Olympos on the Banks of the Nile

Setting out to provide a simple but comprehensive historical overview of Greco-Egyptian religion is by no means an easy task. It is complicated by a number of factors, beginning with the fragmentary state of the sources that we have at our disposal for the reconstruction of this religious system. We possess only a tiny fraction of the literature that was produced during the Hellenistic era, and what we do have often consists quite literally of fragments, surviving in trash heaps, broken monuments, the cartonnage of mummy wrappings, or as random quotations in the works of later authors. However, the amount of material that has come down to us is all the more impressive for this fact.

Which brings us to our next problem: the mass of material relevant to Greco-Egyptian religion has not been collected into a single, easily accessible volume for scholars and interested laymen alike to consult. Several very fine collections of primary source materials have been put together, but none of them are what you would call exhaustive treatments of the subject, especially since their concern is usually with the broader intellectual and material culture of Greco-Roman Egypt, of which religion is but one piece of a very complex puzzle. There have also been some excellent academic studies of the topic – the work of P. M. Fraser, Jack Lindsay, Naphtali Lewis, Robert Bagnall, R. A. Hazzard, David Frankfurter, and Susan A. Stephens come immediately to mind – but few non-specialists have the time or resources to track down obscure scholarly journals, where much of the discussion is being carried out, or academic volumes whose costs are so prohibitive that only select university libraries with a decent Classics department bother to carry them. And even then the really important work being done in the field isn’t actually available in English. You have to be able to read French, German, Italian and several Scandinavian languages – not to mention Greek, Demotic, and Latin – if you really want to get anywhere in your studies. Knowing that all of this material is out there – material that could profoundly impact your own personal religious practice, but remains just beyond your reach – can be an absolutely maddening experience, let me tell you!

Of course, part of the reason why there is no single, authoritative collection of the material is because new discoveries are constantly being made, discoveries which radically alter our understanding of things. A good example of this was the discovery in 2001 of a nearly complete collection of poems written by Poseidippos of Pella, a Makedonian poet who wrote in the early Hellenistic era and served at the court of Ptolemy Soter and his son Philadelphos. Although a few of his poems had been preserved in Athenaios, the Greek Anthology, and papyrus fragments uncovered in the middle of the last century, no one anticipated the range of his poems or the insight that they would give on the life and interests of the early Ptolemaic court. Thus, no one who is at all familiar with the literary remains of Greco-Roman Egypt would presume that our knowledge of its religion approaches anything like completeness.

Another problem which faces the intrepid student of Greco-Egyptian religion is the nature of the religion itself. Although we may today speak of something called “Greco-Egyptian polytheism,” it is a bit of a misnomer, for the term implies a degree of cohesion and systemization that frankly did not exist in antiquity. We are conditioned to think of religion as a collection of common beliefs, ritual actions, and supernatural beings which all adherents of that religion more or less agree upon. Admittedly there is always a diversity of views about how the central tenets of that faith may be understood – and these variants can often be quite radical at times: one thinks about the difference between Rick Warren on the one hand and John Shelby Spong on the other, both of whom nominally adhere to a Christian religion. But even this modicum of conformity was absent in Egypt during the Ptolemaic and Roman periods.

Egypt during this time was a truly multicultural society; already during the Middle and New Kingdoms it had become a multi-ethnic civilization as well. Native Egyptians as well as Nubians, Syrians, Arabs, Phoenicians, Greeks, and Persians all lived and worshiped together, each wave of immigrants bringing with it its national gods. Alexander’s conquest of Egypt in the 4th century BCE opened up a new wave of immigration and people from all parts of the Greek world and the ancient Near East settled in the land, following dreams of wealth and greater opportunity made possible by the efforts of Ptolemy Soter and his descendents. Although a great many social changes were ushered in by the Hellenistic era, the settlers remained largely conservative in religious matters, at least for the first few generations. Although they embraced their new homeland and actively took part in its political and cultural identity, they also proudly clung to their ties to the old homeland, stubbornly so at times. Thus we often find in inscriptions and on legal documents designations such as: “Nikaia daughter of Amyntas, Makedonian, with her guardian N.N. son of Bizones, a Thrakian of the epigone.” (P.Tebt. 3.815.2) The poet Theokritos had great fun at the expense of settlers who maintained a chauvinistic attitude in his 15th Idyll¸ which depicts a pair of Syracusan women, newly arrived in Alexandria, on their way to attend the festival of Adonis which Queen Arsinoe is putting on for the public. As they walk through the streets they chatter on about banalities, complaining about their husbands, making snide comments about the natives or sharing the latest juicy gossip about the crown. When another spectator asks them to quiet down, they make fun of his accent and pronunciation of certain words since he came from a different part of Greece. (This scene is made even funnier as Theokritos shifts into a clumsy, archaic dialect for the women’s parts, a linguistic trick that is often missed in English translations of the poem.)

