Apartheid

162
it is natural to suppose that he did.’ 310
In order to accomplish all of this, the Macedonian rulers required more than just
military and political administration personnel, which was how the Persians, and the
Assyrians before them, had ruled Egypt colonially (or as a province) during the previous
centuries. 311 The Macedonians now also brought about massive immigration by Greek civilian
settlers, an entire commercial class as well as an aristocratic or potentially aristocratic class of
landowners.
The coming of the Greeks created, in effect, a social revolution,
overlaying Egyptian society with a new dominant elite. Through the
first century of Ptolemaic rule Greek immigration continued on a large
scale – from mainland Greece, Macedonia, Thrace, the Aegean
islands, the Greek cities of Asia Minor – a heavy concentration in
Alexandria, but also penetrating all parts of the Nile valley. In their
wake came others too, even the odd Roman, but most conspicuously,
in the middle of the second century BC, great numbers of Jews.
Numerically, of course, the Egyptians remained far superior to the
aggregate of all these immigrants... 312
Many of the Jews in Egypt were mercenaries in the service of the Macedonian king.
Jewish mercenaries in fact had already served in large numbers in the Persian occupation of
Egypt, and it is possible that some simply switched sides following the Greek takeover and
then stayed on in Egypt. A sizeable civilian Jewish population also developed in Ptolemaic
Egypt, especially in Alexandria, and it became the third largest ethnic group, in a middle
position of the ethnic hierarchy, 313 very much like the Asian and Colored groups in South
Africa or the non-Semitic Asian groups in modern Israel.
There is some evidence to suggest that the Macedonian rulers even intended to
establish a biological race of dominators like the South African and Israeli apartheid elites
were to do in their societies. The choices in ethnicity of mercenaries, in as far as they were
choices, provide us with one clue to this end. During the height of Ptolemaic power, in the
third century BCE, the Alexandrian garrison probably consisted mostly of mercenaries from
Gaul, i.e. from Europe north and northwest of Greece, as well as from Crete. In fact, the
mercenaries mostly seem to have come from the north, in any case from outside Africa. Once
an ethnicist system of domination has been set up, it makes much sense for the elites to ensure
that the ethnic classes do have different appearances: ‘…to a superficial observer the
difference between native and Greek (that is, ‘Alexandrian’ as a general term) held good’. 314
And a superficial (as well as largely false) view of cultural and biological differences is
exactly what ethnicism is.
Secondly, slavery in Greek-ruled Egypt was ethnicist in kind, too. A Ptolemaic royal
edict from 180 BCE states that slaves ‘…are to be registered at or before the age of fifteen,
with the names of their mothers.’ Many slaves were fathered by the slave-owners, and they
310
Fraser: Cities of Alexander the Great, 1996: 174, 175
311
Assmann 1996: 462
312
Bowman 1996 (1986): 122. During the second century BCE, at the height of power of the Ptolemaic state, the
historian Polybius complains that Greek men in general are increasingly becoming childless, and of Greek
population shortage. He puts this down to men‘s refusal to marry and the use of infanticide (see more on this
below). Walbank 3 1992 (1981): 165f. Is Polybius implying that Greek women are being impregnated by (non-
Greek) male slaves and servants? If so, why? According to Aristotle’s pseudo-biology, very much the fashion in
Polybius’ time, men are active contributors to conception, women merely passive. The complaint about Greek
males’ childlessness could thus both be what it appears to be as well as an elite attempt to sow xenophobic
suspicion and even paranoia in Greek male minds.
313
Koch 1993: 488; Bowman 1996 (1986): 123
314
Fraser 1972: 81. More on the occasional symptoms of biological racism among classic-era and late-antiquity
Greeks in Section II.9.1, below.