Apartheid

177
entailed by this system of citizenship is unmistakable, and it rhymes well with what was
pointed out about the racist system of slavery in the service of apartheid repopulation in the
previous section.
There would have been some dangers of those traditions [‘Hellenic
traditions’] being contaminated, if the citizenship had been made too
easy for natives and [non-Greek] foreigners to acquire. There were
indeed cases of naturalization, but the new citizens were usually
chosen in Hellenic circles. They were sometimes soldiers from the
regular army, which had preserved its Macedonian and Greek
character. Moreover, the statutes of the cities placed obstacles in the
way of mixed marriages, doubtless because they would have
diminished the purity of the blood. The charter of Naucratis refused to
recognize marriages between citizens and natives as lawful. . . Was it
different in Alexandria? It seems that great importance was attached to
purity of the race, since the citizenship was refused to the illegitimate
son of a citizen, and in the Roman period Alexandria certainly did not
have connubium with the Egyptians... 359
The Roman system of citizenship at first sharpened the racism and classism of the
Greek one: ‘All in all, a system of civic privilege and obligation tied to birth and wealth...The
right to enter this order depended on the ability to show Greek ancestry on both maternal and
paternal sides...’ 360 Thus, the Romans favored the Greeks in the same way that the British
would the Dutch and other Whites in South Africa.
Of course, there was now a new and even more superior kind of citizenship than the
Greek one. Yet, slowly but surely Roman citizenship became more inclusive. The last to
benefit, however, were the Egyptians applying for Roman citizenship. Few in numbers, they
even had to attain Greek citizenship before they could apply for the Roman one. According to
one ancient source, the Egyptians were the only ‘aliens’ (i.e. non-Greeks and non-Romans) in
Egypt who had to go through this lengthy and expensive procedure. The number of Egyptians
with either Greek or Roman citizenship at any time during the first half of Egypt’s apartheid
millennium must have been minuscule, if not even at times zero. Thus, the essential paradox
and untenable characteristic of apartheid is starkly revealed; the most indigenous people are
the most alien, and the more indigenous you are, the more alien you are.
Then, in 212 CE, Emperor Caracalla granted Roman citizenship to almost all of the
free (i.e. non-slave) inhabitants of the empire. From now on, the formal line of class division
was between honestiores and humiliores, the upper and the lower classes, which also,
however, maintained the privileges of birth and wealth. 361
Egyptians were thus still discriminated against, but it is hard to say how badly they
fared on an ideal overall scale of oppression. Perhaps their lot could best be compared with
that of Blacks after having been freed from slavery in the USA in 1865, or with that of Blacks
in South Africa since 1994, or with that of Palestinians who are formally under Palestinian
Authority rule since 1995.
The ethnic lines of separation were in any case blurred considerably in law. Egypt, at
least Roman-ruled Egypt, therefore went through the opposite process as compared with
South Africa: from being an apartheid society by law into becoming one mainly in practice.
(If, on the other hand, South Africa had remained a British colony until the introduction of
democracy in 1994, like almost all other British colonies in Africa, it would have mirrored
359
Jouguet: Macedonian Imperialism and the Hellenization of the East, 1996 (1928): 323
360
Bowman 1996 (1986): 126
361
Ibid: 127f. Just like the elite Jews in modern Israel 2000 years later, the Romans in Egypt prohibited
indigenous people from doing military service up until Caracalla’s reign. See Lewis, N. 1983: 20.