Aegyptus

In Greek mythology, Αἴγυπτος/Aígyptos, usually Latinized as Aegyptus, in Greek ("supine goat"), descendant of the heifer maiden, Io, and the river-god Nilus, was a king in Egypt. [Egypt took its name from his, according to folk etymology (see the article "Copt"); thus for Euripides, in his tragedy "Helen", Aegyptus has become Egypt itself: "Proteus, while he lived, was King here, ruling the whole of Aigyptos from his palace on the island of Pharos."] Aegyptos was the son of Belus ["Belos", "lord", is simply a Hellenized rendition of Baal, a Semitic term, not an Egyptian one.] and Achiroe, a naiad daughter of Nile. Aegyptus fathered fifty sons, who were all but one murdered by the fifty daughters of Aegyptus' twin brother, Danaus, eponym of the Danaans, a name for the Mycenaean Greeks.

A scholium on a line in Euripides, "Hecuba" 886, reverses these origins, placing the twin brothers at first in Argolis, whence Aegyptus was expelled and fled to the land that was named after him. In the more common version, [According to pseudo-Apollodorus, "Bibliotheke" 2.1.4-5.] Aegyptus commanded that his fifty sons marry the fifty Danaides, and Danaus with his daughters fled to Argos, ruled by Pelasgus [An eponym for autochthonous peoples, here represented as pre-Hellenic.] or by Gelanor, whom Danaus replaced. When Aegyptus and his sons arrived to take the Danaides, Danaus relinquished them, to spare the Argives the pain of a battle; however, he instructed his daughters to kill their husbands on their wedding night. Forty-nine followed through, but one, Hypermnestra ("greatly wooed"), refused, because her husband, Lynceus the "lynx-man", honored her wish to remain a virgin. Danaus was angry with his disobedient daughter and threw her to the Argive courts. Aphrodite intervened and saved her. Lynceus later slew Danaus as revenge for the death of his brothers. Lynceus and Hypermnestra founded the lineage of Argive kings, a Danaan dynasty. In some versions of the legend, the Danaides were punished in the underworld by being forced to carry water through a jug with holes, or a sieve, so that the water always leaked out.

The story of Danaus and his daughters, and the reason for their flight from marriage, provided the theme of Aeschylus' "The Supplicants".

The Aegyptus of Greek myth is not a genuinely Egyptian figure, but a figment of Egypt in the European imagination.

In the second or third century CE, Antoninus Liberalis [Antoninus Liberalis, "Metamorphoses," v.] tells of another Aegyptos, who was a young man of Thessaly. He was the companion of Neophron, but the lover of Timandra, Neophron's mother; he became the victim of Neophron's revenge, when Neophron arranged a night-time substitution, so that Aegyptos committed involuntary incest with his mother, Bules. Zeus transformed Egyptos and Neophron into eagles and Timandra into a kite. Many of the transformations in Antoninus' prose compilation are found nowhere else, and some may simply be inventions of Antoninus; this story combines several themes of Hellenistic Romance. The placement of an "Aegyptus" in Thessaly is inexplicable.

Notes

References

*Stewart, M. "People, Places & Things: Aegyptus (1)", Greek Mythology: From the Iliad to the Fall of the Last Tyrant. [http://messagenet.com/myths/ppt/Aegyptus_1.html]
*Jean Vertemont, "Dictionnaire des mythologies indo-europeenes", 1997.