Name: Egypt’s Last Hieroglyph & the Fiery Archbishop of Alexandria
Uploaded: 2025-08-19T00:02:18.000Z
Duration: 33 min 37 s
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A priest named Esmet Akom approaches the walls of Philae, a massive Egyptian temple on the southern edge of the once-powerful kingdom.

It's said that the god Osiris himself was buried here.

To engrave a name so that in one form or another, if only in written form, the worshiper can be in the presence worshiping the deity eternally.

That is Solange Ashby, associate professor of Egyptology at UCLA.

The Temple of Philae is unique in that it was still operating as a traditional temple hundreds of years after the majority of other temples elsewhere in Egypt had been forced to close or been repurposed as Christian churches.

And just a few years ago, Theodosius, the Roman emperor, banned the practice of the ancient Egyptian religion, what he calls paganism.

And he made Christianity the faith of the realm.

Even before that, the Egyptian religion had been in decline for decades, perhaps centuries.

There are only a handful of people left who can even write in the traditional Egyptian language of hieroglyphics.

If you look at the hieroglyphs, they're really ugly.

The person is struggling to compose intelligible sentences.

The inscription is meant to be a tribute to the god Mondeless, worshipped both in Egypt and the Nubian kingdom to the south.

Esmet Akom is defying the emperor, but he likely knows that his act of defiance is, in the end, futile.

He would have had a bad feeling that their way of worshipping traditional gods and practicing temple religion was really coming to a close.

What Esmet Akom probably does not know is that he is etching the last known hieroglyph ever composed in ancient Egypt.

I see it as the sort of the end of a glorious era.

This culture has now stumbled, and we see it fall with this final hieroglyphic inscription.

The Egyptian language and religion are nearly extinct.

Hundreds of miles to the north, at the foot of Mount Sinai, at the very same time this hieroglyph is written, a bishop is fighting what he sees as a holy battle to eradicate this paganism and bring Christianity to the Egyptian masses.

What drives the Patriarch of Alexandria to crush his enemies?

And is it actually possible to erase an entire religion?

The fourth century, the 300s, is a dramatic era of upheaval in the Roman Empire.

Before that time, Christians in the empire were persecuted for their beliefs, often executed.

The state religion was still polytheistic, the pantheon of gods largely inherited from the Greeks.

But in the year 312, the Roman Emperor Constantine converts to Christianity, abandoning Jupiter for Jesus.

In 380, the Emperor Theodosius makes Christianity the official state religion.

Rome, at this time, controls Egypt, which had its own religion.

Egyptians have been worshipping deities like Osiris and Anubis for thousands of years.

In 391, Theodosius explicitly bans the practice of this faith.

By the end of the fourth century, like, yeah, paganism is out, Christianity is in, and Theophilus sort of takes that and runs with it.

Christine Lucretz-Marquis is associate professor of church history at Union Presbyterian Seminary.

She reminds us this is still relatively early in the history of the church.

In the late 300s, five different cities are vying to be the so-called seat of Christianity.

Alexandria, Antioch, Constantinople, and Jerusalem in the east, and Rome in the west.

Each of these cities has an archbishop, the Christian leader of that city, other than Rome, which has the Pope.

But if one of these cities can rival Rome, then that archbishop would have an awful lot of power.

And the archbishop Theophilus of Alexandria thinks, why not me?

He's a good talker. He's a real presence. And he's fiery.

He's kind of that intense person in the room who catches your attention, but also you, if he's your friend, that's great.

And if you're on the wrong side of them, that's not going to be so much fun.

Alexandria has a deep connection with Christianity.

The first church was established there in the 40s.

And it's a major city in the Roman Empire.

Arriving in Alexandria by ship, you'd first pass the lighthouse of Pharaos, the second tallest structure in the ancient world, just behind the pyramid at Giza.

It shoots a beam of light into the sky, a flame magnified by a series of mirrors.

As you drew closer, you might have glimpsed the Library of Alexandria, long past its prime, but still a major center of knowledge.

But you also have, on this sort of higher prominent point, the Serapaeum.

The Serapaeum, a temple named for Serapis, a hybrid Egyptian-Greek god derived from Osiris.

A huge statue of Serapis sits in the middle of the temple.

Imagine a rectangular columned building with a massive courtyard.

The temple's designed for you to move in and out and into the streets of Alexandria so that traffic could like flow through in these big processions and out into the city.

It was a really important locus for power.

To the ruling Christians, it is also a symbol of the past, dedicated to an Egyptian deity, not to their god.

A few months after Emperor Theodosius makes Christianity the official state religion,

Archbishop Theophilus begins renovating an abandoned Egyptian temple, some distance from the Serapaeum.

It's part of his effort to Christianize Alexandria by physically converting buildings throughout the city.

Stephen Davis, Professor of Religious Studies and History at Yale, told us,

Theophilus justifies these actions by drawing on Christianity, the story of Jesus Christ himself.

When Jesus comes to town in Egypt, the Egyptian temple falls down.

It collapses basically under its own weight due to his presence.

And similarly, for a bishop like Theophilus, literally occupying a space, re-sacralizing a space in the name of Christianity, that's a public gesture that's one that is meant to demonstrate that Christianity is where it's at now.

During the renovation of this particular temple,

Theophilus uncovers a shrine filled with Egyptian religious relics.

And rather than treat these objects with respect, he has them paraded through the streets in a way that's meant to mock this ancient faith.

The Christians and the followers of the ancient Egyptian religion, they melee in the streets.

Eventually, sensing that they're outmatched, the practitioners of the Egyptian faith retreat to safety in the Serapaeum.

The Egyptians want their temple back, the one that Theophilus pulled those relics from.

Theophilus obviously disagrees, so they consult a higher power, Theodosius, the emperor.

Each side writes a letter making their case.

So it's actually like a, it's a property dispute, which is a little anachronistic, but like, this is my sacred site or it's yours.

Probably Theophilus stops constructing on this other site for a little bit to just like keep things calm in the city.

And so there's like this lull, but like this lull that probably has, like, I like to imagine with like a lot of charge energy in the air, like what's going to happen?

They all agree to meet at the Serapaeum because it's a site big enough to hold them.

And so what happens is like that sort of charge space over at this other site, all of that charge gets transferred to the Serapaeum when this letter gets read out.

And the letter says the pagans would be granted amnesty, but also that the Christians should eliminate the causes of the evils and the roots of the discord, which they interpret as destroy the Egyptian temples.

These Egyptian believers, they lock themselves in the inner sanctum where the statue is.

And then Theophilus and his rowdy Christian crew break in and decimate the statue.

A Christian soldier takes an axe to the statue of Serapis.

This is the beginning of a well-established Roman ritual, damnatio moriae, damning of memory.

So you see like defacing of statues, you drag around the head and the hands and the feet.

Then you take them to different parts of the city and you like publicly sort of shame Serapis and anybody who believed in Serapis.

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Egypt’s Last Hieroglyph & the Fiery Archbishop of Alexandria

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