Evidence receipt / belief
Published · transcript-backedToby Wilkinson: belief
27 May 2026 Conversations with Tyler Toby Wilkinson on Ptolemaic Egypt and the First Great Commercial Civilization
“I think there are a lot more scholarly works, both surviving and lost, that were composed in ancient Alexandria that would be more surprising and more revelatory than those that you’ve just mentioned.”
Source trail
Everything needed to verify it.
- Speaker
- Toby Wilkinson
- Attribution
- Verified speaker
- Claim type
- belief
- Recorded
- 27 May 2026
- Publisher
- Conversations with Tyler
Transcript context
…Say I try to read Diodorus. There’s a lot of detail, but it’s not to me very interesting. It just seems much worse than Herodotus, who is profound and in a way a step back. Maybe that’s not representative. I think there are a lot more scholarly works, both surviving and lost, that were composed in ancient Alexandria that would be more surprising and more revelatory than those that you’ve just mentioned. What was it exactly that was so special about the intellectual, and scientific, and productive environment of Alexandria and environs? Was it that the Egyptians were there, or the mix of Greeks and Egyptians, or something else? What?…
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