At the limits of Hellenism: Egyptian priests and the Greek world

The subject of this dissertation is the history and historiography of Greek-Egyptian interactions in the Classical and Hellenistic periods as revealed through a series of studies centered on Egyptian priests. In these studies, I explore Egyptian as well as Greek motivations and interests in order to present these encounters as transactional processes in which both sides affected the outcome.; After reviewing the limitations in previous studies on Greek discourses of alterity and in the historiography of Hellenistic cultural interactions, I begin in Chapter 1 with the encounter between Greek historiography and the Egyptian past recorded in Herodotus' Histories. I argue that the genealogies recounted by Theban priests to Hecataeus and Herodotus ( Histories 2.143) were part of a pattern of Late Egyptian representations of the past that played an important role in Herodotus' development of Greek historiography. The subject of my second chapter is the Egyptian priest Manetho, who in the early Ptolemaic period wrote the Aegyptiaca. In this work, I argue, Manetho attempted to translate and to make explicit Egyptian conceptions of the historical past for the Ptolemaic court.; In the third chapter, I turn to Greek-Egyptian interactions in the novel developments of Egyptian religion in the Hellenistic period. Through the rich documentation of Sarapis cults on Delos, and especially the so-called Delian Sarapis aretalogy, I reevaluate assumptions concerning the "Hellenized" status of Egyptian religion in the Greek world and explore the hermeneutical discourses and strategies of authentication central to syncretistic religious phenomena. The final chapter, on the autobiographical story of the Greek doctor Thessalos and his search for magical wisdom, treats the Egyptian priest as he appeared against the background of later Hellenism: a powerful figure of secret wisdom, and extraordinary powers. Thessalos' engagement with Egyptian traditions of astrological knowledge and his efforts to assume the identity of an Egyptian priest show that this figure was a product both of indigenous discourses and Graeco-Roman fantasies.; Collectively, these studies reveal the role of Egyptian priests in representing their traditions to the Greek world, and suggest further interdisciplinary research into historical interactions at the boundaries between Egyptian civilization and Hellenism.