CHAPTER SIX THE COPTIC ALEXANDER ROMANCE Daniel L. Selden d—–—£«—}— – — — Horus- Rē, Protector of Egypt. • ‘ ≈Yi ø cÒ∞ ££ ˙p[˚ — uœ – —–nE–] Ê ∞Òz¬ ‘ ≠ 6 Ê d [{– —} –d—∞ r – —≠] μÂP k fÌ The Perfect God, Son of Amon, Lord of the Two Lands, Lord of Ceremonies, Stp-n-Ra-mrj-Jmn, the bodily son of Re, whom He loves, Lord of Crowns, Alexander, given life, like Rē. —The Great Temple of Luxor Hellenic and Hebraic versions of the Alexander romance tell the story of Alexander’s relationship to Egypt twice. At the opening, both claim that Alexander was not the son of Phillip II of Macedon, but rather the adulterous offspring of Phillip’s Greek queen, Olympias, and Nectanebus, the last indigenous pharaoh of Egypt. Subsequently, once Alexander has come of age, both versions relate that he marched his troops from Greece, down the coast of Palestine where he paid reverence to YHVH in his ascent to Jerusalem, before crossing at Pelusium over into Egypt. Here he freed the Two Lands from Persian occupation and—acclaimed by the oracle of Zeus-Amon at Siwah—assumed his father’s throne as pharaoh. Following Egyptian protocol, moreover, he founded a new capital, “Alexandria by Egypt”—a city that effectively linked the commerce of the Nile Valley with trade in the Aegean, and in which he explicitly invited Egyptians, Greeks, and Palestinians to settle. Thereafter, Alexander set forth on the king of Egypt’s traditional campaign to “smite the Asiatics,” where his victories proved greater than those of any pharaoh who had come before him: not only did he defeat Darius, King of Kings; he subjugated the entire Persian empire from the Bosporus to Bactria—with one refractory domain. In Gedrosia, on the southeastern edge of the Iranian plateau, the desert hills 134 daniel l. selden brought him closer than any of his forebears to absolute defeat: thus, having first realized Egypt’s politico-religious ambitions in the East, his campaign ultimately faltered on the brink of ruin, in lands which, according to the traditional Egyptian vision of the world, were the province of Seth, the god of confusion. Egyptian literary traditions concerning Alexander have come down to us in pieces. A Coptic version of the Alexander romance survives in a unique codex from the White Monastery at Sohaj, now divided between Paris, London, Moscow, and Berlin.1 Moreover, an earlier Egyptian redaction of this material in Demotic—no longer extant but legible through later Greek translation—circulated in Egypt perhaps as early as 275 B.C.: it evidently included the Nectanebus story, as well as an account of Alexandria’s foundation. As befits Alexander’s mixed heritage, moreover, the redactor of the Coptic romance has drawn not only on indigenous Egyptian material, but intertwined this with Hellenic and Palestinian traditions too. Originally a codex of some 220 pages and roughly 37 chapters, nine manuscript folios survive, in addition to one unattached fragment whose relationship to the narrative remains uncertain. Half of the six surviving episodes are familiar from other recensions of the romance: Alexander’s sojourn to the streams of Paradise on the borders of the Land of Darkness [frag. 7]; his conversation with the Brahmans [frag. 8]; and his poisoning at Babylon [frag. 9]. The remaining three, however, as well as many details of the unattached fragment, find no parallel in redactions of the Alexander romance outside Egypt: one episode, evidently set in Elam, records a conversation between Alexander—disguised as his own messenger— with “Eleazar, the old geezer of the Persians” [frag. 1], subsequent to which Alexander’s forces take possession of the city [frag. 2]; in another, Selpharios composes his Last Will and Testament, in which he commits his son to Alexander’s care [frag. 6]. The third—by far the longest extant portion of the narrative—concerns Alexander’s escape from Chaos in Gedrosia (frags. 3–5), an episode not only central to the worldview of the Coptic romance as a whole, but whose remains prove extensive enough to provide us with a clear picture of the Egyptian redactor’s major interests and his working methods. 1 Critical Edition: O. von Lemm, Der Alexanderroman bei den Kopten (St. Petersburg, 1903). the coptic alexander romance 135 At first, Gedrosia appears an odd vantage point from which to view what was overall a celebratory account of Alexander’s life and deeds. Among Greek and Roman historians, in fact, Gedrosia (less commonly “Kedrosia”) figures as an exception in Alexander’s Persian expedition, “the one hiccup in his career.”2 After the Macedonian ranks mutinied on the banks of the Beas in 326 B.C., refusing to proceed further East, Alexander, the Greco-Roman sources tell us, sailed with his company down the Indus River. Some of his troops he then sent to sea under the admiralty of Nearchus, while others he marched West into Boluchistan: along the Makran coast, through the Kolwa depression, and across the Dashtiari plain. This may have been the most direct route back to his operational base at Babylon, but Gedrosia turned out to be a desolate wilderness where, for lack of adequate provisions, the casualties to the troops not only proved enormous—modern historians reckon that as much as 80% of the entire cohort died: Alexander himself, who shared the hardships of his men without special supplies, barely escaped the rigors of Gedrosia alive. Diodoros of Sicily, writing in the mid-1st century B.C., provides the most succinct account of the debacle: Alexander entered a country that was desert and lacked everything necessary for sustaining life. When many died of hunger, the army of the Macedonians lost heart, and Alexander sank into no ordinary grief and anxiety. It seemed a dreadful thing that they who had excelled all others in arms should perish ingloriously from want of sustenance in a wasteland. Accordingly, Alexander sent swift messengers . . . to areas bordering the desert, ordering them to load racing camels and pack animals with food and other provisions. The messengers hurried to the [neighboring] provinces and had supplies transported in large quantities to the designated place. Nonetheless, Alexander still lost many of his soldiers, first because the shortages were not entirely alleviated, and then some of the Oreitai who happened to be in the region attacked them . . . inflicting severe losses before they retreated back to their own country.3 Arrian, whose Anabasis (ca. 100 A.D.) supplements Diodorus’s account,4 describes Gedrosia as filled with “high hills of deep sand” into which Alexander’s men “sank as they stepped in, like liquid mud or, better still, untrodden snow.” The shifting dunes, he reports, obliterated 2 3 4 A.B. Bosworth, Alexander and the East (Oxford, 1996), p. 169. Diodoros of Sicily, Library of History 17.105.6–7. Arrian, Anabasis 6.22–24. 