Page:The Religion of Ancient Egypt.djvu/262

 to hear learned men account for the presence of Oriental ideas in Europe, by the transmission of these ideas through the channel of Alexandria. Alexandria was supposed to be the seat of Oriental philosophy, and Philo, Origen, Porphyry, Plotinos and other great names, were imagined to be the representatives of the alliance between Greek and Oriental thought. All this is now considered as unhistorical as the reign of Jupiter in Crete. It was a mere a priori fancy, which has not been verified by facts. The most accurate analysis of the Alexandrian philosophy has not succeeded in discovering a single element in it which requires to be referred to an Oriental source. All attempts to refer Alexandrian opinions to Eastern sources have proved abortive. And long before the great work of Zeller on Greek Philosophy had dealt with the problem in detail, M. Ampère had shown how extremely improbable the received hypothesis was. Alexandria was a commercial Greek town, inhabited by a population which cared not the least for Eastern ideas. The learned men in it were Greeks who had the utmost contempt for barbarians and their opinions. Of the Egyptian language and literature, they were profoundly ignorant. "It is incredible," he says, "to what an extent the Greeks of Alexandria remained strangers to the knowledge of the Egyptian language and writing; one could not understand it if there were not other instances of the contemptuous aversion of the