AHC/WI: Ancient Egyptian colonization of Mediterranean Europe?

I imagine this could be done sometime during the late 18th or early 19th dynasty most easily but it's up to you. My challenge is to have a Kingdom that is doing realistically well (perhaps with less external or internal conflict than OTL and a more sea faring culture emergent) colonize and populate southern Europe to any significant degree - effecting its culture and genetic makeup longterm.

The Egyptians do not have to (and almost certainly could not) establish any sort of lasting imperial colony across the Med Sea, but preferably there would be enough of a presence to change the linguistic, cultural, musical, genetic, and technological course of the colonized area.

It also does not have to be a military or strictly military conquest. There could be a peaceful immigration of Egyptian peoples for religious, political, necessity, or even adventurous reasons.

Once the challenge is fulfilled, I'd like to discuss the effects of a modicum of Egyptian-ness in early Greco-Roman development (say Egyptians conquer or infiltrate Greece just as the Mycenaeans collapse, and infiltrate southern Italy around this time as well establishing trade routes around the Mediterranean) into the coming centuries.

Once the empire collapses in Egypt, will Greece and Rome still develop along similar lines, but with a tinge of Egyptian-ness leftover? (I hope so)

What do you think about a semi-Egyptian southern Europe?
 
On a related note, I wonder if Egyptians could and would have seized some of modern Maghreb, Libya. Not sure if there would have been any reason, but...
 
I guess that one of the best TLs on this site, The Realm of Million Years, could be heading that way ( it's currently dormant, but I hope fervently it goes ahead). That may be true of "Lo, the Nobles Lament, the Poor Rejoice", the other outstanding Ancient Egyptian TL I know of here (unfortunately sleeping too).
In general, however, I'd say that Egyptians would see very little point in going around colonising anywhere on the Med shores. AFAIK, only two groups did so in any consistent and sustained way: the Greeks and the Phoenicians.
Both came from homelands with relatively scarce arable land that depended on rain (as opposed to rivers) and their collective backs against noticeably large mountain chains. Basically, the sea was pretty much the only place they could go. Also, Greeks and Phoenicians shared a political landscape made of squabbling and fractitious city-states that had interest in dumping politically undesirable people far away (not that it worked every time, but still) that is pretty much the polar opposite of the normal condition in Egypt.
On top of it, all of this IOTL happened during the Iron Age. We have little evidence of sustained and widespread colonization before (Cyprus may be an important exception, but it's easy to explain if you consider its role in the Bronze Age as a key source of copper and its geographical location).

Late Bronze Age sailing tech was pretty limited, and set sail to far away lands would have been a very dangerous and complicated affair that is unlikely to be seen as worthy by your average Egyptian leader.
And many people in top positions during the New Kingdom era would have likely seen any colonization effort as a way to take their tax base away, and react accordingly.

So, no push or pull factor for Egyptians to move by sea, I believe.
You should change Ancient Egypt quite strongly (as both the TL's mentioned above do) to get something similar plausible.
 
On a related note, I wonder if Egyptians could and would have seized some of modern Maghreb, Libya. Not sure if there would have been any reason, but...

I'm by no means an Egyptian expert, but iirc there was some military conflict with western neighbors during the 19th Dynasty. It may have been defensive, but many conquests begin that way...

I guess that one of the best TLs on this site, The Realm of Million Years, could be heading that way ( it's currently dormant, but I hope fervently it goes ahead). That may be true of "Lo, the Nobles Lament, the Poor Rejoice", the other outstanding Ancient Egyptian TL I know of here (unfortunately sleeping too).
In general, however, I'd say that Egyptians would see very little point in going around colonising anywhere on the Med shores. AFAIK, only two groups did so in any consistent and sustained way: the Greeks and the Phoenicians.
Both came from homelands with relatively scarce arable land that depended on rain (as opposed to rivers) and their collective backs against noticeably large mountain chains. Basically, the sea was pretty much the only place they could go. Also, Greeks and Phoenicians shared a political landscape made of squabbling and fractitious city-states that had interest in dumping politically undesirable people far away (not that it worked every time, but still) that is pretty much the polar opposite of the normal condition in Egypt.
On top of it, all of this IOTL happened during the Iron Age. We have little evidence of sustained and widespread colonization before (Cyprus may be an important exception, but it's easy to explain if you consider its role in the Bronze Age as a key source of copper and its geographical location).

Late Bronze Age sailing tech was pretty limited, and set sail to far away lands would have been a very dangerous and complicated affair that is unlikely to be seen as worthy by your average Egyptian leader.
And many people in top positions during the New Kingdom era would have likely seen any colonization effort as a way to take their tax base away, and react accordingly.

So, no push or pull factor for Egyptians to move by sea, I believe.
You should change Ancient Egypt quite strongly (as both the TL's mentioned above do) to get something similar plausible.