136 daniel l. selden every track, and without trees or rocks to mark the trail, Alexander’s guides eventually lost their bearings. Pressed by hunger and fatigue, and having eaten their pack animals for food, the troops had no choice but to abandon their dying comrades along the way. Finally, realizing that the situation had turned desperate, Alexander steered the army “straight through the middle until they reached the provincial capital [at Pura].” There, to celebrate the soldiers’ victory over the terrain, Alexander refreshed his troops with a week of licensed dissipation. So, Diodoros notes: “For seven days, he advanced with his troops in festive dress, while he himself lead a Dionysian komos, feasting and drinking with them as they progressed.”5 In this way, Alexander turned what had been a fiasco into a triumphal procession, whose glory ultimately redounded upon his royal person. Their spirits renewed, the army then pushed on as planned to Babylon such that, in the end, Alexander’s reign effectively proceeded without noticeable disruption. To capture the spirit of this catastrophe—both the character of the threat that hung over the enterprise and the significance of Alexander’s victory—the Coptic romance remythologizes the adventure. The three fragmentary folios that survive (frags. 3–5 Lemm), although too extensive to reproduce in full, run summarily as follows: The king (perro) of Gedrosia has ordered that Alexander be “thrown into Chaos” (enojef epe,aoc), a deep black hole that threatens certain death. Andilochos, however, Alexander’s comrade, devises a plan to save him. Bribing the “Guardian of Chaos” (pethijenpe,aoc), Andilochos conducts Alexander to the brink of the pit where, bidding farewell to the sun, he selects a stone approximately his own size, hurls it as a substitute into the abyss, shrinks back from the edge, and screams as the stone goes tumbling down into oblivion. The ruse works, and so the rumor circulates throughout the region that “Alexander has died in Chaos” (aluxantroc afmou hempe,aoc). Disguised as a simple soldier, Alexander makes his way back to his troops, whom he finds deep in mourning. Suddenly, he throws off his cloak, and revealing himself before the army says, “I am Alexander whom they put to death . . . Andilochos brought me back to life” (anok pe aluxantroc pentaumo[utef] . . . andilo,oc aftanhoi). At that moment, the herald immediately calls out, “King (perro) Alexander is come.” 5 Diodoros, Library 17.106.1. the coptic alexander romance 137 This account, which predates the Arab conquest of 642 A.D., figures the debacle in Gedrosia as the black hole of Chaos, from which Alexander successfully escapes, partly through his own resources and partly through the help of his companions. In fact, all the salient details of the Greco-Roman historical accounts recur here, though refashioned in the logic of a dream: the condensation of the diverse labors of Gedrosia into one; the personification of the desert as the King who condemns all marauders on his land; the hole that swallows up the trespasser; the displacement of the troops’ rescue onto the moment when Alexander reveals himself before them—“We saw your face, and we lived” (annau epekho anwneh); and so forth. At the same time, however, the Coptic redactor has so overdetermined the adventure that it intertwines three distinct motivic strands, each drawn from one of the three principal traditions that had come to shape Egyptian culture from the Macedonian conquest through the Byzantine era: Egyptian, Greek, and Palestinian. Coptic culture in Late Antiquity constituted an amalgam of all three, for which Alexander—both by virtue of his Egypto-Hellenic heritage and in view of his reverence for YHVH—served as its faithful image. It is principally, then, through the multiple negotiations between Egyptian, Greek, and Hebrew-Aramaic matter that the episode evolves—that is: as a set of narrative differences that both resist homogenization and work synergistically within a coherent whole. A. Alexander: Ì Yn » [Pharaoh] To begin with, the notion of “falling into Chaos” has deep resonance with traditional notions of Egyptian kingship. The evidence for whether Alexander III of Macedon was actually crowned pharaoh is ambiguous; reliefs at Luxor, however, portray him unequivocally as the King of Upper and Lower Egypt, while the accompanying inscriptions endow him with a traditional panoply of royal epithets: the “Perfect God,” “Lord of the Two Lands,” “Son of Re,” etc. Amon-Rē greets Alexander, who is adorned with the Blue Crown: “I give you the Black Land and the Red Land. I set all foreign countries [beneath] your sandals.”6 So the Coptic of the romance heralds the king not according 6 M. Abd el-Raziq, Die Darstellungen und Texte des Sanktuars Alexanders des Großen Tempel von Luxor (Mainz, 1984), p. 33. 138 daniel l. selden to his Greek title basileus—a term with different implications—but rather as perro, i.e. “pharaoh.”7 In this capacity, moreover, Alexander’s principal function would have been to ensure order and justice (mAa.t) for the Beloved Land (tA mry): this is the point of Amon-Rē’s remark that he has placed not only Egypt but all foreign, and hence potentially refractory, peoples under Alexander’s feet. As the Egyptian state coalesced out of the Predynastic period, the challenge that confronted each new claimant to the throne was that the order of the world might degenerate into lawlessness, or political and moral confusion, which it was the pharaoh’s duty through cult, right governance, and war, perennially to stave off. Erik Hornung observes: Terms contrasting with Maaat are isf.t, a word whose root meaning is unclear, but which connotes “injustice, disorder, unreason” (de Buck proposed to render the word outright as “chaos”); in addition, gereg, “lie,” and khab, “the crooked.” Alongside these terms of opposition, Maaat takes on the meaning “truth, justice, authenticity, correctness, order, and straightness.” It is the norm that should govern all action, the standard against which everything is to be measured.8 So a royal hymn from the New Kingdom reads: “Re has placed [pharaoh] in the land of the living . . . to administer humankind and satisfy the gods, to realize justice (mAa .t) and eradicate confusion (isf.t).”9 Within this cosmologic framework, then, the idea, in the Coptic romance, that Alexander as perro should “be cast down into Chaos” (isf.t) is by no means a trivial concern. The danger here not only threatens Alexander’s person: symbolically, “falling into Chaos,” as an everpresent possibility, promises to unravel the entire cosmic disposition that the goddess Maaat had established with the creation of the world. As such, it betokens the complete overthrow of everything that Alexander could have stood for, or as he who “endows Order for his father, Amon-Rē” should have achieved in his capacity as pharaoh.10 It is no accident of Egyptian historical memory, then, that Alexander’s ability to elude “Chaos” should be linked in the Coptic romance to his campaign against “Akrikōlaos” (< Lat. agricola, “cultivator” + Grk. laos, 7 The basic syntax of Coptic is Egyptian, but as much as 25% of its lexicon is Greek, with a smattering of Hebrew and Aramaic words. 8 E. Hornung, Geist der Pharaonenzeit, 2nd ed. (Düsseldorf, 1999), p. 136. 