We now tend to think of Egypt in terms of pyramids and mummies and hieroglyphs and a civilization along the Nile that lasted some 3000 years. Or, we think of it as a modern, majority-Muslim country that fought a short unsuccessful war against Israel two generations ago.
But in between ancient Egypt and Muslim Egypt were Hellenistic and Roman Egypt, which tend to get overlooked in the race through the centuries of Western Civ but were extremely important for the Middle Ages.
The so-called Hellenistic Period began with Alexander the Great (d. 323 BC). In his effort to conquer the entire world (as he knew it), he set out from Greece (having conquered it) to conquer Persia, Babylon, points east as far as India, and the eastern Mediterranean, including Egypt. After his death his empire was divided among his generals, who established Greek culture in their territories. Their realms are called "Hellenistic" from Hellas, the Greeks' name for their country. Egypt was ruled for nearly 300 years by General Ptolemy and his descendants, who were Greek. Cleopatra (d. 31 BC), one of these descendants, was Greek, not native Egyptian.
One of the things that Alexander did in Egypt was to found the city of Alexandria, where he wanted to be buried. Alexandria became a great intellectual center, with a library renowned around the Mediterranean. The learned came there to study. Greek became the language of philosophy and education. In this world of advanced study, the Hebrew Bible (what later became the Old Testament for Christians) was translated there into Greek by Jewish scholars.
Disturbingly for scholarship, the library at Alexandria was later destroyed by the Romans (by accident at least).
Julius Caesar, first Roman emperor (d. 44 BC), set out to control western Europe and the entire Mediterranean, including Egypt, in the first century BC. Egypt did not actually fall, however, until 31 BC, when it became a crucial part of the Roman Empire under Augustus Caesar (Julius's nephew and successor, the first to really act effectively as emperor). In the following centuries, it became known as Rome's bread basket, and huge barges full of grain sailed every year from Egypt to Rome, bringing food for that great city.
Egypt was also the center for papyrus production. Papyrus is made from papyrus reeds, which grow along the Nile, and was the ancient world's version of paper. The popes at Rome continued to use papyrus until the eleventh century, slowly working through a treasured horde of the stuff, because after the seventh century it was almost impossible to get in Europe.
Once the Roman Empire became Christian in the third and fourth centuries, Egypt became a great religious center. The patriarch of Alexandria was considered one of the first among the Empire's bishops. Probably most significant for the Middle Ages, monasticism began in Egypt in the third century AD, as I have discussed earlier. Saint Anthony went out into the desert to live an austere life as a hermit, and he was soon copied by others who thought that Christianity made demands on one's heart and soul that could not be satisfied by going to church on Sundays.
Egypt was a good place to be a hermit, because as soon as one got away from the Nile one was in what seemed trackless wilderness, yet it was still close enough to civilization that pilgrims could come out and pray and ask for wisdom and leave the little gifts (mostly food) that kept the hermits alive. Soon, as well as solitary hermits in individual cells, groups of monks began to be formed, men living as brothers under an ascetic rule. The "Lives of the Desert Fathers" were written and considered extremely edifying. Pilgrims came from as far as Jerusalem to visit them.
This Christian-Roman scene all changed with the rise of Islam in the seventh century. Egypt was taken over by the Muslims in 641 AD, after four centuries as being a major Christian center. The major language changed from Greek to Arabic. There continued to be Christians and even some monasteries, but they were now a definite minority. Their version is called Coptic Christianity.
During the Middle Ages, once monasticism reached Europe (fifth-sixth century), the Desert Fathers continued to be the ideal: men who willingly embraced a harsh, difficult life to purify themselves and grow closer to God. During the twelfth century, the monks of St.-Martin of Tournai decided that they should head off to Egypt and become desert fathers themselves. They slipped out of town in the dead of night, but they never made it to Egypt (they may have gotten about twenty miles down the road). The townspeople of Tournai were distraught. This was as bad as having Mom and Dad run away from home. They caught up to them and got the bishop to order them back to Tournai.
Egypt made a cameo appearance in Louis IX's Crusades of the late thirteenth century. They'd been having unsuccessful crusades for a century, always getting defeated in frontal attacks on the Holy Land, so they had a "brilliant" idea: conquer Egypt first, then use that as a launching pad to conquer Jerusalem. You can probably guess how well that turned out.
© C. Dale Brittain 2020
For more on medieval culture and monasticism, see my ebook, Positively Medieval: Life and Society in the Middle Ages. Also available as a paperback1
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