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Document Details : Title: What's in a Name? Subtitle: Greek, Egyptian and Biblical Traditions in the Cambyses Romance Author(s): VENTICINQUE, Philip F. Journal: Bulletin of the American Society of Papyrologists Volume: 43 Date: 2006 Pages: 139-158 DOI: 10.2143/BASP.43.0.3209391 Abstract : This paper investigates the literary and historiographical implications for the conflation of Cambyses, the Persian king who conquered Egypt in 525 BC, and Nebuchadnezzar, the Babylonian king who ordered the destruction of the Temple of Solomon in Jerusalem in 586 BC in the late antique Coptic text known as the Cambyses Romance. In this fictionalized account of the Persian invasion of Egypt, the anonymous author of the Coptic Cambyses Romance blends Greek, Egyptian and Biblical traditions of destruction and impiety committed at the hands of these two rulers and employs these tales for his own rhetorical ends. In conflating the characters of these two notorious rulers, the author of the Coptic story draws an implicit comparison between their destructive and impious actions in Egypt and Jerusalem, and thereby forges a link not only between Greek and Egyptian traditions that deal with Cambyses and Biblical representations of Nebuchadnezzar, but also with Jerusalem and Egypt itself, which becomes the new Jerusalem. |
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