Ptolomaic egypt from a greek view

[Hamata]

i'd like to know if a person from mainland greece whent to go visit ptolomaic egypt will he consider them greek? or not? my oppinion is that the ptolomaic's were so heavely influnced by egyptian culture it would have been diffullcult to tell if they were of greek heritege or not!

[MButcher]

The short answer is yes, they were considered Greco-Macedonian.

There was no monolithic "them" in Ptolemaic Egypt, because it was EXTREMELY diverse. There were Greeks, Macedonians, Galatians, Judeans, Syrians, Arabs, Nubians, Ethiopians, Libyans, Thracians and of course the Egyptians themselves.

Even if certain sections of the populace were not Greco-Macedonian, they faced great pressure to Hellenize. If you were an Egyptian it was (almost certainly) impossible to advance in society unless you Hellenized, or at the very least spoke Greek. (We have an example in the papyri of an Arab complaining to his boss of being ill-treated because he didn't speak Greek.)

When it comes to the low-level Greeks and Macedonians in Egypt, assimilation into Egyptian culture took hundreds of years, and even then it was never complete. Mostly they adopted Egyptian religion (a.k.a. the popularity of Serapis and Isis). We almost never hear of a Greek learning Egyptian (there was one example, but it had an economic incentive). A few Egyptian specialties, such as dream interpretation and medical practices were certainly adopted, but the assimilation was never to the extent that an outsider would say they weren't Greek.

For the Ptolemaic kings, assimilation was a matter of public relations. This took the form of setting up stelae, being generous with the priesthoods and, yes, sibling marriage. They portrayed themselves as Egyptians to the Egyptians and Greco-Macedonians to everyone else.

[Maeran]

As I recall Cleopatra VII ( the famous one) was unusual in that she took an interest in Egyptian culture. Given that this was after some 300 years of Hellenistic colony cities in Egypt this should give some idea of how much the Greeks had preserved some kind of 'Hellenic superiority complex.'

Note that this must not have applied to the library of Alexandria, which reportedly had many copies of cuneiform texts from Mesopotamia.

Actually, I take that mitigation back. They probably prized Homer over Gilgamesh regardless of content.

[Brave Brave Sir Robin]

I always wondered, does anyone know how Egyptian language sounded? We know how to translate hieroglyphics, but do we know what the spoken form of their language sounded like?

[Hamata]

they say it might have sounded alot like coptic

[FinnishedBarbarian]

Usually people in those times identified foreign deities as different versions of their own so at worst they could have dubbed their worshippers as heretics, for example person who practices abrahamic religion is (in terms definition) infidel to buddhist.