Published to accompany an exhibition of the same name held at the J.P. Getty Museum in 2018, this volume provides a lavishly illustrated survey of Egypt's interactions with the Classical world. In recent decades Egypt's role as a Mediterranean power and its interactions with other Mediterranean states have both received increasing scholarly attention, but much of this work, especially that which has addressed the material evidence, has focused on publishing evidence from individual spatial or historical contexts. Although edited volumes have recently tackled literary evidence for interactions from the Classical period to Late Antiquity, most notably I. Rutherford's Greco-Egyptian Interactions (2016), we have lacked a go-to summary of the material evidence and related cultural and historical narratives. Thus, this book serves as a welcome introduction to a subject deserving of greater attention.
The exhibition's catalogue of objects is interwoven with sixteen short, contextualising discussions, which together provide a sweeping historical and cultural narrative of contacts with Egypt from the Bronze Age Aegean to the Roman Empire. Each chapter offers a condensed and accessible account of its topic, described by the best-recognised scholars in the field and reflecting their most recent findings. For anyone who has read around the subject of the book, much of the content will feel familiar from the contributors’ other publications. However, this does not detract from the succinct presentation of the material, the novelty of the book's overarching theme or the quality of its catalogue entries and illustrations.
The book, much like the physical space of the exhibition, is organised chronologically. Its chapters cohere and can be read in order, but they very rarely directly engage with one another. As such, overarching themes and modes of interaction are little discussed. It is not made clear, for example, whether or why the forms of intercultural interactions at Avaris under Dynasty XVIII, well contextualised by Chapter 2, were or were not paralleled in the interactions with Egyptian palaces under Dynasty XXVI or later in the Graeco-Roman period. Chapters 1–4 (1: E.H. Cline, J.M. Kelder, S.E. Cole; 2: M. Bietak and C. von Rüden; 3: Kelder and Cline; 4: Cline) address the links between Egypt and the Bronze Age Aegean. The topic is concisely and engagingly presented, and benefits from an exceptional volume and quality of illustrations of key pieces of evidence. A consistent strength of the book is its inclusion of relevant illustrations beyond the exhibition's own materials, and it is hard to point to an equally strong illustration of the topic in other work. Chapter 4 closes this section with Cline's discussion of the so-called sea peoples, which is an odd addition. It sustains the book's historical narrative, but the difficulty of the subject matter, the uncertainty of the sea-peoples’ links in the Classical world or their [material] culture, leaves the chapter without the same clarity or richness of evidence found in the rest of the book. Concluding this discussion, Cline states that following the end of Mycenaean Greece, Greek contacts with Egypt were not re-established until Dynasty XXVI (p. 34). This can be challenged in two respects. First, it could be argued that, while much reduced, by the late eighth century direct Greek interactions with Egypt had recommenced on some scale, in the context of a tumultuous Eastern Mediterranean in whose politics both Greeks and Egyptians were increasingly engaged. Second, there is abundant evidence for interaction with aegyptiaca or Egyptian objects in Early Iron Age Greece, before Dynasty XXVI. Though there may not have been as clear a sense of Egypt as a political or cultural entity as in the preceding or following periods, these interactions need not all be blended into the broader phenomenon of exchange with the Levant. It is reasonable to imagine that some concept of Egypt and its material culture clung on beyond the Bronze Age and was remoulded by sporadic contacts in the Eastern Mediterranean.
To some extent, both these points are reflected in the opening to Chapter 5, wherein A. Villing discusses Early-Iron-Age aegyptiaca and the escalation of close Greek–Egyptian contacts during the seventh century and thereafter. Here, and in Chapter 6 (H.P. Colburn), the reader is given a short account of the range of forms of interaction between Greece and Egypt in this period, focusing on interactions around hubs of contact, especially Naucratis. The chapters are successful in negotiating the scale of their task, running from the end of the Bronze Age to the end of the Classical period, and still conveying many of the most interesting details. Nonetheless, it is unfortunate that this period, c. 1100–332, is covered by just two chapters, as opposed to four mostly concentrated on the intense interactions around the time of Dynasty XVIII, five on Hellenistic Egypt and five on Roman Egypt. Undoubtedly, the entire book represents snapshots of topics from each period of interaction, but this phase is especially condensed. As a result, the reader gets relatively little exposition of the intense exchange of knowledge, or at least the intense interest in Egyptian customs, suggested by the attention of Greek authors, especially Herodotus. It is also notable that the catalogue entry discussing the depiction of the Bousiris myth (pp. 104–6) does not take the clear opportunity to comment on Egypt and the Egyptians’ roles in the Greek conception of race and depiction of race, an important topic whose ancient popularity is highlighted by sources including Herodotus, janiform vases and the form of many aegyptiaca and moulds from Naucratis.
