Egypt–Greece relations

"Thus the Phrygians, earliest of all races, call me Pessinuntia, mother of all gods. Thus the Athenians, sprung from their own soil, call me Cecropeian Minerva and the sea-tossed Cyprians call me Paphian Venus, the archer Cretans Diana, Dictynna, and the trilingual Sicilians Proserpine; to the Eleusinians I am Ceres, the ancient godess, to others Juno, to others Bellona and Hecate and Rhamnusia. But the Ethiopians, who are illumined by the first rays of the sun-god as he is born every day, together with the Africans and Egyptians, who excel through having the original doctrine, honour me with my distinctive rites and give me my true name of Queen Isis."

"We Greeks own Egypt, the grand monarchy of letters and nobility, to be the parent of our fables, metaphors and doctrines."

"And since Egypt is the country where mythology places the origin of the gods, where the earliest observations of the stars are said to have been made, and where, furthermore, many noteworthy deeds of great men are recorded, we shall begin our history with the events connected with Egypt."

"It was the belief of the Greeks that many elements of their civilization had come to them from Egypt… [I]n Egypt the Greeks acquired many new skills in pottery, textiles, metalworking, and ivory; there, as well as from the Assyrians. Phoenicians, and Hittites, Greek sculptors took the style of their early statues…Second to Egypt’s was the influence of Phoenicia…"

"Egypt can be regarded as the mother of all theogonies and the source of all the fictions which the Greeks received and embellished, for it does not appear that they invented much."

"at a riper age I no longer presume to connect the Greek, the Jewish and the Egyptian antiquities, which are lost in a distant cloud."

"Almost all the names of the gods came into Greece from Egypt. .. Besides these which have been here mentioned, there are many other practices. . . which the Greeks have borrowed from Egypt....it seems to me a sufficient proof of this that in Egypt these practices have been established from remote antiquity, while in Greece they are only recently known."

"How it happened that Egyptians came to the Peloponnese, and what they did to make themselves kings in that part of Greece, has been chronicled by other writers; I will add nothing therefore, but proceed to mention some points which no one else has yet touched upon."

"The temple of Athena there [Lindos in Rhodes] was founded by the daughters of Danaos, who touched at the island during their flight from the sons of Aigyptos."

"Kadmos, the son of Agenor, touched at it [Thera] during his search for Europa and … left there a number of Phoenicians."

"I propose to hold my tongue about the mysterious rites of Demeter, which the Greeks call Thesmophoria, though … I may say, for instance, that it was the daughters of Danaos who brought this ceremony from Egypt and instructed the Pelasgian women in it …"

"The Phoenicians who came with Kadmos … introduced into Greece, after their settlement in the country, a number of accomplishments, of which the most important was writing, an art till then, I think, unknown to the Greeks."

"Now I have an idea that Melampous … introduced the name of Dionysos into Greece, together with the sacrifice in his honour and the phallic procession. He did not, however, fully comprehend the doctrine, or communicate it in its entirety; its more perfect development was the work of later teachers. Nevertheless it was Melampous who introduced the phallic procession, and from Melampous that the Greeks learnt the rites that they now perform. Melampous, in my view, was an able man who acquired the art of divination and brought into Greece, with little change, a number of things which he had learned in Egypt, and amongst them the worship of Dionysos … Probably Melampous got his knowledge about Dionysos through Kadmos of Tyre and the people who came with him from Phoenicia to the country now called Boiotia. The names of nearly all the gods came to Greece from Egypt. [my emphasis] I know from the enquiries I have made that they came from abroad, and it seems most likely that it was from Egypt, for the names of all the gods have been known in Egypt from the beginning of time … These practices, then, and others which I shall speak of later, were borrowed by the Greeks from Egypt … In ancient times, as I know from what I was told at Dodona, the Pelasgians offered sacrifices of all kinds, and prayed to the gods, but without any distinction of name or title – for they had not yet heard of any such thing. They called the gods by the Greek word theoi – ‘disposers’… Long afterwards the names of the gods were brought into Greece from Egypt and the Pelasgians learnt them … then as time went on, they sent to the oracle at Dodona (the most ancient, and at that period, the only oracle in Greece) to ask advice about the propriety of adopting names that had come into the country from abroad. The oracle replied that they would be right to use them. From that time onward, therefore, the Pelasgians used the names of the gods in their sacrifices, and from the Pelasgians the names passed to Greece."

