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KINGS AND ELITES IN AN INTERCULTURAL TRADITION: FROM DIODORUS TO THE EGYPTIAN TEMPLES

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  19 September 2019

Stefano G. Caneva
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The study of Hellenistic Egypt, as it has been jointly carried out by Hellenists and Egyptologists in recent decades, is a remarkable example of the efficacy of interdisciplinary endeavours bringing together different media and cultural traditions. Based on the premises of these studies in social and cultural history, this article focuses on a neglected aspect of the encounters between the Graeco-Macedonian and Egyptian elites in the Ptolemaic kingdom: the role played by self-stylization in cultural encounters in general and, more precisely, in intercultural negotiations for legitimacy and privilege. The focus will be on the strategy by which one party – in this case, the Egyptian elite – could consciously shape a representation of its traditions and values that was meant to gain more prestige and contractual power in diplomatic exchanges with the Ptolemaic establishment.

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Research Article
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Greece & Rome , Volume 66 , Issue 2 , October 2019 , pp. 179 - 202
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Copyright © The Classical Association 2019 

Cultural encounters in Hellenistic Egypt: the quest for literary echoes in Greek historiography

The study of Hellenistic Egypt, as it has been jointly carried out by Hellenists and Egyptologists in recent decades, is a remarkable example of the efficacy of interdisciplinary endeavours bringing together different media and cultural traditions. Based on the premises of these studies in social and cultural history, this article focuses on a neglected aspect of the encounters between the Graeco-Macedonian and Egyptian elites in the Ptolemaic kingdom: the role played by self-stylization in cultural encounters in general and, more precisely, in intercultural negotiations for legitimacy and privilege. The focus will be on the strategy by which one party – in this case, the Egyptian elite – could consciously shape a representation of its traditions and values that was meant to gain more prestige and contractual power in diplomatic exchanges with the Ptolemaic establishment.

Relying on the interdisciplinary approach sketched above, the analysis of the documentary sources in which the dynamics of intercultural interactions are directly legible will pave the way for discussion of a more slippery topic: the question of whether, and how, the Greek historiography of the Hellenistic age might echo the ongoing processes of intercultural negotiation in general, and more specifically the role played by self-stylization of the Egyptian elite.

Diodorus' excursus concerning ancient Egyptian pharaonic traditions in Book 1 of the Historical Library (1.70–2) offers a fitting case study of the interaction between the stylization of the ‘Other’ and self-stylization in contexts of intercultural negotiation. The justification for our starting point is that, even if certain similarities have been identified between Diodorus' account and documented Egyptian practices, the idealized picture of pharaonic power provided in this section of the Library is generally thought to mirror an (early?) Hellenistic philosophical speculation about Greek basileia rather than testify to a genuine analysis of Egyptian traditions. While this article does not intend to reject the thematic and linguistic correspondences between Diodorus' account and the Hellenistic philosophical genre of treatises On Kingship, I argue that the stylization of the Egyptian ‘Other’ in Diodorus encapsulates an echo of the self-stylization that the Egyptian elite put in practice to increase its contractual power in intercultural negotiation. Accordingly, while Diodorus' account of Egyptian royal traditions cannot be considered as a reliable source of historical realia in a positivistic sense, it succeeds in identifying the fundamental elements of the Egyptian elite's self-representation and in translating them into the Greek narrative pattern of an idealized monarchic bios (‘life’).

Shaping identities in intercultural negotiation: a methodological premise

Contemporary psychological, social, and historical studies understand cultural identities as dynamic sets of intersubjective representations and practices, ranging from theoretical knowledge to practical habits and material culture, which social groups actively select, combine, and adapt in response to present needs. This model allows for the possibility that individuals and groups may experience a combination of multiple identity bonds simultaneously – which was the case for a growing part of the population in Ptolemaic Egypt – and that these distributed middle grounds contribute to the constitution of hybrid facets within a group, thus facilitating the transfer of knowledge across groups still claiming to be culturally distinct.Footnote 1

Identity-making intersubjective representations are incremental: that is, they embrace change to respond to new social challenges, but, in order to do so, they continuously reshape the perception of a group's past and its expectations for the future. Such reassessment of the group's shared memory and intentions constitutes an essential step in the adaptive process, turning identity-making traditions into a powerful instrument to interpret the present and to plan the future. In historiographic terms, this dynamic, present-driven exploitation of cultural identities can be compared with the category of ‘intentional history’, a concept proposed by Hans-Joachim Gehrke and fruitfully applied in recent ancient historiography to discuss the interplay between, on the one hand, the perpetuation of traditions felt as bearers of durable value for the life of a community, and, on the other hand, their continuous change and adaptation, which is essential to allow a group to respond to new challenges and agendas.Footnote 2

Understanding identity as an intentional and pragmatic social construct provides a useful tool to investigate the dynamics of intercultural interaction in the Hellenistic period. In this respect, the recent scholarship has replaced a colonial interpretation of Hellenism as a monologue of the Greeks towards the other populations of the eastern Mediterranean with a dialogical model, taking into account the active role played by non-Greeks in the definition of the picture that Greeks would have had of native societies and their traditions.Footnote 3

Because cultural encounters between the high-ranking representatives of the Greek and indigenous societies often occurred in contexts of negotiation for power legitimacy and privilege, modern scholars studying the pragmatics of identity in the Hellenistic world must take into account the role of cultural schemas and stereotypes in intercultural negotiations. The importance of manipulating the other party's expectations through a carefully planned self-representation strategy is well known to the experts of modern negotiating techniques. In intercultural negotiation, this process is deeply affected by the knowledge that each party has of the cultural schemas of the other one. The abundance of sources available for studying modern negotiation processes, and the multiplication of different points of view which they provide, enable scholars and analysts to contextualize single pieces of discourse within the framework of each negotiating party's intentions and strategies.Footnote 4 Conversely, scholars interested in ancient negotiation must work with scattered and often unique pieces of evidence, which raises a dual layer of interpretative issues: first, a document often only sheds light on the point of view of one of the involved parties; second, it delivers a message which is formally and conceptually embedded in the communication strategies of a specific textual genre.

Despite these methodological obstacles due to the paucity of the evidence, a manual of ancient intercultural negotiation would not be entirely deprived of cases revealing the way in which one party could make a creative use of its identity-making traditions to fashion a strategy meant to impress its counterpart.Footnote 5 The famous episode of the priests of Thebes reminding first Hecataeus of Miletus, and later Herodotus, of the discrepancy between the short chronology of the Greeks and the long one of the Egyptians (Hdt. 2.142–4) provides an example of the way in which the Egyptian priestly elite would state the superiority of their cultural system by drawing on, and magnifying, the themes of the eternal continuity of Egyptian traditions and of the role of priests in ensuring this continuity. The episode narrated by Herodotus provides a precedent for the encounters between Greek and indigenous intellectual elites in Hellenistic Egypt and offers a crucial insight into the strategy adopted by the Egyptian priests to represent themselves as the ultimate holders of the keys to Egyptian value-boosting traditions, memory, and power legitimacy.

