Toby Wilkinson on Ptolemaic Egypt and the First Great Commercial Civilization

22:29Tyler Cowen:But say conceptually, what's the biggest cause and effect mystery about this whole history? Something you don't know and would like to know. I suppose for me, it would be, why was it that Julius Caesar decided to throw in his lot with Cleopatra, which was not the obvious choice for a military general? at that time of the famous meeting between the two the tide was with cleopatra's brother ptolemy the 13th he had the army on his side he seemed to to have the wind in his sails why was it that caesar kind of turned his back on his military instincts and decided to side with a woman in the ancient roman world the idea that a woman might be a leader and a great leader at that was anathema.

23:16So it's a very peculiar choice for Caesar. And of course, you know, historians have put it down to chemistry, to love, but this was a great tactician. There must have been more to it than that. And I'd like to get into his head and find out what was really motivating him.

23:32Tyler Cowen:When you visit contemporary Alexandria, do you learn anything about this ancient era? There's not much to see, to be honest with you. There are a few monuments left over from this Ptolemaic period. But in today's Egypt, Alexandria is a big metropolis. It's a bustling, busy, noisy, dirty city like any other big city. It's quite hard to see through that and glimpse anything of the ancient city that it once was. So for me, ancient Alexandria exists in the imagination and in the writings of ancient historians, but it's quite hard to perceive on the ground today. Do you like current Alexandria? I've been there once.

24:13Tyler Cowen:I enjoyed walking along the sea and eating seafood, but so much of it seemed to be a dirty mess. Yeah, I find it, like any great city, I find it has a kind of vitality to it, which is quite energizing. But it's not a place that you go in search of the ancient past, I think. And how is it we're likely to learn more about Ptolemaic Egypt? Is it underwater discovery, DNA studies, LIDAR, recovering manuscripts, using AI? What are the frontiers for learning more? All of the above. You've just put your finger on it. I mean, only recently there's been underwater archaeology, which has reconstructed the appearance of one of the islands in the great harbour of Alexandria, which it turns out Cleopatra spent a great deal of time fortifying and turning into a great sort of commercial slash dynastic port.

25:04So that's only come up out of the sea in the last year or two. That's pretty astonishing. Yeah, the fact that we can now read rolls of papyrus without unrolling them through x-rays and AI, we are poised really at the beginning of a revolution in the study of ancient texts because many of these papyrus rolls are too friable, too fragile to unroll. But if we can now read them with modern technology, that will open up whole new vistas of understanding of the ancient world. So yeah, I mean, archaeological science is really poised to make some huge new breakthroughs, I think, in the study of the ancient world.

25:40Tyler Cowen:And what's the binding constraint? Obviously, money always matters. But is there enough talent and interest and people who know the languages or who know AI to do this? What's holding back progress for not being faster? Archaeology is still quite a small subject. It's not something that many people choose to study at university, not by comparison with, you know, economics or math or whatever it might be. It's still quite a niche pursuit. Funding, as always, is a constraint. You know, mounting a big archaeological excavation or underwater exploration is not a cheap undertaking. It's not an inexpensive thing to do.

26:19and the sources of funding are constrained. So I guess, yeah, getting more people into the discipline and finding ways for them to utilize their talents, that would be great. I think the understanding is there, but it's shared amongst a fairly small group of experts. So bringing more people into the discipline would certainly be a good thing.

26:37Tyler Cowen:Now, most of your books are about non-Ptolemaic ancient Egypt, the kingdoms, and I have a few questions about those. Of course. To what extent can we trust Herodotus? More than we used to think we could. So it was fashionable 50 years ago to decry Herodotus as a charlatan, making up stories, tall tales of Egypt, none of which seemed to stack up. The more we've done archaeological excavation, the more documents that we've unearthed, the more it turns out that Herodotus was actually quite accurate in many ways. Yes, of course, he embellished his counts, as all historians, ancient and modern do, I suppose, to an extent.

27:17But at its core, Herodotus is not that unreliable.

27:21Tyler Cowen:Is there talk of Israel in Egyptian hieroglyphic texts? And if so, what do we learn from those? In the entire corpus of ancient Egyptian writing, the name Israel only occurs once. And this is on a victory stealer from the reign of Muren Ptah. So this is the 13th century BC. It's in the context of a whole list of lands and peoples that the Egyptian pharaoh has conquered. And Israel is included there not as the name of a territory, but as the name of a tribe. And the phrase is, Israel is vanquished, his seed is no more. So this is referring to the Israelites rather than Israel as a territory. And it's almost a footnote in the ancient Egyptian record.

28:06So it's always been one of those curiosities, people looking for echoes of the biblical, the Judeo-Christian narrative in ancient Egyptian texts. They don't find a lot, and Israel occurs just the once.

