Tom Hercules Davies (Princeton University)
This paper sets the Egyptian Book of Nut, a 2nd-millennium BC astronomical treatise, beside the philosophical output of Anaximander of Miletus. I establish the possible influence of this text on Milesian philosophy, then explore the nature and limitations of this influence through sociological analysis of intellectual life in 6th century BC Ionia and Egypt.
The Book of Nut displays a close formal homology with what we can reconstruct of Anaximander’s work. It is a graphic illustration of the earth and heavens, accompanied by a lengthy exposition in prose. Like Anaximander’s treatise, it discusses the origin of the heavens and the motion of the stars, puts forth a theory of sunrise, sunset, and night, and gives an account of the phases of the moon (see Neugebauer & Parker 1960–1969, Von Lieven 2007). Most intriguingly, it discusses the ‘distant region’ (rtḥw-ḳbt) which encompasses the heavens and earth, a ‘uniform darkness’ (kkw smꜣw) which parallels Anaximander’s ἄπειρον.
Given that close economic and diplomatic relations developed between Egypt and Miletus from 664 BC on (Möller 2001, etc.), it is probable that some Milesians, if not Anaximander himself, saw the Book of Nut in person. One place the text was displayed was a tomb at Thebes, built in the mid-7th century BC by the lector priest Padiamenope (TT 33: see Traunecker & Régen 2013, 2015–2016, etc.). This tomb was a public museum of Egyptian philosophy, showcasing many astronomical and cosmological texts. Inscriptions in the tomb explicitly identify it as a tourist attraction, and the pictorial nature of many texts makes them legible even to visitors who cannot read hieroglyphs. Direct influence of Egyptian cosmology on the beginnings of philosophy in Greece is therefore plausible.
But what kind of influence should we imagine? Greek visitors would have encountered the Book of Nut as an ancient text, presented as part of a tradition by priests. Saite priests were court officials, charged with preserving a national cultural tradition already thousands of years old. Their careers were made on the mastery of dead languages and difficult scripts, they wrote commentaries on a fixed canon of texts. Padiamenope resembled Boethius or Simplicius more than he did any Presocratic thinker.
The encounter between Milesian and Egyptian thought was therefore not only a meeting of two cultures, it was a meeting of two distinct phases in the typical development of an intellectual tradition. Drawing on the work of the sociologists John Goldthorpe and Randall Collins, I explore the encounter between the Book of Nut and Anaximander’s treatise through the institutions in which late Egyptian and early Greek thinkers could practice philosophy. Differences between Greek and Egyptian thought have long been leveraged in demarcative projects concerned with where philosophy began (most recently, Sassi 2018, Laks 2018). This paper takes the differences as an object of inquiry, explaining them by reference to the material incentives bearing on intellectuals in each culture.