YouSaid · the spoken record

Toby Wilkinson

lines on the record: 58
first: 2026-05-27
most recent: 2026-05-27
sittings or episodes: 1
sources: podcast

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“Yeah, well, I've just finished my next book, actually, which is on another aspect of the ancient world. I can't say much more than that because I've signed an NDA with a Hollywood documentary producer. So watch this space. And it may be coming to a screen near you as well as to a bookstore near you fairly soon.”
2026-05-27 · Conversations with Tyler · Toby Wilkinson on Ptolemaic Egypt and the First Great Commercial Civilization · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Yeah, I headed up the National University in Fiji for a period. That was pretty exciting, especially as it coincided with the COVID-19 pandemic. So that brought a whole set of challenges. Again, common thread being one of communication. Leadership is really all about communication. And I was also able to indulge my love of languages by learning some Fijian as well, which is a fascinating language.”
2026-05-27 · Conversations with Tyler · Toby Wilkinson on Ptolemaic Egypt and the First Great Commercial Civilization · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“I think it's helped me. I hope it's helped me to write for a broader readership. If I look back at some of the first things that I wrote as an academic, they were pretty soteric, pretty dry and dusty, as a lot of academic journal articles tend to be. I now try to write in a style that is well grounded in research but accessible to anybody who is interested in the ancient world. And I think that has come out of needing to be much more outward-facing.”
2026-05-27 · Conversations with Tyler · Toby Wilkinson on Ptolemaic Egypt and the First Great Commercial Civilization · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“That's a kind of long story. But yeah, I think I would say that research in the humanities can be quite a solitary occupation, unlike in the sciences where scientists are working in labs, in teams, in the arts and humanities, more often than not, you're on your own in a library. And I enjoy that, but I also enjoy working with people and in bigger teams of people. And so I was able at a fairly early stage in my career to kind of to ride both horses, to work in bigger teams in a much more outward-facing role whilst maintaining my research and my interest in ancient Egypt. And it's been a great combination.”
2026-05-27 · Conversations with Tyler · Toby Wilkinson on Ptolemaic Egypt and the First Great Commercial Civilization · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“So I can get by in French, German, a modicum of Italian. I can make myself understood in Arabic. Those are the modern languages. Then in terms of ancient languages, ancient Egyptian, of course, I dabbled a little bit in Sumerian and Akkadian and Hittite once upon a time, but I've forgotten much of that now.”
2026-05-27 · Conversations with Tyler · Toby Wilkinson on Ptolemaic Egypt and the First Great Commercial Civilization · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“I've had a pretty, well, I was going to say circuitous kind of career. I've done lots of different things. I suppose if there's a common thread to everything I've done, whether it's in my writing or in my leadership roles, it's all about communication. I love to take a lot of information, distill it, and to communicate it in a way that hopefully is accessible and relatable. And I guess that's the common thread. I like words. I've always loved words since I was a kid. And manipulating words, whether it's writing a book or writing a strategy, it's all about words at the end of the day and how you tell a story.”
2026-05-27 · Conversations with Tyler · Toby Wilkinson on Ptolemaic Egypt and the First Great Commercial Civilization · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Think it's a really good question. Egypt is a proud nation, and the Egyptians are a proud people, and I think they are very proud of their past and like to share, I think, with the world the achievements of the Egyptian civilizations of the past. So I think they draw great sustenance and great sense of their own position in the world from the ancient forebears. I mean, put it very prosaically, of course, tourism is absolutely critical to the Egyptian economy. There are literally millions of people dependent upon the tourist dollar, and those tourists largely come to Egypt for its ancient remains. Some go to the Red Sea for scuba diving, but most come to Egypt to admire its temples and its tombs and its pyramids. So it is both a source of national pride and a source of national income.”
2026-05-27 · Conversations with Tyler · Toby Wilkinson on Ptolemaic Egypt and the First Great Commercial Civilization · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“I love Middle Egypt, which is the stretch of the Nile Valley between Cairo and Luxor. It's not very much visited by tourists. There's a rhythm of life there which is slower than in the big cities. It's a place where the past feels much more tangible. It's scenically very beautiful. Cliffs coming very close to the river's edge. Yeah, I love Middle Egypt.”