The portions of the book addressing the Hellenistic and Roman evidence (Chapters 7–16) are similarly restricted by the space in which they must coherently discuss a vast array of evidence. They alleviate some of this pressure by switching from the largely chronological progression of preceding chapters to sweeping overviews of Hellenistic and pre-Imperial Rome in Chapters 7 (A.B. Lloyd) and 12 (R.M. Schneider), each followed by a series of more thematic segments. Chapters 8–11 (8: T. Landvatter; 9: S. Caneva; 10: R.S. Bianchi; 11: L. Prada) offer glimpses into the Ptolemaic kingdom, with prominence given to royal and administrative evidence. This includes an impressive collection of portraiture but seems to come at the expense of evidence for the lives of poorer Greeks or Egyptians. Much of the final four chapters’ discussion is centred on Egypt's role in Roman religion and identity, emphasising either the state (Chapter 13: J. Pollini; 15: L. Bricault) or private individuals (Chapter 14: C. Riggs). M.J. Versluys (Chapter 16) concludes by problematising whether ‘Egyptian’ is a useful description for understanding the identity or agency of objects with complex cultural associations, many of which cannot be tied to modern concepts of ‘Egyptianness’.
Despite its success as an accompaniment to the exhibition and as an introduction to a broad array of material evidence, the volume raises some issues concerning Egypt's place in scholarship and the conception of this exhibition. The Getty's aim is to better inform on the context of the European material that defines their permanent collection through a series of exhibitions labelled The Classical World in Context. The challenge of achieving such a goal through the exhibition of their European-focused collections is foregrounded at the very opening of the book (p. xi). However, the preface's explanation (p. xi) that the exhibitions will each show the interactions between the Classical World and one other ‘non-classical’ cultural region also underlines two problems that the book, if not the exhibition itself, could do more to communicate to the audience.
One is that the rubric, a series of individual outputs on ‘X and the Classical World’, might imply a notion of culture as linearly moving between two ends, which is compounded by the exclusive focus of the introduction on Egypt, Greece and Rome, and at odds with the complexity of the subject matter. The second is that the exhibition and publication inevitably position the Getty's own collection as the ‘Classical’ nexus for study and are therefore constrained to a traditional definition of the Classical world as Greece and Italy in a field that is very aware that such biases have previously led to a lack of emphasis of non-classical evidence for interactions (for example, evidence for Egyptians at Naucratis, mentioned on pp. 80–1). The framing of the publication suggests that, from the Bronze Age, Egypt was always alien to a more-alike Graeco-Roman world. This may well be true, but some explicit exposition of why these two regions are distinguished in the book and what made them different would be informative. For example, why is the Bronze Age Aegean more ‘Classical’ than Hellenistic or Roman Egypt? The results of this foregrounding of the Classical world are apparent throughout the book, where Egyptian agency remains consistently less focal than Classical agency. Moreover, the tension, which can be created by cleaving apart Classical and non-Classical cultural property, even while examining interactions between the two, could be conveyed more clearly, especially concerning what it means to call a culture non-classical.
Clearly, each of the contributors is aware of the complexity of the interactions they discuss, and they frequently refer to non-linear interactions involving multiple cultures. Nonetheless, Versluys's contribution on the use of cultural labels is the closest that the book comes to explicitly challenging the distinctions of classical and non-classical on which it is founded. Riggs herself, in a review of the British Museum's exhibition ‘Sunken cities: Egypt's lost worlds’ (TLS May 2016, p. 18), noted that the exhibition could have done more to highlight the long reach of Orientalism. In Beyond the Nile more explicit challenges to the conception of Classical culture would have been even more appropriate, especially in the context of an increasingly complicated public discussion of cultural property and interaction. To justify the publication's claim that this and subsequent exhibitions will be the first time that the phenomenon of ancient cultural interaction will be investigated ‘so comprehensively’ (p. xi), the Getty may need to decentre its gaze and rise to the challenge of tackling synchronous, linked and multifaceted interactions. One can point to the Metropolitan Museum of Art's Assyria to Iberia at the Dawn of the Classical Age exhibition (2014–15) and the two accompanying publications as an example of a more sprawling representation of entangled cultural interactions. That exhibition certainly profited from the wide assortment of cultures represented in the MET's collections, but its catalogue's foreword and introduction also emphasised non-linearity and a decentralised approach. Beyond the Nile could have benefited from a similar, longer introduction, less focused on summarising an overarching narrative and more attentive to situating the book and its purpose in the context of how we think about objects from the ancient world.
Although I hope that the future outputs of The Classical World in Context do more to problematise the definition of the Classical world and stress the complexity of ancient interaction, these issues do not diminish Beyond the Nile’s extremely accessible narrative, its broad catalogue of objects or its fantastic illustration of the evidence. The book will be a valuable point of reference and, moreover, is certain to raise further interest in the cultural interactions of the ancient world.