Negotiating power legitimacy in Hellenistic Egypt: native agents, strategies, and media

Negotiating consists in using the other party's needs and weaknesses to gain a more favourable position for one's group of interest, in terms of power, status, and privilege. The possibility of an agreement arises when the negotiating parties share the same need for a fruitful settlement. This common-sense rule fits well with the historical situation after the Macedonian conquest of Egypt, an event that prompted the new foreign rulers and the Egyptian elite to negotiate their respective interests: consensus and support towards the Macedonian domination on the one hand, and the granting of new privileges (or the confirmation of old ones) to the Egyptian elite on the other.

In Hellenistic Greece and western Asia Minor, negotiating royal benefactions and respect for local autonomy in exchange for consensus and collaboration was a task for the civic elites. In Egypt, conversely, the limited role ascribed by the Ptolemies to Greek poleis left space for other agents.Footnote 6 The native social group holding this function was composed of families of hereditary priests, officials, and landowners.Footnote 7 Alexander the Great, and those who administered Egypt in his and his Argead successors' name, paid attention to fulfilling the ritual expectations of good Egyptian rulers and to recognizing the privileges of the temples in order to ensure themselves the support of the indigenous priests.Footnote 8 To a certain extent, the establishment of new rulers may have damaged the interests of those parts of the Egyptian elite which had found their way of living under the Persians;Footnote 9 yet, the general reaction seems to have been one of acceptance of the new rule, since we have no information of internal revolts before 245 bc, at the beginning of the reign of Ptolemy III.Footnote 10 Other elements, such as the priestly definition of the pharaohs' Great Name,Footnote 11 the appearance of the foreign monarchs as the virtual agents of architectural programmes in the temples,Footnote 12 and the regular use of the Macedonian pharaohs' names in the dating formulae of documents,Footnote 13 suggest that the new order was implemented from the outset with no major opposition.

From the early Hellenistic period, members of the high-ranking priestly families not only played a mediating role in connecting local temples with the central power, but in some cases directly collaborated with the ruling house as court advisers.Footnote 14 As time passed, an increasing number of Greeks in Egyptian temples can be detected, just as the members of the Egyptian priestly elite grew more numerous in the ranks of the Ptolemaic administration.Footnote 15 Moreover, the colonial occupation of the Egyptian inland (chora), which was assigned to veterans as settlers (klerouchoi), together with the integration of Egyptian soldiers in the Ptolemaic army from the Battle of Raphia (217 bc) onwards, contributed to increasing instances of cohabitation and therefore multiplied the middle ground where cultural encounters could lead to the development of hybrid facets of culture.

Egyptian textual sources from the Ptolemaic period show that memories of Persian rule could be shaped and referred to as an example of harsh and impious domination. During the early period of Ptolemaic rule, cultural mediators were already negotiating concessions of land by the satrap Ptolemy to the temple of Buto in the Delta, as testified by the famous Satrap stele.Footnote 16 One can only speculate about how comprehensive this work of cultural brokerage was. A minimalist hypothesis is that the negotiating process concerned only the positive representation of the ruler at the local level in exchange for his benefactions to the sanctuary. However, the topics addressed in the Satrap stele – the identification of the past enemy of the temple of Buto with the Persian Great King Xerxes and the integration of Ptolemy's policy within the traditional model of a good pharaoh – suggest that there was more at stake than a simple quid pro quo: the Satrap stele sheds light on a laboratory where the cultural identities of the two involved parties, with all their ideological and political implications, are scanned in search of a common ground enabling productive collaboration regarding both internal and external politics.

During the Ptolemaic period, the introduction of periodic meetings of the Egyptian priests with the king provided a useful context for political and ideological encounter between the court and the high-ranking representatives of the indigenous elite. Egyptian priests, like contemporary Greek poleis, discussed, voted on, and issued decrees praising the king's resolutions in favour of the temples, and consequently granted honours to the king and his family. Of course, in Egypt as in the Greek world, this model of reciprocity and exchange between royal benefactions (euergesia) and the goodwill (eunoia) of the subjects did not imply that the two parties held the same contractual power. In Egypt, the gap in power was even stronger, since the Ptolemies exerted full control over a model of exchange which stemmed from the Greek political tradition, and which was entirely without precedent in Egypt.Footnote 17 Nevertheless, this channel of communication provided the members of the indigenous elite with a space where they could argue for the traditional values of pharaonic power legitimacy and instruct the Graeco-Macedonian elite regarding royal conduct towards the temples.

In this respect, the euergetic discourse expressed in the honorific decrees of the Egyptian priests points to the positive side of a lively debate about the interaction between rulers and elites. The negative face of this discussion is manifested by the prophetic and apocalyptic temple literature of the same period. Priestly texts of the Graeco-Roman age, such as the Demotic Chronicle,Footnote 18 the Prophecy of the Potter,Footnote 19 and the Dream of Nektanebo,Footnote 20 offer an insight into the priestly view of what a good pharaoh should not do, and on the tragic consequences that misconduct of the monarch towards the gods would unquestionably have on his reign, as well as on the divine equilibrium ensuring the prosperity of Egypt. While the existence of Greek versions of the Egyptian apocalyptic literature, such as the Nektanebo story included in the Greek Alexander Romance, shows that the narrative texts could circulate outside the milieu of the temples where they were conceived,Footnote 21 the complexity and hermetic style of the Chronicle made this kind of writing exclusively fitted for closed priestly milieus. Therefore, the Chronicle sheds light on the work of the priestly elite on the political implications of Egyptian identity-making traditions. Regardless of the differences in style and tone, which depend on the type of occasion and medium related to the various genres, the products of these inner laboratories stated the same principles as the official texts issued in honour of the Ptolemies: the causal link between respect for the Egyptian religious traditions and political legitimacy, and the central role of the native priests in preserving, transmitting, and deploying the native cultural identity for present needs.

In the next section, the focus will move to the account of Diodorus concerning ancient pharaonic kingship. The main purpose is to discuss to what extent Diodorus' account reflects the way in which the Egyptian priestly elite depicted its role in intercultural negotiations with the Ptolemaic establishment. Second, the vexed question of whether Diodorus relied on a source from the Ptolemaic period will be tackled by combining the traditional methodology of source analysis with considerations about the pragmatics of the literary genre of Hellenistic Greek treatises On Kingship.

