Cultural Similarities between Ancient Egypt and Byzantium

Résumé

This paper is intended as a joint tribute to the scholarship of Egyptologist Erik Hornung and Byzantinist Cyril Mango, both of whom recently passed away. Byzantine traits with obvious parallels in ancient Egyptian culture abound in Cyril Mango’s introduction to The Oxford History of Byzantium, and yet –both there and elsewhere– one looks in vain for an overt acknowledgment that these two very different civilizations nevertheless shared a distinctive cluster of characteristics. Drawing on Hornung’s Idea Into Image as a starting point for Egyptological insights, this paper seeks to establish such a correspondence. Shared features of the two cultures include their self-belief, theocratic disposition, bureaucracy, longevity, feigned immutability, preoccupation with order, dynastic tendency, temporal focus, ritualism and artistic conventions, as well as aspects of their kingship paradigms, afterlife anxieties and relative periodisation. The observed similarities point to a nexus of specific principles, behaviours and outcomes – components which tend to co-occur as a group in complex human societies.