Life After Death_ A History of the Afterlife in Western Religion - Alan Segal [39]
Two centuries later, in 332 BCE, Alexander the Great conquered Egypt, styling himself as the savior of Egypt by assuming the title of Horus, the son of the sun god, and putting an end to Iranian rule over all of Western Asia. Yet, he retained the Persian administrative units, the satrapies, and their governors the satraps, even as he restored the hieroglyphic texts and temples. Alexander commanded the building of a fine new port city, to be named Alexandria, but left before construction began and did not live to see the city built.
Alexander died a mere decade later, leaving his general Ptolemy in charge of Egypt. His successors, the Ptolemaic dynasty, in effect, became the Greek pharaohs of the whole country. Although Ptolemy declared himself pharaoh and king (305 BCE), he did not aggressively meld cultures, as Alexander legendarily wanted. Though they often styled themselves in Egyptian fashion, the Ptolemaic rulers spoke educated, Attic Greek, not Macedonian Greek or Egyptian. The aristocracy supported them, making the Greeks a ruling class apart from the previous Egyptian culture. Cleopatra VII, the last ruler of the Ptolemaic dynasty, just as purebred Greek as the first Ptolemy, was the first to claim to understand demotic Egyptian. But, so far as we know, there was not a single Egyptian document in the famous library at Alexandria and all government correspondence was in Greek, thus excluding most native Egyptians from controlling their own country or even understanding what the government was doing much of the time.
Instead, the rulers continued the ancient cults as a way of communicating with the people. The Ptolemies kept the good order of the people, as the Persians did, by patronizing the Egyptian temples and religious cults of the people, building many huge new edifices, styling themselves in the traditional roles of the pharaohs. The Egyptian priests, for their part, cooperated. But they went far beyond cooperation. They began the process of explaining their religion to a classical audience and later developed hellenized forms of their cults which became popular all around the Roman world.
The Romans continued this two-tiered system of social stratification on the basis of language for a thousand years, until the Arab conquest. A brief revival of Egyptian texts and funerary beliefs surfaced during the reign of Cleopatra VII. But Egypt did not regain its independence until the twentieth century. The Romans offered not nearly the same kind of support to the Egyptian cults as the Ptolemies did, setting the stage for the arrival of a new religion, Christianity, to replace the weakened old one.64
Diodorus Siculus, who wrote about the Egypt of 56 BCE when he visited it, describes funeral ceremonies that suggest a parallel between the supernatural judgment in the afterlife and the social judgment placed on the person in this life. Before the burial, there was a public evaluation of the deceased, with an attendant verdict, he tells us. When the judgment was negative, the person was denied a proper burial, unless it was a crime for which the family was able to make restitution. When the burial was not done properly, the deceased’s way to the afterlife was blocked.65 In general, then, Diodorus was extraordinarily impressed with the level of Egyptian morality. (212)
This late report is one of our clearest views of popular religion in Egypt. How far back this practice goes, we cannot speculate. But it certainly would explain why ordinary people were able