The Gift of the Nile: Hellenizing Egypt from Aeschylus to AlexanderUniversity of California Press, 2001年12月4日 - 360 頁 The Egyptians mesmerized the ancient Greeks for scores of years. The Greek literature and art of the classical period are especially thick with representations of Egypt and Egyptians. Yet despite numerous firsthand contacts with Egypt, Greek writers constructed their own Egypt, one that differed in significant ways from actual Egyptian history, society, and culture. Informed by recent work on orientalism and colonialism, this book unravels the significance of these misrepresentations of Egypt in the Greek cultural imagination in the fifth and fourth centuries B.C.E. Looking in particular at issues of identity, otherness, and cultural anxiety, Phiroze Vasunia shows how Greek authors constructed an image of Egypt that reflected their own attitudes and prejudices about Greece itself. He focuses his discussion on Aeschylus Suppliants; Book 2 of Herodotus; Euripides' Helen; Plato's Phaedrus, Timaeus, and Critias; and Isocrates' Busiris. Reconstructing the history of the bias that informed these writings, Vasunia shows that Egypt in these works was shaped in relation to Greek institutions, values, and ideas on such subjects as gender and sexuality, death, writing, and political and ethnic identity. This study traces the tendentiousness of Greek representations by introducing comparative Egyptian material, thus interrogating the Greek texts and authors from a cross-cultural perspective. A final chapter also considers the invasion of Egypt by Alexander the Great and shows how he exploited and revised the discursive tradition in his conquest of the country. Firmly and knowledgeably rooted in classical studies and the ancient sources, this study takes a broad look at the issue of cross-cultural exchange in antiquity by framing it within the perspective of contemporary cultural studies. In addition, this provocative and original work shows how Greek writers made possible literary Europe's most persistent and adaptable obsession: the barbarian. |
內容
THE TRAGIC EGYPTIAN | 33 |
SPACE AND OTHERNESS | 75 |
IN AN ANTIQUE LAND | 110 |
WRITING EGYPTIAN WRITING | 136 |
READING ISOCRATES BUSIRIS | 183 |
PLATOS EGYPTIAN STORY | 216 |
ALEXANDERS CONQUEST AND THE FORCE OF TRADITION | 248 |
Fragmentary Greek Historians on Egypt | 289 |
Abbreviations | 307 |
Index | 337 |
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Aeschylus Alexander Alexander's Ammon ancient antiquity appears Aristagoras Aristotle Arrian Assmann Athenian Athens Atlantis authors barbarian Busiris chapter city-states claim classical contemporary context Critias cultural Danaids Danaus death dialogues Diodorus discourse discussion Egyp Egypt Egyptian history Egyptian king Egyptian priests Egyptian writing Eudoxus Euripides evidence FGrHist fifth century foreign fourth century genre gods Greece Greek writers Hartog Hecateus Helen Heracles Herodotus hieroglyphic human sacrifice images inscription Isis and Osiris Isocrates land language marriage Memphis Menelaus monumental myth narrative Naukratis Nearchus Nile Nile's orientation Osiris Paris parody passage period Persian Phaedrus pharaoh philosophical Plato play Plutarch political Polycrates proto-Athens Psammetichus pyramids refer representations rhetoric river rodotus Saïs says scholars Sesostris sexual Socrates Solon sources space speech Stephanus of Byzantium story Strabo Suppliants temple Theoclymenus Theuth Thoth tian Timaeus tion tragedy Translated Vidal-Naquet women word written Zeus καὶ
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第 115 頁 - I met a traveller from an antique land Who said: Two vast and trunkless legs of stone Stand in the desert. Near them, on the sand, Half sunk, a shattered visage lies, whose frown, And wrinkled lip, and sneer of cold command, Tell that its sculptor well those passions read...
第 48 頁 - Then Sarai dealt harshly with her and she ran away from her. 7 The angel of the LORD found her by a spring of water in the wilderness, the spring on the way to Shur. 8 And he said, "Hagar, slave-girl of Sarai, where have you come from and where are you going?
第 97 頁 - Every man wears two garments ; the women, but one. Other men fasten the rings and sheets of their sails outside ; but the Egyptians, inside. The Grecians write and cipher, moving the hand from left to right...
第 149 頁 - The fact is that this invention will produce forgetfulness in the souls of those who have learned it because they will not need to exercise their memories, being able to rely on what is written...
第 218 頁 - It is the free, joyful Spirit of Greece that accomplishes this, and makes this its starting-point. An Egyptian priest is reported to have said that the Greeks remain eternally children. We may say on the contrary that the Egyptians are vigorous boys, eager for self-comprehension, who require nothing but clear understanding of themselves in an ideal form in order to become Young Men.
第 35 頁 - Why the Orient seems still to suggest not only fecundity but sexual promise (and threat), untiring sensuality, unlimited desire, deep generative energies, is something on which one could speculate: it is not the province of my analysis here, alas, despite its frequently noted appearance.
第 134 頁 - I realized that the fellaheen saw the material circumstances of their lives in exactly the same way that a university economist would: as a situation that was shamefully anachronistic, a warp upon time; I understood that their relationships with the objects of their everyday lives was never innocent of the knowledge that there were other places, other countries which did not have mud-walled houses and cattle-drawn ploughs, so that those objects, those houses and ploughs, were insubstantial things,...
第 143 頁 - ... vowels and the intermediate sounds; in the end he found a number of the things, and affixed to the whole collection, as to each single member of it, the name 'letter.' It was because he realized that none of us could ever get to know one of the collection all by itself, in isolation from all the rest, that he conceived of 'letter...
第 60 頁 - The lunatic, the lover and the poet Are of imagination all compact: One sees more devils than vast hell can hold, That is, the madman: the lover, all as frantic, Sees Helen's beauty in a brow of Egypt: The poet's eye, in a fine frenzy rolling, Doth glance from heaven to earth, from earth to heaven; And as imagination bodies forth The forms of things unknown, the poet's pen Turns them to shapes and gives to airy nothing A local habitation and a name.