Diodorus' account of ancient pharaonic kingship and its Hellenistic premises

Diodorus' account of Egyptian customs in Book 1 of the Historical Library follows a summary of the deeds of the ancient pharaohs from their origins down to Amasis. Opening this ethnographic excursus (1.69.2), Diodorus explains that he has selected his material in compliance with the criteria of exceptionality (τά τε παραδοξότατα) and of usefulness for the readers (τὰ μάλιστα ὠφελῆσαι δυνάμενα τοὺς ἀναγινώσκοντας). However, as the author moves on (1.69.7), he explicitly states that he has not invented details to increase the interest in his narrative, as other authors of Egyptian accounts did before him.Footnote 22 Rather, Diodorus claims that he has followed ‘the very content of the records kept by the priests in Egypt’ (αὐτὰ δὲ τὰ παρὰ τοῖς ἱερεῦσι τοῖς κατ᾽Αἴγυπτον ἐν ταῖς ἀναγραφαῖς γεγραμμένα).

With few exceptions, this introductory passage has been interpreted by modern scholars as a mere transcription of the words of Hecataeus of Abdera, the author of a work On Egypt written at the court of Ptolemy I.Footnote 23 However, the two criteria of exceptionality and usefulness repeatedly appear in the Library and are well rooted in Diodorus' attitude towards historical writing.Footnote 24 Moreover, priestly records (anagraphai) contained in the temple texts (hierai bibloi) are referred to several times in Book 1 as the authoritative sources of his Egyptian account.Footnote 25 These remarks are consistent with the picture of Diodorus that recent scholarship has fashioned by questioning a long-lasting prejudice about this author. Until recently, scholars have reproached Diodorus for a fundamental lack of autonomous thinking, and have concluded that he systematically limited his efforts to following one major source for each section of his work, often copying it verbatim and occasionally seasoning his narrative with interesting digressions imported from other authors. However, a growing number of investigations have shown that Diodorus was able to express a personal vision of history and that he made use of the available sources in different ways, case by case.Footnote 26 Thus, even if we accept the view that similar references to Egyptian sources had already appeared in the works of Diodorus' predecessor(s), there is no reason to deprive the author of his own words, which make perfect sense in his account.Footnote 27

Accordingly, the mention of the hierai bibloi held in the temples and of their authors, the scribes of Egyptian sanctuaries (hierogrammateis), should be taken as an explicit reference to the Egyptian agents and contexts that Diodorus had in mind while writing his account: the House of Life of Egyptian temples and the specialists on sacred books who worked there.Footnote 28 The documentary evidence shows that, in the Graeco-Roman period, Egyptian temples continued to serve as hubs of interpretation, adaptation, and transmission of knowledge. The temples also played an important role in the everyday life of local communities, since they were where legal cases were discussed, often bringing together Greek and Egyptian subjects with their respective legal traditions.

The need for efficacy in ritual and legal activities made Egyptian temples the place where texts written in the Egyptian language were translated into Greek for practical purposes.Footnote 29 Fragmentary remnants of these works from the Hellenistic period and (especially) the Imperial period have provided new information on the cultural horizon of the House of Life and on its role in bridging the gap between Egypt's traditions and their new, Graeco-Egyptian context.Footnote 30 The heterogenous nature of these priestly texts, which comprised prescriptive manuals, narratives, catalogues, and scientific works, can be discerned from both literary sources (Clem. Strom. 6.4.35–8)Footnote 31 and papyrological finds.Footnote 32 At least some of them apparently included lists of kings, sometimes together with a short narrative about their physical and moral qualities, and contained references to major events of their reigns. According to Herodotus (2.100), the priests of Thebes owned a ‘book’ (byblos), a papyrus roll where they could read a list of 331 kings of the past. While this text may have been a concise royal list of the kind documented by the Turin King List,Footnote 33 Diodorus (1.44.5) adds that the sacred books preserved in the temples recorded information about each pharaoh's physical features and character, and about events related to his reign.

The account of the life and education of ancient pharaohs (1.70–2) opens Diodorus' ethnographic treatment of Egyptian traditions. According to him (1.70.1), the life of Egyptian pharaohs of the old time was

not at all like that of other men who enjoy monarchic powers and do in all matters exactly as they please, without being held to account (κατὰ τὴν ἑαυτῶν προαίρεσιν ἀνυπευθύνως). On the contrary, all their acts were regulated by prescriptions set forth in traditional norms (νόμων ἐπιταγαῖς).

As Diodorus highlights, these ancestral regulations were meant to inspire in the sovereigns the highest sense of their mission of justice and a strong piety towards the gods.Footnote 34 The priests, whose sons constituted a court elite accompanying the monarch,Footnote 35 were entrusted with the task of educating and guiding the king and of shaping the public image that the subjects had of their pharaoh. In addition to his administrative tasks, the pharaoh would perform rituals with the guidance of the high priest.Footnote 36 On the occasion of sacrifices, the high priest would pray that the pharaoh might be healthy, on the condition that he was just towards his subjects.Footnote 37 He would also praise the king's virtues in front of the people: piety towards gods and kindness with men; self-control, justice, magnanimity, honesty, mercifulness, and gratitude.Footnote 38

Far from feeling oppressed by the limitations in expressions of their personal power, Diodorus' ancient pharaohs appreciated the fact that normative traditions and advice protected them from the political risks of ruling under the effect of passions and irrational behaviour. The consequence of acting in harmony with norms was that these ancient rulers inspired the goodwill of all their subjects and that, accordingly, they ensured internal peace, wealth, and external power for Egypt for millennia.Footnote 39 The collective memory of the pharaoh's life would also be fashioned on the initiative of priests. As Diodorus puts it (1.72), on the last day of the period of funerary mourning after the king's death, priests summoned the people and set up a tribunal to judge the pharaoh's actions and his fitness to receive the honour of public burial.Footnote 40 Sovereigns would therefore act in compliance with traditional norms not only as a consequence of their education, but also out of fear that their behaviour would deprive them of the customary funerary honours.Footnote 41

