“In brief, there was not an Egyptian thing about which they did not inquire; indeed, all Egyptian narratives and reports are most attractive to the Greek ear” (Heliod. Aeth. 2.27.3). This statement on the importance of Egypt for the ancient Greeks (and Romans) holds true also for the impression Egypt has made on the students of these civilizations, as recent works have made clear, e.g., I. Moyer’s Egypt and the Limits of Hellenism (BMCR 2012.04.45), E. Manolaraki’s Noscendi Nilum Cupido (BMCR 2013.08.05), M. Escolano-Poveda’s The Egyptian Priests in the Graeco-Roman Period (BMCR 2021.10.34), and R. Cioffi’s Egypt, Ethiopia, and the Greek Novel (BMCR 2025.04.15). Edward Kelting’s book is a valuable and welcome addition to this list.
In this philologically accurate and theoretically aware book, the author frames the movement of “Egyptian Things” as an act of cultural translation practiced by “culturally mixed Egyptian authors [who] wrote about Egypt for a Greek and Roman audience” (p. 5). Kelting situates his book and its subject matter at a crossroads of disciplines and methodologies. By focusing on authors from Manetho up until the 2nd century CE, he aims to reconstruct a tradition that has been preserved only in fragments, a fact that, he claims, has contributed to the unpopularity of Aegyptiaca. Indeed, the need to master multiple languages to access and assess these materials (including Ancient Greek, Latin, Middle and Late Egyptian, and Demotic) has tended to isolate them from both Classics and Egyptology.
The introduction tackles, from a post-colonial perspective, the questions of how Egyptian these culturally mixed authors were, why they embarked on a process of translating Egyptian culture for a Greco-Roman audience, and how lively Egyptian culture was in the Roman Empire. By highlighting the material and social gain that authors of Aegyptiaca, such as Apion or Chaeremon, obtained in the colonized world of Roman Egypt, or indeed in Rome itself, Kelting discusses the importance of framing Aegyptiaca in the social and cultural context of the colonial rule of Rome in Egypt. The mixed Greco-Egyptian identity of the authors of Aegyptiaca is then discussed throughout the book with the help of the concept of “créolité,” theorized as “creolization’s ecumenical reach and unending diachrony” (p. 19) as developed by the Martiniquais writer Édouard Glissant.
In the first chapter, Kelting expands the literary category of Aegyptiaca beyond Manetho and, by focusing on Apion’s career, broadens the understanding of what can be viewed as an Egyptian perspective on Egypt. Author of five volumes of Aegyptiaca and of Glossae Homericae, Apion represents, in Kelting’s analysis, a complex figure who blurs the rigid distinctions of citizenship in Roman Egypt. Ethnically Egyptian, he reaches, no mean feat, Alexandrian citizenship and is sent as ambassador to Caligula in 38 ce, showcasing a newfound authority on account of his mixed culture. Conversant in Egyptian botany (cf. the discussion on osiritis in Plin. HN 30.18) and Homeric criticism (cf. his discussion of the etymology of “Elysian” apud Eust. Od. 4.563, which Apion connects to ἰλύς, the Nile’s alluvial soil), Apion’s intellectual production sits at a crossroads. Thus, in Kelting’s words: “What has been a specific issue of what to call Apion balloons out into a much larger question about how one can discuss Egyptian culture in a world characterized on the one hand by increasingly blurry Greek-Egyptian cultural milieu and on the other by the rise to preeminence of Roman hegemony in the Eastern Mediterranean” (p. 43–4). This analysis is conducted with the help of the concept of créolité as theorized by Édouard Glissant. The encounter between Greek and Egyptian culture leads to a constant negotiation of new cultural identities and products, and “creolization highlights that cultural mixture is a process rather than an achieved state” (p. 47). The establishment of this framework allows Kelting in what follows to analyze numerous, and extremely diverse (mainly astronomy, natural philosophy, and magic), literary productions of the Roman empire as Aegyptiaca, without facing the issue of discussing the “cultural purity” of their authors.
