The Silver Age of the Greek World (Paperback)

Purchase of this book includes free trial access to www.million-books.com where you can read more than a million books for free. This is an OCR edition with typos. Excerpt from book: CHAPTER III HELLENISM IN UPPER EGYPT Our knowledge of the history of remote Hellenism, unaffected by the Roman conquest of the world for some generations, is now no longer confined to the vague and occasional notices of Greek kingdoms in inner Asia or on the Sea of Asov. The brilliant discoveries of recent years have disclosed to us the life and doings of a large settlement of Greeks under the sway of the Ptolemies, in Upper Egypt, where they were, indeed, protected and favoured by the crown, but subject to the continuous influence of a large, long-civilised native population of a peculiarly tough and enduring type. In the end this pressure was successful. The phenomenon we can witness in Upper Egypt is the very gradual waning of the Greek, and waxing of the indigenous, elements. As soon as the Alexandrian power declined, and the Greeks were no longer supported or even favoured by the monarchy, this change becomes clearly visible. But for centuries the Greeks, or rather the forces of Hellenism, maintained themselves with no small success, even in this remote and foreign land. It is desirable to review the earlier history of this isolated province of Hellenism, though it belongs to a period prior to the Roman conquest, and, like the Bactrian and Indian kingdoms, was the direct creation of Alexander's immediate successors. But to understand innerEgypt under the Romans would be impossible without some knowledge of Egypt under the Greeks, as the Ptolemies and their mixed population of invaders loved to call themselves; and seeing that the knowledge of this Greek Egypt is too new to be accessible in any but special and often cumbrous works, the reader will not resent going back with me to the moment of the plantation of Hellenism in the kingdom of the Pharaohs. This plantation...