CLAS 654Greeks and Egyptians in Ptolemaic Egypt

This course focuses on a specific period within Egyptian history: the Ptolemaic era, when Egypt was ruled by the Greco-Macedonian dynasty descended from Ptolemy I. For roughly three centuries, until the suicide of the Ptolemaic queen Cleopatra VII in 30 BC, the Egyptians lived under an alien ruling authority of Hellenic heritage. Furthermore, they lived and worked alongside numerous immigrants of the same heritage, immigrants who appear to have benefited frequently from the differential laws, practices, and institutions that favoured them and did nothing for the native people of Egypt. Yet at the same time, a study of Ptolemaic Egypt reveals also a pattern of increasing assimilation between Greeks and Egyptians. Such assimilation was not solely the result of increasing mutual tolerance and respect. Indeed, the history of Greco-Macedonian relations with the Egyptians demonstrates that whatever respect and privileges the ruling classes ultimately granted to the natives of Egypt were at least in part the result of violent Egyptian assertiveness, in the form of armed rebellion. The history of interactions between Greeks and Egyptians in Ptolemaic Egypt offers an unmatched opportunity for the examination of the relations between rulers and ruled, of the clash between ethnic groups, and of the forces that lead to reception on the one hand and resistance on the other.