9 J. Assmann, Ägyptische Hymnen und Gebete, 2nd ed. (Freiburg in der Schweiz, 1999), pp. 98–99. 10 El-Raziq, Darstellungen, p. 18 et passim. the coptic alexander romance 139 “soldiers”), the macaronic pseudonym that the Coptic redactor has ascribed to the Macedonians’ hereditary enemy, Darius. On the plane of Egyptian political ideology, then, Alexander’s extrication from “Chaos” and his success in “striking down the Asiatics” are convertible figures for his commitment to retain the order of Maaat as king. Within Egyptian mythography, moreover, the malefactor thrown into the dark pit recalls traditional teachings about the Netherworld, whose tortuous geography—envisioned as a distorted mirror of the Nile valley—was filled with a myriad of menacing holes, places of darkness and destruction, to which those guilty of misconduct were consigned for punishment. Already in the Pyramid Texts of the Sixth Dynasty there are passages in which the determinative for “dead man” is drawn as a circle filled entirely with black paint [ ],11 an icon for the abyss of destruction, from which the king boasts of his narrow escape: “It is your son Horus, whom you bore, who has snatched [Menthesuphis] from the brink of the dead!”12 A more elaborate image of the same conceit appears in the Amduat, the great New Kingdom account of the Sun’s night journey through the Netherworld to be reborn anew each day, reproduced in royal tombs from Thutmosis I on, and widely copied on coffins and papyri through the Late and Greco-Roman periods. Here, in the nethermost register of the Eleventh Hour, we find a series of dark cavities, into which the bodies of recreants have been hurled. Beside each stands an executioner, holding the knife of punition, who bears such names as: “She who is over her pits.” The inscription that surmounts the scene describes the absolute annihilation that the individual will suffer in this “second death”: Ô∞ Èu p R ¬¸B d¯ ≠Û¬¸∞së È ¸≠¬¸∞r̄ 4∞¬¸∞ÎRHÔ Ω p Ù Û ∞¬¸∞ dë‘Û ¬¸∞ You shall not exist. You shall be turned on your head. You have not arisen, for you have fallen into the pit! You have not escaped, you have not fled!13 Both the falling man (4) and the pit (Ω) are iconically visible in the hieroglyphic text. The Book of Gates, moreover, a reworking of the Amduat composed some half a millennium later, conveys this fate by N. Grimal, et al. Hieroglyphica: Sign List, 2nd ed., rev. J. Hallof, et al. (Utrecht, 2000), 3–1: “O”. 12 K. Sethe, Die altägyptische Pyramidentexte, 4 vols. (Leipzig, 1908–22), 969a. 13 E. Hornung, Das Amduat, 2 vols. (Wiesbaden, 1963), 1:189. 11 140 daniel l. selden actually inserting a gap into the text of the Second Hour, a vacant space that opens up amid the otherwise unbroken line of hieroglyphs. This blank is not, as in modern orthography, the mark of a word boundary or the completion of a colon. Rather, for magical purposes, a term has been omitted, or intentionally effaced—precisely, in fact, the set of signs that would have read: “he who has been annihilated”: u r ® μ ˚Ω i ∞TÒ i ∆fi›Bl⁄sÙÈ∞⁄ To confine the soul of Rē says, “Behold, I have bedecked myself . . . 14 Here the enemies of the cosmic order are not even allowed the fragile status of a representation; or rather, their nihility is indicated by the hole. The miscreant has effectively been swallowed up in the vacuity of the graphic abyss. Like Menthesuphis, however, this is a fate that Alexander manages—though just barely—to forestall. In fact, much of the Egyptian Netherworld literature, from the Old Kingdom through the GrecoRoman period, consists of spells intended to preclude the king from falling into the pit of annihilation, in order to ensure that he will travel safely through the Netherworld to be reborn at dawn in the Bark of the Sun. So the great Litany of Rē entreats: “May you decree for me . . . [that I] come out of the chasm . . . Rescue [me] from the executioners with sharp knives, the butchers who tear hearts out, and carry off [the dead] to their cavities!”15 This explains why, as he enters the house of Chaos, Alexander apostrophizes Rē: Alexander. . .came to the place of Chaos (pma mpe,aoc) and saw it with his eyes. [His] rule (ar,y) had ceased and his power ([om) had left him. He raised his eyes to heaven and spoke to the men who held him bound: “Allow me, my brothers, to see the Sun.” Then Alexander wept and said, “O sun (pry), who illuminates [the world], will I see you again at dawn?” [After this] they escorted him inside. According to the same logic, the romance specifies the exact moment of Alexander’s successful return: “When morning came, Alexander reappeared before his troops and set himself upon the throne of his kingship.” The episode thus follows quite precisely not only the three E. Hornung, et al., Das Buch von den Pforten des Jenseits, 2 vols. (Geneva, 1979– 1984), 1:28 and 2:60 n.7. 15 E. Hornung, Das Buch der Anbetung des Re im Westen, 2 vols. (Geneva, 1975– 1976), 1:140ff. 14 the coptic alexander romance 141 millennia-old tradition regarding the geography of the Netherworld, but the plot of pharaoh’s deliverance from Chaos (isf.t) and his passage along the night journey of the Sun. B. Alexander: ΒΑΣΙΛΕΥΣ [basileus] Pagan religious survivals into Coptic Christianity are sufficiently numerous and detailed to make it clear that this material remained alive to educated readers of Late Antiquity. So, in the Repose of St. John the Evangelist, the apostle now apostrophizes Christ in place of the Sun: “It was you who delivered me from the second death. . .Let the darkness withdraw and chaos (pe,awc) become enfeebled.”16 Within this conspicuously Egyptian field of ideas, however, the key term chaos stands out as a learned borrowing from Greek, as does the ruse of the stone by which Alexander finagles his escape when the King of Gedrosia attempts to precipitate his rival into the bowels of the earth. This complex of motifs derives from Hesiod’s Theogony, a hymnal prelude of the 8th century B.C., perhaps the oldest piece of extant poetry in Greek, which played a crucial role historically in forging the identity of classical Hellenic culture over and against other societies in the Mediterranean East. The Coptic redactor’s recourse to Hesiod, therefore, bears considerable weight in his portrayal of Alexander not only as an Egyptian pharaoh (perro), but concomitantly—though differentially—as a Greco-Macedonian king (basileus). Among the demands that he makes upon his readers, then, is a critical awareness both of the Theogony’s place within the history of Greek letters and of what distinguishes Hesiod’s poem, over and against Egyptian politicoreligious texts, as quintessentially Hellenic. At the beginning of the Bronze Age (ca. 3300 B.C.), the Aegean peoples formed part of a richly integrated East Mediterranean world, which had close political, commercial, religious, and artistic ties both to Balkan Europe and to the great kingdoms of Anatolia, North Africa, Egypt, and the Near East. Indo-European migration to the Greek peninsula, completed by 1600 B.C., did not substantially alter this texture of international relations, though locally it modified Helladic culture in decisive ways. The Mycenaean palace-centered state 16 E.A. Wallis Budge, ed. Coptic Apocrypha in the Dialect of Upper Egypt (London, 1913), pp. 56–57. 