Toby Wilkinson on Ptolemaic Egypt and the First Great Commercial Civilization

Conversations with Tyler is produced by the Mercatus Center at George Mason University, bridging the gap between academic ideas and real-world problems. Learn more at mercatus.org. For a full transcript of every conversation enhanced with helpful links, visit conversationswithtyler.com. Hello everyone, and welcome back to Conversations with Tyler. Today I'm chatting with Toby Wilkinson, who is one of the world's leading Egyptologists. I'm quite intrigued by his latest book. It is called The Last Dynasty: Ancient Egypt from Alexander the Great to Cleopatra, and he is also a fellow at Clare College, Cambridge. Toby, welcome.

Thank you very much for having me on the show.

So Ptolemaic Egypt, you know, it lasts around 300 years. When exactly does it start and end and, and where was it? Just to give our listeners an introduction.

Sure. So we're talking here about Egypt, the Valley of the River Nile in the northeastern corner of the continent of Africa, but always really a crossroads between Africa, the Middle East, and Europe. And the time period we're talking about starts in 332 BC with Alexander the Great's conquest of Egypt, and it ends in 30 BC. So 300 years later with the death of the famous Cleopatra and Egypt's absorption into the Roman Empire.

And Alexander is able to take over Egypt because Persian incursions had weakened it, or how did that happen? We think of Egypt as so strong and mighty and everlasting back then.

Yeah. And, and Egypt of course had been a very, very mighty civilization for thousands of years, but in the centuries before Alexander the Great, it had been weakened internally and threatened externally by a variety of, of other powers, and it had fallen to the might of Persia. Well, the Persians were hated in Egypt. They really were loathed and despised because they didn't celebrate or even pay due respect to Egyptian gods and Egyptian traditions. So when Alexander the Great, who himself was trying to overthrow Persia, arrived at the gates of Egypt, he was welcomed as a hero because he had thrown off the hated Persians. So I suppose it was the old principle, the enemy of my enemy is my friend. So Alexander the Great was welcomed as a friend into Egypt and took over control of the country almost without a fight.

So either technologically or institutionally, what is it that the Persians had that the Egyptians did not?

Well, the Persians had a pretty formidable army. Their military technology was certainly superior to the Egyptians at the time that they conquered Egypt, originally in the 6th century BC. But they, like many empires, I suppose, throughout history, they kind of overreached themselves. They overextended themselves, and they found it increasingly hard to hold together this empire stretching all the way from the Aegean to the, you know, the borders of India. And so bits of the empire started to kind of fragment and pull away. And Egypt had always had this very strong sense of its own identity. So, you know, when it had a chance to throw off the Persian yoke, it took it.

So let's think about some of the achievements of Ptolemaic Egypt as an era. Infrastructure. What did they do that was most impressive?

Build Alexandria. Alexandria, the city, was a new foundation established by Alexander the Great to bear his name. And unlike all previous ancient Egyptian cities, it was a city built from the outset for commerce. It was a city built on the Mediterranean coast with a great natural harbor, with facilities for loading and offloading ships. It had a great lighthouse guarding the entrance to its harbor, which became one of the wonders of the world. So the whole city was really designed from the get-go as a great commercial center looking outwards to the Mediterranean rather than inwards to, to the rest of Egypt.

Canals, artificial lake. What else did they do?

They built a city quite unlike anything previously seen in the valley of the River Nile with, in fact, any inhabitant today of a modern city would recognize the gridiron pattern of streets, streets intersecting at right angles. That was something completely unheard of until this point in Egypt with vast public buildings. This was the Manhattan of the ancient world, if you like, both in scale, in grandeur, and in the level of commercial activity.

And how large was the library in Alexandria, and how did they build that out?

Well, this is interesting because the Ptolemaic kings not only wanted to be wealthy economically, but they wanted to be renowned throughout the ancient world as great scholar leaders. They thought it was important that a new dynasty establish its credentials as a patron of the arts and of learning, not just as the head of a great sort of commercial enterprise. So they invited all the leading scholars from the Greek-speaking world, from right across the Mediterranean to Alexandria, where they provided them with a library, with what was called a museum or a Temple of the Muses, a place where scholars could think great thoughts and, and be well looked after. And the library was developed over centuries really as the greatest repository of learning that the world had ever seen up to this point. It is thought that maybe at its height it contained half a million volumes, half a million manuscripts, mostly written on papyrus, but representing really the sum total of human knowledge at that time.

