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THE GIFT OF THE NILE: HELLENIZING EGYPT FROM AESCHYLUS TO ALEXANDER. By Phiroze Vasunia. Berkeley: University of California Press, 2001. pp. 346. $45.00 cloth.
Beginning with the work of Edward Said, many scholars in diverse disciplines have sought to unveil the specific processes by which Western civilization produced and maintained its fantasies about the East as its "Other." In The Gift of the Nile: Hellenizing Egypt from Aeschylus to Alexander, PI-droze Vasunia contributes well to this project by examining the specific role of Egypt in the ancient Greek imagination. Although there has recently been an increasing attention in classical scholarship to the Greeks' process of "othering" in their ideology, a process consolidated most notably around the category of "barbarian," as Vasunia demonstrates, his particular focus on Egypt is necessary because of the unique position Egypt held within the Greek category of "barbarian," serving as a source of both admiration and anxiety (2, 6).
As Vasunia recognizes, his project therefore seeks not to outline Egypt as an historical entity, but rather to document the ways in which representations of Egypt allowed the Greeks to examine and define themselves, giving them an imagined space for the interrogation of concepts like tyranny, democracy, history, gender, writing, and human sacrifice (31). Yet, Vasunia, in a gesture rarely taken by classicists, also aims to contrast Greek representations of Egypt with the Egyptians' own conceptions of self and nation (8)-an especially strong feature of his work. So, too, in acknowledging the strong influence of cultural studies and postcolonial theory, Vasunia goes beyond the more traditional limits of classical scholarship, including its often troubling tendency to treat literature as completely isolated from historical context, and admirably attempts not only to consider Greek representations of Egypt in the fifth and fourth centuries BCE, but also the consequences of such representations, that is, the ways in which such representations might have laid the ideological groundwork for Greek colonization...