Interesting. Can you offer a brief rundown of the TLs you mentioned? I like to know what I'm getting into.

As far as the rest, my thinking was that, without fundamentally changing the New Kingdom too much you could still have a more seafaring culture arise organically during the 18th Dynasty. More military success along the eastern coast of the Med Sea could inspire such a culture to make it into Greece and slowly infiltrate/colonize/conquer the area there via ports. By the middle to late nineteenth dynasty there could potentially be a strong Egyptian presence in Greece and a port from there to southern Italy and surrounding islands.

Also, by the end of the 19th Dynasty there were plenty of people the king would wish to deport, these could go to trade colonies in Greece and Italy before the Empire slowly begins to collapse.

Is this workable? Has it been done?

Also, IIRC, the trip from Egypt to say, Sicily or Italy, was a dangerous one by sea.

Indeed. My thinking was that the Egyptians would have to have a strong presence in Greece or thereabouts to begin to colonize Italy to any substantial degree.
 
Are we ok with Egyptian intervention/economic adventurism in the Eastern Med rather than outright colonial programs, at least initially? OTL in the late Bronze/Iron age Egypt had very substantial trade interests in the eastern Mediterranean. We also know the Hittites had some limited involvement in this area(various relations with Ahhiwiyya and Suppiluliuma II's attacks on Cyprus). Perhaps if the late Hittite empire has fewer internal problems and reaches a semistable entente cordiale with Assyria concerning Syria(both perfectly possible with a POD in the reign of Urhi-Teshub) while letting relations with Egypt deteriorate, Egypt and Hatti could start competing for power around the Greek Islands and Greece to secure a better part of their trade income. This is especially plausible if neither of them want to go to war outright in Syria, which Egypt might not want to do since it has had bad luck outright fighting Hittites in Syria and the Hittites might not want to do lest they disrupt the balance of power with Assyria.
 
Regarding Egypt, other then a few escapades and the New Kingdom, Egypt didn't really look beyond its borders, rather it was pulled out by the Assyrians, Persians, Greeks, Romans, and so forth. Reading "Destinty Disrupted" the reasoning seems to be largely geographical, as much as Egypt was protected on all sides by favorable geography it also seemed to make it insular. Alexandria After all was the first and only Egyptian capital on the coast, reflecting the Mediteranian Mindset of the Macedonians.

The Phoenicians for example were rather on the border between the eastern part of the "Mediteranian World" where geography favored sea routes and trade, and the "Middle World" with the flat territory stretching across the Cradle of Civilization that favored land travel. In Phoencia they met up and prompted the people's there to expand for trade and by trade lanes, I think the fact that the Middle World was dominated by much more populous land empires (Achamenids) prompted the Phoencians to look to the seas where sailing and craftmenship of quality could beat quantity.

*Middle World being the "Middle East" and "Med World" being coastal Med. Sea.
 
Alexandria After all was the first and only Egyptian capital on the coast, reflecting the Mediteranian Mindset of the Macedonians.

And Alexandria was of course "Alexandria by Egypt", not Alexandria in Egypt. Only with Christianity did Alexandria really become part of the provincial mainstream.

Also, IIRC, the trip from Egypt to say, Sicily or Italy, was a dangerous one by sea.

Yep, something to do with tides and currents, iirc. It's given as one of the factors Byzantium was able to comfortably hold its own against the navies of the Caliphate in the eighth and ninth centuries: it's much, much easier to sail "clockwise" around the Eastern Mediterranean than it is to go the other way. Thinking about it, the majority of Greek and Phoenician colonies tend to go this way...

So, any hypothetical Egyptian colonies would likely be in Libya or, at a push, perhaps Malta or Sicily. But I agree with others that there's not a tremendous amount of reason for Egypt to go a'-colonisin'.
 
I'm by no means an Egyptian expert, but iirc there was some military conflict with western neighbors during the 19th Dynasty. It may have been defensive, but many conquests begin that way...

Interesting. Can you offer a brief rundown of the TLs you mentioned? I like to know what I'm getting into.

As far as the rest, my thinking was that, without fundamentally changing the New Kingdom too much you could still have a more seafaring culture arise organically during the 18th Dynasty. More military success along the eastern coast of the Med Sea could inspire such a culture to make it into Greece and slowly infiltrate/colonize/conquer the area there via ports. By the middle to late nineteenth dynasty there could potentially be a strong Egyptian presence in Greece and a port from there to southern Italy and surrounding islands.

Also, by the end of the 19th Dynasty there were plenty of people the king would wish to deport, these could go to trade colonies in Greece and Italy before the Empire slowly begins to collapse.

Is this workable? Has it been done?