The terminology used by Diodorus to state that the power of ancient pharaohs was limited by normative traditions evokes a long history of practice and theory about the limits of personal power in Greek culture. In the administrative life of Athens and other Greek democratic cities, εὔθυνα was the ‘public examination of the conduct of officials, held on the expiration of their term of office’,Footnote 42 a process overseen by an εὔθυνος, an officer acting as the public examiner. A charge whose holder was ‘liable to give account’ of his administration was therefore labelled as ὑπεύθυνος.Footnote 43 By contrast, the adjective ἀνυπεύθυνος and its variant ἀνεύθυνος defined a type of personal power free from constitutional control, which in fifth-century Athens became a distinctive trait of Greek tyrants and of the Persian king.Footnote 44 In the fourth century, monarchy attracted increasing attention in intellectual discussions about political regimes.Footnote 45 Within this framework, the closest precedent to Diodorus' account of ancient Egyptian monarchy comes from the Academy and points to the developments of Plato's political thinking in the last phase of his life, when the progressive shift from the rule of the βασιλικὸς ἀνήρ (the ‘kingly man’) to the rule of law established the premises for the model of ἀρχὴ ὑπεύθυνος βασιλική (‘law-bound monarchy’) proposed to the supporters of Dion of Syracuse in Ep. 8.355e.Footnote 46

Neither the Argead monarchy nor the Hellenistic ones that developed from its model foresaw constitutional counter-powers limiting the discretional exercise of personal authority by the king. Accordingly, any kind of interaction with the monarch had to take the form of advice or negotiation, based on the prestige of counsellors or on the diplomatic capacities of the subjects.Footnote 47 Thus the necessity of setting up limits to monarchic power, or at least of guiding the royal behaviour towards a positive dynamic of exchange between kings and subjects, became a central topic in Hellenistic theories about monarchic regimes. The Hellenistic age transmitted a flourishing tradition of literary discussions On Kingship, whereby a learned adviser – a philosopher, usually addressing a specific monarch – proposes a model of conduct for the sovereign by means of a comparison between the virtues of the good ruler and the vices of the bad one, the tyrant. Variously inspired by the ethical models of the contemporaneous philosophical schools, these treatises never discuss the exercise of monarchic power in terms of concrete governmental policies, but focus on the bios of the king, his education, and his relationship with his subjects.Footnote 48 Diodorus' account of the life of ancient pharaohs shares with the genre On Kingship its focus on the representation of the king's ideal bios as being based on the respect of normative religious and moral traditions.Footnote 49

The influence of the narrative modes of philosophical treatises On Kingship on Diodorus' account of pharaonic monarchic traditions can be better appreciated by comparison with a passage concerning Darius I's activity in Egypt. This section does not belong to the account of ancient pharaonic kingship, but to an excursus about great Egyptian legislators, among whom Darius figures as the last of six lawgiving pharaohs (1.95.4–5). According to Diodorus, Darius

was incensed at the lawlessness which his predecessor, Cambyses, had shown in his treatment of the sanctuaries of Egypt, and aspired to live a life of virtue and of piety towards the gods. Indeed, he associated with the priests of Egypt themselves, and took part with them in the study of theology and of events recorded in their sacred books; and when he learned from these books about the greatness of soul of the ancient kings and about their goodwill towards their subjects, he imitated their manner of life.

While this section shows the same philo-Egyptian tone as the account on ancient pharaohs, it differs from it in that Diodorus does not represent the process of interaction between pharaoh and priests as the fulfilment of the traditional duty of an idealized king, but as the policy of one specific foreign ruler who wanted to know local traditions as a premise for his lawgiving activity in Egypt. Beyond the celebratory reference to Egyptian priests and priestly traditions, this account therefore replaces the focus on the idealized bios of a generic good monarch, which characterizes the philosophical genre On Kingship, with a historical scenario of intercultural negotiation between the foreign king and the intellectual elite who had control of the local traditions of power legitimacy.Footnote 50

Although Hellenistic literary works On Kingship usually addressed a specific king, their ideas also widely circulated among a large learned public.Footnote 51 It is therefore worthwhile asking whether this twofold target readership could also apply to Diodorus' excursus about ancient Egyptian kingship. As far as we can infer from his own words, his intended audience was neither a Hellenistic royal court nor the entourage of a specific prominent Roman.Footnote 52 From his prologues, it emerges that Diodorus wrote for a large learned Greek (and Greek-reading Roman) audience interested in drawing useful teachings from history.Footnote 53 Against this broad background, we may assume that pharaonic law-bound monarchy was not meant to provide a model to one specific contemporaneous holder of power, but would more generally offer a positive example of personal leadership for the first-century Mediterranean world: a world troubled by the military struggles and political subversions of the Roman civil wars.Footnote 54

Conversely, an original court background for Diodorus' account of pharaonic kingship can only be imagined if we assume that, for this text, Diodorus was inspired by a Hellenistic work discussing ideal monarchic power as limited by traditional norms. This assumption seems to be confirmed by comparison with another excursus where Diodorus discusses the relationship between Ethiopian kings and normative traditions controlled by local priests (3.5–7). In this section, his evaluation is very different from that expressed in the account about ancient Egyptian pharaohs: the submission of the Ethiopian kings to the will of the priests is judged negatively and associated with the power of superstition; accordingly, Ergamenes, the first king who, at the time of Ptolemy II, inverted this power balance by resorting to violence against the priests and ruling ‘according to his own will’ (πρὸς τὴν ἑαυτοῦ προαίρεσιν), is praised for having acted in compliance with his education, which was inspired by Greek philosophy.Footnote 55 This remarkable difference in the treatment of the impact of priests and normative traditions on the conduct of monarchs can be explained if we assume that, for these passages, Diodorus was inspired by two distinct and opposing Hellenistic sources, of which only that concerning Egyptian traditions portrayed ancient pharaonic monarchy as a model coherent with contemporaneous Greek theories about kingship.Footnote 56

Following the traditional interpretation of Book 1, this work might be Hecataeus of Abdera's On Egypt and the original purpose of this excursus would be to celebrate the Ptolemies for reigning over an ancient land whose monarchic traditions were consistent with contemporaneous Greek philosophical reflections about good kingship.Footnote 57 However, this hypothesis relies to a large extent on the above-mentioned assumption that Diodorus simply copied the work of Hecataeus, and that Hecataeus' account of Egyptian kingship, having been written at Ptolemy I's court, could not be deprived of a celebratory tone towards the Ptolemaic rule. Moreover, even if we accept Hecataeus as the source of this passage, we should separate this excursus from Diodorus' final negative consideration about the decline of Egyptian customs under the Macedonian dynasty (1.95.6): according to the Egyptians, as Diodorus reports, many of the good customs of ancient times had changed when the Macedonians conquered the indigenous sovereigns.Footnote 58

It therefore seems more convincing that, be he Hecataeus or not, Diodorus' Hellenistic source would have had a primarily adhortative function. The stylized representation of Egyptian priests as a court elite advising the king on the traditional sources of consensus not only provided a good match for the contemporaneous philosophical reflections about the relationship between monarchic power and traditional norms; it also, and more significantly, drew attention to the role played by the Egyptian priestly elite in shaping and promoting a message of royal legitimacy, in compliance with the traditional cultural codes of the country.