In addition to language and patronymics, one of the fundamental ways that cultural continuity was preserved was in the maintenance of ancestral cults. Thus Dorian settlers in Egypt continued to worship Apollon Karneios; Makedonians favored the cults of Zeus, Herakles, and Dionysos; Athenians built temples to Athene and the Two Goddesses; and so forth. Nor, of course, were the Greeks the only immigrants in Egypt: Idumaeans worshiped their own “Apollon;” Astarte was honored in the Memphite Serapeion; the Jews honored Yahweh at Alexandria and even built a temple to rival the one in Jerusalem for him at Leontopolis; and the goddess Ereshkigal was invoked frequently in the Greek magical papyri, to name only a handful of prominent foreign deities that found their way into the country.

In the same vein, the traditional Egyptian religion gained a renewed vitality, which it had begun to lose during the Persian period. Their distinctive form of religion helped preserve their separate ethnic identity in the face of overwhelming Hellenization. Especially important in this regard were the cults of sacred animals such as the Apis and Mnevis bulls, the ibises and cats who were mummified in the thousands, the crocodiles of the Faiyum and even in some places fish and insects were given elaborate cultus. The Greeks found this the most curious aspect of Egyptian religion, and remarked on it constantly. However, they were willing to treat it with distant respect (especially considering the awesome antiquity of the religious traditions of the land that they found themselves in) and came to seek an allegorical and philosophical explanation for the veneration of animals. Some of the most respectful treatments of this aspect of traditional Egyptian religion are to be found in Plutarch’s On Isis and Osiris and Porphyry’s On Abstinence from Animal Food and Concerning Images. Nor was this just an academic interest: many Greeks eventually came to participate directly in the cults of Egypt’s godly bulls and crocodiles, a fact that amused the Romans to no end when they arrived upon the scene. The Romans had a much harder time acclimating to this type of worship. They regarded the cult of animals as rankest superstition, and mocked the practice with gleeful disdain, especially early poets such as Juvenal, Horace, and Propertius. Since many of these poets were attached to the circle of Maecenas and engaged in writing propaganda for Augustus’ “golden age” after he took Egypt from Kleopatra, the last of the Ptolemaic monarchs, it is entirely possible that a lot of this venomous attack on Egypt’s gods is really nothing more than politics translated into the religious sphere. Soon enough “barking Anubis” and hawk-headed Horus were admitted into the Roman pantheon (Lucian even places them on Olympos in his Zeus the Tragedian), while the last attested Apis bull is dated to the reign of Emperor Honorius, almost a century after the supposed “triumph” of Christianity. Even Augustus did not disdain to have himself represented making offerings in Egypt’s temples, though he is also reported to have rudely commented that he “worshiped gods, not cattle.” The Romans were nothing if not pragmatic, and thus willing to look past such things as they understood that religio helps keep a populace docile and compliant.

Although religion remained largely an ethnic and cultural concern, neither the Greeks nor the Egyptians were exclusivists in the modern Judeo-Christian sense. They were more than willing to participate in the festivals of their neighbors and offer sacrifices to each other’s gods, and in time even this distinction disappeared, so that a Greek might speak of Isis or Sobek as our god (P. Mich. 8.473), and an Egyptian serve as a priest of Demeter at a local shrine (P. Oxy. 2782).

There were several factors that contributed to this. First, the two groups lived close together, particularly in the Faiyum and the khora or Egyptian countryside, where many Greek and Makedonian soldiers and mercenaries were settled by the Ptolemies, granted small land holdings or cleruchies as rewards for their service upon retirement. Living together, they couldn’t help but learn the religious customs of their neighbors, particularly when invited to a festal banquet by a friend or when a temple’s propaganda spread knowledge of a deity’s arête or powerful virtue far and wide.