And Euclid and Eratosthenes are connected to this era.

Almost any big name from ancient science has some connection with Alexandria. Euclid, the mathematician, studied there. Eratosthenes, who quite amazingly calculated the circumference of the Earth, he carried out those calculations in Alexandria. There were leaders in the fields of astronomy, of anatomy and medicine, of geography, of philosophy, of literary theory. They were all active in Alexandria under the patronage of the Ptolemaic kings.

But am I correct in thinking that the era was quite weak in philosophy in some ways? There's no great name. Maybe it's all lost manuscripts, but it seems to be a bit like China— infrastructure intensive. They build amazing things. It's commercial, but they're not really thinkers.

I think that would be a misrepresentation. I mean, Alexandria under the Ptolemies didn't produce a Socrates or a Plato. It is true. But what it did, what its scholars did, was to synthesize strands of philosophy from ancient Greek thought, ancient Egyptian thought, Babylonian thought, ancient Hebrew philosophy and religion. So it was a melting pot and it maybe didn't throw up the big name, but it was a very fertile ground for the exchange and the interchange of ideas.

But say I try to read Diodorus. There's a lot of detail, but it's not to me very interesting. It just seems much worse than Herodotus, who is profound and in a way a step back. And maybe that's not representative.

I think there are a lot more scholarly works, I mean, both surviving and lost, that were composed in ancient Alexandria that would be more surprising and more revelatory than those that you've just mentioned.

So what was it exactly that was so special about the intellectual and scientific and productive environment of Alexandria and environs? Was it that the Egyptians were there or the mix of Greeks and Egyptians or something else? What?

I think there are three factors really. I mean, one is certainly the Egyptian context, and I don't think those intellectual advances that were made in Alexandria could have been made anywhere else. So let's take anatomy, for example.— in the Greek world in general, there was a taboo on cutting up human bodies. But of course, ancient Egypt had a long tradition of mummification, which involved dissecting human corpses. And so if you were an anatomist and you wanted to make discoveries about how the organs functioned, the only place you could do that at this time was ancient Egypt. And the same is true actually in many other branches of science. The Egyptian traditions of scholarship and of learning really laid the foundations for Greek thinkers to take them to the next level. The second aspect was the wonderful infrastructure that was put in place by the Ptolemies to lure scholars to Alexandria. They were paid handsomely. They had access to the world's best library. They had all of the facilities at their disposal. So there was really no better place to be than Alexandria. And the third factor was really the kind of kleptomania of the Ptolemaic rulers. They were not just bibliophiles, but they wanted to acquire a copy or preferably the original, of every book and manuscript circulating in the ancient Greek world. And to that end, they indulged in, in sort of downright thieving. They sent a word, for example, to Athens, which was one of the great centers of scholarship, a rival center of learning, and requested copies of books from Athens' city library. And the copies arrived in Alexandria. They were then seized by the Ptolemaic authorities and kept for Alexandria's own library, and they were only too happy to pay the fine because they had the books. So it was a combination of factors that really led Alexandria to being the greatest center for scholars and for scholarship.

So how good was the medicine back then? Let's say they could set my broken leg, but if I'm sick and I just show up, is my doctor's visit even positive expected value, or are they more likely to harm me than help me?

I think we would be surprised, pleasantly surprised, by the sophistication of medical understanding at this time. There were ancient Egyptian Egyptian papyri on medicine dating back many, many centuries before the Ptolemies came to the throne. And these looked in detail at all sorts of different afflictions and whether or not they could be treated, and if so, what the recommended treatments were. I'll give you one example: migraine. Now, we think of a migraine as, as a relatively Western modern phenomenon, a medical condition. But actually, the ancient Egyptians recognized it, described it. They came up with a word for it, half-head migraine, and they developed very sophisticated electrical treatments for migraine involving an electric discharge from the head of a catfish. A Nile catfish emits a low-level electric discharge, and the ancient Egyptians had discovered that applying this to the head of a migraine sufferer could have a beneficial therapeutic effect. I mean, goodness me, it wasn't until the 20th century that modern medicine rediscovered the importance of electricity in terms of neural pathways. So yeah, they were very sophisticated.

Should we do this today with the catfish?

If you can find one that's sort of skulking along the bottom, maybe they live in the Mississippi too. I wouldn't necessarily recommend it, but it does seem to have done the trick.