28:20Tyler Cowen:And say the legal reasoning in the book of Exodus, the commandments, the constitutional structure, the covenant, to what extent, if anything, if any, do you feel that comes from Egypt? I think there was a lot of sharing of ideas in the ancient world. The idea that, Egypt was on its own and the Middle East was on its own and the Greek world was on its own. Not at all. There was always exchange of people and materials and commodities and ideas. And if you look at, for example, some of the Psalms, you'll find not just echoes, but entire chunks of ancient Egyptian literature that have been sort of, as we would say today, cut and pasted from one to the other.

29:06So people of learning, scribes, writers, poets, certainly would have shared ideas with others of their kind across national and linguistic boundaries. And the more we study the ancient world, the more of these interconnections become apparent to us.

29:23Tyler Cowen:How much of a sense of, say, India did the ancient Egyptians have? Not a lot until the Persians. And as we spoke about at the beginning, the Persian Empire runs at its eastern extremity right up to the borders of India and also includes much of Egypt. And it's through that medium the Egyptians become cognizant of Indian civilization. So for example, Darius I, great emperor of Persia, but also ruler of Egypt, he cuts an early version of the Suez Canal to join the Red Sea with the Nile and sets up along his canal a whole series of kind of boundary stones. And on them, he has an inscription which celebrates him as a great leader.

30:07And he mentions the lands under his control in ancient Egyptian hieroglyphics. And they include Sindh, the ancient name for India. So it was really through the medium of the Persians that these two great civilizations come to know each other.

30:24Tyler Cowen:When did the quality of ancient Egyptian jewelry peak? And can we infer anything from that? Well, I think different Egyptologists would have different opinions on this. I personally think that the most sophisticated and refined jewellery was produced in the 12th dynasty. So this is between about 1950 and 1800 BC. Very beautiful designs inlaid with carnelian and turquoise and lapis lazuli gold filigree work. It's a very refined aesthetic. Why? I think because you had a strong and stable regime that was able to be a great patron of the arts. I like to compare Egypt and the 12th dynasty with France under the son King Louis XIV.

31:13It was a time when arts and craftsmanship really excelled under royal

31:18Tyler Cowen:patronage. Later on, the Egyptians produced heavier, more gaudy, more showy jewellery. But to my mind, the 12th dynasty is really the pinnacle. Have you been to the new Cairo Museum yet? Not yet, but I'm going later this year. It's incredible. I went. Looking forward to it immensely. It was much better than what I was expecting. That's good to hear. How were the pyramids built? With a lot of people and a lot of grunt work, but essentially hauling blocks of stone on wooden sledges up from the quarry to the building site, up large ramps of earth and then laid in place very carefully and dressed from the top down as they cleared all of their ramps away.

32:00So it can be done. It just requires a big workforce and a lot of time.

32:04Tyler Cowen:So no major role for hydraulics or water? Well, I mean, in those days, the Nile, during the inundation, when it was flooded, came right up to the base of the Giza Plateau. So it would have been possible to float blocks of stone from the quarries on the other side of the river right up to the base of the building site in a way that couldn't be done today. So yeah, some blocks brought to the building site by water, but then dragged up the slope to the site itself. In one of your books, you defined ancient Egyptian civilization as monumental hieroglyphics and divine kingship. Is that still true? Why are those the essentials?

32:43Writing defines the civilization from the outset until the very end. writing is not just a means of communication it's not even principally a means of communication in ancient egypt it's the it's hieroglyphics quite literally the signs of gods that the sacred signs hieroglyphics is a way of recording for posterity an ideal state of being and this includes rule by the pharaohs so it encodes their whole world view it's not just a way of communicating everyday ideas. And it is co-evil with Egyptian civilization, so very much a defining feature. And then kingship. I mean, what makes pharaonic Egypt pharaonic is the fact that it had a pharaoh.

33:24And a pharaoh is not just a king. He is God on earth. He's God incarnate. And it was that idea that there was ancient Egyptian society was almost like a pyramid itself with the king, the pharaoh at the apex. And the idea that the gods and the people had this contract mediated through the person of the king is the defining idea of ancient Egyptian civilization and gives rise to all of those aspects that we would recognize today as most characteristically Egyptian. Pyramids, temples, tombs in the Valley of the Kings, it's all there because of the idea of divine kingship.

34:02Tyler Cowen:Why is it relatively so stable for so incredibly long? That's a good question. Egypt is fairly secure within natural borders for much of its history. So if you think about it, it's bounded by deserts with the Mediterranean Sea to the north. The only land bridge between Egypt and the continent of Asia is this very narrow isthmus along the northern fringe of the Sinai Peninsula. So it's quite hard for aggressive forces actually to infiltrate Egypt. It has pretty secure natural borders. It has an incredibly fertile ecology, thanks to the River Nile. So it's able to produce enough food, more than enough food for its own purposes and really power a great civilization.

