Sacred Science: Knowledge, Ruler Cult, and the Ptolemaic State

Abstract

Traditionally, ruler cult has been conceptualized by historians as a useful framework for ancient Greeks to have legitimized (if not comprehend) the drastic political changes of the Hellenistic age. With their newly acquired imperial apparatus—bureaucracies, enormous tax bases, treasuries, armies, armadas, supervised trade routes, mints, archives, limitless livestock, talented individuals, enslaved persons, in short, the full resources of empire—the Ptolemies could wield political power at a scale previously incomprehensible, if not illegitimate (insofar as it reeked of the Persians or, worse, Athenians). But that same imperial apparatus also enabled the Ptolemies to produce scientific information and technology at a scale and of a quality which similarly would have boggled the minds and capabilities of a polis or even Macedon at its height. In less than a century, Ptolemaic courtiers and explorers had measured the earth’s circumference and catalogued the sky, explored sub-Saharan Africa and the Indian Ocean, invented automata and experimented with magnetism, dissected humans and discovered pulse, and perfected torsion artillery and transferred war elephant technology. Eschewing a triumphalist reading of these achievements, this dissertation instead draws on methodologies from History of Science and STS to excavate the destabilizing effects such an influx of knowledge might have had upon the Ptolemaic state, ultimately asking a question relevant to our own age: how do states survive drastic scientific change? Using the Ptolemies as a case study, I argue that, just as ruler cult provided Greeks a conceptual framework for coming to terms with the new political realities wrought by empire, so too did ruler cult empower Greeks to comprehend the epistemological changes induced by empire.