Apartheid

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through to the Third Intermediate Period, written in hieroglyphics or
hieratic, was no longer being copied and was not even, so to speak,
brought up to date. . . Thus, the literary output of over two thousand
years was not preserved…under the Greeks, Romans, and Byzantines,
pagan or Christian. 615
Despite the many momentous changes that took place during the apartheid millennium
in Egypt: Greek invasion and establishment of apartheid, Roman rule superseding Greek rule,
Constantinople superseding Rome, state-imposed syncretistic religion superseding the
Egyptian religion and Christianity superseding all Paganisms, there was remarkable continuity
in the gradual deterioration and destruction of the indigenous culture and civilization, and also
in the identity of the dominant ethnicity. Religion was extremely important during this time,
but on the whole it still does not seem to have been as important as ethnicism was.
Among Egyptian cultural traits only the Egyptian religion, minus the religious texts,
was not downplayed, repressed or destroyed by the Greeks or the early Romans. Several
Ptolemaic rulers emphasized in official texts that they had ‘brought the stolen images of the
Gods back to Egypt’. This referred to the earlier occupations of Egypt by Assyrians and
Persians, who were spuriously accused by the Greeks of stealing or destroying Egyptian
sacred objects. It also echoed indigenous Egyptian legends of a Messianic nature. The only
difference was that the Messianic king that the Egyptians were waiting for was Egyptian, not
Greek, nor anything else. Put in a more modern way: the Ptolemies invested heavily in
religious practice and theory, which became one of the main battlefields in its apartheid war
on Egypt. According to Frank Walbank, one of the main contemporary authorities on the
Ptolemaic era, it was a ‘…system of cultural and religious apartheid by which the Macedonian
conquerors…sought to solve the problem of governing two races, radically different but living
perforce side by side.’ 616
The much-celebrated ‘cosmopolitanism’ of the Hellenistic Age, i.e. the time of Greek
dominance after Alexander, and of its cultural capital, Alexandria, has gone a very long way
towards misrepresenting the period. In fact, the one thousand years preceding the Macedonian
invasion: the Egyptian New Kingdom, Late and Persian Periods, were almost certainly more
cosmopolitan – in the sense of cultural diversity as well as intercultural tolerance within Egypt
– than the Ptolemaic and Roman millennium of oppressive ethnicist rule was, despite the long
periods of Assyrians’, Persians’, and other colonial invaders’ rule during that millennium. 617
The Stoic philosophers, especially the Cypriot-Phoenician founder of the movement,
Zenon of Kition, were indeed cosmopolitan, arguing for laws that should apply to everyone in
the whole world without distinction, that slavery should be abolished and even that everyone
should wear the same clothes. But these ideas had no influence on any powerful decisionmakers.
The Stoic cosmopolitan philosophy, important though it is for the history of ideas,
remained a utopian vision, far removed from the political realities of the time. And, as we
already remarked, the philosophical ideas of the time were otherwise remarkably unworldly
and apolitical. 618 The Epicureans, who were a great deal more successful than the Stoics in
influencing people, were convinced that only Greek-speakers were capable of wisdom, and
that the gods only spoke Greek. This is not readily deducible from an anthropologically
primary ethnocentrism, in which many commentators today believe, since Xenophanes, the
great Eleatic philosopher, of whom the Epicureans were almost certainly aware, had critically
615 Verbrugghe & Wickersham 2000 (1996): 7
616 Walbank in Bulloch et al. (eds.) 1994: 121; Assmann 1996: 424
617 Ray: Literacy and Language in the Late and Persian Periods, 1994: 51
618 Tzermias 1998: 187ff. According to one ancient source, cited by Diogenes Laertius, one of the most
authoritative ancient historians of philosophy, the founder of the Stoic school, Zenon, was dark-skinned and of
Egyptian descent, although he was raised in Kition, a Cypriot Greek city with many Phoenician settlers. Laertios:
Leben und Lehre der Philosophen, Book 7, § 1, 296. See also Löwstedt: World Citizenship, 2003