142 daniel l. selden developed as a hybrid, which superimposed Kurgan social institutions upon a substratum of indigenous Old European and Minoan traditions: a trifunctional class system (sovereign-priests; warrior nobility; agricultural producers); cult offerings to a resplendent sky-god; and pit-graves hollowed into rock or soil—all hallmarks of Indo-European settlement—enter the archaeological record of the mainland and the islands at this point. In the latter half of the 13th century B.C., however, the collapse of Mycenaean power effectively suspended Greek relations with Europe and the Levant, and isolated the disparate geographic regions of the mountainous Helladic peninsula from one another. At those sites which the survivors of this catastrophe did not abandon, the discrete communities turned in upon themselves, though the costs of this dissociation were considerable—depopulation, a sharp decline in living standards, vast tracts of desolated land. Insularity, however, had one historically productive effect: it afforded the scattered Helladic towns the opportunity to inflect their common Bronze-Age heritage as they saw fit, in ways that not only diverged considerably from the centralized and hierarchical societies such as Egypt that flourished elsewhere in the Middle East, but showed remarkable ingenuity of character from place to place. When, in the 8th century B.C., Greek cities resumed regular communication with one another, and growing prosperity enabled them to reestablish politico-commercial exchange with the Near East, it became increasingly apparent to the “Panhellenes” that, despite the kaleidoscopic diversity of their institutions, they had come to share a set of collective and historically unprecedented social forms—what Herodotus, in retrospect, would call to Hellēnikon. Much of the distinctiveness of this emergent “Hellenicity” derived from its internal dialectic: on the one hand, the rise of the polis, a set of discrete corporate communities which vested power—legislative, judicial, military, religious—in a closed and privileged set of indigenous free citizens, conceived over and against foreigners and slaves; on the other, the concurrent organization of intercity athletic competitions (Olympic games), supranational sanctuaries (Delphi, Delos), memorialization of a shared heroic past (Iliad, Odyssey), the diffusion of alphabetic scripts, and secret sodalities, alongside public festivals, that a single polis supervised but accorded access to all participants who could speak Greek (Eleusinian mysteries, the Greater Dionysia). The received text of Hesiod’s Theogony constitutes one of the fundamental expressions of this Hellenic ethnogenesis. A highly innovatory reflex within the Indo-European poetic tradition, the burden of the Theogony is to subordinate pre-Hellenic cults, along with local Greek the coptic alexander romance 143 traditions, to the supersession of the Olympian gods, through a lineal narration of Zeus’s rise to power. As such, Hesiod’s account is not only a dynamic synthesis of Old European, Anatolian, West Asiatic, and Egyptian mythical motifs within the governing framework of Kurgan religious tenets: Norman O. Brown has stressed the extent to which Hesiod’s Theogony is “systematic[ally] concern[ed] with showing how Zeus integrates older powers into his new order: [Zeus] is essentially only the ultimate coordinator of a plurality of [forces] not of his own making, his distinctive attribute [being] not strength but statesmanship.”17 With Hesiod, then, the historical becomes the mutable: as opposed to Egyptian cosmologic speculations, in which all events festally repeat the phenomenology of the “first occasion” or where every pharaoh’s duty is to return Maaat to her proper place, the Theogony portrays the current state of the universe—and hence its ultimate potential—as the processual outcome of purposeful growth, selectivity, and change. The poem therefore not only posits the self-generating emergence of the cosmos—physical, divine, and human; ideologically, it recasts the trifunctionality of the communal Indo-European heritage into the set of hierarchized binary oppositions that would come to structure classical “Greek thought”: truth vs. lie, knowledge vs. ignorance, good vs. evil, permanence vs. change, Greek vs. barbarian, and so forth. Thus—as Hellenic writers from the Archaic period through the Imperial era repeatedly acknowledged—Hesiod’s poem laid substantial portions of the foundation upon which later Greek literature, politics, philosophy, and science were erected. Within the sphere of theology and ritual, in particular, where the Greek states neither maintained professional priesthoods nor recognized orthodox scripture comparable to the Amduat or the Torāh, Hesiod’s Theogony provided a synthetic account of Hellenic religion as a system with its own peculiar logic and coherence. Herodotus, in fact, goes so far as to claim that it was Hesiod who “composed (poiein) for the Greeks a genealogy of the gods, assigned them names, distributed their functions, and described their forms.”18 Written in a hybrid idiom that, while predominately Ionic, artificially combined lexical features drawn from all the major dialects of post-Mycenaean Greek, Hesiod’s Theogony thus served as one of the principal agents of classical Panhellenism. Not only, as Louis Gernet remarks, did “the 17 18 N.O. Brown, Hesiod: Theogony (Upper Saddle River, 1953), pp. 11, 10 and 44. Herodotus 2.53. 144 daniel l. selden representation that Hesiod offers of the world of the gods. . .continue to govern whatever ideas the [Helladic city- states] were able to formulate collectively on this matter:”19 for Greeks scattered across the diaspora of the Hellenistic, Roman, and Byzantine eras, the Theogony remained a defining point of ethnic reference well into the first millennium A.D., particularly, it seems, among Greeks resident in Egypt. For the Coptic redactor to evoke the Theogony, then, is not simply to allude to one Greek literary composition among others: the story that the Theogony has to tell is precisely the origin and evolution of Hellenic culture as distinct from Egyptian or other Near Eastern formations. It is to this end, then, that the redactor of the Coptic romance draws on three cardinal moments from the Theogony which stand out as quintessentially “Greek”: the inception of the Hesiodic cosmos; the climax of the Succession Myth, which spares Zeus Kronos’s murderous designs; and the Olympian gods’ collective triumph over the Titans, whereupon they elect Zeus “king (basileus) of gods and men” (923). What the Hesiodic subtext provides the Coptic romance, then, is not only an alternate cosmogony, but a progressive view of history and an oligarchic politics that were, in fact, quite foreign to traditional political protocols in Egypt or Palestine. The Theogony is the earliest extant Greek poem to name its poet: in fact, the proëm to the narrative represents Hēsíodos (< hēsi- “hurler” + (w)odē “human speech” = “he who emits a [beautiful/ immortal] voice”) as having learned his craft directly from the Muses —that is, as the Greek poet par excellence. When “Hesiod” turns to the body of his composition, then, he begins authoritatively with Chaos, the beginning of all (poetical) beginnings. First of all Chaos came into being . . . [and] from Chaos there arose Erebos and black Night. [116/123] According to M. West, Chaos is defined as follows: Khaos: best translated Chasm. It is a yawning space ([cf.] khaskō); it is dark and gloomy; and it appears from 736–45 and 807–14 that it is beneath the earth. But it is more than empty space, it is stuffed with darkness.20 19 L. Gernet and A. Boulanger, Le génie grec dans la religion, 2nd ed. (Paris, 1970), pp. 97 and 235. 