In his classic study, Alien Wisdom: The Limits of Hellenization, Arnaldo Momigliano explored what he called “an intellectual event of the first order, the confrontation of the Greeks with four other civilizations” in the Hellenistic period: Romans, Celts, Jews, and Iranians. Remarkable for its absence from his account is the ancient civilization of the Egyptians, which had long fascinated the Greeks, and, after the conquests of Alexander, confronted them more directly than ever before. Momigliano's argument for excluding Egypt from his lectures was twofold. First, “there was no dramatic change in the Greek evaluation of Egypt during the Hellenistic period.” Egypt from Homer through Herodotus had been a fantastical land of “strange customs” and “unusual knowledge” and remained so into the Hellenistic period. Secondly,

Momigliano went on to state that “the Hellenistic Greeks preferred the fanciful images of an eternal Egypt to the Egyptian thought of their time.”