Greeks and others

It hardly needs saying that the Greeks had earlier fitted Egyptian 'historical' events into their own chronological narrative scheme, which accomodated, for example, Solon's visits to Egypt, where he heard about Atlantis. But early in the Ptolemaic period an internal Egyptian chronological 'narrative' was constructed, was used by classical historians such as Diodorus, and is still used, as is too rarely explicitly stated, as the basis of the modern chronology of dynastic Egypt. This was created in the third century BC in the ambience of the Ptolemaic court by an Egyptian priest of Isis, Manetho of Sebennytos (in the Delta), writing in Greek, who alone 'represents a complete and systematic version of the Egyptian tradition' (G.P. Verbrugghe and J.M Wickersham, Berossos and Manetho. Michigan, 1996).
Egyptian history was thus recaptured or re-invented within a classicising historiographical framework possibly with the encouragement, if not instruction, of Ptolemy II Philadelphus, the monarch who founded that factory of classical scholarship, the Alexandrian Museum.
The history and culture of one civilization were described and explained in the language of another. It is hardly necessary to labour the striking parallels: the work of Berossus, the Letter of Aristeas, the Septuagint. Manetho, of course, uses earlier Egyptian source material but, as far as I am aware, none of this is self-reflexive or historiographically conscious; that is, it never asks itself whether what it is saying is correct or plausible. The key difference is that Manetho and his material become part of a historiographical tradition, in which he debates with and criticises Herodotus and is in turn criticized by Josephus.

Alan Bowman

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Alan Bowman. Recolonising Egypt. In: T.P Wiseman ed. Classics in Progress. Essays on Ancient Greece and Rome. Oxford UP, 2002-2006.