Secondly, many of these Greco-Makedonian settlers took Egyptian wives, since good Greek women were initially scarce in the khora. Naturally a husband is going to learn of the gods important to his wife and her people, and together they will honor their household and local divinities, and raise their children to do likewise. The mother is also the one who usually has the greatest impact on the early development of the child and thus it is not surprising to see a strong Egyptianizing tendency among second and third generation Greeks in the khora. Although these individuals continued to have a proper Greek education, were enrolled in the gymnasia and participated in their city’s boule and other government offices, they were truly multicultural and frequently had both a Greek and an Egyptian name by which they were known. A Roman visitor to Egypt in the early Imperial period remarked that so much mixing had been going on for so long that one could no longer tell Greek from Egyptian in some parts of the country.

And a third factor that contributed to this process was the official policies of the crown. While Ptolemy Soter was still just the satrap of Egypt, nominally governing the country in the name of Alexander the Great’s son and brother, he met with the High Priest of Ptah in Memphis, which had been Egypt’s capital for several centuries at that point. (Ptolemy originally had his royal residence there before moving it to the newly constructed polis of Alexandria on the Mediterranean coast, which became the new capital of the country and remained so even under the Romans.) The High Priest of Ptah, who was the closest thing that Egypt had to a “pope” (Dorothy J. Thompson’s Memphis under the Ptolemies does a great job of discussing the importance of this priesthood, and the intimate relationship it had with the ruling dynasty; there is even some speculation that the unknown grandmother of Kleopatra VII came from this line) informed Ptolemy that anyone who would rule the country must do so as the Pharaoh, and that Egypt’s safety, prosperity, and social order depended on the Pharaoh’s proper performance of the ancient and ancestral rites. Pharaoh must ensure that the Nile flooded in due season and the only way that this would happen is if Egypt’s gods were kept in good spirits through regular gifts to their priests, the construction of elaborate temples, and the great festivals were celebrated in every part of the land. The people of Egypt understood this well and they would not tolerate a ruler who did not perform all of the duties of Pharaoh.

The Persians had failed to heed his predecessor’s advice. They despoiled the temples, carrying the treasures away to distant lands. They impoverished the priesthood and abolished the cults of the gods. Blasphemy of all blasphemies, they even slew the sacred Apis bull! (It should, perhaps, be noted that some scholars question the Egyptian account of things, since this seems to fly in the face of the otherwise tolerant religious policy that the Persians employed in governing subject lands. However, considering the abundance of evidence we have concerning this matter, I think it safe to side with the Egyptians and assume more was going on than just a resentment of high taxation.) For such grave impiety, they were punished with destruction at the hands of Alexander the Great, who came like Horus, the Avenger of his Father, to liberate the land of Egypt.

And now Ptolemy, too, could be Horus, who manifested himself in the body of the living Pharaoh, and make things right. And Ptolemy, ever the wise and calculating general, one of Alexander’s most trusted advisors, agreed to the demands of the High Priest of Ptah, and from that moment on had himself represented in the guise of the traditional Egyptian Pharaoh. Although Soter could not read the hieroglyphic texts (according to Plutarch in his Life of Antony, no Ptolemy could until Kleopatra VII, though some scholars have begun to question this claim) he was advised in his duties by representatives from the various priesthoods and even had an account of Egyptian history and religion written in Greek by Manetho, a native Egyptian priest from Sebennytos, so that he could better understand the mind of his people and the responsibilities that came with the crown. He dutifully performed all of the ceremonies required of him. He conducted an expedition to retrieve the temple treasures from foreign lands, built lavish temples for the Egyptian gods, and made extravagant donations to the priesthood of land and gold won through battle, all of which is recounted in the Satrap Stele, which was erected by the Egyptian priests to honor his benefactions early in his reign. Additionally, as Diodoros Sikeliotes relates (1.84.8) he funded the burial of the Apis bull out of his own coffers, at a cost of what would amount to around six and a half million dollars in today’s currency. In every way, Ptolemy sought to promote the revival of Egyptian culture, and even elevated native Egyptians to prominent positions at his court.