What remains to be discussed is the key question of whether Egyptian priests could actually play such a normative role in relation to the conduct of pharaohs as suggested by Diodorus (and possibly by his Hellenistic source). The answer to this question is no.Footnote 59 Nevertheless, even though the Egyptian priestly elite never had the authority to impose a normative model of conduct on the kings (any more than did the Graeco-Macedonian elite, since Hellenistic kingdoms were not constitutional monarchies),Footnote 60 they still had the chance to exert pressure on the king at a diplomatic level thanks to their function as holders of the native traditions. Thus, if we consider the interactions between king and priests from the perspective of processes of negotiation outlined above, Diodorus' account provides us with a reliable set of ingredients, ranging from the continuous contact between the monarch and the native elite to the fundamental role of written texts (and of the priestly class in authoring and interpreting them) in the preservation of Egyptian cultural memory and identity.

Final remarks and a future research agenda

If the Ptolemaic kingdom never ceased to be a bi- or multi-cephalous system, as shown by the lack of a common legal framework across ethnic groups,Footnote 61 encounters, both collaborative and conflictual, were the natural consequence of cohabitation. As Diodorus explicitly states, the Egyptian side of these encounters must be sought in the socio-cultural milieu of the House of Life of indigenous temples. Egyptian sanctuaries not only provided the chora with a network of settings where intercultural encounters would take place on a daily basis, but also functioned as an inner laboratory where the native elite could work on Egyptian cultural identity and political traditions to develop a discourse of legitimacy. Such a discourse could then be deployed in negotiations with the Graeco-Macedonian ruling class, at court or elsewhere in the kingdom. Accordingly, Egyptian priests did not transmit neutral, static knowledge of their traditions, but actively selected and communicated a picture of Egyptian identity and of its political implications that served to gain contractual power in the processes of negotiation concerning power legitimacy and consensus.

Diodorus' account of pharaonic traditions translates into Greek ideas and narrative forms a fundamental claim of the Egyptian priestly elite: the task of evaluating the deeds of the pharaohs in relation to a value-giving set of moral and religious requirements, over which the priests exert their control in compliance with the identity-making traditions of their land. In doing so, he (and perhaps his Hellenistic source) transposes the historical dynamics of negotiation into an idealized model of royal bios and education – a hallmark of the philosophical genre On Kingship – thus adding to the priests' self-styling of Egyptian identity a further layer of stylization that relied on Greek cultural codes.

It is impossible to provide a conclusive answer to the question of whether Diodorus' pharaonic discourse was inspired by Hecataeus of Abdera or by one or more authors working at a later stage of Ptolemaic history. In this respect, we must bear in mind that the recent scholarship has dismissed an old opinion assuming that the Ptolemies replaced an initial collaborative attitude towards the indigenous elites with a more assertive Graeco-Macedonian way of governing, once their power was well rooted in Egypt.Footnote 62 Accordingly, the adhortative tone of the account about ancient pharaonic kingship could find a suitable socio-cultural background at any moment of Ptolemaic history.

While the complex intercultural palimpsest transmitted by Book 1 of the Historical Library resists a simple process of identification of its textual layers,Footnote 63 I hope that this analysis of Diodorus' debts to the discourse of legitimacy authored by the Egyptian elite of the Ptolemaic period may inspire new studies discussing Hellenistic cultural encounters with an interdisciplinary and properly cross-cultural perspective. What is at stake is the purpose of reconnecting Greek ethnographic historiography of the age after Alexander with the concerns and agendas of the native populations of the eastern Mediterranean, as these emerge from their own literary and documentary evidence. Diodorus' archaiologia is necessarily at the heart of this ambitious project, where the purposes and methods of traditional source analysis can contribute to an encompassing overview of the cross-cultural history of the ancient Mediterranean world.

Footnotes

The research leading to these results received funding from the European Commission, Seventh Framework Programme, under Grant Agreement no. 600376, during a Marie Curie Piscopia fellowship at the University of Padova, Italy (2015–17). An earlier version of this article was presented at the Elite Identity and Self-Representation in the Ancient Mediterranean World conference, organized by J. Murray and P. Michel at Fondation Hardt, Vandœuvres (Switzerland), 24–25 October 2015. I am grateful to Emily Cole and Alexander Meeus for their observations on that text. The final re-working of the article took place during the first year of an F.R.S.-FNRS postdoctoral scholarship at the University of Liège. I am particularly grateful to Ivana and Andrej Petrovic as well as to the anonymous referees of Greece & Rome for their remarks, which have helped me improve the clarity of my arguments. Of course I am solely responsible for every statement in this article, as well as for any mistakes or lack of precision which might have remained in the text. Translations of Diodorus are taken, sometimes with slight adaptations, from C. D. Oldfather (ed.), Diodorus of Sicily. Vol. I, Books I and II.1–34 (London and New York, 1933).

References

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18 This demotic text groups a list of hermetic oracular statements interpreted by the priests as references to historical events, whose good or bad impact is related to the moral and religious conduct of the pharaohs of the past: see Johnson, J. H., ‘The Demotic Chronicle as a Statement of a Theory of Kingship’, SSEA Journal 13.2 (1983), 61–72Google Scholar; Johnson, J. H. and Ritner, R. K., ‘Multiple Meaning and Ambiguity in the “Demotic Chronicle”’, in Israelit-Groll, S. (ed.), Studies in Egyptology Presented to Miriam Lichtheim, 2 vols. (Jerusalem, 1990)Google Scholar, i.494–506; Bresciani, E., ‘Il pleut sur la pierre: prophéties politiques dans la littérature démotique’, in Assmann, J. and Blumenthal, E. (eds.), Literatur und Politik im pharaonischen und ptolemäischen Ägypten (Cairo 1999), 282–4Google Scholar; Felber, H., ‘Die Demotische Chronik’, in Blasius, A. and Schipper, B. U. (eds.), Apokalyptik und Ägypten. Eine kritische Analyse der relevanten Texte aus dem griechisch-römischen Ägypten (Leuven, 2002), 65–111Google Scholar.

