hybridization, ethnicity and cultural exchange in the early ptolemaic egypt (s. iv-iii a.c.)

Since the emergence of the New Cultural History in the late eighties, the historiographical production in the field of cultural studies seems endless. The multiplicity of concepts, some without further differentiation from the above or directly overlapped on content, received plenty of criticism, mostly because of the difficulty of combining theories with available sources as well as alleged epistemological weaknesses. In this article we propose an updated analysis of various models of cultural analysis used for the study of pre-capitalist societies. In particular, we propose a methodological approach that combines elements from anthropology, semiotics and history, to decide which concepts are more convenient when dealing with ancient sources. Also, in order to assess the relevance of these approaches to the analysis of Ancient History and specifically Hellenistic, we propose the implementation of some of the proposed conceptualizations of particular historical cases of our specialty, i.e. those linked to the shaping process of the Ptolemaic state (IV-III centuries BC).