20 M. West, Hesiod. Theogony (Oxford, 1966), p. 192. the coptic alexander romance 145 No independent documents are old enough in Greek to substantiate what chaos actually meant for Hesiod. Indic and Old Norse parallels, however, indicate that the notion of an originary void was part of the Indo-European legacy to Greece. Whereas Egyptian cosmogonies portray primeval waters “unique and without second,”21 and Mesopotamian creation accounts personify a first begetter (rēštû zāriu), or life force (mummu),22 the Ŗg-Veda contends that “in the beginning . . . there was neither non-existence nor existence,” only the “potential” (ābhū) of an “empty” (ābhu) and “formless black abyss (ābhvam).”23 Similarly, in Sturluson’s Edda, Hár cites a poetic reflex from the Völuspá to answer Gylfi’s question, “What came first?”: It was the beginning of the ages when nothing was (þat er ekki var). Sand was not, nor sea nor chill waves. Earth was not found, nor above it heaven: a mighty gap was there (gap var ginnunga), but no growth.24 “Etymologically speaking,” U. Dronke comments, “[Ginnungagap] is . . . a Gordian knot of ancient verbal elements signifying ‘gaping,’ ‘vacuous,’ ‘vast,’ ‘potent.’ The poet gives a fresh vitality to the old name by reversing its elements and making of it a positive statement: at that time the void existed—gap var ginnunga—in strong contrast to the negatives around it.”25 In Hesiod, this antinomy achieves resolution in two complementary ways. Teleologically, within the trajectory of the Theogony per se, as the firmament bodies forth around Chaos, the abyss comes to assume its “proper” place (pma m pe,aoc): the primordial gap anchors as a cleft cut deep into the Earth (chasma), which reaches down beyond the “roots” of Ocean to murky Tartarus beneath (814). Within the Hesiodic tradition, moreover, Classical writers came to refigure Chaos as inchoate matter—Anaxagoras’s συμμιξισ παντων κρηματων, Ovid’s discordia semina rerum26—that is, the primal, indeterminate confusion of raw elements out of whose ordering the kosmos took shape. Both senses of Hesiod’s term remained current through Late Antiquity: Plotinos, for example, equates Chaos with “place and space” (κωραν και τοπον) while, for his near contemporary Loukian, 21 A. de Buck, The Egyptian Coffin Texts, 7 vols. (Chicago, 1935–61), 6:343j = CT 714. 22 23 24 25 26 Enūma eliš 1.3–4. Ŗg-Veda 10.129.1/3 and 1.92.5. S. Sturluson, Gylfaginning 4. U. Dronke, The Poetic Edda, 2 vols. (Oxford, 1997), 2:33. Edited. Anaxagoras, 59 B 4 DK; Ovid, Metamorphoses 1.9. 146 daniel l. selden the word connotes an “indistinct and jumbled lack of shape (αφανουσ και κεξυμενησ αμορπηιασ).”27 Characteristically, however, the Byzantine redactor declines to choose between them. Thus, on the one hand, Chaos functions in the Coptic romance as a synecdoche for the wilderness of the Gedrosia that the Greek and Roman Alexander historians describe—a place of absolute material disorder and maximum disarray. At the same time, however, Chaos retains its cosmogonic connotations: it stands in the romance for “the nothing that is,” an existential vacuum which, in its capacity to swallow up King Alexander—who like Zeus successfully integrated older powers into a precariously balanced world regime—threatens not only to undo whatever historical progress he had achieved, but even to return the order of the world to the state þat er ekki var, i.e. when nothing was. Ultimately, then, history here encounters myth: refusing the katabasis that the epic heroes whom Alexander emulates (Odysseus, Aeneas) had undergone, the great world conqueror shudders at the void, evading Chaos—an ever present possibility—as the dark light against which Alexander continues on its way. The centerpiece of the Theogony is the Succession Myth, and it is from this well- known sequence that Alexander comes by his suppositious stone. Out of Chaos, the Theogony traces three generations of familial struggle among the immortals for the “Kingship of Heaven”: first Ouranos thrusts the children Gaia bears him back into the recesses of the Earth, prompting Kronos to castrate his father and usurp his place. Family romance then repeats itself: Rhea was subject in love to Kronos and bore him splendid children . . . These great Kronos swallowed as each came forth from their mother’s sacred womb . . . with this intent: that none of [his] proud sons should hold the office of king among the immortals . . . But when Rhea was ready to bear great Zeus, the youngest of her offspring, [she went to Crete,] where prodigious Earth received him from [his mother] to nourish and bring up . . . To the great lord [Kronos], however, the earlier king of the gods, she gave a great stone wrapped in swaddling clothes. He took it in his hand and thrust it down into his bowels, oblivious (skhetlios)! He did not perceive with his wits that in place of the stone his son was left behind, unconquered and without care, who was soon to overpower [his father] by force, drive him from his office, and lord it among the immortals himself. [453–491] 27 Plotinus, Enneads 6.8.11 and [Lucian], Amores 32. the coptic alexander romance 147 The trigenerational framework of this filial revolt, the castration, and the omophagia derive from Hurrian sources; a Hittite redaction has survived, perhaps transmitted to Greece through Phoenicia, though the myth is most likely Babylonian in origin. What stands out in the Hesiodic version of the episode, however, as typically Hellenic is the implicit value that it places on “cunning”—that peculiar form of mental suppleness that the Greeks called mētis. In competitive contexts from Homer to Oppian, Hellenes recognized two alternative ways for securing the upper hand: success could come from superiority in force, or the combatant might prevail through manipulative savoir-faire. Iliad 23 supplies the classic exemplar: in the funeral games held for Patroclus, Antilochus bests his fellow charioteers not because his horses are the swiftest; rather, he steals the first place by conniving “gain” (τῷ δ’ ἄρ’ ἐπ’ Ἀντίλοχος Νηλήϊος