Indeed. My thinking was that the Egyptians would have to have a strong presence in Greece or thereabouts to begin to colonize Italy to any substantial degree.

Egypt had intermittent defensive conflicts with "Libyans" and other people from its west for much of its history, and quite consistently tried with varying but generally fairly good success to control the major oases immediately west of the Nile Valley.
The problem is that most of what is there is basically desert and really not worth the bother of permanent conquest outside said oases.
The closest to anything worthwhile in that direction is Cyrenaica, which is across an insane amount of desert difficult to control by Bronze Age standards and not particularly useful to Egypt anyway.
So basically, what would be needed is a stronger and more developed culture there that could pose such a threat to motivate the Egyptian to undertake the considerable logistical and political effort required for establishing control. But that would also entail a more populated Cyrenaica, which hardly favors colonization on a major scale. The area was far less useful than the Nile agriculturally and would have required major shifts from the agricultural techniques the Egyptians were used to.
So, not much promise there.

"The nobles lament" assumes that a form of local council government/proto-democracy develops during the First Intermediate. We don't know where Jonathan Edelstein intends to go from the premise, but I suppose there's chance a this Egypt could more focused on trade and out-ward looking.
"The Realm of Million years" has a far more successful reign of Akhenaten, both externally and internally. The result, reducing spoliers to minimum, is a strong Atenist Egyptian imperial state that, again, is likely to prove far more outwardly oriented and interested in exploration and expansion than IOTL.
Both TLs are extremely well-written and treat the topics with considerable insight, detail and acumen, but so far, neither has shown Egypt actually undertaking serious naval expansion.
I would expect, anyway, that the mark Egypt leaves in both these worlds would be larger than IOTL all over the spectrum.

I don't know if something like you propose has ever have been done.
Very ancient Alternate History is damn difficult to manage for many reasons and we don't have many Ancient Egypt TLs.
I can see two major difficulties, the first being that, by Bronze Age standards, Greece is damn far away by see and projecting power in the area would be a nightmare for the Pharaoh on the long term. The second is that the second half of the second millennium BCE had significant local powers in the Aegean that are likely to make life very hard for major Egyptian presence: the Minoans were probably better sailors than the Egyptians and had every reason to be so. Later on, you have the Miceneans, that I understand as being loosely unified by one or two central hegemonic kingdoms (Micene and somewhere in Beotia IIRC).
Egypt had contact with both historically, but trying to conquer and keep territory on their home turf is very likely to seem a very pointless proposition to any sane Egyptian ruler.
It may be attempted and pursued for a few years (maybe as a part of some grand strategy to encircle the Hittites?) and then abandoned to leave an "Egypt in Exile" somewhere in Greece growing on its own?
Probably not impossible, but sounds very though.
 
While this idea does sound very interesting, I don't see it really happening. I'm no Egyptologist, but there weren't the social triggers in place, nor the resource need.
 
Tin was the ultimate strategic metal of the bronze age. A quick google suggests egypt got her tin initially from crete and cyprus, and then later from spain and britain.

I would guess that tin from the further sources was carried on phoenicians or greeks.

So... posit a major northern power, possibly the hittites, occupying crete and cyprus, denying egypt those sources. Said power controls far enough south that the phoenicians have to cease trading tin to egypt.

In this scenario, egypt has GOOD reason to set up major trade networks with the western Med, and maybe *Carthage would be an egyptian colony rather than a punic one.
 
Egypt could do as the Assyrians did, conquering the Pheonicians and putting their sailing expertise to the task of naval exploration and conquest.

A timeline in which the Egyptians more soundly thrash the sea peoples with minimum loss of life or prestige has been in the back of my mind for awhile now. Since the Sea People basically introduced a bronze era dark age for the majority of the region, a more stable Egypt would essentially have its way with other powers for a few centuries at the least. In order to keep trade stable and perhaps prevent another upwelling of nomadic destruction from taking place Egypt might enter into another era of empire building and colonization (their first empire was inspired by the conquests of the Hyksos, a foreign power that ruled during the second intermediate period and inspired the Pharaohs to conquer their neighbors lest they be conquered).

Alternatively, perhaps the early Pharaohs of the New Kingdom could be inspired to take a more aggressive policy towards their empire. In the ancient days Egyptians conquered Nubia through a program of fortress building and colonization. Had they stuck with that strategy rather than the hands off "swear loyalty to me and keep trade flowing and we will leave you to your own devices" approach, maybe we could see more Nubias in later centuries. In other words, a few policy changes could introduce successor states in the Levant and possibly regions of Mesopotamia. If one of those states is also from a region that favors sea faring (the Pheonicians or whatever was left of the Minoans after Thera blew) we could see Egyptian culture or something similar spread to other parts of the Mediterrean in addition to or instead of Greek and Asiatic cultures.
 
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