The Egyptian Cults in Athens

Abstract

Ammon was made known to old Greece by the Greeks of Cyrene, Kimon visited the oracle at Siwa, Pindar wrote a hymn to Ammon, and the Athenians made his cult public at some undetermined date earlier than 371/0 B.C. Like Sarapis, Ammon seems never to have been extremely popular; Isis out-did them both. Nevertheless Ammon arrived long before, the others: the preserved records happen to show that he was receiving sacrifices from the Athenian generals themselves in a year (333/2) when the cult of Isis, which we learn about then for the first time, was still a cult of immigrants. Why Ammon, alone of all Egyptian gods, should have succeeded thus early is no mystery: he had an oracle, and he had Greek intermediaries.

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