Apartheid

difficult method of turning themselves culturally into Greeks. 109
In terms of formal political rule, the Ptolemaic state was something in between an
absolute monarchy and a military dictatorship, 110 but there was also a small free space for
well-off and educated Greek men, which could perhaps even be described as an open
society. 111 Similarly, the South African and Israeli apartheid societies would later introduce
‘democracy’ at several levels, but mainly or only for the benefit of members of the dominant
ethnicity.
In the rigid, multi-layered class society of Ptolemaic Egypt, privilege was based
mainly on ethnicity. 112 Just like in South Africa and Israel, immigration from the European
mother countries was encouraged and subsidized by the Greek-led state. There were some
poor Greeks too, similar to the white underclass in South Africa or to the Ethiopian and
Sephardic Jews in present-day Israel.
A minor difference to modern South Africa was constituted by the fact that the Greeks
did allow more – though still only very few – exceptions to their version of apartheid.
Nonetheless, contacts between the physically segregated ethnic groups were regulated and
controlled. 113 And the South Africans also seem to have been compelled to come up with
exceptions to almost all of their discriminatory regulations, barring the right to vote, which
remained an exclusive white privilege between 1910 and 1983, and a non-black privilege until
1994. The few Egyptians who enjoyed exceptional status, e.g. those who made careers under
the Ptolemies, were already assimilated, i.e. ‘de-egyptianized’, to a great extent. As implied in
the quote above, they used the Greek language instead of Egyptian, and many of them even
took Greek names. 114 Visible differences between Greeks and Egyptians were of course not as
great as those between Blacks and Whites in South Africa, and that made apartheid a slightly
more pliable and flexible system in Egypt. Yet, this made no difference for the vast majority
of the inhabitants.
Though later...a certain degree of low-level acculturation took place,
in the fourth and third centuries imperial racism was rampant among
109 3
Walbank: The Hellenistic World, 1992 (1981): 65
110
Weber: Dichtung und höfische Gesellschaft: Die Rezeption von Zeitgeschichte am Hof der ersten drei
Ptolemäer, 1993: 4, 23f
111 3
Walbank 1992 (1981): 176ff. As we shall see, the open character of male Greek society in Egypt is paralleled
in much of male white South Africa as well as in much of present-day male Jewish Israel.
112
Weber 1993: 22ff
113
Weber 1993: 78, 154. One of the earliest proponents of the idea of Graeco-Roman Egypt as an apartheid
society was a classical archaeologist at the University of the Witwatersrand in Johannesburg, South Africa –
Davis, S.: Race-Relations in Ancient Egypt: Greek, Egyptian, Hebrew, Roman, 1951: esp. 41ff. The idea slowly
gained ground during the rest of the century and has now become a ‘new orthodoxy’ according to Bagnall: Egypt
in Late Antiquity, 1993: 231. Bagnall – who strangely uses the word ‘juxtaposition’ instead of ‘segregation’,
‘discriminatory segregation’ or ‘apartheid’ in this context – is apparently unhappy with this new dominant view.
In the same vein as Bagnall, Goudriaan: Ethnicity in Ptolemaic Egypt, 1988, states “there was no ‘apartheid’ in
Ptolemaic Egypt”, referring to his contention that we do not know of any Ptolemaic laws of oppressive
segregation, although he has some doubts as well and definitely considers early Roman Egypt an apartheid
society, ibid: Preface and 119. In fact, we do know of a law prohibiting interethnic marriage in at least one city
under Ptolemaic rule already (see references in footnote 116), and I also intend to show in this investigation that
all the phenomena that make up apartheid in my wide sense were present throughout the Graeco-Roman period.
Apartheid in the narrow sense, South Africa 1948-94, was of course independent and thus more like Egypt under
Greek than under Roman rule.
114
‘Any Egyptian who wanted to get anywhere under the Ptolemies had to speak and preferably also write koine
Greek.’ (Koine Greek was the lingua franca that was used around the Eastern Mediterranean at the time.) Green:
Alexander to Actium: The Historical Evolution of the Hellenistic Age, 1990: 313; see also Weber 1993: 388ff;
Huß 2001: 663; Walbank 3 1992: 117. Similarly, Non-whites in South Africa took on English and Afrikaner
names, and hundreds of Palestinian (Arab) citizens of Israel have now also started to take Hebrew names. See
footnote 571, below.
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