Needless to say, he was immensely popular with both the Egyptian priesthood and populace, and his descendents were careful to follow in his footsteps, cultivating an image of themselves as traditional-minded Pharaohs with a strong working relationship with the priesthood (especially at Memphis) who ensured the loyalty of the native Egyptians (except at Thebes, which was often a hotbed of dissent and at times even open rebellion, largely because the Thebans were jealous of the prestige of Memphis, which had closer ties to the crown as a result of its more favorable geographic location). As a means of attaining upward mobility, many Greeks at court followed suit, funding festivals (IG 12.7.506), building shrines (P.Cair. Zen. 2.59168), and generally participating in Egyptian religion (OGIS 89). Even poets such as Theokritos, Kallimakhos, and Apollonios Rhodios incorporated Egyptian mythological material in their writings, as Susan A. Stephens has shown in Seeing Double: Intercultural Poetics in Ptolemaic Alexandria, disproving the assertions of previous scholars that the Ptolemaic court represented a secluded oasis of elite Greek culture in the midst of the barbaric hinterlands, with the intellectuals pointedly ignoring the natives and their gods. Thus in many respects the fusion of Greek and Egyptian culture occurred simultaneously from the top down (through court support) and the bottom up (through intermarriage and cohabitation).

But the Ptolemies in Egypt did not turn their backs on their ancestral traditions. Janus-like they presented two faces to the world, one Egyptian the other Greek. They took a direct hand in the promotion of Greek cults, especially those gods who had been important in Makedonia. They claimed direct descent from Zeus, Herakles, and Dionysos (OGIS 54), and in some instances claimed to be incarnating the gods themselves (Plutarch, Life of Antony 26.1-3). A suburb of Alexandria was named Eleusis and had mysteries of Demeter and Kore imported there (Strabo 17.16). As we saw earlier, Arsinoe oversaw the celebration of mysteries in honor of Adonis and Aphrodite, and the fourth Ptolemy instituted reforms in the worship of Dionysos (Berlin Papyrus No. 11774, verso). In Alexandria they built the famous Mouseion, which was presided over by a priest of Apollon and the Mousai (Vetruvius, On Architecture 7.4). The Mouseion housed the great Library of Alexandria, which was created with the intent to collect all of the world’s literature together in one place, Greek and barbarian alike, and was also home to scholars paid by the crown to explore the fields of mathematics, astronomy, physical science, literature, philosophy and the arts. The scholars of the Mouseion made such great strides in all of these fields that one can, without any hint of hyperbole, state that they changed the course of human history. (A good, general introduction to the Mouseion and its intellectual accomplishments can be found in The Rise and Fall of Alexandria: Birthplace of the Modern World by Justin Pollard and Howard Reid.) In Greece itself the Ptolemies were greatly active in the promotion of Hellenic culture and religion. They put down tyrannies (Diodoros Sikeliotes 20.100.4) and enacted democratic reforms (the Itanos Decree). They funded the reconstruction of temples (Pausanias 1.17.2) and financed priesthoods and massive festivals such as that of Artemis Leukophryene (Syl3 557). They had themselves initiated into the mysteries of Samothrake (IG 12.8.227) and competed successfully at the Olympics and other Panhellenic festivals (P.Mil.Vogl. 13.31-34). In fact, they even founded their own Ptolemaeia festival in honor of Soter, which in time came to rival the prestige of the Olympic and Isthmian Games, with athletes and sacred envoys from all parts of Greece attending (SEG I 366). Above all they understood that their power and wealth depended on the favor of the gods, and did their utmost to cultivate that kharis or reciprocity.

The final factor that we shall consider in this discussion, which contributed in an important way to the formation of a Greco-Egyptian religiosity, is the concept of syncretism which allowed people to see in their neighbors’ gods a reflection of their own. The common view is that syncretism is the equation of deities – that Zeus really is Ammon, simply understood in a different social context. And that makes a certain kind of sense – especially when comparing two deities that overlap extensively and not just in ways that logically follow from their primary attributes, as we see for instance with Osiris and Dionysos or Hathor and Aphrodite, for whom one can come up with hundreds of points of contact – but it’s really just one form of syncretism. For the ancient Egyptians, syncretism could be a temporary process: two separate deities temporarily cohabiting together, their essences merging to form a third entity (Apis as the ba or soul of Osiris becomes Oser-Apis or Serapis) or a hyphenated double-god (Bawy, who is Seth and Horus the Elder united). Once they had accomplished the task for which this epiphany was necessary, they would split apart again and retain their distinct identities.

