Tyler Cowen, Toby Wilkinson on Ptolemaic Egypt and the First Great Commercial Civilization (Ep. 278), May 27, 2026.
Toby Wilkinson is one of the world’s leading Egyptologists, whose books have ranged across the full sweep of pharaonic history. His latest, The Last Dynasty: Ancient Egypt from Alexander the Great to Cleopatra, covers the 300-year Ptolemaic period — stranger and more modern-feeling than the Egypt of the pyramids, built around commerce and cosmopolitanism rather than divine kingship, and home to the greatest concentration of scientific talent the ancient world ever saw.
Tyler and Toby cover how Alexander took over the empire almost without a fight, why Alexandria became the Manhattan of the ancient world, whether the era was as philosophically fertile as it was scientifically, whether your ancient doctor’s visit had positive expected value, what Egypt was actually exporting and selling, whether living standards rose above subsistence or stayed Malthusian, how the ethnic divide between Greek rulers and Egyptian subjects shaped society, what constrained the Ptolemaic Empire from becoming the next Rome, whether Cleopatra has been overhyped, what Julius Caesar was really thinking when he sided with her over her brother, the new frontiers in archeology, whether Herodotus can be trusted, what ancient Egypt knew about Israel and India, when Egyptian jewelry peaked and why, what triggered the sudden emergence of civilization across the ancient world, why a six-year-old Tyler knew King Tut better than Napoleon, and much more.
After the preliminaries, the first of three segments from the whole conversation:
I. On intellectual activity of Alexandria
COWEN: How large was the library in Alexandria and how did they build that out?
WILKINSON: This is interesting because the Ptolemaic kings not only wanted to be wealthy economically, but they wanted to be renowned throughout the ancient world as great scholar leaders. They thought it was important that a new dynasty establish its credentials as a patron of the arts and of learning, not just as the head of a great commercial enterprise.
They invited all the leading scholars from the Greek-speaking world, from right across the Mediterranean to Alexandria, where they provided them with a library, with what was called a museum or a temple of the muses, a place where scholars could think great thoughts and be well looked after. The library was developed over centuries, really, as the greatest repository of learning that the world had ever seen up to this point. It is thought that maybe at its height, it contained half a million volumes, half a million manuscripts, mostly written on papyrus, but representing really the sum total of human knowledge at that time.
COWEN: Euclid and Eratosthenes are connected to this era?
WILKINSON: Almost any big name from ancient science has some connection with Alexandria. Euclid, the mathematician, studied there. Eratosthenes, who quite amazingly calculated the circumference of the earth, he carried out those calculations in Alexandria. There were leaders in the fields of astronomy, of anatomy and medicine, of geography, of philosophy, of literary theory. They were all active in Alexandria under the patronage of the Ptolemaic kings.
COWEN: Am I correct in thinking that the era was quite weak in philosophy in some ways? There’s no great name. Maybe it’s all lost manuscripts. It seems to be a bit like China, infrastructure intensive. They build amazing things. It’s commercial, but they’re not really thinkers.
WILKINSON: I think that would be a misrepresentation. Alexandria under the Ptolemies didn’t produce a Socrates or a Plato. It is true. What its scholars did was to synthesize strands of philosophy from ancient Greek thought, ancient Egyptian thought, Babylonian thought, ancient Hebrew philosophy and religion. It was a melting pot. It maybe didn’t throw up the big name, but it was a very fertile ground for the exchange and the interchange of ideas.
COWEN: Say I try to read Diodorus. There’s a lot of detail, but it’s not to me very interesting. It just seems much worse than Herodotus, who is profound and in a way a step back. Maybe that’s not representative.
WILKINSON: I think there are a lot more scholarly works, both surviving and lost, that were composed in ancient Alexandria that would be more surprising and more revelatory than those that you’ve just mentioned.
COWEN: What was it exactly that was so special about the intellectual, and scientific, and productive environment of Alexandria and environs? Was it that the Egyptians were there, or the mix of Greeks and Egyptians, or something else? What?
