Conclusions

Almost forty years ago Christian Froidefond published a book entitled Le Mirage egyptien in which he discussed the reception of Egypt in Greek literature from Homer to Aristotle, but his term ‘‘mirage’’ is only partly apposite. On the one hand it suggests that the Greeks generated a blurred and shimmering image of Egypt; on the other hand, the term mirage implies an illusion - a mirage is something which does not exist. The first implication of the term is correct; the second lies some way wide of the mark. The preceding analysis has shown in some detail that Greeks and Romans were reacting over many centuries to experiences of a real phenomenon, but that the cultural processing of that experience took place at many levels, in different ways and times, and in order to meet a variety of different agenda. When we first encounter the Greek reception of Egypt in Homer, the die is already cast; the course of reception is already well advanced, and the seeds of much that follows are clearly present. From these beginnings an image evolved which presented Egypt as a distant, mysterious, marvellous, and enormously ancient land, a land of great wealth and power, and a land whose inhabitants, particularly priests, were endowed with extraordinary wisdom and mastery of a rich store of arcane knowledge. Admiration for Egypt had reached the point even in our earliest texts where the Greeks enthusiastically endorsed the conviction, misguided though it was, that large elements of Greek civilization had originally come from Egypt, and there are many examples of Greeks and Romans taking over and customizing elements in Egyptian culture either because of a perceived superiority to anything they themselves possessed or because of the invincible allure which Egypt and things Egyptian exercised on the foreign observer. In all this there is little sign of any real understanding of, or empathy with, the ethos of Egyptian culture. Greeks made Egypt in their own image, and the Romans largely followed suit, despite a large dose of Egyptophobia, all obligingly assisted by Hellenized Egyptians, or, at least, Egyptians with a knowledge of Greek, but the end product was much more than mirage. Rather it was the result of a dialogue between what existed at an objective level and what Greeks and Romans wanted and needed Egypt to be. It is, therefore, not at all surprising that, while the image of Egypt shows some of the blurred and shimmering dimensions of a mirage, it is also a mirror of the terms in which Greeks and Romans strove to locate themselves in a wider world of which the Mysterious East was a most important part.

FURTHER READING

The reception of Ancient Egypt in the Classical world continues to attract much scholarly attention. Valuable discussions of many aspects of the topic will be found in Froidefond 1971, Hartog 1988, Fowden 1993, Burstein 1996, Assmann 2000, Hornung 2001, Versluys 2002, and Burkert 2004.