This evolving dynamic of contact and exchange was based on a continuum of interactions on a local scale and in daily life. It was only once Macedonian and Ptolemaic rule had been established that the power balance shifted substantially, with a Greek-dominated administration, the Greek language, and other Greek cultural elements gaining prominence. This was true especially in the case of mercenaries in the pay of the pharaoh Greek traders enjoyed a certain autonomy in the port city of Naukratis, on land granted to them by the pharaoh. Nonetheless, as much of the direct interaction, especially in the early years, took place on Egyptian soil, it was Egyptians, as well as the Egyptian administrative and cultural context, that dominated relations. Thus pharaohs hired Greek mercenaries to help defend Egypt’s borders and to establish or secure a ruler’s power internally and benefited from foreign traders’ wide commercial networks, while traders in turn received privileged access to Egyptian commodities (and thus financial and social gain), and mercenaries (or at least their leaders) might obtain rich rewards for their services. For much of the history of Egyptian-Greek interaction then, commercial transactions, military assistance, and strategic alliances were based largely on exchange and reciprocity. Following Alexander’s conquest, finally, the Ptolemaic period (332–30 BC) for the first time saw a Greek dynasty rule Egypt as pharaohs. Egypt’s conquest by the Persian king Cambyses II (526 BC) ushered in two long periods of Achaemenid rule (526–404 and 343–332 BC), during which trade (not least of highly desirable Egyptian grain) flourished and we hear of occasional military alliances. 3Ĭlose contact and exchange persisted throughout times of political change. 2 Foreigners served in a separate part of the army, might occupy their own town quarters, or were barred from certain religious spaces, but they also practiced intermarriage, and some rose to positions of prestige and importance. Texts, archaeology, and epigraphy suggest that relations were not entirely unproblematic, and integration coexisted with segregation.
664‒526 BC) finally renewed intensive contact with the Mediterranean world, partly it seems in a bid to shake off Assyrian rule, numerous Greeks, Carians, and other foreigners came to Egypt as mercenaries or traders. When the pharaohs of this 26th (Saite) Dynasty (ca. Egyptians, too, however, had closely experienced the foreign by this period, being ruled first by Libyan and then by Nubian dynasties and finally (664 BC) by a local dynasty established, however, by Assyria following its conquest of Egypt. This at first largely excluded Egypt, whose Mediterranean trade at the time concentrated largely on the Levant. Greeks had already begun to reengage in contact with peoples along the Mediterranean shores for trade and settlement by the eighth century BC. Instead, as in the Bronze Age, it was traders and mercenaries who moved between Egypt and the Greek world, the commerce of goods and labor driving intercultural exchange.
Rule and conquest stood only at the very end. Over the centuries, the framework for this contact was subject to fundamental change. Drawing on new insights from recently uncovered or reevaluated archaeological evidence, all three case studies focus on the agents and contexts of cultural contact-that is, people, their actions, and their motivations. They will take us from sixth-century BC cosmopolitan Memphis, with its international population including Greeks and Carians, down the Nile to the Egyptian-Greek trading port of Naukratis, and further to Alexandria, on the Mediterranean shore, newly founded at the beginning of the Hellenistic period. In the discussion that follows, I use three case studies to examine what exactly “understanding and accommodation” entailed. The seventh century BC marks the start of what the historian Joseph Manning has termed “the Greek millennium” of Egyptian history, arguing that when Egypt fell under Greek rule with Alexander the Great’s conquest in 332 BC, it was merely “the consummation and not the beginning of a long process of understanding and accommodation” between Egypt and Greece. Centuries later, as part of wider power realignments in the ancient world, a new pharaonic dynasty once more united Egypt under its rule and forged links with emerging Greek city-states. 1550–1069 BC) brought an end to nearly all direct interaction between the two regions. The collapse of the Aegean palace societies in the twelfth and eleventh centuries BC and Egypt’s political fragmentation after the end of the New Kingdom (ca. The Late Bronze Age was a time of vibrant contact and exchange between Egypt and the world of Mycenaean Greece.
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