So what were the main exports of the Alexandria region? What are they selling, making?

Oh, there are two big exports that account for the lion's share of Egypt's wealth at the time. Are gold and grain. So gold has been mined in Egypt for millennia up to this point, but it's still the place in the ancient world that produces large quantities of gold. And of course, you know, gold has always been a great currency of international commerce. And then Egypt is famed as the breadbasket of the ancient world. It produces a superabundance of grain thanks to the fertility of the Nile and the benign climate, produces more than it needed for its own consumption by comparison with poorer agricultural regions in Greece and Asia Minor, which struggled to produce enough food. So yeah, golden grain was the absolute engine of Egyptian prosperity.

There's metalwork, there's glass, or what else is there? Manufacturing, as we would call it today.

Oh yeah, there's, there's a big ceramics industry. So producing not just pots, but terracotta statues and votive objects. There's glassmaking, as you've said, there's advanced metallurgy, goldsmithing, ironworking, copper and bronze foundries. There's what we might what you might call the decorative arts. So sculpture, painting, all of these things thrived in ancient Alexandria.

So do they have living standards sustainably above subsistence, or is this a Malthusian equilibrium where they get some wealth and then more people survive and the wage falls again and it doesn't get much above what is required to keep people alive?

Depending on where you lived, I think if you were an urban dweller of Alexandria, you were living significantly above subsistence levels. You were a merchant, you were a trader, you were an artisan, you were manufacturing objects or trading objects. Yeah, you had a decent standard of living by the standards of the ancient world. If you were a peasant laboring in the fields of Upper Egypt, it was a pretty hand-to-mouth existence as it always had been.

But what stops the living standards from being equalized? Is there a barrier to entering the city, or why don't people flow in as they do say in modern India until the living standards are roughly equal.

They do flow in, but there's an important dimension to Ptolemaic society, which is the ethnic divide. Put very bluntly, the ruling class were Greek-speaking immigrants from the Mediterranean world, of course presided over by a Greek-speaking dynasty of pharaohs, the Ptolemies. And Greek speakers more or less monopolized all of the, the key positions of office. And then the vast majority of the population out in what the Greeks call the khora, the countryside were indigenous Egyptians, many of whom, most of whom probably couldn't converse in Greek, which was the language of, of government and diplomacy. So it was very much a kind of, it was a society of two halves.

And how much slavery is there?

So slavery is one of the less attractive aspects of the kind of Greek package that comes to Egypt with the Ptolemies. Up until this point in Egypt, there hasn't really been slavery in the way that we would recognize it. There's been feudalism, but there's not been slavery. The Greeks introduce slavery to Egypt, and they buy and sell slaves in markets, including in Alexandria. It's still not a defining feature of Ptolemaic society in the way that it would be later in ancient Rome, but it has reared its ugly head for the first time in Egyptian history.

Given all the successes, what should I think of as the limiting principle behind rule here? So it stretches as far as what we would call Cyprus today., but it never becomes a very large area, right? It doesn't become the next Roman Empire. Why doesn't it?

I mean, at its greatest extent, the Ptolemaic Empire includes much of the coast of modern-day Libya, certainly Cyprus, the Nile Valley, parts of present-day Lebanon and Syria and Turkey, and some islands in the Aegean. So yeah, it's not as big as the Roman Empire would later be. Uh, what are its constraining factors? Partly it's a lack of ambition. Well, not a lack of ambition, moderate ambition. I mean, the Ptolemies really want to rule Egypt, which is regarded as the jewel in Alexander the Great's crown. It's the most prosperous part of his empire. And the other territories that they conquer in a ring around Egypt are really only there as a defensive buffer zone to protect Egypt. So they have no particular ambition to, to create a kind of world empire as Alexander the Great did. So that was one constraining factor, but they are also not the only players in the ancient world. I mean, there are other powerful dynasties of kings in, in Asia, uh, and in the Greek mainland who have territorial designs of their own. So it sort of keeps these various powers in equilibrium and it stops one of them becoming dominant really until the Romans upend the whole system. So I suppose, yeah, those are the two constraining factors, ambition and competition.

And you think the Romans had the ambition in a way Ptolemaic Egypt did not.

