Apartheid

324
These needs stemmed from a very basic fear. Just like the South African Whites with
regard to Blacks, and Israeli Jews with regard to Palestinians, the Greeks were afraid of
Egyptians due to the latter’s larger numbers, and to the fact that the Greeks oppressed and
exploited them, thus giving rise to resentment. Moreover, the Greeks were superstitious; they
were afraid of the power of Egyptian magic and religion. The great age of Egyptian
civilization also awed them and contributed to the fear. At least some of them adopted
mummification. To some extent, this is still a European sentiment about Egypt today. The
hellenomanic and eurocentric interpretations of world history, Napoleon’s invasion, the
British and American periods of domination, and now, also, the mass tourism from the rich,
western countries as well as the indirect domination by Israel – all these factors contribute to
rational and irrational fearful anticipations of Egyptian reactions to nearly two millennia of
nearly unbroken European or white domination and oppression of Egypt. ‘With Alexander’s
conquest, as again with Napoleon’s, Egypt was simultaneously the imaginative territory in
which the European mind revisited its most basic anxieties of otherness and a geographical
space that was subjected to European imperialism.’ 686
During the Greek period, throughout the country, ‘…to judge by the evidence of
surviving inscriptions, the Ptolemies did not demand from the Greeks the full ruler-cult which
they…received from the Egyptians…’ 687 It is hard to imagine how the Egyptians could have
given the rulers that cult freely.
It seems, however, that the Egyptians, at least in Alexandria, did not care much for the
state-imposed cult of Sarapis, at least not until the beginning of Roman rule, but then it was no
longer state-imposed. 688 Under Greek rule, though, it appears to have been perceived as a
chore more than anything else. The Greeks had been very clever at imposing ideology and desecularization,
but, although already hundreds of years old, the craft of getting people hooked
on this opium was still in its infancy, and many Egyptians are sure to have seen through much
of what the Greeks were attempting to accomplish and why.
At the end of the 800-year period of the ancient Egyptian religion under European
rule, it was hardly recognizable as Egyptian religion any more. The Greek and Roman
oppressors had worked hard to make Egyptians feel that their gods had abandoned them. It is
no wonder that the Egyptians, and neither the Greeks nor the Romans nor the Jews, were the
first people in Egypt to turn for transcendent salvation to Christianity in great numbers. 689
A fairly certain indication that the Pagan Egyptian priests were the indigenous class
most favored by Greeks and Romans, or more accurately, the least oppressed class, is the fact
that they were the last ancient Egyptians to hold any titles to their names. During independent
ancient times, the priests had been a mere professional group of officials and workers among
others. Only under European rule, when all officials had become Greek and later also Roman,
did Egyptian priests become a class of their own, with rigorously circumscribed rights and
duties. 690
Religion as superstition and escapism (there are of course many other aspects of
religion) and other, similar phenomena, such as divination, alchemy, dream interpretation,
magic, demonolatry, exorcism, and astrology, were thus encouraged, even created, and they
experienced an enduring surge of popularity in Graeco-Roman Egypt. This was when Egypt
686 Vasunia 2001: 288. As we shall see (Section III.6 below), however, there was a big exception to the
domination of Egypt by Europe, the beginning of which coincided with the defeat of Greek and Roman apartheid
in Egypt and the introduction of Islam, and the end of which was marked by the Ottoman Empire and the
beginning of European world domination, i.e. from the 7 th until the 15 th century CE. On mummification among
Greeks, see Parsons 2007: 216.
687 Fraser 1972: 115f.
688 Ibid: 273. It was thus possibly a thorn in the side of the new – Roman – authorities.
689 Koch 1993: 623ff. Moreover, Naphtali Lewis 1983: 101 makes the ‘[traditionally,] generally accomodating
attitude of the [Egyptian] population in matters of religion’ responsible for allowing Christianity a strong, early
foothold in Egypt, without which it might not even have survived outside Palestine and Syria.
690 Quirke: Altägyptische Religion, 1996 (1992): 143; Koch 1993: 497