Beyond Conflicts : Cultural and Religious Cohabitations in Alexandria and Egypt between the 1st and the 6th Century CE

That there were various ways of interaction between different groups in Graeco-Roman Egypt cannot be doubted, as a number of more or less recent regional studies have further reinforced. And as is well-known, Egypt emerges as a sort of exception in the study of ancient cultures and religions because it provides scholars with the opportunity to draw on a great number and variety of documents. Exploring interactively the diversity of documentary material is the main aim of this book. In socio-cultural terms, such an analysis corroborates the image of Egypt as a pervasive cultural system where for many centuries different elites coagulated themselves around a number of standard modalities to produce "cultural" and "religious" micro-systems. This shows that people, even when different languages and textual practices survive, respond to specific modalities of cohabitation under the umbrella of this hegemonic cultural "field."