Apartheid

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knowledge and practices of reading and writing. 107
Egypt was added fairly peacefully to the Macedonian-Greek Empire in 332 BCE by
Alexander (‘the Great’) of Macedonia and his Macedonian and Greek forces. The ancient
Macedonians were a Greek-speaking people who neighbored the Greeks to the north and were
often, but far from always, considered ‘Greek’. I will mostly refer to the Greeks and
Macedonians together as ‘Greeks’. There was never any serious conflict between them in
Egypt.
At first, the Greeks were widely seen by the Egyptians as liberators, casting off the
yoke of Persian occupying forces who had ruled Egypt as a province of their empire, with
intervals, since 525. Persian dominance and oppression in Egypt had been of an unequivocally
colonial or provincial kind, with the Persian military and administrative staff usually kept at
minimum strength. Combined, this vulnerability of the Persians in numbers, their recent
history of exploitation and subjugation of the indigenous people, and the alliance of the
powerful Greeks with the Egyptians, led to many native uprisings against Persian rule, further
resulting in brutal retribution and oppression. The Greeks had been anti-Persian for as long as
anyone could remember, and Greek mercenaries greatly assisted Egyptian rulers in liberation
wars against the Persians. But Alexander’s invasion was the first time that Greeks themselves
assumed power over Egypt. Alexander had himself proclaimed son of Amun – one of the
highest-ranking gods in Egypt – and divine ruler over Egypt by Egyptian priests. He then
moved on to conquer elsewhere. He only returned to Egypt as a corpse after his Asian
adventures, to be buried and worshipped there.
After the death of Alexander in 323, his empire split into parts, the most prized one
being Egypt. One of his top generals, Ptolemy, a Macedonian like Alexander, instated himself
as god-king, a divine ruler, over Egypt and in one stroke declared all the land to be crown
land. His dynasty, the Ptolemies, then ruled the country without any major interruptions until
30 BCE – lasting longer than any other dynasty of the Greek-led kingdoms during this time,
the so-called ‘Hellenistic’ era. Indeed, some present-day commentators do not wish to refer to
Prolemaic Egypt as a kingdom, but only as an ‘Empire’. The Ptolemaic period manifests both
material wealth and political as well as military power that were at times unrivalled in the
world. The other Macedonian generals and their descendants were not as successful as the
Ptolemies. Alexandria, the new capital of Egypt, was founded by Alexander himself and was
the largest and most important city in the world during the last three centuries before the
Christian era. Ptolemy made sure that Alexander was buried there and deified him and created
religious cults around Alexander’s and his own alleged divinity. Only towards the end of this
period was Egypt gradually eclipsed by the rising power of Rome, which developed from a
republic into the Roman Empire once Egypt had been conquered by Octavian, who then
became the first Roman emperor, now calling himself Augustus. Ptolemaic Egypt has been
characterized as ‘the most exploitative of all known systems of oppression throughout
antiquity’. 108 The economic elite that profited from the exploitation was almost identical with
the political, military and social elite, i.e. the ethnic elite.
In public life the Greeks and Macedonians formed the ruling class.
They were a closed circle to which natives gained access only
gradually and in very small numbers – and then usually only by the
107 Bowman: Egypt after the Pharaohs, 1996 (1986): 7; Lewis, N.: Life in Egypt under Roman Rule, 1983: 1ff.
108 Koch: Geschichte der ägyptischen Religion, 1993: 488. Through war, military aggression and diplomacy, the
Ptolemies established colonies and controlled territories to the west, north, and east: in Cyrene (in present-day
Libya), in Cyprus, in much of the Aegean, in parts of the Greek mainland and Asia Minor, in Palestine, Syria,
Lebanon, Jordan and elsewhere. Neither they nor their Roman successors, however, were ever able to defeat and
conquer their southern neighbors in Kush and Meroe (in present-day Sudan). Bowman 1996 (1986): 27ff; Hölbl:
A History of the Ptolemaic Empire, 2001 (1994): 304ff. See also Huß 2001: 33ff