WILKINSON: I think there are three factors, really. One is certainly the Egyptian context. I don’t think those intellectual advances that were made in Alexandria could have been made anywhere else. Let’s take anatomy, for example. In the Greek world in general, there was a taboo on cutting up human bodies. Of course, ancient Egypt had a long tradition of mummification, which involved dissecting human corpses. If you were an anatomist and you wanted to make discoveries about how the organs functioned, the only place you could do that at this time was ancient Egypt. The same is true, actually, in many other branches of science. The Egyptian traditions of scholarship and of learning really laid the foundations for Greek thinkers to take them to the next level.
The second aspect was the wonderful infrastructure that was put in place by the Ptolemies to lure scholars to Alexandria. They were paid handsomely. They had access to the world’s best library. They had all of the facilities at their disposal. There was really no better place to be than Alexandria.
The third factor was really the kleptomania of the Ptolemaic rulers. They were not just bibliophiles, but they wanted to acquire a copy, preferably the original, of every book and manuscript circulating in the ancient Greek world. To that end, they indulged in downright thieving. They sent a word, for example, to Athens, which was one of the great centers of scholarship, a rival center of learning, and requested copies of books from Athens’ city library. The copies arrived in Alexandria. They were then seized by the Ptolemaic authorities and kept for Alexandria’s own library. They were only too happy to pay the fine because they had the books. It was a combination of factors that really led Alexandria to being the greatest center for scholars and for scholarship.
II. From the Ptolemaic Empire to Rome
COWEN: Given all the successes, what should I think of as the limiting principle behind rule here? It stretches as far as what we would call Cyprus today, but it never becomes a very large area, right? Now, it doesn’t become the next Roman Empire. Why doesn’t it?
WILKINSON: At its greatest extent, the Ptolemaic Empire includes much of the coast of modern-day Libya, certainly Cyprus, the Nile Valley, parts of present-day Lebanon, and Syria and Turkey, and some islands in the Aegean. It’s not as big as the Roman Empire would later be. What are its constraining factors? Partly, it’s a lack of ambition. Not a lack of ambition, moderate ambition.
The Ptolemies really want to rule Egypt, which is regarded as the jewel in Alexander the Great’s crown. It’s the most prosperous part of his empire. The other territories that they conquer in a ring around Egypt are really only there as a defensive buffer zone to protect Egypt. They have no particular ambition to create a world empire as Alexander the Great did. That was one constraining factor.
They are also not the only players in the ancient world. There are other powerful dynasties of kings in Asia and in the Greek mainland who have territorial designs of their own. It keeps these various powers in equilibrium, and it stops one of them becoming dominant, really, until the Romans upend the whole system. I suppose, yes, those are the two constraining factors, ambition and competition.
COWEN: Do you think the Romans had the ambition in a way Ptolemaic Egypt did not?
WILKINSON: Yes, I do. I think the Romans were motivated by a real desire to conquer. Ancient Roman military leaders were only as good as their last victory on the battlefield. You see that in the later days of the Republic and the beginning of the empire. Whereas in ancient Egyptian tradition, certainly, military success was not the benchmark of a successful reign. It was something that you needed to do in order to protect your own borders. There were other achievements—honoring the gods, building great temples, presiding over a glittering civilization—that were considered equally important.
COWEN: How is it that all this ends, or at least starts to decline? What’s the mechanism?
WILKINSON: It begins with the finances. The Ptolemaic Empire becomes overstretched. It has to invest hugely in its armed forces in order to fend off not just the growing predations of Rome, but actually its closer neighbors as well. That leads to higher taxes. There’s a series of climatic shocks, poor Niles leading to poor harvests. It’s a perfect storm. The economy goes south pretty quickly. The only solution that the Ptolemies can see is to go cap in hand to Roman moneylenders to bail out the Egyptian economy. That then really gives Rome leverage over Egypt.