19 This text, which is only preserved in a Greek version, contains the prophecy pronounced by a potter to Pharaoh Amenophis, announcing an epoch of chaos and destruction under the rule of foreign followers of Typhon/Seth, identified with the Macedonian dynasty: see Koenen, L., ‘Die Prophezeiungen des “Töpfers”’, ZPE 2 (1968), 178–209Google Scholar; L. Koenen, ‘Die Apologie des Töpfers an König Amenophis oder das Töpferorakel’, in Blasius and Schipper (n. 18), 139–87; Ladynin, I. A., ‘The Isolationist Concept of the Potter's Oracle and its Alternative’, in Rutherford, I. (ed.), Graeco-Egyptian Interactions. Literature, Translation, and Culture, 500 bce–300 ce (Oxford, 2016), 163–86CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

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25 Diod. Sic. 1.31.7, 43.6, 44.4, 46.7–8, 63.1, 69.7, 81.4, 96.2.

26 See, among others, Rathmann, M., ‘Diodor und seine Quellen. Zur Kompilationstechnik des Historiographen’, in Hauben, H. and Meeus, A. (eds.), The Age of the Successors and the Creation of the Hellenistic Kingdoms (323–276 b.c.) (Leuven, 2014), 49–113Google Scholar; C. Rubincam, ‘New and Old Approaches to Diodoros: Can They be Reconciled?’, in Hau et al. (n. 24), 13–39.

27 The question of how and to what extent Diodorus had access to texts shedding light on Egyptian priestly traditions cannot be answered, since almost nothing is known of his stay in Egypt. For a brief discussion of the information derived from his text, see Muntz, 2017 (n. 23), 4, 217. However, the existence of a lively tradition of cultural encounters in Late Ptolemaic Egyptian temples, as well as at the court of the last Ptolemies, suggests that a learned man with good contacts who came to Egypt to learn more about the local culture and traditions could easily satisfy his curiosity. On Cleopatra speaking Egyptian, see Plut. Vit. Ant. 27.4–5; on the close links between the Alexandrian court and the Memphis priests of Ptah in the Late Ptolemaic period, see Thompson, D. J., Memphis under the Ptolemies (Oxford, 2012), 128–36Google Scholar.

28 As pointed out by Quaegebeur, J., ‘Sur la “loi sacrée” dans l’Égypte gréco-romaine’, AncSoc 11–12 (1981), 227–40Google Scholar, in Egyptian contexts the expression hiera biblos must be interpreted as the Greek translation of the Egyptian ḏmʻ-nṯr (‘divine book’), the papyrus roll containing texts collected in the libraries of the House of Life in the temples. The Greek expression is occasionally accompanied by the word Σεμ(ε)νουθι, which Quaegebeur explains as the Greek transliteration of ḏmʻ-nṯr. See also Aufrère, 2012 (n. 14), 324–33, on the Egyptian sources of Manetho.

29 On translations and bilingual or multilingual texts as expressions of cultural contact and hybridization in Hellenistic Egypt, see L. Prada, ‘Multiculturalism in Ptolemaic and Roman Egypt: Language Contact through the Evidence of Papyri and Inscriptions', in Spier et al. (n. 6), 148–54.

30 For the legal documentation, see Quaegebeur (n. 28). On the Book of the Temple, a normative manual concerning the functioning of Egyptian sanctuaries, see Quack, J. F., ‘Ein ägyptisches Handbuch des Tempels und seine griechische Übersetzung’, ZPE 119 (1997), 297–300Google Scholar; Quack, J. F., ‘Das Buch vom Tempel und verwandte Texte’, ARG 2 (2000), 1–20Google Scholar; J. F. Quack, ‘Translating the Realities of Cult’, in Rutherford (n. 19), 267–83. On the Egyptian temple wisdom, see also J. Osing, ‘La science sacerdotale’, in Valbelle and Leclant (n. 17), 127–40; Ryholt, K., ‘On the Content and Nature of the Tebtunis Temple Library: A Status Report’, in Lippert, S. and Schentuleit, M. (eds.), Tebtynus und Soknopaiu Nesos. Leben in römerzeitlichen Fajum (Wiesbaden, 2005), 141–63Google Scholar; R. Jasnow, ‘“Between Two Waters”: The Book of Thoth and the Problem of Graeco-Egyptian Interactions', in Rutherford (n. 19), 317–56.

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34 Interestingly, Diodorus does not take into account the assumed divine dimension of pharaonic power, but only the moral definition of the monarch as a pious human being. It is worth noting that this approach is consistent with both the Greek genre of treatises On Kingship (for which see below, n. 48) and the Egyptian priestly texts concerning the duties of the good pharaoh towards the temples.

35 In pharaonic Egypt, as is in other monarchic traditions, the young members of the court elite were the companions of the young heir: see E. F. Morris, ‘The Pharaoh and Pharaonic Office’, in Lloyd (n. 7), 204. On Egyptian court society, see Spence, K., ‘Court and Palace in Ancient Egypt: The Marna Period and Later Eighteenth Dynasty’, in Spawforth, A. J. S. (ed.), The Court and Court Society in Ancient Monarchies (Cambridge, 2007), 267–328Google Scholar.

36 On the pharaoh as the virtual agent of every official initiative taken in the civil and religious life of the kingdom (although most tasks would be carried out by his representatives), see Baines, J., ‘Kingship, Definition of Culture, and Legitimation’, in O'Connor, D. and Silverman, D. P. (eds.), Ancient Egyptian Kingship (Leiden and New York, 1995), 3–47Google Scholar; Morris (n. 35); B. Haring, ‘Administration and Law: Pharaonic’, in Lloyd (n. 7), 218–36.

37 Regarding the prayer of the priest, Diodorus' text can be contrasted with a section of the demotic Book of the Temple concerning the duties of a priest called nsw.tj, who was in charge of the rituals for the king: see Quack, J. F., ‘Organiser le culte ideal: le Manuel du temple’, Bulletin de la Société française d’égyptologie 160 (2004), 21Google Scholar.

38 On the definition of pharaonic virtues in the Ptolemaic priestly decrees, see Clarysse (n. 17); Pfeiffer, S., Das Dekret von Kanopos (238 v. Chr.). Kommentar und historische Auswertung eines dreisprachigen Synodaldekretes der ägyptischen Priester zu Ehren Ptolemaios' III. und seiner Familie (Munich and Leipzig, 2004), 200–29Google Scholar.

39 While eunoia is a Greek concept, the topic of divine reward for pious kings is common to both Greek and Egyptian sources. For the Greek evidence, see also Diod. Sic. 18.28.5–6 on Ptolemy winning human consensus and divine protection against his rivals because of his virtuous behaviour. For a comparative analysis of the vocabulary of good kingship in Ptolemaic sources, see Schubart, W., ‘Das hellenistische Königsideal nach Inschriften und Papyri’, APF 12 (1937), 1–26CrossRefGoogle Scholar; Schubart, W., ‘Das Königsbild des Hellenismus’, Die Antike 13 (1937), 272–88Google Scholar; Mooren, L., ‘The Nature of the Hellenistic Monarchy’, in Dack, E. Van't et al. (eds), Egypt and the Hellenistic World (Leuven, 1983), 205–40Google Scholar.