I do. I think the Romans were motivated by a real desire to conquer. Ancient Roman military leaders were only as good as their last victory on the battlefield. I mean, you see that in the, in the later days of the Republic and the beginning of the Empire, whereas in ancient Egyptian tradition, certainly military success was not the benchmark of a successful reign. It was something that you needed to do in order to protect your own borders. But there were other achievements honoring the gods, building great temples, presiding over a glittering civilization that were considered equally important.

So how is it that all this ends, or at least starts to decline? What's the mechanism?

Well, it begins with the finances. So the Ptolemaic Empire becomes overstretched. It has to invest hugely in its armed forces in order to fend off not just the growing predations of Rome, but actually its closer neighbors as well. That leads to higher taxes. There's a series of climatic shocks, poor Niles leading to poor harvests. So it's a kind of perfect storm. The economy goes south pretty quickly, and the only solution that the Ptolemies can see is to go cap in hand to Roman moneylenders to bail out the Egyptian economy. And that then really gives Rome leverage over Egypt. That all gets bound up in the Republican politics of Rome., and in the rivalry between Caesar and his rivals, and then ultimately, uh, Octavian, who becomes the first emperor Augustus. And Egypt goes from being a great civilization confident of itself to being a pawn in other people's power play. And ultimately, Rome is able to march into Alexandria, overthrow Cleopatra, and seize Egypt for itself. And it's a kind of salutary lesson for our own time, that a civilization can appear to the outside world to be magnificent and wealthy and successful, but actually the seeds of its own destruction are usually lying there somewhere, just waiting for the conditions to germinate.

Do we have a sense of how high the tax burden was then, or government spending as a share of GDP? Anything numerically?

Nothing that we can lay our hands on in that sense. No kind of reliable statistics. But we do have we have papyrus records of farmers complaining of the increasing tax burden, complaining that an ever-increasing amount of their harvest is being taken by the state in the form of an agricultural produce tax. So no, we can't sort of chart this in graphs, but we definitely get a sense from the people on the ground that this is becoming increasingly burdensome.

And there was a system back then where companies would bid for government-backed monopolies. And they'd hold them as a kind of franchise. How did that work out?

That's right. Yeah, particularly with regard to the manufacture of certain products which were controlled by the government. So I'm thinking here of oil, cooking oil, for example. That was a government monopoly, but you could bid to acquire the franchise to produce cooking oil. And, you know, if you won the franchise, then it was pretty lucrative because you then had an effective monopoly on this until the next bidding war came around. The same was true for farming crown land. So land held by the government. If you thought you could farm this more productively than, than the last guy, then you might be prepared to bid a little bit more and then you'd reap the benefits. So yeah, it was quite an interesting economic system. This was entirely new in ancient Egypt. This was a product of the Ptolemies and of their desire to maximize the tax take, really.

And how important a figure is Cleopatra in this whole history? Is it just marketing and Shakespeare and Elizabeth Taylor, or was she really at the center of what was happening? Did she matter?

She mattered. You know, she was the last Egyptian pharaoh because after her, Egypt as an independent nation ceases to exist and it becomes part of the Roman Empire. But more than that, you know, she was the inheritor of a dynasty that had ruled for 300 years. She managed to play the cards that she had been dealt more effectively than her immediate predecessors. She was very smart. All ancient authors are agreed upon that point. She was very charismatic. She was a great strategist. She was the only Ptolemy ever to learn to speak Egyptian, so she could actually speak to her own people in their language rather than through a translator. And I suppose the question for me is not so much, Why did Cleopatra ultimately fail? But how did she manage to survive and succeed for so long when all the other parts of Alexander's empire had already been gobbled up by the might of Rome? So yes, she does matter. She, she manages to maintain and preserve not only her inheritance, but the inheritance of 3,000 years of pharaonic civilization against all the odds. Of course, ultimately we all know how the story ends, but she had a remarkable run of success.

If there were 2 or 3 burning questions, maybe you think about them every day, things you don't know about Ptolemaic Egypt but wish you did, what's on your shortlist?

I'd love to know where Cleopatra was buried. Cleopatra's tomb has never been found, probably because it now lies underwater. Much of ancient Alexandria has, by combination of earthquake and rising sea levels, been submerged under the waters of the Mediterranean. And that almost certainly includes the mausoleum where Cleopatra was buried. So it would be good to, to to discover that. Equally, it would be very neat to find the burial place of Alexander the Great, the guy who started it all off. We're told ancient authors who recorded visits to Alexander's tomb tell us that he was buried in a glass coffin, richly kind of overlaid with gold. It would be pretty amazing to find that too. So those are two of the persistent kind of questions that nag at Egyptologists and archaeologists. Finding the tombs of those two great figures from, from ancient history. But for me personally, I'd quite like to just be transported in a time machine back to Ptolemaic Alexandria and walk the streets and soak up the vibe and see what it was really like.