That all gets bound up in the republican politics of Rome and in the rivalry between Caesar and his rivals, and then ultimately Octavian, who becomes the first emperor, Augustus. Egypt goes from being a great civilization, confident of itself, to being a pawn in other people’s power play. Ultimately, Rome is able to march into Alexandria, overthrow Cleopatra, and seize Egypt for itself. It’s a salutary lesson for our own time that a civilization can appear to the outside world to be magnificent, and wealthy, and successful, but actually the seeds of its own destruction are usually lying there somewhere just waiting for the conditions to germinate. [...]
COWEN: How important a figure is Cleopatra in this whole history? Is it just marketing, and Shakespeare, and Elizabeth Taylor, or was she really at the center of what was happening? Did she matter?
WILKINSON: She mattered. She was the last Egyptian pharaoh, because after her, Egypt as an independent nation ceases to exist and it becomes part of the Roman Empire. More than that, she was the inheritor of a dynasty that had ruled for 300 years. She managed to play the cards that she had been dealt more effectively than her immediate predecessors. She was very smart. All ancient authors agreed upon that point. She was very charismatic. She was a great strategist. She was the only Ptolemy ever to learn to speak Egyptian, so she could actually speak to her own people in their language rather than through a translator.
I suppose the question for me is not so much why did Cleopatra ultimately fail, but how did she manage to survive and succeed for so long when all the other parts of Alexander’s empire had already been gobbled up by the might of Rome? Yes, she does matter. She manages to maintain and preserve not only her inheritance, but the inheritance of 3,000 years of pharaonic civilization against all the odds. Of course, ultimately, we all know how the story ends, but she had a remarkable run of success.
III. The spread of ideas through writing
COWEN: Is there talk of Israel in Egyptian hieroglyphic texts? If so, what do we learn from those?
WILKINSON: In the entire corpus of ancient Egyptian writing, the name Israel only occurs once. This is on a victory stele from the reign of Merneptah. This is the late 13th century BC. It’s in the context of a whole list of lands and peoples that the Egyptian pharaoh has conquered. Israel is included there, not as the name of a territory, but as the name of a tribe.
The phrase is, “Israel is vanquished, his seed is no more.” This is referring to the Israelites, rather than Israel as a territory. It’s almost a footnote in the ancient Egyptian record. It’s always been one of those curiosities. People looking for echoes of the biblical, the Judeo-Christian narrative in ancient Egyptian texts, they don’t find a lot, and Israel occurs just the once.
COWEN: Say the legal reasoning in the Book of Exodus, the commandments, the constitutional structure, the covenant, to what extent, if any, do you feel that comes from Egypt?
WILKINSON: I think there was a lot of sharing of ideas in the ancient world. The idea that Egypt was on its own, and the Middle East was on its own, and the Greek world was on its own, not at all. There was always exchange of people, and materials, and commodities, and ideas.
If you look at, for example, some of the Psalms, you’ll find not just echoes, but entire chunks of ancient Egyptian literature that have been, as we would say today, cut and pasted from one to the other. People of learning, scribes, writers, poets, certainly would have shared ideas with others of their kind across national and linguistic boundaries. The more we study the ancient world, the more of these interconnections become apparent to us.
COWEN: How much of a sense of, say, India did the ancient Egyptians have?
WILKINSON: Not a lot until the Persians. As we spoke about at the beginning, the Persian Empire runs at its eastern extremity right up to the borders of India, and also includes much of Egypt. It’s through that medium that the Egyptians become cognizant of Indian civilization. For example, Darius I, great emperor of Persia, but also ruler of Egypt, he cuts an early version of the Suez Canal to join the Red Sea with the Nile, and sets up along his canal a whole series of boundary stones.
On them, he has an inscription which celebrates him as a great leader. He mentions the lands under his control in ancient Egyptian hieroglyphics. They include Sindh, the ancient name for India. It was really through the medium of the Persians that these two great civilizations come to know each other. [...]
COWEN: In one of your books, you defined ancient Egyptian civilization as monumental hieroglyphics and divine kingship. Is that still true? Why are those the essentials?
