Apartheid

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The responsibility for the demise of Egyptian writing must therefore be partly
shouldered by some of the Egyptians themselves, namely, by the priests who played a part in
effecting the inflation of symbols and cryptography. It made the writing, and the reading,
more and more esoteric. Yet, I find this would not have happened if it had not been for the
Greek (and Roman) apartheid system, which first put the language and the priests under such
immense pressure.
It has been argued in the recent past that the Egyptians took over the Greek language
because their own writing system was so complicated, whereas the Greek alphabetic system
was much simpler. However, the scholar, Dorothy Thompson, accuses this line of thought of
perpetuating a kind of eurocentrism. Her counter-example is Japanese, for which a knowledge
of no less than 8,800 characters is needed in order to read and understand a newspaper.
Literacy in Japan today is 99 per cent, which she compares with literacy in the USA, which is
only 96 per cent, despite its use of a script with only 26 different characters. Thompson
plausibly thus concludes that Egyptian scripts were replaced by the Greek alphabet (and the
Egyptian by the Greek language) mainly because of political pressures from the Greek
elites. 552
Due to Egypt having been phonographically literate since nearly 3,000 years before
the coming of the Greeks, and for well over 2,000 years before the Greeks themselves first
became phonographically literate, we seem to have a more important difference between
Graeco-Roman Egypt and White-ruled South Africa, (which only ever had European
languages as official languages). Although most surviving documents from the entire Graeco-
Roman period are in Greek, there were also official documents written in Egyptian (in the socalled
Demotic script) throughout the Ptolemaic period. Coptic was also used later, though
almost exclusively in Church matters. 553 As we saw in the previous section, however, the
Greeks in Egypt, at least sometimes, did not consider Egyptian writing as writing, but
apparently as some kind of illiterate activity. I will return to the role of literacy at the end of
this section.
Similarly, the Greeks were astoundingly ignorant, not only of ‘foreign’ languages, but
also of multi-lingualism. The famous and well-travelled Galen, a very important figure in the
history of medicine, wrote: ‘In ancient times there was a man who spoke two languages, that
was a miracle: a man who understood and fluently spoke two languages.’ And he apparently
meant what he was writing! 554
Despite this strange lack of knowledge of linguistic matters, the Greek elites – in the
words of scholar Simon Swain – displayed an ‘obsession with language’. 555 The resolution to
this apparent paradox lies in the power of language as a tool for ethnicism, i.e. its use as an
instrument of power and as a symbol of status. That is what the obsession was all about.
The Greek scholars of Alexandria made sure that school grammars were generally to
be learned and used by a literate and Greek elite. For any of the very few outsiders let into the
educated elites, it was necessary to be steeped in Greek culture, language and ideals. But even
that was not sufficient. One also had to know an already ancient Greek culture and an ancient
Greek language, which up until this point in time had not been spoken for centuries.
The grammars which they analyse and present in running lists is not
that of any spoken form of Greek, but the normative grammar of
classic literary Attic, including forms such as the dual [beside singular
and plural], which were long obsolete in the koine [the standard or
common Greek, used around the eastern Mediterranean at the time]. . .
all Greek tabular grammars are of classical literary Attic. Grammar
552 Thompson 1994: 78
553 Bowman 1996 (1986): 158
554 Quoted in Werner 1992: 12
555 Swain: Hellenism and Empire: Language, Classicism and Power in the Greek World AD 50-250, 1996: 7