Egypt’s Last Hieroglyph and the Fiery Archbishop of Alexandria

HISTORY This Week

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History, Education, Society & Culture

4.6 • 3.9K Ratings

🗓️ 18 August 2025

⏱️ 31 minutes

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Summary

August 24, 394. On the walls of a fading Egyptian temple, a priest carves what will become the last known hieroglyph in history. At the same moment, in Alexandria, a fiery archbishop named Theophilus is rising to power. He mocks the ancient Egyptian gods, desecrates their temples, and sets out to stamp out “paganism” for good. But Theophilus is fighting more than ancient religion—he clashes with monks, rivals, even fellow bishops, in a ruthless bid to make Alexandria the beating heart of the Christian world. What drives him to destroy? And can an entire faith really be erased? Special thanks to our guests: Solange Ashby, Assistant Professor of Egyptology and Nubian Studies at UCLA in Los Angeles, author of Calling Out to Isis: the Enduring Nubian Presence at Philae; Stephen Davis, Woolsey Professor of Religious Studies and Professor of History at Yale University; and Christine Luckritz Marquis, Associate Professor of Church History at Union Presbyterian Seminary, and author of Death of the Desert: Monastic Memory and the Loss of Egypt's Golden Age. Artwork: Saint John Chrysostom and the Empress Eudoxia by Jean-Paul Laurens. -- Get in touch: [email protected] Follow on Instagram: @historythisweek To stay updated: http://historythisweekpodcast.com To learn more about listener data and our privacy practices visit: https://www.audacyinc.com/privacy-policy Learn more about your ad choices. Visit https://podcastchoices.com/adchoices

Transcript

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0:00.0	The History Channel, original podcast.
0:04.6	History this week, August 24, 394.
0:10.5	I'm Sally Helm.
0:14.7	A priest named Esmet Akam approaches the walls of Philae, a massive Egyptian temple on the southern edge of the once powerful kingdom.
0:24.6	It's said that the god Osiris himself was buried here.
0:28.6	And Esmond Akham wants to leave a mark.
0:32.6	To engrave a name so that in one form or another, if only in written form, the worshipper can be in the
0:42.1	presence, worshipping the deity eternally.
0:45.8	That is Solange Ashby, Associate Professor of Egyptology at UCLA.
0:50.5	The Temple of Phila is unique in that it was still operating as a traditional temple
0:56.5	hundreds of years after the majority of other temples elsewhere in Egypt had been forced
1:03.4	to close or been repurposed as Christian churches.
1:07.7	Rome controls Egypt now.
1:10.0	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.
1:30.3	There are only a handful of people left who can even write in the traditional Egyptian language
1:35.4	of hieroglyphics.
1:38.2	Luckily, Esmond Akham is one of them.
1:50.4	But he's not very good.
1:55.1	If you look at the hieroglyphs, they're really ugly.
1:58.1	They're not well done.
2:02.5	The person is struggling to compose intelligible sentences.
2:09.3	The inscription is meant to be a tribute to the god mandolus, worshipped both in Egypt and the Nubian kingdom to the south. Definitely not worshipped by Christians.
	...

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