When Egypt Was Christian

Abstract The following three chapters are a very rough historical sketch, based on a few of the better known works. Those who are well versed in Egyptian history are advised to skip chapters 1-3 of this book. To shed some light on Coptic myths and the commemorations of suffering and sacrifice that reproduce the Coptic past, I will attempt to outline in a rudimentary fashion the main personalities and events of the third to fifth centuries AD that captivate the imagination of Egyptian Christians to this day. The Greeks of Egypt were the first converts to Christianity and the first proselytizers among the native population. Alexander the Great arrived in Egypt in October 332 BC; the priests of Memphis (modem Luxor) offered him the crown of Upper and Lower Egypt, and after seven months, in April of 331, he left Egypt to engage in further conquests. He was never to return; he died eight years later in the year 323 BC in Babylon. However, his legacy, the prosperous capital city of Alexandria, which he had founded in April 331, was to become, under the Ptolemaic dynasty, the home of some of the greatest scholars of the age: Euclid the geometer, Erastosthenes the geographer, and Philo the New Platonist, a Jew who resided in Alexandria in the first century AD (after the Greeks, the Jews constituted the largest foreign community in Alexandria).