Apartheid

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behind nuclear physics being such a great scientific effort, possibly the greatest, during the
20 th century CE: the reason is and was political, more specifically, the production of weapons,
physical and ideological.
Similarly, the Museum was ultimately under royal, i.e. political, authority, but second
in line was a religious authority: ‘It remained a cult centre, directed by a priest. If the principal
shrine of Apollo was Delphi, and that of Zeus, Olympus, then surely the shrine of the Muses
would be Alexandria.’ 611
The de-secularization of society went on almost unabated for the rest of the period
under consideration, although the number of gods was curtailed and other religious aspects
altered dramatically with the rise of Christianity. The weapons of mass distraction remained
the same: ‘The Alexandrian mob of the Byzantine period found its opiate not only in chariot
races but in popular Christianity and it would pack the great churches...’ 612
The Greeks even had an ideology for imposing ideology in this manner. Isocrates,
mentioned above, who was a contemporary of Plato’s, wrote that religion was good in order to
keep the masses in fear, to make them respect the law and the stability of the state. 613 With
this kind of meta-ideology, the Greek elites did not even need to feel cynical or hypocritical
about their use of religion. It simply fulfilled a practical purpose.
As we have now seen, the continuous de-secularization of Egypt took place in the
(perceived) interest of the occupiers, and important secular aspects of ancient Egyptian
culture, such as its own phonographic script, philosophy, science, medicine, and several forms
of art, appear to have been downplayed and even repressed by the ruling and the intellectual
classes in order to ‘prove’ the inferiority of Egyptians as compared to Greeks, and later also to
Romans. The open and tolerant character of ancient Egyptian culture, e.g. the fact that it did
not have any holy texts, made it all the more vulnerable to surreptitious meddling by elites.
(This could have been a factor involved in the considerably younger, and ultimately victorious
religions of this region – Judaism, Christianity, and Islam – making sure that their ‘Word of
God’ was to remain immutable.) Over the decades and centuries, the Greek and Roman elites
were able to make ancient Egyptian culture, especially the religion, stand for almost whatever
they wanted, for whatever their needs were at that moment.
If the Egyptian form of writing, the so-called hieroglyphic writing, was not
disqualified out of hand, it was downgraded, among others by the famous 3 rd century Neo-
Platonic Alexandrian philosopher, Plotinus, to mere pictographic or conventional signs (as
opposed to phonographic, which most of them really are). In a typically de-secularizing twist,
he contended that the Gods understood the signs, but the latter lacked logical and causal
stringency. 614
Today, it is often reiterated that ‘western’ science and civilization rediscovered and
deciphered Egyptian writing, but it is seldom remembered or mentioned in this context that
the most celebrated roots of that very same civilization were ultimately responsible for
destroying the ancient Egyptian culture in the first place.
During the Greek, Roman, and Byzantine rule of Egypt, the religious,
philosophical and historical material of Egypt from the Old Kingdom
611 MacLeod 2002: 4
612 Bowman 1996 (1986): 217
613 Assmann 2000: 47f. Interestingly, Isocrates attributes (‘transfers’ in Assmann’s rendition) this meta-ideology
to the Egyptian elite using it on its own people. (Isocrates lived decades before Alexander’s conquest of Egypt.)
In the same manner, the Greeks took over different kinds of magic techniques – designed to ward off harm
defensively – from Asia, but they would turn them into offensive techniques and incorrectly as well as unjustly
attribute the offensive uses to the Asians. See Trampedach 1996. On an optimistically gauged, emancipatory use
of ‘meta-ideologizing’ in totally different contexts, see Sandoval 2000: 107ff.
614 Plotinus: The Enneades, V,8,5,19 and V,8,6,11, quoted in Assmann 2000: 68, and further Löwstedt 1995:
143ff. See also Chapters II.7.1 and 8.1 above for the Greek bureaucratic denial of the status of Egyptian writing
as writing.