40 It is worth noting that official judgements of deceased pharaohs by priests are not attested in the Egyptian documentation. Diodorus' posthumous judgement can be better understood as the transposition of the Egyptian ritual scene of the ‘judgement of the dead’, which is known from chapter 125 of the Book of the Dead, into a real judgement. For this text, see Quack, J. F., ‘Conceptions of Purity in Egyptian Religion’, in Frevel, C. and Nihan, C. (eds.), Purity and the Forming of Religious Traditions in the Ancient Mediterranean World and Ancient Judaism (Leiden, 2013), 148–50Google Scholar; and Quack (n. 30).

41 See also Diod. Sic. 1.64.5–6 for the people's hostility to Chemmis and Kephren. Significantly, their successor, Mykerinos, is said to have adopted a different style of government (Diod. Sic. 1.64.9).

42 LSJ online, <http://stephanus.tlg.uci.edu/lsj> (accessed 24 May 2019).

43 On the Athenian euthynoi, see [Arist.] Ath. Pol. 48.4–5, with Piérart, M., ‘Les εὔθυνοι à Athènes’, ClAnt 40 (1971), 526–73Google Scholar. On the development of the euthynoi in the Greek poleis down to the first century bc, see Fröhlich, P., Les cités grecques et le contrôle des magistrats. IV–I siècle avant J.-C. (Geneva, 2004)Google Scholar.

44 See Aesch. PV 324, concerning the violent domination of Zeus, the new king of the gods: τραχὺς μόναρχος οὐδ’ὑπεύθυνος κρατεῖ (‘a violent monarch and absolute ruler’). For the Persian king, see Aesch. Pers. 213, where Athossa contrasts the power of her son Xerxes to that of a city magistrate: being οὐχ ὑπεύθυνος πόλει (‘not liable to give account to the city’), his position will remain unchallenged even if his campaign results into disaster. Similarly, in his pro-democratic speech in Hdt. 3.80, Otanes argues against a political system allowing the monarch to be ἀνεύθυνος. Reflecting on the different kinds of constitutions, Arist. Pol. 4.10.1295a identifies the lack of constitutional control as a crucial element turning monarchy into tyranny.

45 For an overview of the developments in Greek reflections about monarchy during the classical period, see Luraghi, N., ‘One-Man Government: The Greeks and Monarchy’, in Beck, H. (ed.), A Companion to Ancient Greek Government (Malden MA, 2013), 131–45CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

46 Murray (n. 23), 164–6, tentatively seeks the philosophical premises of Diodorus' passage (ascribed to Hecateus) in the philosophical school of Abdera, but the result of this enquiry remains highly speculative. On Ep. 8, see Brisson, L., Platon. Lettres (Paris, 1987), 233–52Google Scholar; Parente, M. Isnardi, Platone. Lettere (Milan, 2002), 257–64Google Scholar. On the shift of Plato's political thinking from the rule of philosophers to the rule of law and on the resulting stress on the role of euthynoi, see Lane, M., Method and Politics in Plato's Statesman (Cambridge and New York, 1998), 146–63CrossRefGoogle Scholar; Piérart, M., ‘Du règne des philosophes à la souveraineté des lois’, in Eder, W. (ed.), Die athenische Demokratie im 4. Jahrhundert v. Chr. Vollendung oder Verfall einer Verfassungsform? (Stuttgart, 1995), 249–68Google Scholar; Eder, W., ‘Le blanc, le pourpre et le noir: les funérailles des εὔθυνοι dans les “Lois” de Platon et le culte des grands hommes’, in Delruelle, E. and Pirenne-Delforge, V. (eds.), De la religion à la philosophie (Liège, 2001), 153–66Google Scholar; Meyer, S. Sauvé, ‘Plato and the Law’, in Benson, H. H. (ed.), A Companion to Plato (Malden MA, 2007), 373–87Google Scholar. More generally on the topic of the sovereignty of laws in fourth-century Athens, see D. Cohen, ‘The Rule of Law and Democratic Ideology in Classical Athens', in Eder, Die athenische Demokratie (this note), 227–47.

47 On the Macedonian monarchic system, see the discussion in Anson, E. M., Alexander the Great. Themes and Issues (London and New York, 2013), 13–42Google Scholar. On Hellenistic kingship, see Strootman, R., Courts and Elites in the Hellenistic Empires. The Near East After the Achemenids, c. 330 to 30 bce (Edinburgh, 2014)Google Scholar; Caneva, 2016 (n. 19), 29–34, 49–57. On negotiation at the level of international diplomacy between cities and kings, see Ma, J., Antiochus III and the Cities of Western Asia Minor (Oxford, 2002)Google Scholar. The entry basileia (‘kingship’) of the Byzantine lexicon Suda (B 147 Adler), thought to reflect a Hellenistic conception of monarchic power, explicitly maintains that ‘kingship is rule without accountability’ (βασιλεία ἐστίν ἀνυπεύθυνος ἀρχή).

48 For a general discussion of this genre, see Bertelli, L., ‘Perì Basileias: i trattati sulla regalità dal IV secolo a.C. agli apocrifi pitagorici’, in Bettiolo, P. and Filoramo, G. (eds.), Il dio mortale. Teologie politiche tra antico e contemporaneo (Brescia, 2002), 17–61Google Scholar; Murray, O., ‘Philosophy and Monarchy in the Hellenistic World’, in Rajak, T. et al. (eds.), Jewish Perspectives on Hellenistic Rulers (Berkeley, CA, Los Angeles, CA, and London, 2007), 13–28Google Scholar; Haake, M., ‘Writing down the King: The Communicative Function of Treatises on Kingship in the Hellenistic Period’, in Luraghi, N. (ed.), The Splendors and Miseries of Ruling Alone. Encounters with Monarchy from Archaic Greece to the Hellenistic Mediterranean (Stuttgart, 2013), 165–206Google Scholar. On the relationship between king and laws in Hellenistic political thinking, see also Ramelli, I., Il basileus come nomos empsychos tra diritto naturale e diritto divino. Spunti platonici del concetto e sviluppi di età imperiale e tardo-antica (Naples, 2006)Google Scholar.