2026-05-27 · Conversations with Tyler · Toby Wilkinson on Ptolemaic Egypt and the First Great Commercial Civilization · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“And, I would say. So, particularly when you're out of the cities in the countryside in a small Egyptian village, you will see patterns of subsistence, of farming, architecture of mud brick houses that has changed very little in three, four, five thousand years. So life, the rhythm of life, the patterns of life in a rural Egyptian community are still very recognizable from the days of the pharaohs. But contrast that with the cities of Cairo or Alexandria. These are big modern metropolises that don't seem to have very much to do with or very many visible signs of the ancient world. So it's both and, I think, you know, for me as an Egyptologist, I love getting into the rural parts of Egypt because there one can almost feel the past as still very much present.”
2026-05-27 · Conversations with Tyler · Toby Wilkinson on Ptolemaic Egypt and the First Great Commercial Civilization · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Not to the same degree as there was in the 1920s when Egyptian themes were picked up in almost every domain from architecture, as you say, to jewelry design and costume and songs and films. But the Egyptian influence is still one of the kind of traditions that artists and designers do draw from time to time, whether it's the Luxor Hotel in Las Vegas or Egyptian elements that are popping up in art and design, but it doesn't have the same worldwide appeal that it did in the 1920s.”
2026-05-27 · Conversations with Tyler · Toby Wilkinson on Ptolemaic Egypt and the First Great Commercial Civilization · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“The discovery of King Tut's tomb was the first archaeological discovery of the modern media age. So Lord Carnarvon did a very smart thing. He entered into an exclusive relationship with the times of London to cover the excavation.”
2026-05-27 · Conversations with Tyler · Toby Wilkinson on Ptolemaic Egypt and the First Great Commercial Civilization · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Yeah, I'm not sure that I got a satisfactory answer to your question, Tyler. It's a good one. Why at this moment in history did it all suddenly kind of come together and not before? Yeah, I need to ponder that one a little more.”
2026-05-27 · Conversations with Tyler · Toby Wilkinson on Ptolemaic Egypt and the First Great Commercial Civilization · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“I think when we look at the origins of these great civilizations all within a few centuries of each other, there's a kind of combination of factors that each one individually perhaps wouldn't have tipped the balance, but taken together they made a difference. Climate, very important one. So this is a period where there is a shift in the rainbelt across North Africa and the Middle East. It shifts further south. It leads to the drying out of large swathes of land that had previously been inhabitable by cattle herders and small-scale farmers. And what this does is concentrate population in river valleys. People head for the permanent sources of water. And that critical mass of people in a fairly constrained area does give rise to social change and to the emergence of civilization. So climatic stress, climate change, environmental pressures, certainly a big factor right across.”
2026-05-27 · Conversations with Tyler · Toby Wilkinson on Ptolemaic Egypt and the First Great Commercial Civilization · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Curiously enough, the Egyptians throughout most of their history don't seem to have been motivated by a great sense of empire building. They had a sense of themselves as a chosen people, and the sense of their land as a chosen land. And when they write about other countries and cultures, they are very pejorative. They're very denigrating of other cultures and cultures because Egypt to them is special. The land of Egypt, the people of Egypt are unique. They are God's creation. So they never really have that same sense of wanting to conquer lots of other territories because nothing in their minds could ever live up to Egypt and the Egyptians.”
2026-05-27 · Conversations with Tyler · Toby Wilkinson on Ptolemaic Egypt and the First Great Commercial Civilization · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“That's a good question. Egypt is fairly secure within natural borders for much of its history. So if you think about it, it's bounded by deserts, with the Mediterranean Sea to the north, the only land bridge between Egypt and the continent of Asia is this very narrow Isthmus along the northern fringe of the Sinai Peninsula. So it's quite hard for aggressive forces actually to infiltrate Egypt. It has pretty secure natural borders. It has an incredibly fertile ecology thanks to the River Nile. So it's able to produce enough food, more than enough food for its own purposes and really power a great civilization. So climate, ecology, natural borders, I think they, yeah, they make a pretty strong and stable combination.”
2026-05-27 · Conversations with Tyler · Toby Wilkinson on Ptolemaic Egypt and the First Great Commercial Civilization · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“That the gods and the people had this contract mediated through the person of the king is the defining idea of ancient Egyptian civilization and gives rise to all of those aspects that we would recognize today as most characteristically Egyptian, pyramids, temples, tombs in the valley of the kings it's all it's all there because of the idea of divine kingship.”
