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  • Egypt and the Limits of Hellenism. by Ian S. Moyer
  • Susan A. Stephens
Ian S. Moyer. Egypt and the Limits of Hellenism. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2011. 357 Pp. $110.00. ISBN 978-0-521-76551-0.

Ian Moyer’s study begins by observing that Egypt occupies a position that “is ‘other’ twice over: Other not only to ancient Greeks, but also to modern historians, classicists and other students of Hellenism” (2). His introduction provides ample evidence of the ways in which modern scholars from Gustav Droysen to Arnaldo Momigliano have positioned Egypt as unworthy of serious attention either because it was unknowable, in decline, developmentally separate during periods of contact, or no more than a projection of Greek ideas about the “other.” Arguing that this is a kind of “intellectual apartheid” that traces its roots to colonialism, Moyer prefers a dialogic and transactional model of agency.

Beginning with Herodotus, Moyer argues that, by privileging “Herodotus’ text as the only producer of significant meaning,” scholars have reduced Egypt to a “passive object, a flat screen for Greek projections.” He offers by way of contrast a reading of Herodotus’ encounter with the Theban priests (2.142–144) with its embedded story of Hecataeus of Miletus. When Hecataeus claimed an ancestry sixteen generations removed from a god, these priests countered with the antiquity of their own culture, demonstrated by carefully kept human genealogies that reached back three hundred generations. Moyer demonstrates the existence of such detailed priestly and kingly genealogies, and the particular historical circumstances in which they were produced. They constituted, he suggests, a “fundamental and novel orientation to the human past” that could have served as a stimulus for what is taken to be a significant innovation of Herodotus’ writing—to think of causalities in human terms, not divinely directed.

In his second chapter Moyer turns to Manetho’s history of Egypt, written under the first Ptolemies. Although this history now survives only in quotations [End Page 709] and epitomes, Moyer makes the case that this was not (as usually presented) an Egyptian enabled to write the history of his own country for the first time thanks to earlier Greek models so much as a response to Herodotus that asserts the primacy and value of authentically Egyptian modes of representing its own past by means of the king list. Manetho annotates his basic chronology with events that illustrate the king acting to uphold the cosmic order, thus modeling good kingship, or failing to do so with the attendant consequences—thus it is a template set out for the Ptolemies themselves to imitate.

In his third chapter, Moyer focuses on the establishment of a temple of Serapis on Delos in the late third or early second century b.c.e., an event for which we have an inscription that consists of a Serapis aretalogy with details of a law suit over the temple’s establishment; it is followed by a hexameter poem by Maiistas that fleshes out the earlier narrative (Both are provided in appendices). Moyer argues that the lawsuit was an intra-Egyptian dispute brought by priests of other Serapeia, not (as is generally thought) by Greeks trying to exclude Egyptian gods from the island. A compelling part of his argument is the way in which the aretalogy positions the opponents as Sethian (the god of chaos), evoking Osirian myths of legitimate succession to authenticate the rights of one line of Egyptian priests over another. Although Maiistas’ hymn has been criticized as hackneyed and derivative, Moyer points out that a series of allusions to Odysseus, particularly his speech to the Achaeans to stay the course at Troy, provides a recognizable Homeric precedent for the struggles of the Egyptian priests to establish their shrine in the face of local opposition, thus less a case of colonial mimicry than self-conscious deployment of alien tropes to persuade Greek audiences.

The final chapter jumps forward six centuries. Thessalus is the Greek author of a fourth-century c.e. pharmacological treatise (a translation is provided in an appendix) offered to a Roman emperor that claims to have compelled an Egyptian priest to reveal his secret learning. In doing so, Thessalus constructs his...

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