Sadly, in dealing with the issue of cultural exchange, the Greeks were rather naive. They believed in the principle that each cultural item was invented only once and thus had only one identifiable ‘‘first discoverer’’ (protos heuretls). They admired ancient cultures, especially that of Egypt, found in them many phenomena that looked similar to their own, and essentially assumed that their ancestors had discovered these on their travels and brought them back home (Lloyd 1975-88: 1.56, cf. 2.220-1; Zhmud 1996: 65-9). Even more sadly, modern scholars, both outsiders and insiders, have been equally naive in accepting these views. In order to illustrate how cautious one needs to be in this respect, I discuss here one example in some detail. It concerns early Greek lawgiving and is thus directly relevant for one of this chapter’s main topics.
According to Herodotus, Solon went abroad for ten years to prevent any change of his laws (1.29-30). In Egypt he learned of a useful regulation enacted by the pharaoh Amasis:
Amasis established an admirable law, which Solon borrowed and introduced at Athens where it is still preserved because it is excellent; this was that every man once a year should declare before the Nomarch, or provincial governor, the source of his livelihood; failure to do this, or inability to prove that the source was an honest one, was punishable by death. (2.177.2; trans. de Selincourt and Marincola 1996, modified)
Diodorus claims that Solon’s laws prohibiting lending on a person’s security and abolishing debt bondage were inspired by laws of the pharaoh Bocchoris/Bakenranef (1.79.3-5). I omit here the thorny problem of the historicity of Solon’s travels and focus on that of his borrowing of Egyptian laws.6
Diodorus prompts suspicion by grouping Solon together with mythical figures like Orpheus and Daedalus. The ‘‘testimony’’ of Egyptian priests he cites leads to the Serapeum in Memphis, an early Ptolemaic foundation, and suggests a Hellenistic context (Diod. Sic. 1.96.1-3; cf. Burton 1972 ad loc). The rationale he gives for Bocchoris’ laws on debt unmistakably reflects Greek thought and polis culture. No independent evidence exists for such laws, particularly not in Egypt: apparently, debt bondage played a negligible role in prehellenistic pharaonic legislation (LdA 1: 993 s. v. ‘‘Darlehn’’; cf. Burton 1972: 232). Worse, Bocchoris himself is a shadowy figure. He ruled only briefly during the turbulent Third Intermediate Period (around 715 bce), hardly prevailed over local dynasts, and left minimal traces in Egyptian sources. His elevation to a major legislator clearly is a product of Greek invention (LdA 1: 846; Burton 1972: 193-4; Kitchen 1995: 141-2, 376-7). Hecataeus of Abdera, probably Diodorus’ main source, was a historicizing philosopher under Ptolemy I and wrote books about the Egyptians and Hyperboreans(l). Felix Jacoby characterizes these as ‘‘ethnographic utopias’’ that combined historical and ethnographic material, travel reports, philosophy, and pure invention in discussing conceptions of ideal states and other philosophical ideas supposedly realized in ‘‘historical’’ or mythological societies (Burton 1972: 1-34; Spoerri 1988: 279-82, with ref. to Jacoby). Xenophon’s Cyropaedia is an early example of this genre (Tatum 1989). Undoubtedly, therefore, Hecataeus generously imported Greek ideas into Egyptian contexts. This remains true even if recent scholarship assesses his work in a more differentiated way, allowing for the possibility that he ‘‘recognized the convergence’’ of Greek and Egyptian ideas and that in his utopias ‘‘Egyptian and Greek culture... could interpenetrate and interpret the other in meaningful ways’’ (Dillery 1998: 260, 275). Hence here the object of comparison with Greek phenomena is massively distorted; Diodorus is useless as a source for Solon’s legal borrowings from Egypt.
Nor is it likely that Solon imported from Egypt the law on income declaration mentioned by Herodotus. On both sides, these kinds of regulations were embedded in specific social contexts that gave them legitimacy and guaranteed their effectiveness. Since these social contexts differed greatly, a simple transfer of relevant laws from one to the other is a priori unlikely. Indeed, a law concerning annual income declaration is well attested and makes perfect sense in the Egyptian tax system: the state depended on this income, honesty in such declarations was essential, and violations were considered serious offenses (Lloyd 1975-88: 1.56 with bibliog. in n227). In Athens, two different laws have been considered (Ruschenbusch 1966: 99-100, frr. 78a-c with comm.). The census classes (tele) of Solon’s timocracy, however, were connected with taxes only in the fourth century. What counted in Solon’s time was primarily the citizens’ military capacity, based on economic capacity and social status; if agrarian income was already defined in exact quantities - an issue much debated recently - the principle was self-declaration enforced by peer pressure (de Ste Croix 2004: 5-72; Raaflaub 2006: 404-23; van Wees 2006). The nomos argias (prohibition of idleness, also attributed to Peisistratus) possibly served two purposes: to safeguard social harmony by protecting the weak or to prevent neglect of one’s farm - an understandable concern in a community with insufficient agrarian resources (Todd 1993: 112, 245; Schmitz 2004: 190-202). Overall, then, despite superficial similarities, these laws have very little in common with their Egyptian model suggested by Herodotus. The conclusion seems inevitable: Solon’s legal imports from Egypt are a phantom of later Greek imagination.
World History
