THE GREAT EGYPTIAN REVOLUTION. 
Until rather recently it was customary among the historians, even those without popu- 
larizing tendencies, to describe the age of the Ptolemaic kings as a kind of millennium for 
Egypt. In order to strengthen this impression of bliss, that age was usually contrasted with 
the preceding time of Persian rule, which was depicted in the darkest colors possible, as a time 
of misery and cruel oppression. Even the religion of the poor Egyptians was said to have been 
touched; the good, patient, harmless people were not allowed to worship their sacred animals 
in peace. No wonder that the oppressed again and again rose in desperate revolts against the 
Persian tyranny, notwithstanding the bloody cruelty with which these struggles for freedom 
were always suppressed. Finally deliverance came by Alexander the Great. Welcomed 
enthusiastically as a divine savior by all Egypt, he inaugurated there an era of peace, prosper- 
ity, and happiness, the most brilliant~-fruit of Hellenism. Happy in religious liberty, the 
Egyptians gave themselves faithfully and willingly to the illuminating influence of Greek 
civilization ! 
We have learned more and more that those lovely fancies are untrue. As far as we know 
the Persian administration, it seems to have treated Egypt very mildly, leaving everything in 
the country as much as possible in the condition in which the Persian conquest had found it. 
It seems rather that the numerous and serious rebellions of the Egyptians were due much more 
to the lax and over-liberal administration of the Persians than to oppression; another reason 
for those rebellions may be found in the difficult class of population which we have to discuss 
below. At any rate, no religious persecutions can be proved by the monuments. ‘The calum- 
nies of cruelty and intolerance with which Cambyses, the conqueror, is covered in the reports 
of Herodotus are manifestly priestly lies of a very clumsy character. The Egyptian monu- 
ments from the Persian period show us that those foreign kings tolerated and supported the 
gods, temples, and priests of Egypt quite as much as the Macedonian and Roman rulers did 
in succeeding times. 
The pleasant picture of conditions under the Ptolemaic kings is also deceptive. It was 
too much an argumentum e silentio, based on the fact that our knowledge of the history of the 
Ptolemaic kingdom, as long as it rested completely on the Greek historians, was exclusively a 
history of the foreign relations of Egypt and of her royal family. This history, moreover, was 
confined to Alexandria, and whenever the Egyptian people were considered at all by the classi- 
cal writers, this meant only the Greek population of Alexandria. ‘The great mass of the native 
Egyptians, who by their labor and their taxes supported the court, the large armies of mercen- 
aries, the fleets, and the expensive foreign policy, are scarcely considered in the Greek authors. 
Thus we have practically what we ought to call a history of the kingdom of Alexandria rather 
than of Egypt. If the history of Paris and of London would give only incomplete histories of 
France and England, the case is infinitely worse with Alexandria and Egypt. 
If we should compare the position of Alexandria as capital of Egypt with that of modern 
Calcutta as capital of India, we should express the incongruity of the nationalities far too mildly. 
- Calcutta is, after all, an Indian city, and the recognition of the native element in the English 
: 7 