"I will never admit that the similar ceremonies performed in Greece and Egypt are the result of mere coincidence – had that been so, our rites would have been more Greek in character and less recent in origin. Nor will I allow that the Egyptians ever took over from Greece either this custom or any other."

"The people of Troizen [in the Argolid] ... say the first human being to exist in their country was Oros, which looks to me like an Egyptian name, certainly not a Greek one."

"He says that the Greeks learnt about processions and national festivals from the Egyptians as well as the worship of the twelve gods; the very name of Dionysos, he says, was learnt from the Egyptians by Melampous, and he taught the rest of the Greeks; and the mysteries and secret rituals connected with Demeter were brought from Egypt by the daughters of Danaos … Nor is this the worst. He traces the ancestry of Herakles to Perseus and says Perseus, according to the Persian account, was an Assyrian; ‘and the chiefs of the Dorians’ he says, ‘would be established as pure-blooded Egyptians …’; not only is he anxious to establish an Egyptian and a Phoenician Herakles; he says that our own Herakles was born after the other two, and he wants to remove him from Greece and make a foreigner out of him. Yet of the learned men of old neither Homer nor Hesiod … ever mentioned an Egyptian or a Phoenician Herakles, but all of them knew only one, our own Herakles who is both Boiotian and Argive"

"In short, they forgot none of the interesting features of Egypt, for there is no country in the world which Greeks prefer to hear about."

"That Osiris is identical with Dionysos who could more fittingly know than yourself, Klea? For you are the head of the inspired maidens [devotees of Dionysos] of Delphi, and have been consecrated by your father and mother in the holy rites of Osiris."

"Rather think that as the Egyptians were the first of men to be allotted the participation of the gods, the gods when invoked rejoice in Egyptian rites."

"We do not know how many works Psellos composed on Hermetic literature. The only one that remains is a gloss on the ‘Poimandres’ … After maintaining the influence of ‘Genesis’ on the formation of the cosmogonic doctrines of the ‘Poimandres’, Psellos affirms that all Hellenic conceptions of God are influenced by Eastern models. He justifies this superiority of the East over Greek philosophy by pointing out that Porphery [the Neo-Platonist of the 3rd century AD] had gone to an Egyptian priest, Anebon, in order to receive instruction on the first cause."

"It is impossible that in this exchange of ideas and goods, the Egyptian language did not participate in the formation of Greek."

"Thus the Greeks, emerging from their forests, no longer saw objects under a frightening and sombre veil. Thus the Egyptians in Greece softened bit by bit the severe and proud expressions in their paintings. The two groups, now making a single people, created a language that sparkled with vivid expressions."

"For the whole length of the 3,000 years of her history, Egypt thus, little by little, prepared the way for the Greek scholars who - like Thales, Pythagoras and Plato - came to study then even to teach, like Euclid, at the school in Alexandria."

"From Egypt Pythagoras thus without doubt brought the idea of his Order, which was a regular community brought together for purposes of scientific and moral culture … Egypt at that time was regarded as a highly cultured country, and it was so when compared with Greece; this is shown even in the differences of caste which assume a division amongst the great branches of life and work, such as the industrial, scientific and religious. But beyond this we need not seek great scientific knowledge amongst the Egyptians, nor think that Pythagoras got his science there. Aristotle (Metaph.I) only says that ‘in Egypt mathematical sciences first commenced, for there the nation of priests had leisure.’53"

"The name of Greece strikes home to the hearts of men of education in Europe, and more particularly is this so with us Germans … They [the Greeks] certainly received the substantial beginnings of their religion, culture … from Asia, Syria and Egypt; but they have so greatly obliterated the foreign nature of this origin, and it is so much changed, worked on, turned round and altogether made so different, that what they – as we – prize, know and love in it is essentially their own."