WILKINSON: Writing defines the civilization from the outset until the very end. Writing is not just a means of communication. It’s not even principally a means of communication in ancient Egypt. Hieroglyphics—quite literally, the signs of gods, the sacred signs—is a way of recording for posterity an ideal state of being. This includes rule by the pharaohs. It encodes their whole worldview. It’s not just a way of communicating everyday ideas. It is coeval with Egyptian civilization, so very much a defining feature.
Then kingship. What makes pharaonic Egypt pharaonic is the fact that it had a pharaoh. A pharaoh is not just a king. He is god on earth. He’s god incarnate. Ancient Egyptian society was almost like a pyramid itself with the king, the pharaoh, at the apex. The idea that the gods and the people had this contract mediated through the person of the king is the defining idea of ancient Egyptian civilization, and gives rise to all of those aspects that we would recognize today as most characteristically Egyptian: pyramids, temples, tombs in the Valley of the Kings. It’s all there because of the idea of divine kingship.
COWEN: Why is it relatively so stable for so incredibly long?
WILKINSON: That’s a good question. Egypt is fairly secure within natural borders for much of its history. If you think about it, it’s bounded by deserts with the Mediterranean Sea to the north. The only land bridge between Egypt and the continent of Asia is this very narrow isthmus along the northern fringe of the Sinai Peninsula. It’s quite hard for aggressive forces actually to infiltrate Egypt. It has pretty secure natural borders. It has an incredibly fertile ecology thanks to the river Nile, so it’s able to produce more than enough food for its own purposes and really power a great civilization. Climate, ecology, natural borders, I think they make a pretty strong and stable combination.
COWEN: Why not just cross the Mediterranean with boats—it’s very much a navigable sea—and start taking things? It seems open as prey.
WILKINSON: Curiously enough, the Egyptians throughout most of their history don’t seem to have been motivated by a great sense of empire building. They had a sense of themselves as a chosen people and the sense of their land as a chosen land. When they write about other countries and cultures, they are very pejorative. They’re very denigrating of other countries and cultures because Egypt is very special. The land of Egypt, the people of Egypt are unique. They are God’s creation. They never really have that same sense of wanting to conquer lots of other territories because nothing in their minds could ever live up to Egypt and the Egyptians.
COWEN: This is a very speculative question, but I’m sure you’ve thought about it. Humankind has been around for a long time and it seems there’s not much progress. Then all of a sudden, there’s the Sumerians, the Assyrians, the ancient Egyptians, then more. What is it you think happened? Was it writing? Something else?
WILKINSON: I think when we look at the origins of these great civilizations, all within a few centuries of each other, there’s a combination of factors that each one individually perhaps wouldn’t have tipped the balance, but taken together they made a difference. Climate, very important one. This is a period where there is a shift in the rain belt across North Africa and the Middle East. It shifts further south. It leads to the drying out of large swathes of land that had previously been inhabitable by cattle herders and small-scale farmers.
What this does is concentrate population in river valleys. People head for the permanent sources of water.[1] That critical mass of people in a fairly constrained area does give rise to social change and to the emergence of civilization. Climatic stress, climate change, environmental pressures, certainly a big factor right across the Middle East.
COWEN: There’s a whole world of people, and for 300,000, 400,000 years this never happens. I always find that strange. Maybe it did happen and there’s no surviving record of it, but that’s strange as well.
WILKINSON: I’m not sure that I’ve got a satisfactory answer to your question, Tyler. It’s a good one. Why at this moment in history did it all suddenly come together and not before? Yes, I need to ponder that one a little more.
As always, there's more at the link.
[1] Wikipedia, Hydraulic empire:
A hydraulic empire, also known as a hydraulic despotism, hydraulic society, hydraulic civilization, or water monopoly empire, is a social or government structure which maintains power through control over water. It arises through an ecological need for flood control and irrigation, which requires central coordination and a specialized bureaucracy. The term was promoted by Karl August Wittfogel's book Oriental Despotism: A Comparative Study of Total Power (1957).[1]
Often associated with these terms and concepts is the notion of a water dynasty. This body is a political structure which is commonly characterized by a system of hierarchy and control often based on class or caste. Power, both over resources (food, water, energy) and a means of enforcement such as the military, is vital for the maintenance of control.
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