deeply embedded in the intellectual structures of their time, not just in the evidence available at any specific point. The interpretations were situated in an ideological context in which such evidence could be used and within the cultural institutions through which such interpretations could be projected and disseminated. Egypt’s varied past provided a large repertoire of ideas and physical remains that could be selected or rejected in constructing an image of Egypt, and its changing role in the classical, medieval and early modern eras gave many different contexts in which Egypt, both contemporary and ancient, could be viewed.

Although societies have constructed their image of Egypt according to their own concerns and on the basis of the evidence available to them, Egypt’s own geographical location and its historical fate, not unrelated to its location, seem to have made it particularly adaptable to such varied representations.

Egypt at the crossroads

Egypt has occupied an ambiguous place in many different visions of the spatial ordering of the world, whether in geographical, political or cultural terms. Ancient Egypt perceived itself as lying at the centre of the cosmos, but to other eyes its location in the world has been very different. Thus, for example, Herodotus (II.15–17) discussed the place of Egypt within a three-continent system comprising Europe, Asia and Libya (Thomas 2000: 80–88). Archaic Ionian tradition had adopted a division based on physical features, with continental land masses separated by major rivers, but Herodotus regarded it as absurd to divide Asia from Africa along the line of the Nile, thus bisecting the homeland of the Egyptians. Instead, he proposed to adopt contemporary political or cultural divisions and to align the boundaries of the continents with the boundaries of the Egyptians. His primary concern at this point, however, was to criticize the three-continent scheme itself and to emphasize the unity of the occupied earth, and hence he avoided the question of which continent Egypt really belonged to.

This argument recalls contemporary concerns about the place of Egypt in Africa and therefore the role of Africa in the development of civilization (O’Connor and Reid 2003a: 1–10; Wengrow 2003). Since Egypt lies (mostly, in terms of modern political borders) within the physical boundary of Africa, it is possible to insist on Africa as a meaningful entity for the cultural analysis of the human past, and thus to affirm the importance of Africa’s role in that past by virtue of Egypt’s civilization. O’Connor and Reid (2003b: 2–3) write:

On the face of it this appears to be a rather simple question to resolve: geographically Egypt is indisputably situated in Africa. Yet this statement immediately throws up the question, What exactly is Africa? and the logical corollary, What is African? The geographical division of the world into continents is a consequence of European geographical traditions and its fixation with categorization. Mazrui (1986) for instance presents a provocative case for redrawing the continent’s boundaries to include the Arabian peninsula ... [T]he definition of what is African, and what it is to be African, is still more complex ... these are constructs which have been generated by European discourse and their definition ... helps to define the opposite of ‘European’, with implicit notions of civilization and sophistication equally important to this definition ... Hence, the dominant perception of Ancient Egypt, particularly in western thought, has long been ‘in Africa, but not of Africa’.

An alternative configuration of the world in Greek and Roman thought placed the Mediterranean at the centre, with the civilized peoples round its coast: “living round the sea like ants and frogs round a pond” in Plato’s famous phrase (Phaedo 109B). Hellenistic geographers from Eratosthenes onwards often saw the world beyond the Mediterranean margins as divided among the Celts in the west, the Scythians in the north, the Indians in the east, and the Libyans in the south. Here too, Egypt belongs implicitly to the inner circle of Mediterranean lands, clearly distinguished from the less well known and barbarian world of Libya, though not part of the Greek koine, at least until Alexander the Great’s conquest in 332 BC. The same geographical frame of reference, placing the Mediterranean centre stage, has been adopted by modern historians, most notably Braudel (1972) in his study of the times of Philip II of Spain in the 16th century, and by Horden and Purcell (2000) in their study of Mediterranean history in the classical and early medieval periods. It is interesting to see the part played by Egypt in these lengthy works. Egypt appears throughout Braudel’s study of the Mediterranean, but the 16th century was a time of comparative economic and political decline, and it receives less attention than other areas such as Turkey. Egypt is similarly present in Horden and Purcell’s work, but it plays a relatively minor role in comparison to Spain, Italy, Asia Minor and the Levant. Here too, Egypt seems to be geographically part of the Mediterranean world, but historically and culturally peripheral.

