In this stunning book, Edward Kelting tells the story of how Rome discovered Egyptian culture in the first century ce. He skillfully explores the lives of the people who made it happen, a group of bicultural intellectuals and writers who worked in Rome but had their roots in Alexandria. This is an important book that needed to be written and deserves to be widely read.--Ian Rutherford, Professor of Greek at the University of Reading Rich and wide-ranging, this book interrogates the concept of Aegyptiaca and finds something that was never fixed, never simply the merging of two pure components, Greek and Egyptian. The reality was, instead, both heterogeneous and fluid. Kelting repeatedly draws out the problems of reductive readings of Greco-Roman Egypt. A major scholarly contribution.--John Dillery, Professor of Classics at the University of Virginia