34:48So climate, ecology, natural borders, I think they make a pretty strong and stable combination.

34:57Tyler Cowen:But why not just cross the Mediterranean with boats? It's very much a navigable sea and start taking things. It seems open as prey. Curiously enough, the Egyptians throughout most of their history don't seem to have been motivated by a great sense of empire building. They had a sense of themselves as a chosen people and the sense of their land as a chosen land. And when they write about other countries and cultures, they are very pejorative. They're very denigrating of other countries and cultures because Egypt to them is special. The land of Egypt, the people of Egypt are unique. They are God's creation.

35:39So they never really have that same sense of wanting to conquer lots of other territories because nothing in their minds could ever live up to Egypt and the Egyptians.

35:49Tyler Cowen:This is a very speculative question, but I'm sure you've thought about it. So humankind has been around for a long time, and it seems there's not much progress. and then all of a sudden there's the Sumerians, the Assyrians, the ancient Egyptians, then more. What is it you think happened? Was it writing? Something else? I think when we look at the origins of these great civilizations, all within a few centuries of each other, there's a kind of combination of factors that each one individually perhaps wouldn't have tipped the balance, but taken together they made a difference. Climate, very important one.

36:24So this is a period where there is a shift in the rain belt across North Africa and the Middle East. It shifts further south. It leads to the drying out of large swathes of land that had previously been inhabitable by cattle herders and small-scale farmers. And what this does is concentrate population in river valleys. People head for the permanent sources of water. And that critical mass of people in a fairly constrained area does give rise to social change and to the emergence of civilization. So climatic stress, climate change, environmental pressures, certainly a big factor right across the Middle East.

37:04Tyler Cowen:But there's a whole world of people. And for three, four hundred thousand years, this never happens. I always find that strange. Or maybe it did happen and there's no surviving record of it, but that's strange as well. Yeah, I'm not sure that I've got a satisfactory answer to your question, Tyler. It's a good one. Why at this moment in history did it all suddenly kind of come together and not before? Yeah, I need to ponder that one a little more. Here's a very sociological question. In America in particular, how is it that King Tut became so very famous? So when I was six years old, I knew who King Tut was, but I had no idea, say, of Napoleon.

37:40Tyler Cowen:I'm not even sure I knew who Hitler was. How did it become such a big deal? Well, the discovery of King Tut's tomb was the first archaeological discovery of the modern media age. So Lord Carnarvon did a very smart thing. He entered into an exclusive relationship with the Times of London to cover the excavation and the discovery of all these amazing objects. And so it was hot property in media terms. And, you know, the Times then syndicated its stories around the world. It was also something about the era, I think, the early 1920s. The world was picking itself up after the First World War. There was a real hunger for glamour and stories of beauty and opulence and magnificence.

38:24So it kind of struck a chord with the zeitgeist, you might say. So it's a combination of the media frenzy, the time, and also, let's face it, ancient Egypt is just such a visually appealing civilisation. It's a civilization that produced great art, but it's also the exoticism of Egypt. It's the sheer antiquity of Egypt. And I think all of these ingredients just combine to make it the gift that kept on giving as far as the media were concerned. And it became a global sensation in a way that no discovery really before or since ever had.

38:57Tyler Cowen:There's the old Hollywood movie, The Mummy. There was the Egyptian theater in Hollywood, which I think is maybe still there. Do you see anything like this obsession coming back today? Are there any signs of that? Not to the same degree as there was in the 1920s when Egyptian themes were picked up, you know, in almost every domain from architecture, as you say, to jewellery design and costume and songs and films. But the Egyptian influence is still one of the kind of traditions that artists and designers do draw from time to time, whether it's the Luxor Hotel in Las Vegas or, you know, Egyptian elements that are popping up in art and design.

39:34but it doesn't have the same worldwide appeal that it did in the 1920s.

39:39Tyler Cowen:If you think about current Egypt, and surely you've spent a lot of time there, knowing a great deal about the distant past, does it give you any insight or does it just feel quite unconnected to you? Both and, I would say. So particularly when you're out of the cities in the countryside, in a small Egyptian village, you will see patterns of subsistence, of farming, architecture of mudbrick houses that has changed very little in three, four, five thousand years. So life, the rhythm of life, the patterns of life in a rural Egyptian community are still very recognisable from the days of the pharaohs.

