Going back as far as the Old Kingdom, ancient Egyptian speculative thinkers had already developed a complex understanding of the relationship between personal agency, power, and the role of magic. What is more, these early philosophers saw that this world and the other operated according to the same principles. The rules by which one secured power were the same whether one was a peasant or a god. Through perception, the heart/mind would design an idea, the mouth would speak it and, (...) as if by magic, the task would be accomplished. Thoughtful, reasoned speech was the mechanism for reestablishing the order that was manifested in the reasoned creation of the. (shrink)

In 2005, an Egyptian dialogue’s editio princeps was published, named by its editors the ‘Book of Thoth’. While prior research on the relation between this dialogue and the Corpus Hermeticum could not identify far reaching parallels, another relation has not been taken into account yet: the relation to Plato’s critique of writing in the Phaedrus. The present article argues that very likely the Book of Thoth forms a source of the Platonic text, to which Plato responds with a diametrically opposed (...) criticism. To underline the argument, literal and thematic parallels are pointed out in a first step. Then, secondly, the focus is put on the order of the two texts. Finally, a systematic comparison between the Platonic and the Egyptian understanding of scripture underscores the argument. Thematic parallels and literal correspondences are numerous and therefore suggest excluding a similarity by accident: In the Book of Thoth we grasp a concrete Egyptian source of Plato for the first time. (shrink)

Aksumite elites electively identified themselves as “black” in relation to the paler integument of other Mediterranean peoples. Prior to the fourth century CE, the proper noun Aithiopía referred to the area of northern Sudan. Aksum, however, deliberately appropriated the Greek term for its own geopolitical purposes, partly as a way to write itself both into the grand narratives of Graeco-Roman history, where “Ethiopians” recurrently figure as morally “blameless,” as well as—with their conversion to Christianity—into Old and New Testamental eschatologies that (...) consistently position “Ethiopians” as first in the sight of God. This process of self-definition—achieved under the formative gaze of Hellenic, Roman, and Levantine Others—ultimately allowed ‘Ityȯpyā to become a key, if nonetheless still liminal and rogue, player in the post-Constantinian politico-religious arena, in such a way that both economic and cultural capital accrued to the benefit of Aksum. (shrink)