ἤλασεν ἵππους, | κέρδεσιν, οὔ τι τάχει γε, παραφθάμενος Μενέλαον [v.515])—as the race course narrows around the turning post, he strategically outflanks the competition, “his mind filled with every guile (mētis)” [v.313–314]. The Odyssey, likewise, frames the quarrel between Achilles and Odysseus, the “best of the Achaeans,” in terms of the respective merits of heroic might (biē) over against calculated machination (mētis). Thus the celebrated cunning by which Odysseus blinds the inebriated Cyclops, or Penelope nightly unweaves Laertes’s never-to-be-finished shroud, are of the same ingenious order as Rhea’s foresight to serve Kronos up a swaddling stone in order to spare their late born son. According to a logic, then, that is particularly Greek, when Alexander’s power ([om) fails him, the companion who bears the Iliadic name “Andilochos” advises the captive king to repeat the Hesiodic ploy of hurling a boulder, in place of his body, into the Gedrosian abyss. Virgil had cautioned the increasingly Hellenized world to be “wary of Danaans, even when they are bearing gifts”:28 once Kronos disgorged the rock, the Theogony relates that Zeus erected it “to be a sign (sēma) and marvel (thauma) for mankind at holy Delphi” [498–500], where, in the second century A.D., Pausanias still found the admonitory emetic the recipient of daily cult in what remained—for the Levantine imaginary—the Panhellenic sanctuary par excellence, even after the Edict of Theodosius (391 A.D.) officially closed the shrine. 28 Virgil, Aeneid 2.49. 148 daniel l. selden As a subtext to the Gedrosia episode, then, the Theogony inflects the Coptic romance according to a logic that Greeks and non-Greeks alike recognized as characteristically Hellenic: faced with his annihilation in the depths of Chaos, Alexander—like Hesiod’s Rhea—employs mētis rather than biē (force), to escape the void that threatens to engulf his being. It is, moreover, by reference to a third passage in the Theogony that the Byzantine redactor brings the Gedrosia encounter thematically to a close. In the sequel of Hesiod’s poem, the Olympian gods’ bid for universal power culminates in their clash with the Titans, a battle that Zeus wins by hurtling Typhoeus down into Chaos. This concludes the Titanomachy, which Hegel—recapitulating the Hellene’s vision of their own cultural development—identified as the decisive moment in the constitution of Greek thought: “The old gods or Titans are cast down by the new deities and banished to the brink of the Earth, banished into darkness, while the new gods have erected their hegemony in the clear daylight of human consciousness.”29 In fact, from the Imperial era through the Late Antique, Greek audiences regularly read the Typhoeus episode—if not the whole of the Titanomachy—as an allegory of the triumph of an enlightened Hellenism over local religious cults and archaic modes of thinking. That the victorious gods, moreover, collectively “urge far-seeing Olympian Zeus to reign and rule over them” [883–884] both puts an end to divine tyranny and ushers in the oligarchic and electoral politics that so distinguished the aspirations of classical Greece. From a Hellenic point of view, then, the Coptic Alexander’s ability to avoid Typhoeus’s fate not only serves as a synecdoche for the supremacy of Greek over “barbarian” culture—which in this case would also include Egypt; it emblematizes Aristotle’s pupil’s larger politico-cultural designs, which more fully extant versions of the romance narrativize as his ability to subjugate the entirety of the inhabited world—in some instances by force, but also as part of his Peripatetic quest for knowledge. Hence, Kandake remarks in the α-recension of the Greek romance, “Not by war alone have you subdued the world and its people, but by great wisdom.”30 In fact, the Macedonian basileus was not traditionally a monarch, but ruled as primus inter pares, a politics—reflected elsewhere in the CopG.W.F. Hegel, Vorlesungen über die Philosophie der Religion, ed. W. Jaeschke, 3 vols. (Hamburg, 1993–95), 2:636ff. 30 A.M. Wolohojian, The Romance of Alexander the Great by Pseudo-Callisthenes (New York, 1969), p. 139. 29 the coptic alexander romance 149 tic romance—that dovetails with the collaborative spirit of Alexander’s scientific interests in precisely such things as bottomless black holes. In the end, then, it is not the least of the Coptic redactor’s achievements to have woven into the Gedrosia episode the beginning, climax, and denouement of Hesiod’s Theogony, a Freudian Verdichtung (“condensation”) that both epitomizes Isocrates’s fantasy that the Greeks had become the schoolmasters of the world, and parodies it. C. Alexander: ‫[ משׁיחא‬Messiah] In part, the irony here emerges from the overall Palestinian plotting of the episode whereby Alexander, in his putative descent and resurrection from the abyss, functions as figura Christi, an allegorical framework not only alien to classical Pharaonic and Helenic traditions, but one which puts the authority of each directly into question. Christian communities sprang up early on along the Nile, originally among Jewish sectors of the population who, alongside their Egyptian and Greek neighbors, constituted the third principal demographic component of Late Antique Egypt. Classical Egyptian and Hellenic culture, in different ways, both laid stress on the survival of the soul (bA, psukhē), but Old Israelite religion evidently proscribed speculations of this sort, perhaps as one of the inversions that set the Mosaic covenant apart as oppositionally distinct. Thus, a well-known injunction from the Mishnāh states: “Whoever reflects on three things would have been better off had he not been born: what is above, what is below, what is before, and what is beyond.”31 Accordingly, the earlier strata of the Hebrew Bible remain reticent on the subject of the hereafter, though by the time of the Babylonian captivity, the etymologically ambiguous She’ol (‫)שאול‬, commonly taken to mean “grave”, had come to designate a shadowy region in the underworld to which the God of Israel regularly consigned souls upon death. So Ezekiel, in an admonition specifically addressed to “Pharaoh, the King” recalls the punishment that YHVH had meted out to ’Aśśur and its dependents: All are delivered unto death, to the nethermost regions of the earth, amidst the children of men, to them that go down to the Pit . . . On the 31 Ḥagigāh 2:1. 