40:16But contrast that with the cities of Cairo or Alexandria. These are big modern metropolises that don't seem to have very much to do with or very many visible signs of the ancient world. So it's both and. I think for me as an Egyptologist, I love getting into the rural parts of Egypt because there one can almost feel the past as still very much present.

40:37Tyler Cowen:What's the most interesting rural part for you to go to? I love Middle Egypt, which is the stretch of the Nile Valley between Cairo and Luxor. It's not very much visited by tourists. There's a rhythm of life there which is slower than in the big cities. It's a place where the past feels much more tangible. It's scenically very beautiful, cliffs coming very close to the river's edge. Yeah, I love Middle Egypt. And how important is ancient Egypt as an object of political display today? So the Egyptian government, obviously that has been contested. And insofar as a lineage can be claimed or new discoveries shown off or the new museum in Cairo, to what extent does it bolster the claims of the current rulers?

41:20Tyler Cowen:Or is that more or less irrelevant? I think it's a really good question. Egypt is a proud nation and the Egyptians are a proud people. And I think they are very proud of their past and like to share, I think, with the world the achievements of the Egyptian civilizations of the past. So I think they draw great sustenance and a great sense of their own position in the world from the ancient forebears. I mean, put it very prosaically, of course, tourism is absolutely critical to the Egyptian economy. There are literally millions of people dependent upon the tourist dollar, and those tourists largely come to Egypt for its ancient remains.

42:00Some go to the Red Sea for scuba diving, but most come to Egypt to admire its temples and its tombs and its pyramids. So it is both a source of national pride and a source of national income.

42:10Tyler Cowen:For our final segment, just a few questions about you and your career. What is it you had to learn to do what it is you've been doing? I've had a pretty, well, I was going to say circuitous kind of career. I've done lots of different things. I suppose if there's a common thread to everything I've done, whether it's in my writing or in my leadership roles, it's all about communication. I love to take a lot of information, distill it, and to communicate it in a way that hopefully is accessible and relatable. And I guess that's the common thread. I like words. I've always loved words since I was a kid.

42:42And manipulating words, whether it's writing a book or writing a strategy, it's all about words at the end of the day and how you tell a story.

42:50Tyler Cowen:And what languages did you have to learn? So I can get by in French, German, a modicum of Italian. I can make myself understood in Arabic. Those are the modern languages. Then in terms of ancient languages, ancient Egyptian, of course, I dabbled a little bit in Sumerian and Akkadian and Hittite once upon a time, but I've forgotten much of that now. How did you end up doing development work for Clare College, Cambridge? Oh, that's a kind of long story. But yeah, I think I would say that research in the humanities can be quite a solitary occupation, unlike in the sciences where scientists are working in labs and teams.

43:27In the arts and humanities, more often than not, you're on your own in the library. And I enjoy that, but I also enjoy working with people and in bigger teams of people. And so I was able at a fairly early stage in my career to kind of to ride both horses, to work in bigger teams in a much more outward facing role whilst maintaining my research and my interest in ancient Egypt. And it's been a great combination.

43:49Tyler Cowen:How has that changed your scholarship, having the connection to the external world, seeing what's relevant, seeing what other people think is relevant? I think it's helped me. I hope it's helped me to write for a broader readership. If I look back at some of the first things that I wrote as an academic, they were pretty satiric, pretty dry and dusty, as a lot of academic journal articles tend to be. I now try to write in a style that is well-grounded in research, but accessible to anybody who's interested in the ancient world. And I think that has come out of needing to be much more outward-facing.

44:25Tyler Cowen:And you worked for a while as a dean in Fiji, is that correct? Yeah, I headed up the National University in Fiji for a period. That was pretty exciting, especially as it coincided with the COVID-19 pandemic. So that brought a whole set of challenges. Again, you know, common thread being one of communication. Leadership is really all about communication. And I was also able to indulge my love of languages by learning some Fijian as well, which is a fascinating language. Before my final question, just another plug for your last book, The Last Dynasty, Ancient Egypt, from Alexander the Great to Cleopatra.

45:01Tyler Cowen:I enjoyed reading all of your books. And finally, what will you do next? Yeah, well, I've just finished my next book, actually, which is on another aspect of the ancient world. I can't say much more than that because I've signed an NDA with a Hollywood documentary producer. So watch this space, and it may be coming to a screen near you as well as to a bookstore near you fairly soon. Toby Wilkinson, thank you very much. Thank you for having me. Thanks for listening to Conversations with Tyler. You can subscribe to the show on Apple Podcasts, Spotify, or your favorite podcast app. If you like this podcast, please consider giving us a rating and leaving a review.

45:41Tyler Cowen:This helps other listeners find the show. On Twitter, I'm at Tyler Cowan, and the show is at Cowan Convos. Until next time, please keep listening and learning.