49 For the link between the royal bios and the legitimacy of monarchic power in Greek historiography from the fourth century bc onwards, see Farber, J. J., ‘The Cyropaedia and Hellenistic Kingship’, AJPh 100.4 (1979), 497–514Google Scholar; Murray, O., ‘Modello biografico e modello di regalità’, in Settis, S. (ed.), I Greci. Storia Cultura Arte Società. Vol. 2.III, una storia greca. Trasformazioni (Turin, 1998), 249–69Google Scholar.

50 In this respect, see also the comparison with the great pharaohs of the past in the episode of Darius being reminded by the chief priest of Memphis that his deeds have not surpassed those of Sesoosis (Diod. Sic. 1.58.4).

51 Some philosophers to whom treatises On Kingship are attributed belonged to the court elite of the king they addressed, or at least had a long acquaintance with the court milieu. The somewhat problematic overlap between the figures of the advising philosopher and of the court philos can be summarized by a statement that Plutarch (Mor. 189D) attributes to Demetrius of Phalerum. A prominent member of the Ptolemaic court at the time of Ptolemy I, Demetrius would have advised the king to purchase and read treatises On Kingship because ‘what philoi do not dare offer to kings as advice, is written in these books'; on this passage, see Haake (n. 48), 165–6.

52 This point should be distinguished from the possibility that Diodorus expressed sympathy for one of the competitors of the Roman civil wars. On this point, see recently Muntz, 2017 (n. 23), 215–47; R. Westwall, ‘In Praise of Pompeius: Re-Reading the Bibliotheke Historike’, in Hau et al. (n. 24), 91–127.

53 On the expected public of Diodorus' Library, see Meeus (n. 24), 168–72.

54 For the Roman civil wars as the historical background of Diodorus' work, see Sacks (n. 23). On the possible meaning of the account about Egyptian kingship in this context, see also Muntz, 2017 (n. 23), 197–206.

55 Diodorus' observations follow the reference to a tradition by which the priests of Meroe would not only control the choice of the local kings, but even order their death on the basis of the gods' will expressed via oracles. By killing the priests, Ergamenes puts an end not only to this unusual habit but, more generally, to the supremacy of priests and traditional norms over the power of kings, and does so – according to Diodorus – in the name of Greek philosophy. The episode of the murder of the priests of Meroe, probably drawing on Agatharchides, is also reported by Strabo (17.1.2–3), who does not mention the name of Ergamenes.

56 To double-check the validity of this inference, it is useful to recall that, by contrast, throughout the Library Diodorus provides coherent treatments of topics that are of fundamental importance for his view of history. In addition to the principle of the usefulness of historical writing, see K. S. Sacks, ‘Diodoros of Sicily and the Hellenistic Mind’, in Hau et al. (n. 24), 43–63, on the link between arete and parrhesia. On the place granted to myths in Diodorus' project of universal history, see Sulimani (n. 24); and C. E. Muntz, ‘Diodoros, Mythology, and Historiography’, in Hau et al. (n. 24), 365–87.

57 See, for instance, Fraser (n. 23), i.497; a more nuanced assessment is provided by Murray (n. 23).

58 This observation would have made sense at the time of Diodorus' work, which witnessed the final fall of the Ptolemaic kingdom, and is consistent with his use of the imperfect tense, which characterizes the description of the customs of ancient times (1.72.6). Diodorus' list of Egyptian rulers includes the whole sequence of Macedonian kings, as one can infer from the passage 1.44.4, counting 276 years of Macedonian domination.

59 As already observed by Murray (n. 23), 157–61.

60 According to Ryholt (n. 30), 161, a section of the Book of the Temple testifies to the existence of a specific part of temple wisdom concerning the regulations of the life of the pharaoh. However, it seems more probable that this passage deals with the etiquette for meetings with the pharaoh, as suggested by J. F. Quack, ‘Die Dienstanweisung des Oberlehrers aus dem Buch vom Tempel’, in H. Beinlich et al. (eds.), Ägyptologische Tempeltagung (Wiesbaden, 2002), 166. This might include the ceremonies for the purification of the king, which are discussed in another section of the Book. Ryholt also draws attention to Clem., Strom. 6.4.35.3, where an ἐκλογισμὸν δὲ βασιλικοῦ βίου is the content of the second book that temple singers are expected to learn. However, the interpretation of the expression as ‘the regulations of the king's life’ is unconvincing. Aufrère, 2007 (n. 14), 29, translates it as ‘un exposé de la vie du roi’ (‘an exposition of the life of the king’), which seems more plausible in the light of the meaning of ἐκλογίζομαι as ‘to reckon’ or ‘to relate in detail’ (LSJ). If this means a celebration of the king, this could make it the pair of the first book used for the education of singers in Clement's text, which is said to contain hymns for the gods. For the possible correspondence between the content of the first book mentioned by Clement and the ‘aretalogy’ style by which knowledge about the gods is expressed in the demotic Book of Thoth, see Jasnow (n. 30), 326–7.

61 Yiftach-Firanko, U., ‘Law in Graeco-Roman Egypt: Hellenization, Fusion, Romanization’, in Bagnall, R. (ed.), The Oxford Handbook of Papyrology (Oxford, 2009), 541–60Google Scholar; Rupprecht, H.-A., Recht und Rechtsleben im ptolemäischen und römischen Ägypten. An der Schnittstelle griechischen und ägyptischen Rechts 332 a. C.–212 p. C. (Stuttgart, 2011)Google Scholar; Manning, J. G., ‘Law under the Ptolemies’, in Keenan, J. G. et al. (eds.), Law and Legal Practices in Egypt from Alexander to the Arab Conquest. A Selection of Papyrological Sources in Translation, with Introductions and Commentary (Cambridge, 2014), 17–19Google Scholar.

62 For a discussion of this approach, see Murray (n. 23), 141–52.

63 The category of ‘palimpsest’ was used by Genette, G., Palimpsestes. La littérature au second degré (Paris, 1982)Google Scholar, in his discussion of intertextuality in literary traditions. Aufrère, S. H., ‘Priestly Texts, Recensions, Rewritings and Paratexts in the Late Egyptian Period’, in Alexander, P. et al. (eds.), In the Second Degree. Paratextual Literature in Ancient Near Eastern and Ancient Mediterranean Culture and Its Reflections in Medieval Literature (Leiden and Boston, MA, 2010), 159–80Google Scholar, applies this concept to the iterative and anonymous process of interpretation, adaptation, and transmission of texts which took place in Egyptian temples. It is clear that, in our case, the intercultural perspective further complicates this multi-layered intertextual tradition, where different messages, with their specific pragmatics and contexts, are absorbed and reshaped in compliance with new conceptual patterns and agendas.