2026-05-27 · Conversations with Tyler · Toby Wilkinson on Ptolemaic Egypt and the First Great Commercial Civilization · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Writing defines the civilization from the outset until the very end. Writing is not just a means of communication. It's not even principally a means of communication in ancient Egypt. It's hieroglyphics, quite literally, the signs of the gods that the sacred signs. Hieroglyphics is a way of recording for posterity an ideal state of being. And this includes rule by the pharaohs. So it encodes their whole worldview. It's not just a way of communicating everyday ideas. And it is co-evil with Egyptian civilization, so very much a defining feature. And then kingship. I mean, what makes Pharonic Egypt pharonic is the fact that it had a pharaoh and a pharaoh is not just a king, he is God on earth. He's God incarnate. And it was that idea that there was ancient Egyptian society was almost like a pyramid itself with the king, the pharaoh at the apex. And the idea...”
2026-05-27 · Conversations with Tyler · Toby Wilkinson on Ptolemaic Egypt and the First Great Commercial Civilization · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Well, I mean, in those days, the Nile, when it was during the inundation, when it was flooded, came right up to the base of the Giza Plateau. So it would have been possible to float blocks of stone from the quarries on the other side of the river right up to the base of the building site in a way that couldn't be done today. So, yeah, some blocks brought to the building site by water but then dragged up the slope to the site itself.”
2026-05-27 · Conversations with Tyler · Toby Wilkinson on Ptolemaic Egypt and the First Great Commercial Civilization · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“With a lot of people and a lot of grunt work, but essentially hauling blocks of stone on wooden sledges up from the quarry to the building site up large ramps of earth and then laid in place very carefully and dressed from the top down as they cleared all of their ramps away. So it can be done. It just requires a big workforce and a lot of time.”
2026-05-27 · Conversations with Tyler · Toby Wilkinson on Ptolemaic Egypt and the First Great Commercial Civilization · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Well, I think different Egyptologists would have different opinions on this. I personally think that the most Sophisticated and refined jewellery was produced in the 12th dynasty. So this is between about 1950 and 1800 BC. Very beautiful designs inlaid with Carnelian and turquoise and lapis lazuli, gold filigree work. It's a very refined aesthetic. Why? I think because you had a strong and stable regime that was able to be a great patron of the arts. I like to compare Egypt in the 12th dynasty with France under the sun king Louis XIV. It was a time when arts and craftsmanship really excelled under royal patronage. Later on the Egyptians produced heavier, more gaudy, more kind of showy jewelry, but to my mind the 12th dynasty is really the pinnacle.”
2026-05-27 · Conversations with Tyler · Toby Wilkinson on Ptolemaic Egypt and the First Great Commercial Civilization · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Not a lot until the Persians, and as we spoke about at the beginning, the Persian Empire runs at its eastern extremity right up to the borders of India and also includes much of Egypt. And it's through that medium, the Egyptians become cognizant of Indian civilization. So, for example, Darius I, great emperor of Persia, but also ruler of Egypt, he cuts an early version of the Suez Canal to join the Red Sea with the Nile, and sets up along his canal a whole series of kind of boundary stones. And on them he has an inscription which celebrate him as a great leader. And he mentions the lands under his control. In ancient Egyptian hieroglyphics, and they include Sindh, the ancient name for India. So it was really through the medium of the Persians that these two great civilizations Come to know each other.”
2026-05-27 · Conversations with Tyler · Toby Wilkinson on Ptolemaic Egypt and the First Great Commercial Civilization · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“I think there was a lot of sharing of ideas in the ancient world. The idea that Egypt was on its own and the Middle East was on its own and the Greek world was on its own, not at all. There was always exchange of people and materials and commodities and ideas. And if you look at, for example, some of the Psalms, you'll find not just echoes, but entire chunks of ancient Egyptian literature that have been sort of, as we would say today, cut and pasted from one to the other. So people of learning, scribes, writers, poets certainly would have shared ideas with others of their kind across national and linguistic boundaries. And the more we study the ancient world, the more of these interconnections become apparent to us.”