If Egypt’s location in the spatial ordering of the world is ambivalent, then its location on the frontiers of Asia and Africa and on the coastline of the eastern Mediterranean has played a major part in its changing historical fortunes. For more than two millennia the various kingdoms and dynasties that dominated some or all of the Nile Valley, and occasionally further afield, remained independent, but from early in the first millennium the area came increasingly under pressure from external powers in Europe and in Asia. Conquest by Assyria in 671 BC initiated a long and almost unbroken sequence of domination by foreign powers, including Achaemenid Persia (twice), Macedonia, the Roman, Byzantine, Islamic and Ottoman empires (Matthews and Roemer 2003a, b; Warburton 2003; Warburton and Matthews 2003), France and Britain – before eventual independence again in the 20th century AD. Thus, at first, Egypt was squeezed between a succession of power blocks emanating from Europe and from Asia: the dominant polities might change, but Egypt’s location at the junction of the continents, and its wealth of productive resources, made it perpetually vulnerable. Later, as European expansion led to the creation of overseas empires, Egypt’s location gave it a new, critical importance in global geopolitics, as the key to speedier communications between western Europe and India and the Far East, whether by the so-called ‘overland route’ between Alexandria and the Red Sea or later, from 1869, via the Suez Canal. Like central Asia, Egypt became a pawn in a ‘great game’ of imperial competition (Jeffreys 2003a, b). Napoleon’s invasion was designed to hinder Britain’s links with its richest possession and inevitably provoked an immediate response, resulting in naval disaster and eventual withdrawal; the Suez Canal became a major factor in the politics of the later 19th century, and as late as 1956 Britain intervened militarily in an attempt to retain control of it as a gateway to the empire east of Suez.

This chequered political history has produced a similarly complex cultural mixture in Egypt. After the millennia of political independence and autonomous cultural development, the indigenous Egyptian tradition was diverted by its incorporation into the Greek world of Alexander’s empire and its successor states (La’da 2003). The foundation of Alexandria on the Mediterranean coast was not only a symbol of the importance of the conquered territory in the Macedonian empire, but its very location represented Egypt’s reorientation towards the north and the significance of its integration into the hellenistic world. Egypt was of enormous economic and strategic importance to the Greco-Roman world, but it also had a value as the source of ancient wisdom and as a contemporary centre of scholarship. Alexandria became the leading Greek city of the eastern Mediterranean, at least up to the foundation of Constantinople, and its lighthouse and its library (Butler 2003: 260-261; El Daly, Chapter 3) were wonders of the ancient world. With the Arab conquest in 641 AD, just three centuries after its adoption of Christianity, all was changed. Egypt was incorporated into an Islamic world that included the Middle East and North Africa; though it made inroads into Europe, especially in the Balkans and in Spain, its progress there was largely blocked by the forces of Christian Europe, and it achieved greater success in its attempts to expand eastwards. Egypt reached the peak of its economic and political importance in this world under the Ayyubid and Mameluk dynasties in the 13th and 14th centuries (Abu Lughod 1989). When an Egyptian city once again played a major role as a place of world importance, it was Cairo, not Alexandria, and its importance lay not in its connections to the Mediterranean and Europe, but in its role in a network of economic and political relationships embracing the Indian Ocean, the Red Sea and the Arabian Gulf, and stretching to the east coast of Africa and the Far East (Chaudhuri 1985, 1990). Egypt was a centre of Islamic culture and scholarship, as well as of economic power.

The later centuries of Ottoman Egypt were a period of comparative decline as the Indian Ocean was increasingly penetrated by western European traders and armies. By the 18th century Egypt’s importance was for strategic reasons of communications rather than economic or cultural significance. Europe’s commercial and military power was outstripping that of the Islamic world, and the industrial revolution was creating real differences in the wealth and productive potential of nations on a scale that had simply not existed in the pre-industrial world. Though the terminology of ‘development’ and ‘under-development’ lay far in the future, Egypt was becoming a third-world country in comparison to western Europe. By the 19th century Egypt was again turning to the west, and to the United States as much as to Europe, as Mohammed Ali initiated a policy of modernization and industrialization, often at the expense of the surviving remains of Egypt’s past. Overseas trade was vital, as was the role of foreign consuls: the United States Consul, George Gliddon (Champion, Chapter 7: 168–175), came to sell industrial machinery and ended up purchasing mummies and other antiquities to supply to collectors and scholars abroad.

Where exactly was Egypt?

