Giulio Leghissa, University of Toronto
Since the seventeenth century and until recently, 'Western' (that is European and settler colonial) scholarly views of Hellenistic Egypt were effectively encapsulated by the following vignette: besides being the ‘gift of the Nile’, Egypt became a ‘Mediterranean-Sea-looking land’ after the foundation of Alexandria in 332 BCE. By conceptualizing it so, scholars have marked a divide between the times of Alexander’s arrival and of the subsequent Greco-Macedonian rule on the one hand, and the previous periods, which would have been characterized by Egypt’s inward-looking, despotic and xenophobic attitudes. This view, which is notably based on classical literary sources, centers and elevates Macedonian and Greek (and thereby, European) contributions to Egyptian ‘civilization’ and economic prosperity (e.g., Bowman 1986; Busarelis, Stephanou and Thompson 2013. On this point, see Blouin 2017). At the same time, it reinforces the assumed centrality of water and waterborne connections in the history of ancient Egypt.
Are we able to move away from this still common narrative? Can we provide a more nuanced portrait of Hellenistic Egypt's relationships with the broader Afro-Eurasian world? If so, what other, disruptive, stories are waiting to be told?
In this paper I argue that we can draw a different picture indeed. To do so, I will focus on the archaeological evidence of Egyptian connections with the Central Sahara in the Hellenistic period. Usually considered inhospitable, bereft of natural resources and disconnected, the Saharan desert was actually an anthropicized space; one which, in the latter centuries BCE, saw the movements of people, goods and ideas between Egypt and the Garamantian communities of the Fazzan oases (Liverani 2000; Mattingly et al. 2017; Duckworth et al. 2020). This case of desertborne ‘connectivity’, which is one among many I am illuminating in my PhD thesis, debunks colonial views of the Sahara as a fragmented and isolated anti-Mediterranean system. It also shows how Ptolemaic Egypt, far from being merely projected on the sea, was also well-anchored on land, and Sahara-oriented.