2026-05-27 · Conversations with Tyler · Toby Wilkinson on Ptolemaic Egypt and the First Great Commercial Civilization · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“In the entire corpus of ancient Egyptian writing, the name Israel only occurs once, and this is on a victory stealer from the reign of Maren Ptar, so this is the 13th century BC. It's in the context of a whole list of lands and peoples that the Egyptian pharaoh has conquered. And Israel is included there not as the name of a territory, but as the name of a tribe. And the phrases Israel is vanquished, his seed is no more. So this is referring to the Israelites rather than Israel as a territory. And it's almost a footnote in the ancient Egyptian record. So it's always been one of those curiosities, people looking for echoes of the biblical, the Judeo-Christian narrative in ancient Egyptian texts. They don't find a lot and Israel occurs just the once.”
2026-05-27 · Conversations with Tyler · Toby Wilkinson on Ptolemaic Egypt and the First Great Commercial Civilization · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“More than we used to think we could. So it was fashionable fifty years ago to decry Herodotus as a charlatan making up stories, you know, tall tales of Egypt, none of which seemed to stack up. The more we've done archaeological excavation, the more documents that we've unearthed, the more it turns out that Herodotus was actually quite accurate in many ways. Yes, of course he embellished his counts as all historians ancient and modern do, I suppose, to an extent. But at its core, Herodotus is not that unreliable”
2026-05-27 · Conversations with Tyler · Toby Wilkinson on Ptolemaic Egypt and the First Great Commercial Civilization · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Archaeology is still quite a small subject. It's not something that many people choose to study at university, not by comparison with economics or math or whatever it might be. It's still quite a niche pursuit. Funding as always is a constraint, you know, mounting a big archaeological excavation or underwater exploration is not a cheap undertaking. It's not an inexpensive thing to do. And the sources of funding are constrained. So I guess, yeah, getting more people into the discipline and finding ways for them to utilize their talents, that would be great. I think the understanding is there, but it's shared amongst a fairly small group of experts. So bringing more people into the discipline would certainly be a good thing.”
2026-05-27 · Conversations with Tyler · Toby Wilkinson on Ptolemaic Egypt and the First Great Commercial Civilization · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Of the above, you've just put your finger on. I mean, only recently there's been underwater archaeology, which has reconstructed the appearance of one of the islands in the great harbour of Alexandria, which it turns out Cleopatra spent a great deal of time fortifying and turning into great sort of commercial slash dynastic port. So that's only come up out of the sea in the last year or two. That's pretty astonishing. Yeah, the fact that we can now read roles of papyrus without unrolling them through x-rays and AI, we are poised really at the beginning of a revolution in the study of ancient texts because many of these papyrus roles are too friable, too fragile to unroll. But if we can now read them with modern technology, that will open up whole new vistas of understanding of the ancient world. So yeah, I mean, archaeological science is really poised to make.”
2026-05-27 · Conversations with Tyler · Toby Wilkinson on Ptolemaic Egypt and the First Great Commercial Civilization · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“I find it a dirty mess. Yeah, I find it like any great city. I find it has a kind of vitality to it, which is quite energizing, but it's not a place that you go in search of the ancient past, I think.”
2026-05-27 · Conversations with Tyler · Toby Wilkinson on Ptolemaic Egypt and the First Great Commercial Civilization · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“There's not much to see, to be honest with you. There are a few monuments left over from this Ptolemaic period, but in today's Egypt Alexandria is a big metropolis. It's a bustling, busy, noisy, dirty city like any other big city. It's quite hard to see through that and glimpse anything of the ancient city that it once was. For me, ancient Alexandria exists in the imagination and in the writings of ancient historians, but it's quite hard to perceive on the ground today.”
2026-05-27 · Conversations with Tyler · Toby Wilkinson on Ptolemaic Egypt and the First Great Commercial Civilization · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“I suppose for me it would be why was it that Julius Caesar decided to throw in his lot with Cleopatra, which was not the obvious choice for a military general. At that time of the famous meeting between the two, the tide was with Cleopatra's brother, Ptolemy XIII. He had the army on his side. He seemed to Caesar kind of turned his back on his military instincts and decided to side with a woman in the ancient Roman world, the idea that a woman might be a leader and a great leader at that was anathema. So it's a very peculiar choice for Caesar. And of course, you know, historians have put it down to chemistry, to love. This was a great tactician. There must have been more to it than that. And I'd like to get into his head and find out what was really motivating him.”