In some cases we see the sharing of certain attributes, powers, and character traits among the gods. It is as if one deity was dressing up in the costume of another and acting in the role usually assigned to that other deity. For instance, there are numerous terracotta statues depicting Isis in the posture of Aphrodite, lifting up her skirt to reveal her pudenda. In such instances Isis is hailed as the goddess of love, sexuality, and the patron of courtesans, a role not previously given to her. Although these images are usually labeled Isis-Aphrodite, we should understand them as reflecting Isis taking on the persona of Aphrodite, and wielding her powers as her own. There is a solid basis for this kind of thing in the lore: in one famous Egyptian story (found in the Turin Papyrus) Isis tricked the god Re into revealing his true name to her, whereby she was able to acquire his magical powers for herself. Similarly, in Greek myth Aphrodite gave her golden girdle to Hera so that she could use its erotic power to seduce her husband Zeus in order to distract him during a pivotal moment in the Trojan War (Homer, Iliad 14.159;187). However, at no time are the distinct identities of either deity in danger of being conflated.

Although syncretism had existed long before the Greeks came to Egypt (and was a theological expression found among both cultures) the Hellenistic era has often been described as the age of syncretism, par excellence. It was the time when major syncretic deities emerged out of the shifting cultural matrix and became powerful, independent figures in their own right. Serapis (who had existed as a minor figure in Egyptian religion from at least the New Kingdom, but experienced a meteoric rise to prominence once he was adopted as the patron deity of Alexandria and given special favor as a dynastic god, the result of the revelatory dream he had given Ptolemy Soter) and Hermes Trismegistos (a fusion of Hermes and Thoth, under whose name a whole body of esoteric magic and Middle Platonic philosophy was written) are perhaps the most famous gods of this era, but there were also deities such as the lion-headed lord of eternity Aion; the rooster-headed, snake-footed Gnostic demiurge Abrasax; Arsinoe-Aphrodite Zephyritis, the protector of sailors and the broken-hearted; and all the assorted syncretic manifestations of Hermes: Hermanubis, Hermekate, Hermathene, Hermaphroditos, Hermares, Hermes-Antinous, Hermapollon, Hermammon, Hermosiris, Hermeros, Hermarpokrates, Hermerakles, and Hermagathosdaimon, etc. (No doubt there were others as well, but these are just the ones that I’ve been able to track down citations for!)

Although we have examples of syncretism in artwork from the period (the fascinating representations of Horus wearing the armor of a Roman soldier come immediately to mind), as well as the writings of important authors of high literature (both Cicero’s On the gods and Plutarch’s On Isis and Osiris deal extensively with the topic) and even on the level of actual cultus – a priestess of Aphrodite who tends the sacred cow of Hathor (PSI 4.328) or the dedication to Dionysos which includes an epithet normally reserved for Osiris (OGIS 1.130) – the Greek magical papyri (PGM) remain one of our clearest and most reliable glimpses at how syncretism actually occured in antiquity. These random scraps of papyrus and pottery shards upon which spells, formulas, ritual procedures, and magical recipe books were written are a testament to a living and vital faith as it was being experienced by the average man and woman on the street. They are a record of visions and hopes, fears and obsessions, a spirit-haunted, god-filled dream-like world in which all of the old certainties have fallen away, and man is left grappling for something solid, whether that be magical power, communication with the divine, or just someone to love them back. Here, experiences are still white-hot and new; they haven’t had time to grow old and solid and respectable in order to become enshrined as part of the traditional, civic or temple-sponsored cultus. Nor have the ideas yet been rendered abstract, systematized and toothless by philosophizing. Here we find it raw, direct, confusing, and messy – but real experiences recorded by real people, and thus worthy of our consideration.

