Graeco-Egyptian Interactions: Literature, Translation, and Culture, 500 BC–AD 300

438 Pages·2016·3.88 MB·English

by  Ian Rutherford

Title Pages
Greco-Egyptian Interactions: Literature,
Translation, and Culture, 500 BC–AD 300
Ian Rutherford
Print publication date: 2016
Print ISBN-13: 9780199656127
Published to Oxford Scholarship Online: April 2016
DOI: 10.1093/acprof:oso/9780199656127.001.0001
Title Pages
(p.i) Greco-Egyptian Interactions (p.ii)
(p.iii) Greco-Egyptian Interactions
(p.iv)
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Acknowledgements
Greco-Egyptian Interactions: Literature,
Translation, and Culture, 500 BC–AD 300
Ian Rutherford
Print publication date: 2016
Print ISBN-13: 9780199656127
Published to Oxford Scholarship Online: April 2016
DOI: 10.1093/acprof:oso/9780199656127.001.0001
(p.v) Acknowledgements
Many of the papers in this volume had their origin in a conference at the
University of Reading, Graeco-Aegyptiaca/Aegypto-Graeca: Interactions between
Greece and Egypt 700 BCE–300 CE. I’d like to thank the British Academy for
supporting that with a conference grant and the University of Reading for
providing facilities and general support. Some of the editing in the final stages in
2013–14 was done when I was a visiting research scholar at the Institute for the
Study of the Ancient World in New York. Finally, many thanks to the Sackler
Library in Oxford for facilitating research. (p.vi)
Page 1 of 1
List of Figures
Greco-Egyptian Interactions: Literature,
Translation, and Culture, 500 BC–AD 300
Ian Rutherford
Print publication date: 2016
Print ISBN-13: 9780199656127
Published to Oxford Scholarship Online: April 2016
DOI: 10.1093/acprof:oso/9780199656127.001.0001
(p.ix) List of Figures
6.1 Ptolemy III and Berenike II receive their royal titles and symbols of
perpetual rule, all carefully recorded by the god Khonsu. The pharaoh
wears the double crown while the queen wears the distinctive Hathor
headdress of sun disk, horns, and plumes. Relief from the Euergetes
Gate, temple of Karnak. Photograph: Lloyd Llewellyn-Jones. 154
6.2 Berenike II (face mutilated probably in the early Christian period)
wears the distinctive crown of the goddess Hathor. Detail of a relief from
the Euergetes Gate, temple of Karnak. Photograph: Lloyd Llewellyn-
Jones. 154
6.3 Ptolemy gives nu jars and Berenike II offers lotus garlands to the god
Khonsu, accompanied behind the throne by Het Heret, a fertility aspect of
Hathor. Relief from the Euergetes Gate, temple of Karnak. Photograph:
Lloyd Llewellyn-Jones. 155
8.1 Factors influencing literary interaction and the evaluation of literary
parallels 189
9.1 Placement of the Hymns of Isidorus at the gates of the temple at
Medinet Madi (plan adapted from Vogliano 1937) 213
11.1 PSI Inv. I 89, first fragment PSI Inv. I 89, second fragment, PSI Inv. I
89, third fragment P.Carlsberg 312 272
12.1 Copies of Greek inscriptions from the temple of Mandulis by Lepsius
and Gauthier 289
12.2 ‘Mandulis the great god (netjer aa)’, depicted as a young adult and
crowned with the atef and the hemhem crowns © Pr Françoise Dunand
297
12.3 The Underworld is divided into six area caverns (qereret) ©
Hornung (1999) 299
12.4 Mandulis depicted as a child sitting on a lotus flower © Pr Françoise
Dunand 301
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List of Figures
12.5 Mandulis the triple god © Pr Françoise Dunand 305
12.6 Mandulis as a solar Greek god sitting on a lotus © Pr Françoise
Dunand 307
12.7 Horus in an oracular statue from the Egyptian Museum in Cairo 308
(p.x)
Page 2 of 2
List of Contributors
Greco-Egyptian Interactions: Literature,
Translation, and Culture, 500 BC–AD 300
Ian Rutherford
Print publication date: 2016
Print ISBN-13: 9780199656127
Published to Oxford Scholarship Online: April 2016
DOI: 10.1093/acprof:oso/9780199656127.001.0001
(p.xi) List of Contributors
Gideon Bohak
is a Professor in the Department of Jewish Culture at Tel Aviv
University. He works on Jewish magic, especially in Antiquity and the
Middle Ages. His most recent monographs are Ancient Jewish Magic:
A History (2008), and a critical edition of a fifteenth-century
manuscript of Jewish magic and Kabbalah (2013).