2026-05-27 · Conversations with Tyler · Toby Wilkinson on Ptolemaic Egypt and the First Great Commercial Civilization · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“I'd love to know where Cleopatra was buried. Cleopatra's tomb has never been found, probably because it now lies underwater, much of ancient Alexandria has by combination of earthquake and rising sea levels been submerged under the waters of the Mediterranean. And that almost certainly includes the mausoleum where Cleopatra was buried. So it would be good to discover that. Equally, it would be very neat to find the burial place of Alexander the Great, the guy who started it all off. We're told ancient authors who recorded visits to Alexander's tomb tell us that he was buried in a glass coffin richly kind of overlaid with gold. It would be pretty amazing to find that too. So those are two of the persistent kind of questions that nag at Egyptologists and archaeologists, finding the tombs of those two great figures from ancient history. But for me personally, I'd quite like to just be transporting a time machine.”
2026-05-27 · Conversations with Tyler · Toby Wilkinson on Ptolemaic Egypt and the First Great Commercial Civilization · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“So, yes, she does matter. She manages to maintain and preserve not only her inheritance but the inheritance of three thousand years of pharonic civilization against all the odds. Of course, ultimately we all know how the story ends, but she had a remarkable run of success.”
2026-05-27 · Conversations with Tyler · Toby Wilkinson on Ptolemaic Egypt and the First Great Commercial Civilization · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“She mattered. You know, she was the last Egyptian pharaoh because after her Egypt as an independent nation ceases to exist and it becomes part of the Roman Empire. But more than that, you know, she was the inheritor of a dynasty that had ruled for 300 years. She managed to play the cards that she had been dealt more effectively than her immediate predecessors. She was very smart. All ancient authors are agreed upon that point. She was very charismatic. She was great strategist. She was the only Ptolemy ever to learn to speak Egyptian, so she could actually speak to her own people in their language rather than through a translator. And I suppose the question for me is not so much, why did Cleopatra ultimately fail, but how did she manage to survive and succeed for so long when all the other parts of Alexander's empire had already been gobbled up by the might of Rome?”
2026-05-27 · Conversations with Tyler · Toby Wilkinson on Ptolemaic Egypt and the First Great Commercial Civilization · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“That's right. Yeah, particularly with regard to the manufacture of certain products which were controlled by the government. So I'm thinking here of oil, cooking oil, for example. That was a government monopoly, but you could bid to acquire the franchise to produce cooking oil. And, you know, if you won the franchise, then it was pretty lucrative because you then had an effective monopoly on this until the next bidding war came around. The same was true for farming crowned land, so land held by the government. If you thought you could farm this more productively than the last guy, then you might be prepared to bid a little bit more. And then you'd reap the benefits. So, yeah, it was quite an interesting economic system. This was entirely new in ancient Egypt. This was a product of the Ptolemies and of their desire to maximize the tax take, really.”
2026-05-27 · Conversations with Tyler · Toby Wilkinson on Ptolemaic Egypt and the First Great Commercial Civilization · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Nothing that we can lay our hands on in that sense, no kind of reliable statistics, but we do have papyrus records of farmers complaining of the increasing tax burden, complaining that an ever-increasing amount of their harvest is being taken by the state in the form of an agricultural produce tax. So, no, we can't sort of chart this in graphs, but we definitely get a sense from the people on the ground that this is becoming increasingly burdensome.”
2026-05-27 · Conversations with Tyler · Toby Wilkinson on Ptolemaic Egypt and the First Great Commercial Civilization · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Augustus and Egypt goes from being a great civilization confident of itself to being a pawn in other people's power play and ultimately Rome is able to march into Alexandria, overthrow Cleopatra, and seize Egypt for itself. And it's a kind of salutary lesson for our own time that a civilization can appear to the outside world to be magnificent and wealthy and successful, but actually the seeds of its own destruction are usually lying there somewhere, just waiting for the conditions to germinate.”
