Having wandered through the gallery of portraits of ancient deities, with our noses in the air, our eyes and ears wide open to hear their names and the stories they tell, passing from Zeus to Yahweh, from Hecate to Isis, from Melqart to Bel, one may wonder whether we have lost our bearings? Like Brobdingnagians, those giants visited by Gulliver, we have spanned centuries and millennia, leapt from one shore of the Mediterranean to the other, and climbed to the heights of Olympus to scrutinise the gods, eye to eye. However, we have not been satisfied with looking, observing details, admiring colours, noting contrasts and underlining the nuances; our sound and light portraits resonated with 1,001 names. We have invited you to a concert of divine music: like Lilliputians, this time, sitting in a huge cave filled with many and varied sounds, we have listened to what might seem to be an incredible cacophony of names, a heterogeneous symphony of onomastic sequences, a labyrinth of sounds to make your head spin. Would naming the gods be a virtuoso game? Scholarly entertainment? Or a deluge, a random proliferation or chaos?

The Greeks often saw Egypt as a model of long-term cultural stability; in fact, Egyptian history is full of ruptures – periods of instability or external invasions – and a major theme in Egyptian literature is the methods by which such threats to continuity were resisted. This chapter looks at several modes of resistance illustrated by Greco-Egyptian literature of the first millennium. It looks at three topics: first, heroes of the Egyptian resistance to Persia (in Herodotus and the Inaros Cycle); secondly, resistance narratives in the Ptolemaic Period: the story of Nectanebo’s Dream (which probably presented the Ptolemies as re-establishing legitimate kingship in Egypt after the Persians) and the apocalyptic Oracles of the Potter and the Lamb (probably directed at the ‘Typhonian’ Ptolemies). The chapter closes by looking at Manetho’s narrative of Egyptian resistance to the foreign Hyksos rulers, which corresponds to events in the mid-second millennium BCE and the foundation of the New Kingdom. It asks whether Manetho’s narrative should be interpreted as reflecting contemporary concerns with foreign rule and resistance to it.

This chapter engages explicitly with the challenges faced by any kind of comparative analysis: while the question of historical influence remains an attractive topic for discussion, we should explore the interpretative potential of differences, as opposed to the similarities on which comparative studies tend to focus. An appreciation of differences may help us to see how one culture may be ‘receptive’ to some aspects of other tradition, while blocking others, perhaps because they are not in line with its established norms. The discussion thus examines those aspects of Anatolian and Syrian Storm Gd mythology that, unlike the central elements of the Song of Emergence, seem not to have been adopted in early Greek sources, in particular the myth of the Storm God’s conflict with the Sea, and reflects on the likely reasons that explain this apparent ‘blocking’.