Apartheid

223
Manetho’s account. 501
From Manetho onwards, the Greeks in the Museum seem to have been indifferent
towards or even ignorant of Egyptian culture and Egyptian people. The poets and scientists
seem to have had less contact with the Egyptians than any other Greeks in the country,
possibly even including the royal family, who were, to put it mildly, out of touch with
Egyptians. The first Macedonian regent to learn the Egyptian language, the indigenous
language and the language of the vast majority of the population, was Cleopatra VII, who was
the last Ptolemy. On the other hand, she seems to have been quite a talented linguist. She
spoke at least nine languages fluently. By that time her family had lived in and ruled the
country for three centuries. 502
The extravagant and ostentatious 503 Ptolemaic kings are famous for trying to acquire
every existing book in the world for their Museum, but that was not really the case:
The library was essentially a collection of Greek literature. . . [and
despite some doubtful ancient testimony to the contrary] we may
suspect that the works in the library translated from other languages
were in fact comparatively few. The whole surviving body of Greek
and Latin literature includes only a handful of translations from one of
these languages into the other, and translations from other languages
may have been rarer still. 504
The only ones that really mattered to the Ptolemaic rulers and scholars were apparently
Greek books. And they mattered immensely to Greek elite society. With typical Anglo-Saxon
understatement Lewis remarks that a payment of 448 drachmas to a reciter of Homer recorded
on a papyrus in Egypt is ‘impressive’, especially when compared to the wages of skilled
laborers at the time, which amounted to four drachmas a day. 505
The translations of foreign language texts, on the other hand, were mainly restricted to
technical texts. This goes for the whole Greek-speaking world during the Hellenistic Age:
501
Verbrugghe & Wickersham: Berossos and Manetho, Introduced and Translated: Native Traditions in Ancient
Mesopotamia and Egypt, 2000 (1996): 8, 98ff, quote: 102. According to Clauss 2003: 176f, the poet, Pancrates,
who was made member of the Museum through personal intervention by Emperor Hadrian in 124 CE, was an
Egyptian. On the practically and/or theoretically eurocentric disregard of pre-Greek, mainly Egyptian and
Mesopotamian, contributions to the development of the sciences, see Pingree: Hellenophilia versus the History
of Science, 1992: 554-563; Bernal: Animadversions on the Origins of Western Science, 1992: 596-607;
Assmann: Hellas, Hellas über alles, 1995.
502 4
Huß 2001: 318f; Walbank 1994 (1981): 123, 181ff, Weber 1993: 74ff. An instructive comparison with a
vastly different development from a similar premise could be drawn here with the Bernadotte family, which
occupies the throne of Sweden since the Napoleonic wars. The first Bernadotte, Karl XIV Gustaf, originally Jean
Baptiste Jules Bernadotte, never learned Swedish and remained very much disliked by the people subjected to his
rule. His son, however, and all further heirs, made Swedish the first language of the royal court, although French
was initially still the language of the Swedish upper classes, and they were no doubt less unpopular among their
subjects as a result of that. In England, foreign kings, such as William the Conqueror or George I, did not learn
the indigenous language either, but, again, their immediate descendants did, as opposed to the Greeks in Egypt.
Only if the present Queen of England knew no English and all her predecessors since George I at the beginning
of the 18 th century spoke German, but no English, would the situation in Egypt under Ptolemaic rule have been
reflected by England today.
503
The many festivals and parades in Alexandria were basically tributes to the heroism and conquests of the
Greeks, i.e. self-celebratory affairs. An article on the subject ends with the words: ‘...the generosity and thus
expense involved redeems a certain nouveau riche attitude which the Ptolemies had inherited from Alexander,
but outside of this stood the indigenous population.’ Goukowsky: The Pomp of the Ptolemies, 2000 (1992): 140,
quote, 147. One might add that the indigenous were not only excluded from, but also humiliated by these
celebrations of Greek excellence, as they typically included bombastic victory parades through the city, to be
watched by one and all. See also Lewis, N. 1983: 39; Clauss 2003: 76ff.
504
Barnes: Cloistered Bookworms in the Chicken-coop of the Muses: The Ancient Library of Alexandria, 2002:
67
505
Lewis, N. 1983: 61