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 XIII. 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. So 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.

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, you know, 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, that it once was. So for me, ancient Alexandria exists in the imagination and in the writings of, of, of ancient historians, but it's It's quite hard to perceive on the ground today.

Do you like current Alexandria? I've been there once. I enjoyed walking along the sea and eating seafood, but so much of it seems 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, 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 harbor of Alexandria, which it turns out Cleopatra spent a great deal of time fortifying and turning into a great sort of commercial/dynastic port. So 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 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.

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 from 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, 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, and 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.

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, you know, tall tales of Egypt, none of which seemed to stack 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 accounts, as all historians, ancient and modern, do, I suppose, to an extent. But at its core, Herodotus is not that unreliable.

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 stele from the reign of Merenptah. 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. So 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.

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, you know, 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. So 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.

How much of a sense, say, India did the ancient Egyptians have?

Not a lot until the Persians. And as we, we spoke about at the, 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 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. And 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.

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 jewelry 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 in the 12th Dynasty with France under the Sun King, Louis XIV. It was a time when arts and craftsmanship really excelled under royal patronage. You know, later on, the Egyptians produced heavier, more gaudy, more kind of showy jewelry. 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.

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

So no major role for hydraulics or water.

Well, I mean, in those days, the Nile, when it was 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, 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?

Writing 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 the gods, 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 worldview. It's not just a way of communicating everyday ideas. And it is coeval with, 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. And 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, it's all there because of the idea of divine kingship.

And 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, it's bounded by deserts with the Mediterranean Sea to the north. The only land bridge between Egypt and, and the continent of Asia is this very narrow isthmus along the, the northern fringe of the Sinai Peninsula. So it's quite hard for aggressive forces actually to infiltrate Egypt. It has pretty secure borders. Pure 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. So climate, ecology, natural borders, I think they, yeah, they make a pretty, pretty strong and stable combination.

But why not just cross the Mediterranean with boats? It's very much a navigable 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, are unique. They are God's creation. So 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, to Egypt and the Egyptians.

This is a very speculative question, but I'm sure you've thought about 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. So this is a period where there is a shift in the rainbelt across North Africa and the Middle East. It shifts further south. It, it leads to the drying out of large swathes of land, uh, that had previously been inhabitable by cattle herders and, and small-scale farmers. And what this does is concentrate population in river valleys. They, 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.

But there's a whole world of people, and for 300,000, 400,000 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 6 years old, I knew who King Tut was, but I had no idea, say, of Napoleon. 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. You know, the world was picking itself up after the First World War. There was a real hunger for for glamour and stories of, you know, of kind of beauty and opulence and magnificence. So it kind of struck a chord with the zeitgeist, you might say. So it was a combination of the media frenzy, the time, and also, let's face it, ancient Egypt is just such a visually appealing civilization. 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 combined 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.

You know, 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 jewelry 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, from time to time, whether it's the Luxor Hotel in Las Vegas or Egyptian elements that are popping up in art and design. But it doesn't have the same worldwide appeal that it did in the 1920s.

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 are out of the cities in the countryside, in a small Egyptian village, you will see patterns of subsistence, of farming, architecture of mud brick houses that has changed very little in 3, 4, 5,000 years. So life, the rhythm of life, the patterns of life in a rural Egyptian community are still very recognizable from the days of the pharaohs. But contrast that with, you know, 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, you know, 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.

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, 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're, I think they draw great sustenance and great, 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. I mean, some 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 source of national pride and a source of national income.

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 gonna 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, and relatable. And I guess that's the common thread. I like words. I've always loved words since I was a kid and manipulating words, whether it's, you know, writing a book or writing a strategy, it's all about words at the end of the day and how you tell a story.

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 in teams. In 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.

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, in research, but accessible to anybody who's interested in the ancient world. And I think that has come out of needing to be be much more outward-facing.

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, 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. I enjoyed reading all of your books. And finally, what will you do next?

Yeah, well, I, 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 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. This helps other listeners find the show. On Twitter, I'm @TylerCowen. Tyler Cowen, and the show is @cowenconvos. Until next time, please keep listening and learning.