Speaker

Toby Wilkinson

Toby Wilkinson

British Egyptologist and Fellow of Clare College, Cambridge, best known for his popular histories of ancient Egypt. His most recent book, The Last Dynasty: Ancient Egypt from Alexander the Great to Cleopatra (2024), covers the Ptolemaic period — the 300-year interval between Alexander’s conquest in 332 BC and the death of Cleopatra in 30 BC.

Wilkinson’s earlier work spans the full sweep of pharaonic civilisation: The Rise and Fall of Ancient Egypt is his landmark single-volume narrative history. He has also held senior administrative roles at Clare College and led the University of the South Pacific in Fiji. He attributes his move between scholarship and institutional leadership to a common thread: distilling large bodies of information and communicating them accessibly.

Core positions

The defining ideas of ancient Egyptian civilisation, in Wilkinson’s account, are hieroglyphics and divine kingship — the two things that make it distinctively itself. Hieroglyphics were not merely a communication system but a way of encoding an ideal state of being; and the pharaoh was not a king in the ordinary sense but god on earth, mediator of the contract between gods and people. Everything most recognisable about ancient Egypt — pyramids, temples, the Valley of the Kings — follows from that one idea.

On Ptolemaic Egypt specifically, Wilkinson argues it was the ancient world’s first genuinely commercial civilisation. Alexandria was built from scratch as a trading city, its intellectual achievements (the Library, the Mouseion) were in part marketing — the Ptolemies understood that scholarly prestige was a form of geopolitical power — and its economic innovations (franchise monopolies, competitive bidding for crown land) were centuries ahead of their time. Cleopatra he reads not as a romantic figure who failed but as the most competent of her dynasty, who held the last independent pharaonic state together against Rome far longer than should have been possible.

In the wiki