Subject Peoples and Civilizational Priority: Competition among Babylonians, Egyptians, and Judeans in the Hellenistic Era

This article proceeds on the principle that we need to decenter dominant ethnic groups—primarily Greeks and Greco-Macedonians in the early Hellenistic era—in order to understand other marginalized viewpoints and experiences, including but not limited to those of Judeans (Jews). An analysis of the Babylonian author Bel-re’ushu helps to provide a new angle on Judean (e.g., Artapanus) and Egyptian (e.g., Manetho) participation within ethnic discourses that include claims to civilizational priority. I would suggest that the rhetoric of ethnic superiority in writings by subject peoples can be viewed as a symptom of ethnic interactions and not merely as a literary response to elite Greek claims regarding the inferiority of supposedly “barbarian” peoples. So it is not always the currently hegemonic Greeks that are the principal interlocutors in these ethnic discourses.