2026-05-27 · Conversations with Tyler · Toby Wilkinson on Ptolemaic Egypt and the First Great Commercial Civilization · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Well, it begins with the finances. So the Ptolemaic Empire becomes overstretched. It has to invest hugely in its armed forces in order to fend off not just the growing predations of Rome, but actually its closer neighbors as well. That leads to higher taxes. There's a series of climatic shocks, poor Niles leading to poor harvests. So it's a kind of perfect storm. The economy goes south pretty quickly and the only solution that the Ptolemies can see is to go cap in hand to Roman moneylenders to bail out the Egyptian economy. And that then really gives Rome leverage over Egypt. That all gets bound up in the Republican politics of Rome and in the rivalry between Caesar and his rivals and then ultimately Octavian, who becomes the first emperor.”
2026-05-27 · Conversations with Tyler · Toby Wilkinson on Ptolemaic Egypt and the First Great Commercial Civilization · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“I do. I think the Romans were motivated by a real desire to conquer ancient Roman military leaders. We're only as good as their last victory on the battlefield. I mean, you see that in the later days of the Republic and the beginning of the empire. Whereas in ancient Egyptian tradition, certainly, military success was not the benchmark of a successful reign. It was something that you needed to do in order to protect your own borders, but there were other achievements honoring the gods, building great temples, presiding over a glittering civilization that were considered equally important.”
2026-05-27 · Conversations with Tyler · Toby Wilkinson on Ptolemaic Egypt and the First Great Commercial Civilization · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“I mean, at its greatest extent, the Ptolemaic Empire includes much of the coast of modern day Libya, certainly Cyprus, the Nile Valley, parts of present-day Lebanon and Syria, and Turkey and some islands in the Aegean. So, yeah, it's not as big as the Roman Empire would later be. What are it's constraining factors? Partly it's a lack of ambition. Well, not a lack of ambition, moderate ambition. I mean, the Ptolemies really want to rule Egypt, which is regarded as the jewel in Alexander the Great's crown. It's the most prosperous part of his empire. And the other terror...”
2026-05-27 · Conversations with Tyler · Toby Wilkinson on Ptolemaic Egypt and the First Great Commercial Civilization · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“So, slavery is one of the less attractive aspects of the kind of Greek package that comes to Egypt with the Ptolemies. Up until this point in Egypt, there hasn't really been slavery in the way that we would recognize it. There's been feudalism, but there's not been slavery. The Greeks introduce slavery to Egypt, and they buy and sell slaves in markets, including in Alexandria. It's still not a defining feature of Ptolemaic society in the way that it would be later in ancient Rome, but it has reared its ugly head for the first time in Egyptian history.”
2026-05-27 · Conversations with Tyler · Toby Wilkinson on Ptolemaic Egypt and the First Great Commercial Civilization · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“They do flow in, but there's an important dimension to Ptolemaic society, which is the ethnic divide. Put very bluntly the ruling class were Greek-speaking immigrants from the Mediterranean world, of course presided over by a Greek-speaking dynasty of pharaohs, the Ptolemies, and Greek speakers more or less monopolized all of the key positions of office. And then the vast majority of the population out in what the Greeks call the Korah, the countryside, were indigenous, Egyptians, many of whom, most of whom probably couldn't converse in Greek, which was the language of government and diplomacy. So it was very much a kind of, it was a society of two halves.”
2026-05-27 · Conversations with Tyler · Toby Wilkinson on Ptolemaic Egypt and the First Great Commercial Civilization · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Depended on where you lived, I think, if you were an urban dweller of Alexandria, you were living significantly above subsistence levels. You were a merchant, you were a trader, you were an artisan, you were manufacturing objects or trading objects. Yeah, you had a decent standard of living by the standards of the ancient world. If you were a peasant laboring in the fields of Upper Egypt, it was a pretty hand-to-mouth existence as it always had been.”
2026-05-27 · Conversations with Tyler · Toby Wilkinson on Ptolemaic Egypt and the First Great Commercial Civilization · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Oh, yeah, there's a big ceramics industry, so producing not just pots, but terracotta statues and votive objects. There's glassmaking, as you've said, there's advanced metallurgy, goldsmithing, ironworking, copper and bronze foundries. There's what we might call the decorative arts. So sculpture, painting. All of these things thrived in ancient Alexandria.”