When Herodotus (II.15) took issue with some Ionian geographers who applied the term ‘Egypt’ only to the area of the Delta, he was implicitly recognizing the important fact that such terms are not neutral or objectively given, but culturally constructed in a specific intellectual milieu. He poked fun at them by asking where the Egyptians would have lived before the formation of the Delta, but their perception of the meaning of the name is quite understandable. In the seventh and sixth centuries BC, under the Saite rulers of the twenty-sixth Dynasty, Egypt’s political and economic centre of gravity had shifted to the Delta region and contacts with archaic Greece were expanding. The most important locations in Egypt were the cities of the Delta, such as Sais itself, or the Greek colonial enclave at Naukratis. Just as important as the political setting were the prevailing modes of representing geography in the early Greek world: one of the major genres was the periplous, or description of the coastline from the point of view of a navigator, which inevitably gave prominence to the coastal region at the expense of the hinterland. Herodotus, however, was writing in, or perhaps developing, a different mode of enquiry and was interested in a much wider range of historical and cultural evidence; he quite naturally took a broader view of what constituted Egypt, defining it in human terms as the area where Egyptians lived (Harrison 2003; Tait, Chapter 2). Although he did not define specific limits, it is clear that he regarded the core of Egypt as comprising the Nile Valley northwards from Elephantine and the First Cataract. The bulk of his Egyptian ethnography is then devoted to the area of the Nile south of the Delta; when he finally turns to the Delta and the very different life of the inhabitants of the marsh lands there (Herodotus II.92-95), his treatment is much briefer and reads like an obligatory appendix to a discussion of the real Egypt.

Most subsequent discussions of Egypt have, for the most part implicitly, followed the pattern established by Herodotus. Egypt was defined by reference to its core rather than to any borders; regardless of whatever contemporary political boundaries may have existed, that core territory was seen as the middle Nile Valley from Memphis to Aswan. The effect of this dominant representation of the whole of Egypt by a selected part has been to exclude other regions of what was once Egypt from equal consideration, and to relegate them to positions of little or no significance. Perhaps most important was the whole area of the Delta. The environment was, of course, as Herodotus had observed, completely different and monuments survived far less well there than further south, but the whole region was by its very location more outward-looking and more cosmopolitan than the more isolated and introverted valley to the south. Cities such as Naukratis, Tanis, Sais and then Alexandria, and later still Tinnis and Damietta, were all subject to influence from the Mediterranean and must have presented very different characters from those further up the Nile.

Also missing from the selective image of Egypt were the areas of desert, especially the Eastern Desert, with the mineral resources so important in the Roman period, and the Red Sea coast. The conceptual southern boundary of Egypt at Elephantine also acted to preclude any consideration of Egypt’s further expansion up the Nile, though from the time of the Old Kingdom onwards, albeit not continuously, Egyptian power had regularly extended into Nubia and in the time of Tuthmosis I reached as far as the Fifth Cataract. The significance of this geographically blinkered view of Egypt is not just that it obscures the extent of Egyptian power and authority, but it presents a partial and flawed version of the nature of Ancient Egypt. By concentrating on the cities, tombs and monuments of the Nile Valley, the military and expansionist nature of the Egyptian state is minimized. At its maximum extent, Egypt’s rule extended from the Fifth Cataract in the south to beyond the Euphrates in modern Syria, but that is not a perception that sits easily with a narrow focus on the Nile.

This geographically metonymical representation of Egypt was, of course, shaped by the survival of distinctive monuments in that region. From at least the time of Augustus, large Egyptian monuments have been exported or imitated, and the monumental architecture has become the standard iconic representation of Ancient Egypt, in particular the distinctive forms of the pyramid (Hassan 1998: 205–206; Humbert 2003) and the obelisk (Hassan 2003). Only mummies can rival these monuments as icons of Egypt (Lupton 2003). Even before Renaissance scholars turned their attention to Egyptian monuments, as recounted by Curran (Chapter 5), or travellers began to return with more reliable accounts of Egypt in the later 17th century (Haycock, Chapter 6), western Europe knew of the pyramids as distinctive features of Ancient Egypt (Burnett, Chapter 4). As graphic representations of Egyptian and Egyptianizing monuments became more common, first from Rome and later from visits to Egypt itself, so the visual imagery of Egypt as a land of monuments clustered along the Nile was created and regularly reinforced.

In the 19th century it was possible for many more ...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Title
• Copyright
• Series Editor's Foreword
• Contents
• Contributors
• List of Figures
• A note on transliteration from ancient Egyptian
• 1 Introduction: Egypt Ancient and Modern
• 2 The Wisdom of Egypt: Classical Views
• 3 Ancient Egypt in Medieval Arabic Writings
• 4 Images of Ancient Egypt in the Latin Middle Ages
• 5 The Renaissance Afterlife of Ancient Egypt (1400-1650)
• 6 Ancient Egypt in 17th and 18th Century England
• 7 Beyond Egyptology: Egypt in 19th and 20th Century Archaeology and Anthropology
• References
• Index