Apartheid

250
technological superiority over the Egyptians and the neighboring states. 605
Indeed, throughout the country, ‘…to judge by the evidence of surviving inscriptions,
the Ptolemies did not demand from the Greeks the full ruler-cult which they…received from
the Egyptians…’ 606 It is hard to imagine how the Egyptians could have given the rulers that
cult freely.
It seems, however, that the Egyptians, at least in Alexandria, did not care much for the
state-imposed cult of Sarapis, at least not until the beginning of Roman rule, but then it was no
longer state-imposed. 607 Under Greek rule, though, it appears to have been perceived as a
chore more than anything else. The Greeks had been very clever at imposing ideology and desecularization,
but, although already hundreds of years old, the craft of getting people hooked
on this opium was still in its infancy, and many Egyptians are sure to have seen through much
of what the Greeks were attempting to accomplish and why.
At the end of the 800-year period of the ancient Egyptian religion under European
rule, it was hardly recognizable as Egyptian religion any more. The Greek and Roman
oppressors had worked hard to make Egyptians feel that their gods had abandoned them. It is
no wonder that the Egyptians, and neither the Greeks nor the Romans nor the Jews, were the
first people in Egypt to turn for salvation to Christianity in great numbers. 608
A fairly certain indication that the Pagan Egyptian priests were the indigenous class
most favored by Greeks and Romans, or more accurately, the least oppressed class, is the fact
that they were the last ancient Egyptians to hold any titles to their names. In Dynastic times,
the priests had been a mere professional group of officials and workers among others. Only
under European rule, when all officials had become Greek and later also Roman, did Egyptian
priests become a class of their own, with rigorously circumscribed rights and duties. 609
Religion as superstition and escapism (there are of course many other aspects of
religion) and other, similar phenomena, such as divination, alchemy, dream interpretation,
magic, demonolatry, exorcism, and astrology, were thus encouraged, even created, and they
experienced an enduring surge of popularity in Graeco-Roman Egypt. This was when Egypt
became the center of the occult, a reputation that has been found difficult to shake off.
Astrology, which has been called ‘the most comprehensive scientific theory of
antiquity’ by David Pingree, a leading contemporary historian of ancient science, consisted of
‘advanced Babylonian celestial divination’ (a Greek import to Egypt from western Asia),
‘Aristotelian physics’, and ‘Hellenistic astronomy’, and it was created in Egypt in the second
century BCE, that is, under Ptolemaic rule. 610 Due to hellenophilia in the popular modern
consciousness, we are not used to consider the Greeks as anything else than rational
contributors to the history of science. Of course, they did make invaluable contributions, but
the largest Greek scientific effort was no doubt astrology, which is in my view a scientifically
worthless effort, or nearly so. And the reason it was such a big effort is the same as the reason
605
Quote from Fraser 1972: 27. See also Hellström 1997: 23; Clauss 2003: 13, 28, 94f.
606
Fraser 1972: 115f
607
Ibid: 273
608
Koch 1993: 623ff. Moreover, Naphtali Lewis 1983: 101 makes the ‘generally accomodating attitude of the
[Egyptian] population in matters of religion’ responsible for allowing Christianity a strong, early foothold in
Egypt, without which it might not even have survived outside Palestine.
609
Quirke: Altägyptische Religion, 1996 (1992): 143; Koch 1993: 497
610
Pingree 1992: 560. See also Koch 1993: 519ff and the references in footnote 40, above. A further aspect of
continuous de-secularization was the transformation of medicine, which had been virtually free of magic during
the Old and Middle Kingdoms, but from the time of the New Kingdom, from 1550 BCE onwards, it increasingly
developed magical techniques for healing until magical medicine finally became dominant. See Westendorf:
Erwachen der Heilkunst, Die Medizin im Alten Ägypten, 1992: 19; Theurl: Staat und Gesundheitswesen:
Analyse historischer Fallbeispiele aus der Sicht der neuen institutionellen Ökonomik, 1996: 164f. More recently,
Assmann described the de-secularization of Egypt as the ‘process of increased religious determination’,
observable in ‘the areas of wisdom literature, the concept of history, and the interpretation of everyday
experience.’ He also goes on to describe the de-secularization of medicine as an example from the lastmentioned
realm. Assmann: The Search for God in Ancient Egypt, 2001 (1984): 2f