Ancient Perspectives on Egypt

by Roger Matthews (Editor), Cornelia Roemer (Editor)

The allure of Egypt is not exclusive to the modern world. Egypt also held a fascination and attraction for people of the past. In this book, academics from a wide range of disciplines assess the significance of Egypt within the settings of its past. The chronological span is from later prehistory, through to the earliest literate eras of interaction with Mesopotamia and the Levant, the Aegean, Greece and Rome. Ancient Perspectives on Egypt includes both archaeological and documented evidence, which ranges from the earliest writing attested in Egypt and Mesopotamia in the late fourth millennium BC, to graffiti from Abydos that demonstrate pilgrimages from all over the Mediterranean world, to the views of Roman poets on the nature of Egypt. This book presents, for the first time in a single volume, a multi-faceted but coherent collection of images of Egypt from, and of, the past.

Genres: History

274 pages, Hardcover

First published August 15, 2003

Reviews

[Eforw · Rating 4 out of 5]

This bundle showed with clear language the potential of historical archaeology in Egypt and how much we can learn from it. It shows that the kinds of statements and interpretations that can be generated on the basis of archaeological evidence are very different from those based on written sources, and it is important to ensure that interpretations based on one type of source are not judged by the criteria applied to.

[DAJ · Rating 4 out of 5]

This volume in the Encounters with Ancient Egypt series addresses Egypt's interactions with its neighbors in ancient times, so it both complements Mysterious Lands, the volume on ancient Egyptian perception of outside lands, and sets the stage for The Wisdom of Egypt, which discusses how ancient Egypt was seen in medieval and early modern times. Not every culture with a close relationship with Egypt is included; Persia and Israel and Judah are left out, while Nubia is instead covered in Ancient Egypt in Africa. Much more could be said about most of those that are included. But the timespan is huge, from the Early Bronze Age to the start of late antiquity, and the types of interaction covered—trade, political maneuvering, warfare, pilgrimage, literature, and art—are well-rounded.

Not all the chapters are equally interesting. The first three after the introduction focus on the Levant and the Aegean in periods when textual evidence is scant, so they mostly discuss the sort of archaeological evidence that makes people's eyes glaze over. The chapter about Egyptian influence on Greek art is more academic than I'd like, talking at length about past approaches to the question. In contrast, the inevitable chapter on Herodotus' book about Egypt is lively and admirably balanced, and the studies on the Hittites and the great powers of Mesopotamia are pretty interesting. They make the case that Near Eastern powers saw Egypt in its imperialist phase as an arrogant, unsophisticated newcomer to the world of international relations, a perspective you're not likely to find in most Egyptological books.

Two chapters give a small sampling of the interactions between ethnic Greeks and Egyptians in Ptolemaic Egypt, about which much more could be said. A study of the Palestrina mosaic and another on Latin writers give the impression that the Romans were largely uninterested in Egypt and usually looked down on it. One wouldn't think that after having read Nile Into Tiber, though the author of the last chapter acknowledges the Egyptomania that gradually took hold in the empire and says the cynical attitude toward Egypt may have been limited to intellectuals in Rome.