The second chapter highlights the careers of Chaeremon, Tiberius Claudius Thrasyllus, his son Tiberius Claudius Balbillus, the latter’s granddaughter Iulia Balbilla, and the poet-magician Pancrates. To present the career of these authors, Kelting has to deal with complex prosopographical issues. His analysis has the merit of offering a fresh and accessible review of the available shards of evidence, and of strengthening the hypothesis that multi-faceted authors whom traditional prosopography had divided into several homonymous figures according to their specialization (e.g., four different Balbilli active between 40–60 CE) rather represent different aspects of the same individual. His reading of Iulia Balbilla’s epigram 29 left on the colossal statue of Amenhotep III (the so-called Memnon) as a reenactment of her Egyptian ancestry is compelling. When in the poem she identifies the colossus as being “Amenoth,” she performs an act of cultural translation. However, Kelting affirms that “Very few references to any Amenhotep exist in Greek literature. None before Manetho […]. Then Chaeremon and Josephus pick him up, when the Exodus story was often slotted into the Eighteenth Dynasty. But these are the only references until Julia Balbilla” (p. 74). His subsequent analysis depends on Balbilla’s authoritative identification. He does, however, not mention that Strabo 1.42.3 and Polyainos (BNJ 639 F1) provide the very same information about the Memnon colossus representing “Amenophis,” and that both comment on Cambyses’ vandalism on the statue. In this light, Kelting’s analysis would have been even more powerful in that Iulia Balbilla chose to reenact this admittedly rare tradition on the very surface of the statue of Amenhotep III.
Moving from the authors to the content of their works, in chapters 3 and 4, Kelting aims to demonstrate how Aegyptiaca functioned as a “bridge between long-standing traditional Egyptian cultural forms discussed by Egyptologists and Roman authors like Vergil and Juvenal discussed by Classicists” (p. 83). From the barbarizing view of Egyptian animal gods in Aeneid 8, to the syncretic assimilation of Isis to Io via the latter’s metamorphosis into a cow and, more generally, Ovid’s narratives of gods taking animal shapes, Kelting explores the different modes of representation for Egyptian zoolatry in Rome. He moreover shows that some ancient authors (e.g., Cicero and Plutarch) took zoolatry seriously and evaluated it against the practice of representing gods as anthropomorphized. Plutarch (DIO 382b-c) even came to the conclusion that worshipping gods through animals might be better than doing so with statues. Kelting traces this philosophical debate by addressing Seth and his animals as a case study. In a suggestive and convincing analysis, he shows that Manetho may be the source of Seth’s identification with the crocodile, the hippopotamus, and the ass. In particular, Manetho mentioned the hippopotamus in translating Old-Kingdom pharaonic ideology for a Greek readership, framing it as an element of disorder against which the king had to fight, an element that Plutarch readily adopted (DIO 371b-c). Kelting also connects the hippopotamus in Plutarch’s DIO 371c-d to an inscription found in the temple of Edfu that shows unmistakable proximity with the Greek author, thus tracing a specific and highly persuasive thread from Egyptian to Greek language material.
