Apartheid

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separate quarters for Greeks of different origins. The impoverished Egyptian quarter of
Rhakotis was situated at the south-western end of the city, not unlike Soweto – an
abbreviation for South West Township – in, or rather outside Johannesburg, a perversely
populated city with one million inhabitants and three million in its main black suburb.
Rhakotis was also the part of the city that was farthest away from the coast, i.e. from the
center of commerce and trade, the harbor. In this regard, as in so many others, it is like the
Black and Colored townships of Cape Town or the poor Black and Latino quarters of the large
coastal cities in another country with oppressive ethnicist segregation, i.e. New York (Harlem
and the Bronx), Chicago (South Side) and Los Angeles (East LA and South Central). They are
all safely away from the coast. The widest street in Alexandria, 14 meters wide, separated the
ethnic communities as a demarcation line, similar to the current ‘Apartheid Wall’ in Jerusalem
(see Chapter II.6.3, below). The Egyptians in the southwest were kept at a maximum distance
from the royal palace and from the rest of the Greeks in the northeast. And they were kept
separated from the Jews, who lived in the east of the city. 390
Just as in apartheid South Africa, or in the Israeli-occupied Palestinian territories, the
rural population in apartheid Egypt was driven to find work in the cities. When the tax burden
became unbearable, the peasants would try their luck there. However, Ptolemy VI introduced
a measure that would become a notorious, and indeed a hated symbol of apartheid in South
Africa, two millennia later. Peasants were only allowed into cities for 20 days. If they became
involved in a court case during their stay in the city, Ptolemy decreed, the case would have to
be concluded within five days. Moreover, judges were to oversee and further limit and
regulate urbanization by administrative means, so that a sufficient number of peasants stayed
in the countryside to work the land. 391
Throughout the period and throughout the land, soldiers also seem to have been a
constant nuisance to the indigenous. Aside from their main function in rural areas as a kind of
feudal lord, they would simply confiscate and rearrange a house or parts of it whenever they
saw fit and usually did not bother to reinstate its original arrangement once they were ready to
leave, if they ever did leave. No form of compensation was ever paid to the Egyptians who
suffered from this practice, which would sometimes also involve acts of physical violence
against the original inhabitants.
None of this was due to lawlessness but to a decree granting the soldiers these extreme
freedoms. The law was introduced by one of the first two Ptolemies, who felt insecure about
relying militarily on short-term contract mercenaries, as all rulers of Egypt – indigenous or not
– had done since the 9 th century BCE. With this new decree, however, there would be many
soldiers who stayed in service longer, and the amount of soldiers who stayed for good also
increased. In addition, as the profession increasingly became hereditary, the mercenaries
would gradually turn into a caste of aristocrats and landlords, largely loyal to the royals. 392
390 Haas 1997: 2, 49, 165; Clauss 2003: 25. Alston states that during Roman times ‘...there is no evidence to
suggest any notable division of areas between ethnic groups.’ Alston 2002: 153. His only positive example of
mixing, however, is in a residential area which ‘appears’ to have been shared by Greeks and Egyptian priests
(ibid.), who, as we know, made up the only privileged indigenous group under Greek and Roman rule. It can
hardly be said to be a good argument for his hypothesis. Moreover, Alston almost contradicts himself by later
stating that ‘There is some reason to believe that there was a measure of ethnic segregation in the cities of
Roman Egypt.’ He then, however, dismisses it as a survival from Ptolemaic times, which only further begs the
question (ibid: 172). In 262 CE, during a nearly full-blown civil war between the Egyptian south of Alexandria
and the Greek north, the main street was referred to as more difficult to cross than the Sinai desert (Clauss 2003:
209f.) On oppressive, ethnicist, residential segregation in US cities and an apparently unheeded warning of the
subsequent LA riots, see Hamilton: Apartheid in an American City: The Case of the Black Community in Los
Angeles, 1987.
391 Huß 2001: 594
392 Walbank 3 1992 (1981): 116f; Blomqvist 1997: 63f. A close parallel to this practice can be seen today in the
Israeli army requisitioning, i.e. occupation, of civilian Palestinian houses on nominally Palestinian land. When
their military use, if any, is no longer required, they are often left littered and partly damaged by the soldiers, for
no apparent reason, and with no compensation or apology offered. Moreover, moveable, valuable Palestinian