And the picture that emerges from a study of the PGM is a fascinating one indeed. We see the Olympian deities not as the beautiful, idealized figures familiar to us from Classical poetry and art, but as powerful, archaic and at times frightening personalities, much more in line with how the early Greeks saw them before they fell under the spell of Homer’s sanitizing Muse. In the same text Zeus and Aphrodite may rub shoulders not just with Osiris and Nephthys – which is only to be expected in texts written in Greek but found in the sands of Egypt – but also with the Jewish god and Christian angels and Mesopotamian Ereshkigal and Persian Mithras and a host of shadowy daimones whose names are nothing more than a string of barbaric-sounding syllables. All the old boundaries have collapsed, and the people pray desperately to anyone who will hear them. And yet, we also find old myths and rituals that haven’t seen the light of day for a thousand years given a new life, and we wonder how the person scribbling their spell on a piece of papyrus came by this obscure knowledge, suggesting an even stronger continuity of tradition than we have been led to believe existed at this time. Even for those with no interest in the practice of magic, the texts of the PGM are an important tool in uncovering the nature of Greco-Egyptian beliefs and practices on the common, folk level.

In a similar way we have a wealth of information on the domestic worship that was carried out by the individual in their home. The small niches that they carved in the wall to house their family’s gods, the offerings that they set out for them and regular – sometimes daily – rituals that they performed in their gods’ honor, the religious customs attached to family life and civic identity, the wealth of festivals that an individual family or a small community participated in, the records of minor miracles, important dreams, curious visions and strange occurrences that individuals felt the need to tell friends and family about in private letters, or record in monumental stelai for all to see, the votive gifts and major sacrifices that were left at a temple when a god had intervened favorably in one’s life, the prayers for healing, fertility, protection, and vengeance which were constant concerns of the people at that time: all of this and so much more has come down to us, providing a record of a living faith, one that is far more individual and direct than we are often led to believe ancient religion was experienced as.

Hopefully, by this point, I have succeeded in accomplishing the task that I set for myself at the start – to give my readers a simple yet comprehensive understanding of what Greco-Egyptian religion was like in antiquity. I think one of the best ways that I have seen it described (in David Frankfurter’s Religion in Roman Egypt: Assimilation and Resistance) was as a series of concentric but overlapping circles. He went on to describe each of the numerous spheres. There was the individual, the familial, the local, the regional, the national, and the Pan-Mediterranean. Each level had its own concerns, its own way of understanding and speaking about the gods, its own customs and religious practices. Although these levels were distinct from each other – and sometimes brought into conflict as a result – there was also a great deal of commonality and fluidity, and one might draw on different levels at different times to articulate and negotiate one’s experiences.

In other words, the Greco-Egyptian tradition was like a grand mosaic, made up of many different pieces with many different textures and colors. What you see when you look at the mosaic depends on where you’re standing and what part of the mosaic you are looking at. Step far back and a smooth, beautiful image presents itself to you. Get a little closer and you see the jagged pieces that appear to have been randomly fixed in place, jarring and contradictory and perhaps even a little ugly. Look even closer, at a single pebble or shard of polished stone, and your impression again changes. In the same vein, what we see when we study ancient Greco-Egyptian religion depends on where we’re looking, and sometimes what we expect to find when we look there. There is the high culture of the Ptolemaic court with its poets and philosophers heatedly debating this or that obscure Homeric verb, and the peasant woman in her mud-brick hovel bowing to her god in its small niche shrine, the statue black from the soot of incense and the grime of the decades. There is the Roman tourist who has come to see the famed crocodile god of Egypt, and possibly feed it a bit of cheese and bread – after all, this season Egypt is in vogue back home and all his friends have already made the trip – and there is the canny old priest whose job it is to care for the sacred crocodile, who has learned to call him Kronos or one of the Dioskouroi, and not Sobek or even Soknopaios, because it flatters the visitors to let them see their gods in his own, and they are more generous with their coins that way.

Greco-Egyptian religion has a definite feel, a definite spiritual quality to it. It is dream-like, constantly shifting, defying easy categorization. In a word it is fluid – but you can easily recognize it when you see it, even if you can’t entirely say why that is. I suppose that is really only appropriate for a religion that grew out of a culture that placed such a great importance upon the Nile river and the Mediterranean Sea.

© 2009 H. Jeremiah Lewis