In the fifth chapter, Kelting, building on the idea that Greco-Roman philosophical debate on Egyptian animals stems from “the most obvious piece in the network of association that constituted Egypt’s animal symbolisms” (p. 140), i.e., hieroglyphs, shows how the authors of Aegyptiaca chose to present the Egyptian script symbolically to their public. Focusing on etymologies, Kelting proves that Manetho may be a very reliable source (e.g., in Plut. DIO 354c-d in which the Egyptian etymology for Amun [𓇋𓏠𓈖𓀃𓏜, ꞽmn, “to hide”] is given) as well as an untrustworthy one, as in the case of the etymology for the Hyksos rulers ascribed to him by Josephus (Ap. 1.82). Since he pushes back against the idea that Chaeremon had very little knowledge of Egyptian, it could have served the author’s purposes to discuss the training of scribes and priests. Indeed, in the Roman period, knowledge of the sacred writings sometimes appears as a legal requirement to access priestly offices (cf. e.g., P. Tebt. II 291 Fr. B ll. 40–4), and as an Egyptian priest, Chaeremon had surely been trained in reading at least hieratic and Demotic. These elements notwithstanding, by destabilizing Manetho as a yardstick to measure the knowledge of hieroglyphs of latter-day authors of Aegyptiaca, Kelting argues that their mode of translation should not be evaluated according to a right/wrong criterion, but rather as a process of negotiation of culture via cultural translation, another facet of the creolization process he emphasizes. In light of this, the analysis would have benefited from a discussion of Westerfeld’s useful book on late antique reception of hieroglyphs.[1] The focus of these authors on the symbolic, philosophical, and religious aspects of hieroglyphs prompts Kelting to analyze to what extent their conflation of priest and philosophers was indebted to Egyptian conceptions as well as to Greek ones.
In his final chapter, Kelting reexamines the reasons why authors of Aegyptiaca, especially Chaeremon, sought to creolize their identity and authority, blending Egyptian (e.g., sẖ pr-ꜥnḫ, “scribe of the house of life”) and Greek (φιλόσοφος) professional titles. His analysis touches on the widespread imperial narrative that identifies Pythagoras as the one who brought philosophy from Egypt to Greece and expands on the several shifts that occurred in Egyptian priestly culture as witnessed by such texts as the Book of Thoth. Kelting advances our understanding of the connections that existed between the two cultures, both caused and encouraged by the mixed identity of the authors of Aegyptiaca. The so-called Vienna Papyrus presents an interesting material comparison. One side of it is indeed inscribed with passages of the Book of Thoth in Demotic, the other with a Greek astronomical text, which in Kelting’s analysis perfectly showcases the ongoing process of creolization.
The author’s conclusion restates the main finding of the book via the prism of the fictionalized character of Acoreus in the last book of Lucan’s Pharsalia. As a priest who both advises and instructs Cesar, he exemplifies the paths of Nero’s teacher, Chaeremon, and of the Alexandrian ambassador, Apion. However, these Roman encounters always look back to previous ones: to Pythagoras’ and Plato’s travels to Egypt, and to the influence Africa had had on Greek thought. Kelting lucidly pushes back against an exacerbated Quellenforschung that tries to establish who got to philosophy, science, and culture first, and tries to highlight that from the earliest encounters, both Egyptian and Greek cultures benefited from an ongoing process of creolization.
While this book provides an excellent treatment of a genre understudied in scholarship and explores fruitfully key moments in the cultural translation of specific topics along the roads that lead from Alexandria to Rome, a thorough study of all fragmentary Aegyptiaca remains a desideratum. Indeed, the author acknowledges, in his treatment of the Seth animals, that “one could tell a similar story about animals connected with solar deities” (p. 139). Hence, many — minor — authors of Aegyptiaca fall outside the scope of this study. Kelting focuses instead on the systemic pathways they followed. Though readers may disagree on specific points, the book presents substantial progress in our understanding of a very slippery matter: how systems of knowledge and belief passed from one language to another, from one culture to another, and what marks this translation left on both cultures.
The book is very nicely produced and presents almost no typographical infelicities. The only real complaint of this reader is the inconsistency in the quotation of ancient languages. All ancient passages are quoted in translation in the body of the text with the original given in the notes. Latin quotations are given in full, while “for accessibility and economy […] I only print the italicized excerpts of extended Greek passages” (p. 30 n. 11). Regarding Egyptian quotations, hieroglyphs without transliteration are given on p. 133, while transliteration without hieroglyphs is given on p. 165. Despite these trivial matters, this book is not only a fundamental contribution to the scholarship on Egypt in the Greco-Roman world, but also very pleasant to read.
Notes
[1] Jennifer Westerfeld. Egyptian Hieroglyphs in the Late Antique Imagination. Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2019.