150 daniel l. selden day of [their] descent to She’ol, [the Lord God] closed the deep over it and covered it. [31:14–15] Proverbs similarly refers to “the shades which are there in the depths of She’ol” (9:18), which suggests that this is their abiding state. From the Hasmonean period on, however, mainstream currents within Second-Temple Judaism came to espouse a restorationist eschatology. Extrapolating from an agrammatical chiasmus in Isaiah (26:19), as well as later Biblical passages derived therefrom, exegetes claimed not only anagogic restitution for the Land of Israel, but also corporeal resurrection of the dead. Pharisaic circles, in particular, vigorously promoted such beliefs, and even altered Temple liturgy specifically to reflect this tenet. Whatever survival Egyptian and Hellenic cultures credited to the soul after death, the road down to their underworlds only ran one way: “Resurrection,” as N.T. Wright has underscored, “[was] not part of the pagan hope.”32 Thus Egyptians held that a transfigured spirit (Aḫ) might return from “the West” to admonish those abiding in this world and on occasion transitorily assume embodied form. At no point, however, did the Egyptian religious imagination seriously entertain the possibility that a mummified corpse (saḥ ) ever had or would see reason to return to a permanently animate state among those “living on the earth.” Similarly, in the Greek world, the few dead who ostensibly returned from Hades—e.g. Persephonē, Theseus, Alkestis—constitute exceptions that prove the rule. Rather, J. Neusner argues, the resurrection of the dead only became conceivable within the framework of the Palestinian monotheism that ultimately prevailed among the various competing “Judaisms” that flourished just prior to the turn of the Common Era. The “monotheistic system,” Neusner explains, requires the doctrine of personal resurrection, so that the life of this world may go onward to the next. Indeed, without the conception of [bodily] life beyond the grave, the system as a whole yields a mass of contradictions and anomalies . . . [Eschatologically], the last things are to be known from the first. In the just plan of creation, humanity was meant to live in Eden, and Israel in the land of Israel in time without end. The restoration will bring about that long and tragically-postponed perfection of the world order, sealing the demonstration of the justice of God’s plan for creation . . . Israel for its part, when it repents and con- 32 85. N.T. Wright, The Resurrection of the Son of God (Minneapolis, 2003), pp. 81 and the coptic alexander romance 151 forms its will to God’s, recovers its Eden. So the consequences of rebellion and sin having been overcome . . . God’s original plan will be realized at the last.33 The logic here presupposes the entirety of Hebrew scripture. Excerpted from this context, however, the resurrection of the body tended to impress pagan intellectuals as risible, if not revolting. Porphyry, for example, a native of Syria who studied in Athens before joining the circle of the Egyptian-born Plotinus in Rome around 262 A.D., found the notion that the Divinity would reconstitute and raise the dead to be—as Celsus had put it before him—“thoroughly ridiculous”:34 It is preposterous to think that when the universe (το παν) is destroyed, there follows a resurrection; that [God] raises with a wave of his hand a man who died three years [ago] with those like Priam and Nestor who lived a thousand years before, along with those who lived when the human race was new. Nevertheless, you say, “He will raise up the rotten and stinking corpses of men.” What an unpleasant sight that will be! For even if God should refashion the dead bodies, making them more tolerable than before, there is still this: it would not be possible for earth to accommodate all those who have died from the beginning of the world if all should be raised from the dead.35 Writing specifically contra Christianos, Porphyry’s dismissal illustrates the radical nature of the challenge that Christian belief initially posed to Levantine-Mediterranean pagan cultures. To judge by Paul’s first Letter to the Corinthians, however, bodily resurrection also proved a conceptual challenge for many early Christians too: To begin with, I handed over to you what I also received: that Christos (< χριστός, “annointed”) died for your sins, in accordance with the scriptures; that he was buried; and that he was raised on the third day, according to the scriptures; and that he appeared to Kēphas, and afterwards to the Twelve . . . Now, if Christos is declared (kērussetai) to have been raised from the dead, how can some you say there is no resurrection of the dead? If there be no resurrection, then Christos was not raised; and if Christos was not raised, then our proclamation (kērugma) is empty and empty is your faith . . . you are still in your state of sin.36 33 J. Neusner, “Death and the Afterlife in the Later Rabbinic Sources” in Judaism in Late Antiquity, 3 vols, ed. J. Neusner, et al. (Leiden, 2001), 3: 267–268. 34 Origen, Contra Celsum, ed. M. Marcovich (Leiden, 2001), p. 489. 35 Macarius Magnes, Apocriticus 4.24; condensed. 36 1 Corinthians 15. 152 daniel l. selden Here Paul hazards his entire proselytic mission on the resurrection of a single individual: the charismatic Yēshuaa ha-Notzrī. The wager confirms D. Boyarin’s contention that, however critically Paul castigated the Pharisaic culture to which he originally ascribed, he nonetheless remained a “Jewish thinker . . . [who] lived and died convinced that he was a Jew living out Judaism.”37 In fact, what Paul seized upon was precisely the most idiosyncratic—and hence least readily assimilable— tenet of contemporary Palestinian Judaic thought, i.e. the resurrection of the dead, which he in turn deployed as the main dialectical lever in his cosmopolitan bid to supersede the ethnic, class, and gender differences that heretofore had structured Mediterranean societies under Roman rule. The association was, in fact, so vital to the foundations of the orthodox faith, that the life According to Iōannēn goes so far as to have Iēsous identify himself completely in the predicate: “I am the resurrection” (egō eimi hē anastasis) [11:25]. Despite numerous differences in detail, the formulaic language of the earliest resurrection accounts (apethanen—etaphē—anestēsen— ōphth) [“He died—He was buried—He arose—He was seen”]) confirms both that the tradition pre-dates Paul and that it had its origins in Palestine. Similarly, the earliest creed that Irenaeus records for the faith—perhaps in use by 150 A.D.—jointly professes: “both the passion and the resurrection of the dead” (καὶ τὸ πάθος καὶ τὴν γερσιν ἐκ νεκρῶν).38 When and through what channels this kerygma reached Egypt remains uncertain, though as the Coptic Church elaborated the gospel of Christophany, Egyptians inflected the precept in accordance with local culture. For example, Coptic writers regularly render the New Testament’s anistanai / egeirein (“to rise” [scil. from the dead]) as twoun (tōoun), a verb that first appears in Late Egyptian as dwn, and remains widely attested from the New Kingdom on in various mutually reinforcing senses: “to stretch out” [scil. one’s limbs], “to get up” or, in medical contexts, “to recover”; nominalizations of the stem connote “reward.” What is conspicuous by its absence in the Coptic works, however, is the vocabulary of the Pharaonic funerary corpus—that is, Coptic derivatives of such verbs as prj [> πειρε], ḥ fd [ > *hwft > heft- ], or jar [ > ale], which from the Pyramid texts 37 38 D. Boyarin, A Radical Jew: Paul and the Politics of Identity (Berkeley, 1994), p. 2. Iranaeus, Adversus