2026-05-27 · Conversations with Tyler · Toby Wilkinson on Ptolemaic Egypt and the First Great Commercial Civilization · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Oh, they're two big exports that account for the lion's share of Egypt's wealth at the time are gold and grain. So gold has been mined in Egypt for millennia up to this point, but it's still the place in the ancient world that produces large quantities of gold. And of course, gold has always been a great currency of international commerce. And then Egypt is famed as the breadbasket of the ancient world. It produces a super abundance of grain thanks to the fertility of the Nile and the benign climate produces more than it needed for its own consumption by comparison with poorer agricultural regions in Greece and Asia Minor, which struggle to produce enough food. So, yeah, golden grain with the absolute engine of Egyptian prosperity.”
2026-05-27 · Conversations with Tyler · Toby Wilkinson on Ptolemaic Egypt and the First Great Commercial Civilization · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“If you can find one that's sort of skulking along the bottom, maybe they'll live in the Mississippi too. I wouldn't necessarily recommend it, but it does seem to have done the trick.”
2026-05-27 · Conversations with Tyler · Toby Wilkinson on Ptolemaic Egypt and the First Great Commercial Civilization · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Of a migraine sufferer could have a beneficial therapeutic effect. I mean, goodness me, it wasn't until the 20th century that modern medicine rediscovered the importance of electricity in terms of neural pathways. So, yeah, they were very sophisticated.”
2026-05-27 · Conversations with Tyler · Toby Wilkinson on Ptolemaic Egypt and the First Great Commercial Civilization · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“I think we would be surprised, pleasantly surprised by the sophistication of medical understanding at this time. There were ancient Egyptian papyri on medicine dating back many, many centuries before the Ptolemies came to the throne. And these looked in detail at all sorts of different afflictions and whether or not they could be treated and if so, what the recommended treatments were. I'll give you one example, migraine. Now we think of a migraine as a relatively Western modern phenomenon, a medical condition. But actually the ancient Egyptians recognized it, described it. They came up with a word for it, half head migraine. And they developed very sophisticated electrical treatments for migraine involving an electric discharge from the head of a catfish, a nile catfish emits a low-level electric discharge, and the ancient Egyptians had discovered that applying this to the head”
2026-05-27 · Conversations with Tyler · Toby Wilkinson on Ptolemaic Egypt and the First Great Commercial Civilization · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“And the third factor was really the kind of kleptomania of the Ptolemaic rulers. They were not just bibliophiles, but they wanted to acquire a copy or preferably the original of every book and manuscript circulating in the ancient Greek world. And to that end, they indulged in sort of downright thieving. They sent a word, for example, to Athens, which was one of the great centers of scholarship, a rival center of learning, and requested copies of books from Athens city library and the copies arrived in Alexandria. They were then seized by the Ptolemaic authorities and kept for Alexandria's own library. And they were only too happy to pay the fine because they had the books. So it was a combination of factors that really led Alexandria to being the greatest center for scholars and for scholarship.”
2026-05-27 · Conversations with Tyler · Toby Wilkinson on Ptolemaic Egypt and the First Great Commercial Civilization · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“I think there are three factors, really. I mean, one is certainly the Egyptian context, and I don't think those intellectual advances that were made in Alexandria could have been made anywhere else. So let's take anatomy, for example. In the Greek world in general, there was a taboo on cutting up.”
2026-05-27 · Conversations with Tyler · Toby Wilkinson on Ptolemaic Egypt and the First Great Commercial Civilization · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“I think there are a lot more scholarly works, I mean, both surviving and lost that were composed in ancient Alexandria that would be more surprising and more revelatory than those that you've just mentioned.”
2026-05-27 · Conversations with Tyler · Toby Wilkinson on Ptolemaic Egypt and the First Great Commercial Civilization · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“I think that would be a misrepresentation. I mean, Alexandria under the Ptolemies didn't produce a Socrates or a Plato. It is true. But what it did, what its scholars did was to synthesize strands of philosophy from ancient Greek thought, ancient Egyptian thought, Babylonian thought, ancient Hebrew philosophian and religion. So it was a melting pot and it maybe didn't throw up the big name, but it was a very fertile ground for the exchange and the interchange of ideas.”
2026-05-27 · Conversations with Tyler · Toby Wilkinson on Ptolemaic Egypt and the First Great Commercial Civilization · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source