John Dillery
is Professor of Classics at the University of Virginia. He works on
ancient historical writing, chiefly Greek. He is especially interested in
late Classical and early Hellenistic historiography. He is currently
working on a large project involving non-Greek historians of the third
century BCE who wrote histories of their native lands in the Greek
language.
Richard Jasnow
is Professor of Egyptology in the Department of Near Eastern
Languages and Civilizations at Johns Hopkins University. He is a
specialist in the Late Period of Egypt, with a particular interest in
Demotic Egyptian. He has published, with Professor Karl-Theodor
Zauzich, The Ancient Egyptian Book of Thoth (2005).
Ivan A. Ladynin
is Associate Professor with the Department of Ancient History,
Faculty of History, Lomonosov Moscow State University. His research
interests are the history of Egypt under the Argeads and the early
Ptolemies; the Ancient Egyptian kingship and, generally, the patterns
of the Ancient Egyptian mentality; the reception of the Late Egyptian
historiography in the Classical tradition.
Nikolaos Lazaridis
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List of Contributors
is Assistant Professor of Ancient Mediterranean History at the
California State University, Sacramento. He has authored numerous
articles on ancient Egyptian and Greek language and literature, as
well as the book Wisdom in loose form: The language of proverbs in
Egyptian and Greek collections of the Hellenistic and Roman periods
(2007). He is currently preparing a monograph on storytelling
techniques in Ancient Egypt and Greece and the publication of
ancient travellers’ inscriptions discovered north of Kharga Oasis.
(p.xii) Lloyd Llewellyn-Jones
is Professor of Ancient History at Cardiff University and a specialist in
the history and culture of ancient Iran, Greece, and Egypt. He is the
author of Aphrodite’s Tortoise: the veiled woman of Ancient Greece
(2003) and of Ctesias’ History of Persia: Tales of the Orient, and King
and Court in Ancient Persia (2010). He is editor of Women’s Dress in
the Ancient Greek World (2002), Creating a Hellenistic World (2011),
and The Hellenistic Court (forthcoming), and numerous articles on
Greek, Egyptian, and Persian culture.
Ian Moyer
is Associate Professor in the Department of History at the University
of Michigan. He is author of Egypt and the Limits of Hellenism
(2011), and numerous articles dealing with the complex relationship
between Egypt and the Greco-Roman world.
Joachim Quack
is Professor of Egyptology at the University of Heidelberg. He is a
leading authority on Egyptian literature and religion, especially of the
Greco-Roman period, and is the author of Die demotische und gräko-
ägyptische Literatur (Münster, 2005) and, with Friedhelm Hoffmann,
of Anthologie der demotischen Literatur (2007). He is working on an
edition of the fragments of the so-called ‘Book of the Temple’, an
Egyptian guide to ritual practice.
Ian Rutherford
is Professor of Classics at the University of Reading. He works on
ancient Greek literature and religion, and interactions between
Greece and other ancient cultures of the Mediterranean, especially
Anatolia and Egypt.
Susan Stephens
is Sara Hart Kimball Professor in the Humanities and Professor of
Classics at the University of Stanford. She is author of Ancient Greek
Novels: The Fragments (with Jack Winkler) (Princeton, 1995), of
Seeing Double: Intercultural Poetics in Ptolemaic Alexandria
(Berkeley, 2003), and of Callimachus in Context. From Plato to the
Alexandrian Poets (with Benjamin Acosta-Hughes) (Cambridge, 2011).
Gaëlle Tallet
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List of Contributors
is maître de conférences in Greek History at the University of
Limoges. Since 2008, she has been the director of the Archeological
Mission of El-Deir (Kharga Oasis, Western Desert of Egypt).
Steve Vinson
is Associate Professor in the Department of Near Eastern Languages
and Cultures at Indiana University. He is author of ‘The craft of a
good scribe. Narrative and meaning in the first tale of Setne
Khaemwas’.
