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The paper deals with the ideological, religious, and historical aspects of the Potter’s Oracle. Other Greco-Egyptian sources (the Manetho tradition, the story of Nectanebo, and the figure of Alexander in the early Alexandrian prototype of the Romance of Alexander) allow us to discern in the Late Egyptian historiography the concept of long historical cycles ending with the disruption of order in Egypt and its eventual restoration by the agency of a great king-founder. Thus, in the Potter’s Oracle the Macedonian rule in Egypt is a disaster ending a historical cycle and the eventual legitimate king originates from the Sun and is appointed by Isis as a new king-founder. Symptomatically, this concept of historical cycles can be given various messages in different versions: for Manetho contacts with the world outside Egypt are no good, and isolation is the best way to run foreign affairs (probably, because Egypt is not strong enough to achieve something better while a defeat by foreigners costs it too much); on the contrary, the concept of Alexander, son of Nectanebo, as a ‘new Sesonchosis’ implies that Egypt’s expansion and supremacy in the world is something natural. The Potter’s Oracle is, in fact, ultra-isolationist; and the comparison of these sources reveals a variety of ‘virtual histories’ shaped from standard elements and from the same matrix of the concept of long cycles.
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