Читать книгу A History of Ancient Egypt - Marc Van De Mieroop - Страница 14

It may seem easy to look at something – a monument, coffin, statue, or inscription – and call it ancient Egyptian, but it is not so simple to draw the boundaries of ancient Egypt both in time and space. In the late 4th century AD, the Roman emperor Theodosius issued an edict closing all Egyptian temples and dispersing the priesthood. His act ended the knowledge of Egyptian hieroglyphs, which could no longer be taught. Can we take the withdrawal of official support for ancient Egyptian cults and writing systems as the end of ancient Egypt? Theodosius’s edict only affected a small minority of people that had long been under threat. Ancient Egyptian cultural characteristics had been immersed in a world inspired by Hellenistic, Roman, and Christian ideas for centuries. Certainly in political terms Egypt had lost its separate identity hundreds of years earlier. From the Persian conquest in 525 BC onward, but for brief spells of independence, the land had been subjected to outside control. In native traditions the Persian rulers were still considered part of the long line of Egyptian pharaohs, but their successors were different. Modern historians do not call the Greek and Roman rulers of Egypt pharaohs, although their Egyptian subjects continued to represent them with full pharaonic regalia. Is “Egypt after the pharaohs” no longer part of ancient Egyptian history then? Individual scholars and institutions use different approaches. Some histories of ancient Egypt end with Alexander of Macedon’s conquest in 332 BC, others at the death of Cleopatra in 30 BC, yet others run into the Roman Period up to 395 AD and Theodosius’s reign.

It is always difficult to draw a line after an era in history, as all aspects of life rarely changed simultaneously. More often the change in the sources that modern scholars use determines where they end historical periods. In Egypt’s case the gradual replacement of the traditional Egyptian language and writing systems by the Greek language and script necessitates a different type of scholarship. Most specialists of Egyptian hieroglyphic writing do not easily read Greek sources and vice versa. Although the ancient Egyptian scripts survived after the Greek conquest of the country, there was a constant increase in the use of Greek writing, which turns the modern study of Egypt into a different discipline. Yet, Ptolemaic and Roman Egypt in many respects preserved ancient Egyptian traditions and customs, so I will include a discussion of that period in this survey.

If the disappearance of ancient Egyptian writing in the late 4th century AD heralds the end of the civilization, does its invention around 3000 BC indicate the beginning? No single event announced a new era, but from around 3400 to 3000 BC radical changes that were clearly interrelated took place in Egypt and forged a new society. Those innovations included the invention of writing, a process that lasted many centuries from the earliest experiments around 3250 to the first entire sentence written out around 2750. In the last centuries of the 4th millennium BC the unified Egyptian state arose, and that period can serve as the beginning of Egyptian history despite its vague boundaries. Naturally, what preceded unification – Egyptian prehistory – was not unimportant and contained the germs of many elements of the country’s historical culture. Hence, I will sketch some of the prehistoric developments in this chapter to make the influences clear, but the creation of the state with the coincident invention of writing and other aspects of culture will indicate the start of Egypt’s history here.