J. R. Harris (1)

Although half a century old (and so very much out of date in the detail), 'The Legacy of Egypt', part of a series of such books published by Oxford (Clarendon Press) on the later influence of many of the ancient civilisations, remains a useful summary of the contribution of Egypt to Western culture.

It is rather dry. Some chapters (each by a different academic) have too much of the air of the professor looking down from a lectern at rows of eager students who will all by now be moving into show more their seventies yet there are still things to be learned and appreciated.

Three and a half thousand years of history (until the country was thoroughly Arabised) are not easy to evaluate in well under 500 pages, especially as two purposes are only variably served - to tell the story of the civilisation and to recount its influence on later civilisations.

The overwhelming impression is that the traditional culture of Egypt was largely displaced by Greek colonisation and that it is Graeco-Egyptian or Hellenistic culture drawn from Egypt that had most influence on Western culture until the nineteenth century.

Chapters review Egyptian calendars and chronology, mathematics and astronomy, the 'canonical' tradition in art, technology and material culture, hieroglyphs, language and writing and the law, often in ways only true specialists are going to understand or rather make the effort to understand.

The image is one of a culture that was truly distinctive although not unconnected to surrounding cultures. It tended to import innovation rather than be innovative. Its ideas and modes of thinking (often shown through a Hellenistic lens) spread elsewhere far more than did anything material.

Even then, taken away from its cultural roots, Egyptian 'canonical' forms in art would become embarrassingly debased as in the appalling statue of Antinous from Hadrian's villa at Tivoli and yet this cannot be said not to be an 'influence' on Western culture.

It is the influence of ancient medicine, religious concepts (both ancient and Christian such as monasticism) and narrative forms in literature that seemed to be able to embed themselves in the Hellenistic world and so become part of the medieval and early modern world view.

Ancient Egypt itself is rather lost to view until the rise of the professional egyptologist following Champollion's work on the Rosetta Stone except, that is, as a mystery in itself with ruins and signs that were consistently misinterpreted and usually a source of fantasy and the exotic.

One chapter does, however, show us the debt of Israel and Jewish Biblical culture to Egypt (logical in view of the dynamic relationship between Egypt and Palestine) and another explores critically Ancient Egypt's influence on Africa (notably Meroe).

There are in-depth studies of Graeco-Roman Egypt, the Greek Papyri, Christian and Coptic Egypt and Islamic Egypt (by Bernard Lewis) that only go to confirm that Ancient Egypt died as substance rather than form with the building of Alexandria and that Islam created something entirely new.

In fact, Ancient Egypt took a long time to die, nearly a millenium. There are still small traces, beyond the monuments and the artefacts in tombs, in the Arabic of peasants but die it did except as a fantasy for many Westerners, a position it still holds for many today.

Of course, a civilisation that lasted two and a half thousand years or more before its decline cannot be fixed 'in stone' (so to speak) at just one moment in that long period. Pre-Dynastic, Old Kingdom, Intermediate Periods, Middle and New Kingdom all had their distinctive cultures.

Yet the book does indicate many continuities regardless of the shifting power relations which seemed to give us periods of individualism (women, for example, did have property rights) under an imperial religious monarchy and periods of exploitative quasi-feudalism and priestly theocracy.

The periods when it seems to be a culture of individual rights are most interesting. After all, who would have thought that the Egyptians appear to have invented something like the first Soviet (workers' council) in the Theban necropolis.

Anyone interested in the rise and fall of empires must be interested in Egypt. It fell to better organised outsiders several times in its history before the Greeks systematised its exploitation from their urban centres. The Greeks were the first to compete fully with the indigenous culture.

It is more complicated than this, of course, but incursions previously appear to have left the core Egyptian system intact, imposing only political authority from above. Although the Ptolemies were careful to respect indigenous tradition, Hellenistic culture was to displace it in the cities.

Socio-economic power lay in these cities, predominantly in Alexandria, and it tended to enforce an exploitative apartheid on the country that steadily degraded the older culture and eventually displaced it with an urban-based Judaeo-Christianity (to be replaced in turn by Islam).

It was not a sudden death but a death by neglect with the useful intellectual ideas of Egypt (medicine, mysteries and literature) incorporated into the Greek urban milieu and then dispersed throughout the Hellenistic world by trade and the Library at Alexandria.

It was post-Hellenistic Egypt that brought the Cult of Isis to Rome. Similar intellectual traditions spread in a decaying Roman Empire and thence into the culture of the West largely as the exotic. Egypt as more than a culture of the dead and of magical thinking is still quite new to us. show less