A History of Egypt under the Ptolemaic Dynasty (Routledge Revivals) by Edwyn Bevan

Author:Edwyn Bevan [Bevan, Edwyn]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: History, Ancient, Egypt
ISBN: 9781317682257
Google: T4g9BAAAQBAJ
Publisher: Routledge
Published: 2014-08-07T01:24:03+00:00

FIG. 32. —Part of the Gurob Papyrus (the entry into Antioch)

No more of the roll remains. It is certainly a document of extraordinary human interest—a bit of ancient history which comes to us still alive, in which the events narrated are not told by some historian at second, or third, or tenth, hand, but by some one who writes of what he himself saw and did, the actual scrap of torn papyrus being, if not the handwriting of the narrator, at any rate a copy made at a date not far from that of the original. Yet while its human interest is so great, its value as a historical document is diminished by our inability to say for certain who the writer was, or who “the Sister” was, or what the places were in which the events described happened. The document certainly speaks plainly about a Seleucia and an Antioch, but whilst in Northern Syria there was the great Antioch, the chief residence of the Seleucid kings, and the strong city of Seleucia-in-Pieria which guarded the approach to Antioch at the mouth of the Orontes, there was also an Antioch and a Seleucia on the opposite Cilician coast, and some scholars have thought that it was these lesser cities to which the document refers. Again, in order to read the name “Soli in Cilicia,” we have to suppose that the scribe in writing left out by mistake one of two sigmas which came together, and “Cilicia,” is simply a conjecture filling in the place of a lost word. Instead of “Soli in Cilicia,” Holleaux reads “all the places.”1 Further on again, where our translation gives “the citizens of Soli,” Holleaux reads “the citizens of Seleucia,” though Wilcken affirms that the photographic facsimile of the papyrus proves “Soli” to be right. And then, who was the writer? An officer from one of the soldier-settlements in the Fayûm, Mahaffy at first thought. A naval commander, Wilcken held when he brought out his Chrestomathie. The king Ptolemy III. himself, Mahaffy thought, after column iv. of the papyrus came to light, and this view has been accepted by Holleaux, Wilhelm, Bouché-Leclercq., Wilamowitz-Moellendorff, and now by Wilcken.2 Lastly, there is the problem—Who was “the Sister”? Before the discovery of column iv., the Sister was thought to be Laodice: that column made it evident that she was some one on the Egyptian side, resident at Antioch after it had been occupied by the Egyptian forces. She is now commonly held to have been Berenice, the queen of Syria, Ptolemy III.’s sister, not yet murdered, it is supposed, at this date.

It can, I think, now be hardly questioned that the Seleucia and Antioch in question are the great Antioch and Seleucia. In Antioch the writer found a large number of magnates and military chiefs gathered together, which is much more natural in the chief city of Syria than in the comparatively obscure city on the Cilician coast. That the narrator is the king himself may also be taken as established.

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