Submitted by 3ayzamout t3_ygnr5n in history

I thought all my life that egyptians saw themselves as superior semigods and saw everyone else as slaves or atleast lower than them or something like that but looking it up i cant find anything written on it so it seems like bs? im wondering if we know what they thought of other races and nations that they could interact with and if they were friendly with any countries and was it normal and legal for Egyptians to intermarry with other nations?

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arran-reddit t1_iu9sm7l wrote

You might want to clarify if you mean the rulers of Egypt (often not Egyptian) or the local populace.

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Ferengi_Earwax t1_iu9uqpd wrote

Mostly is right, but for hundreds of years foreign dynasties ruled as pharaohs too. You have the hyksos (semitic) the kushites, and the Macedonians. As for your post, there are a multitude of inscriptions and documents that call anyone from outside the Nile, barbarians. Pretty much all the great civilizations treated foreigners the same way. As if they were inferior, barbaric, uncivilized and less human.

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Bentresh t1_iu9yiob wrote

It's not uncommon to see literary texts from highly urbanized societies like Mesopotamia and Egypt mocking outside groups for their clothing, dietary habits, housing, perceived character traits, etc., but it cannot be emphasized enough that these are ideological statements and do not necessarily reflect how most people in those societies actually felt about outsiders.

We see many negative statements in Egyptian military inscriptions about "wretched Retjenu" (Canaan), for example, and yet kings like Thutmose III married Canaanite women. Similarly, Ramesses II was quite negative and dismissive about the Hittites in his Kadesh inscriptions, referring to the Hittite king as the "Enemy" and the "Fallen One," and yet he had few qualms about establishing a peace treaty with the Hittites, marrying Hittite princesses, exchanging gifts and technical experts with the Hittites, and so on.

The Egyptologist Thomas Schneider has used the terms topos (highly negative depictions of foreigners in ideological statements in monumental/royal inscriptions) and mimesis (more favorable and realistic depictions of foreigners in everyday texts) to differentiate between the contradictory attitudes we see in the Egyptian textual record.

I've written a few posts about this over on r/askhistorians.

Letters of the Great Kings of the Ancient Near East by Trevor Bryce and Brotherhood of Kings: How International Relations Shaped the Ancient Near East by Amanda Podany are the best introductions to Bronze Age diplomacy. They're a bit more theoretical, but Mario Liverani's International Relations in the Ancient Near East and Amarna Diplomacy: The Beginnings of International Relations edited by Raymond Cohen and Raymond Westbrook are very interesting reads as well. The latter includes contributions not only by Egyptologists and ancient Near Eastern historians but also specialists in political science and international relations.

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Ferengi_Earwax t1_iu9z58m wrote

First off, there are hundreds of trmples all over ancient egypt with hieroglyphics stating the king protects egypt from barbarians and shows him bashing their head in. There are steles which record all kinds of victories over barbarian peoples and they often denigrate the people. And I'm not sure how you couldn't find any sources, I literally got dozens of sites right away... but here you go. https://www.thetorah.com/article/egypts-attitude-towards-foreigners#:~:text=In%20ancient%20Egypt%2C%20the%20attitude%20towards%20foreigners%20varied,a%20mace%20on%20the%20exterior%20of%20temple%20walls.

https://www.gradevalley.com/ancient-egyptian-attitudes-towards-foreigners

https://anthropology.msu.edu/anp455-fs18/2018/11/29/foreigners-in-egypt/ here they talk about how subjected princes or their kids were taken to egypt to be culturally washed and made egytian to be sent back to rule their people under egypt.

https://chrisnaunton.com/2020/09/03/the-foreigner-as-scapegoat-lessons-from-ancient-egypt-and-today/

https://www.bloomsbury.com/us/foreigners-in-ancient-egypt-9781474241601/ .... again there are thousands of depictions of foreignors in tomb paintings. Rarely kind.

If you're looking for books, search it yourself. All of this info I found in seconds.

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Petd80 t1_iua5zub wrote

Pretty much everybody but the Minoans were “foreign barbarians.” Wonderful lecture series by Bob Brier at the learning company/the great courses. Charles Pelligrino also did a great look at the ancient world and Thera/Minoan civilization in “Return to Sodom and Gomorrah.”

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cantcountnoaccount t1_iuaklmw wrote

Cleopatra was the most famous in the Ptolemaic line. They descend of Ptolemy, who was Greek/Macedonian, and came to rule after Alexander the Great conquered Egypt.

Many people are aware of the relationship between Cleopatra and Roman general Mark Antony, but slightly less known is that she had a son whose father was Julius Caesar.

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fiendishrabbit t1_iual45j wrote

To understand egypts relationship to outsiders you have to understand that Egyptians viewed Egypt as the kingdom of ma'aat (order, justice, how things were supposed to be) and non-Egypt as the kingdom of isfet (chaos, injustice, misrule, to do evil). With some exceptions everything outside the nile valley was chaos and unfamiliar, with the rivers being unreliable, the rulers strange and capricious and the people violent and given to chaos&misrule.

So much of egypts relations with abroad was the ritual conquest of chaos, with each pharaoh warring (or raiding under less militarily&economicly prosperous pharaohs) to establish dominance and take tribute. This changed somewhat over the millenia (with for example medjay mercenaries becoming the norm in the new kingdom era as internal security troops, to the point that medjay became the egyptian word for police), but in general egypt was suspicious of non-egyptians who hadn't established their role in the egyptian order.

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Apprehensive_Coat105 t1_iuba66y wrote

For example nubians were captives. And enemy. Even tuthankamon had a walking stick with a captive nubian figurine on it 💁🏼‍♀️

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Lootlizard t1_iubidl3 wrote

Ya, you can pretty much assume every culture was wildly racist until like 1900. Not 100% accurate but a pretty safe bet.

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Matty_Patty_ t1_iublyab wrote

I don’t know the answer to this however I know that at times the Romans came to Egypt and so it was certainly a mix of different cultures with the Romans being the ruling class at that point

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tossthis210 t1_iubpcrc wrote

The thing is, people didn't really care about race the way we do now. They were more focused on culture and nationality than skin color. The ancient Egyptians themselves were a very diverse people, as were many civilizations in the past such as the Mongols, and Romans, which is why people back then had a tendency to focus more on someone's culture and nationality. Back then what seemed to have mattered most was what language you spoke, who you prayed to, and who you paid your taxes to :P But to answer your question, they did view their culture as more civilized than their neighbors, but they didn't see themselves as semigods, and intermarriages were extremely common. There's records of marriages between Egyptians and Berbs, Romans, Greeks, Jewish people, Hittites etc.

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3ayzamout OP t1_iudlss9 wrote

that was the end of ancient egypt actually basically it all ended when the ptolemy and romans invaded and then after that it was all invasion after invasion no self rule for 2500 years until really really recently in 1954 where egyptians got self rule on their country again from the last british invasion

and idk if i can call it a mix of cultures since the nile valley has always been mostly egyptians with only a minority of foreigners that came to live there even if there was invasions it was only the ruling class that changed so

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