Haereses I.10. the coptic alexander romance 153 through papyri and inscriptions of the Roman period had traditionally designated the ascent of the deceased’s spirit to the vault of heaven. The Coptic twoun, then, bore with it definite corporeal connotations which, in distinction to classical Egyptian and Hellenic teachings about death, served to emphasize that the Christian promise—originating out of Palestine—specifically entailed resurrection of the flesh. Hence, Coptic writings on the resurrection often turn explicitly on the pair ōnḥ , var. anh (“life”) || ouwnh (“[bodily] apparition”), the latter a syncopated form of the classical Egyptian wn-ḥr [ > Dem./Copt. *ouwn-ho], “to reveal or disclose the face”. The Fourth Tractate of the Jung Codex, for example, which concerns “the signs and images of the resurrection,” affirms that Iēsous’ ability to “raise himself up” (twoun) served not only as the “origin of life” (wnh), but simultaneously represented a “revelation (ouwnh) of the real.”39 Coptic accounts of the resurrection, then, generally rely upon a triadic hypogram—that is, the underlying narratival patterning: twoun | wnh | ouwnh [“He rose—He lived—He appeared”], whose chiastic assonance (ōo | ō | oō) passes acoustically by way of the Cross. So a Coptic homily On the Passion, attributed to Cyril of Jerusalem, stresses, regarding “the manner of his resurection” (twoun), that Iēsous revealed (ouwnh) to all that, despite his death, he nonetheless returned to life (wnh): Iēsous went to his disciples and said to them: “Peace be with you.” Seeing their faces troubled and incredulous of so much joy, he said to them, “Why do you doubt? Look at my hands and my feet, and the nail wounds that are in them: these signs will never disappear, and on the day when I judge the whole world, I will show them to the Jews and to all peoples, since the body that was dead a little while ago has risen (=pcwma =ntafmou ha;y =noukoui pai on pentaftwoun), and it is the same.40 This pastiche of Luke 24 and John 20 makes it clear that the Coptic redaction of the Alexander romance employs the same triadic hypogram at the conclusion of the Gedrosia episode. Alexander’s apparent execution in Gedrosia plunges his troops into mourning: the King of Makedonia has died in Chaos. Some days later, however, much to the astonishment of his comrades, Alexander reappears among them, H.W. Attridet, et al., Nag Hammadi Codex I (The Jung Codex) (Leiden, 1985), pp. 123–157. 40 Ps.-Cyril of Jerusalem, Omelie Copte, ed. A. Campagnano (Milan, 1980), pp. 70 and 60–62. 39 154 daniel l. selden revealing his presence by—and here the text is quite specific on this point—disclosing his previously concealed face: literally, that is, wn-ḥ r > ouwnh. Like the resurrected Christ, Alexander gives his soldiers to believe that, through salvific agency, his body has risen and returned to join them from the grave: “I am Alexander whom they put to death (mou) . . . Andilochos restored me to life (anh).” The scene breaks off as Alexander’s herald—echoing Coptic 2 Kingdoms 19—trumpets forth before the Macedonian forces: “The king (perro) is come.” The catch here is, of course, that Alexander’s death and resurrection in the Coptic romance, unlike Iesous’s, are a novelistic hoax, a Scheintod (“false death”) after the manner of Charitōn’s Kallirhoē, and other Greek imperial fictions. In Christian terms, however, this is precisely what allows Alexander to stand as a type of Christ: the defective mimicry involved in the Macedonian king’s execution and return adumbrates—in good Alexandrian allegorical tradition—the reality of their future fulfillment in the person of Iesous. Overcoming chaos, cheating death, pacifying the world, and uniting the sum of mankind, Alexander comes as a figure for the Messiah (‫)משׁיחא‬, cast into the future. At the same time, however, the polycultural context of the Coptic romance begs questions about the credibility of the Palestinian kerygma. While the option that M. Smith sets out between trickster and Messiah is indubitably reductive, there remains abundant evidence that Palestinians of all persuasions considered Iēsous to be “a magician from Galilee . . . whose disciples stole his body by night from the tomb where it was laid, and now try to deceive people by claiming that he arose from the dead.”41 “Literature,” Paul Valéry famously remarked, “is, and can be nothing but, a kind of extension and application of certain properties of language.”42 We would not be unwarranted, then, to see the Gedrosia episode of the Coptic Alexander romance as a thematic projection of the three principal linguistic reserves—Egyptian, Greek, and Semitic— that made up the Coptic vernacular in its classical phase. Each projection unfolds alongside the others through the creative motivation of sememes embedded in Sahidic idiom that the Coptic redactor— without the least recourse to originary invention—reactivates in re- Justin Martyr, Dialogue with Trypho, p. 108. P. Valéry, “De l’enseignement de la poétique au Collège de France,” Variété 5 (1949), 289. 41 42 the coptic alexander romance 155 composing the romance. The Gedrosia episode is, therefore, not only celebratory of the different cultural formations that, in Alexander’s wake, flourished side-by-side in Byzantine Egypt; the relationship between these different strands remains dialogic, in Bakhtin’s sense of that Ì term: thus, Alexander stands simultaneously here as Pharaoh (y√ »), King (ΒΑΣΙΛΕΥΣ), and Messiah (‫)משׁיחא‬, all competing notions of divine kingship which do not dovetail but remain distinct, though always in such a way that each relativizes the claims of the others. Thus, the Pauline reading—wherein the Pharaonic victory of mAa.t over isf.t, Zeus’s deliverance through the ruse of the stone, and Alexander’s escape from Chaos all stand subordinate as so many types of the resurrection of Christ—always finds itself displaced by the motivic hierarchy of the romance proper, which sets Pharaoh and Zeus alongside Christ as analogues for Alexander, and not the other way around. Moreover, the parallels that the redactor draws between Pharaoh and Christ must have begged questions for pagan communities in the vicinity of the White Monastery who still availed themselves of monks in the scriptorium as ritual practitioners of traditional Egyptian magic. Viewed from an indigenous perspective, for example, the apparition (ouwnh) which Coptic scribes in the White Monastery regularly credited to =I=c =,=c p=rro (“Iēsous the Anointed, Pharaoh”) effectively maintained one of the traditional epithets of the Egyptian king: “Lord of Appearances” (nb h̠a.w). Examples could be multiplied, but the principle remains the same: the Coptic redactor allows no understanding of the Gedrosia episode to assert itself as final, thereby assuring that the potential contexts for the narrative’s cross-cultural dialogue—like the millennial destiny of the vast text network that we call the Alexander romance—remain historically open, within Egypt and throughout the literary world at large.