(p.xiii) Alexandra von Lieven,
currently Privatdozentin at the Freie Universität of Berlin, is a
specialist in ancient Egyptian religion. She is author of Der Himmel
über Esna—Eine Fallstudie zur religiösen Astronomie in Ägypten am
Beispiel der kosmologischen Decken- und Architravinschriften im
Tempel von Esna (Harrassowitz, 2000) and Grundriss des Laufes der
Sterne: das sogenannte Nutbuch (2007). Her forthcoming
publications include Cultural History of Ancient Egyptian Music
(Leiden).
Stephanie Winder
was, until 2014, a lecturer in Classics at the University of Edinburgh.
She specializes in Hellenistic poetry and culture as well as gender
and reception theory. She has published on Cavafy and other Greek
poets, and now lives in Greece. (p.xiv)
Page 3 of 3
Introduction
Greco-Egyptian Interactions: Literature,
Translation, and Culture, 500 BC–AD 300
Ian Rutherford
Print publication date: 2016
Print ISBN-13: 9780199656127
Published to Oxford Scholarship Online: April 2016
DOI: 10.1093/acprof:oso/9780199656127.001.0001
Introduction
Interaction and Translation between Greek Literature and Egypt
Ian Rutherford
DOI:10.1093/acprof:oso/9780199656127.003.0001
Abstract and Keywords
This chapter provides an introduction to the volume, setting out a variety of
aspects of interaction between Egyptian and Greek literature in the period 700
BCE–300 CE.Section 2 surveys various types of interaction, including translation
from Egyptian to Greek, mixed forms, borrowing of genres (the romance, the
aretalogy, religious literature), and Greek influence on Egyptian. Section 3 looks
specifically at the case of translation from Egyptian to Greece. Section 4 looks at
the broader issue of Greek engagement with Egyptian culture.
Keywords:   Egypt, Greece, literature, translation, interaction, influence, biculturalism,
multiculturalism, bilingualism
1. Preface
One of the main ways the study of Ancient Greek literature has advanced over
the last few decades is through an increased awareness that there is a lot to be
gained by treating it not in isolation but in relation to other cultural traditions of
the Mediterranean and Western Asia. For one thing, other literary traditions may
provide insight into where and how the forms of early Greek literature
originated and what, if anything, is special about them.1 But perhaps even more
than that, for ancient Greek writers themselves the similarities and differences
between Greeks and other peoples, real or imagined, was a central concern, not
only because this is a way of defining what it means to be Greek, but also
because in the hyper-connective ancient Mediterranean, encounters with other
cultural traditions was a central part of lived experience.2
Page 1 of 46
Introduction
(p.2) The subject of this volume is the relationship between Greek literature
and the literary and cultural traditions of ancient Egypt. Egyptian culture was of
course ancient by Greek standards (as Plato’s Saite priest told Solon)—the first
flowering of Egyptian literature was during the Middle Kingdom (early second
millennium BCE)—and it was also conservative (which may be why Plato used it
as a model in his Laws).3 It was not static, however, and in fact it reinvented
itself several times over its long history, most significantly for our purposes in
the Greco-Roman period, when the so-called ‘Demotic’ literature emerged.4
Undoubtedly, the relation between Egyptian and Greek culture is at its closest in
the Hellenistic and Roman periods, when translations and adaptations of
Egyptian literary works were made into Greek (to a lesser extent possibly in the
other direction as well), and for this period we can talk about a mixed Greco-
Egyptian culture. But this was only the culmination of an older relationship
between Greek writers and Egypt.
The earliest evidence for contact between Aegean peoples and Egypt comes
from the Egyptian New Kingdom (mid‐second millennium BCE), though (despite
the argument of Bernal’s Black Athena) the significance of this is uncertain.5
Direct or indirect contact must have continued into the first millennium, though
to be on the safe side the official beginning is usually put in the seventh–sixth
centuries BCE, when Ionian mercenaries served in the Egyptian army and the
celebrated port of trade was founded at Naucratis.6 Early Greek poetry and
myth sees Egypt as a magical and dangerous place: witness Homer’s account of
Proteus and Helen’s drug,7 and the popular myth (p.3) of the monstrous
Busiris, who becomes a symbol for Egyptian xenophobia.8 At the same time,
Greece and Egypt were supposed to be linked by ancestral ties, particularly the
Argive royal line, which arrived from Egypt (in the person of Danaos and his
daughters), having several generations before emigrated in the other direction
(in the person of Io). Some have seen Egyptian influence in early Greek
sculpture and medicine.9 Are the similarities that have been noted between
some of Hesiod’s precepts in the Works and Days and much earlier Egyptian
instruction-literature accidental?10
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