As Alexander’s successors, the Diadochi, fought for prominence, tens of thousands of mostly intelligent, highly-cultivated Greeks flooded the recently-founded Alexandrias across Africa and the Middle East.

This flood, which may have reached the low hundreds of thousands over a few decades, also ended in older cities ranging from Antioch-on-the-Orontes/Antiochia to Bactria. All those Greeks chased riches and the protection of Macedonian warlords who went on to becoming dynasty-founders like Ptolemy and Seleucus.

The language these people spoke is evidence enough of the Hellenic world’s greatness: Greek may have been the only ancient language with a word meaning “freedom” in the abstract (“eleutheria”); a word for “practical intelligence” and the ability to give good counsel (”phronesis”); a word for “protection from reprisals by the powerful” (“asylia,” from which “asylum” sprung); a word for the extraordinary, uniquely Greek idea of “freedom of expression” (“parrhesia”) and yet another for the right to use such freedom (“isegoria”); one for “orderly government” (“eunomia”), one for “excellence” that combines the roots for “beautiful and good” (“kalokagathia”) and also a wonderful word for “vulgarity,” (“apeirokalia,” meaning “lack of experience in things beautiful”) that really sums up much of the classical Greek mindset.

Even a land as ancient and proud and Egypt ended up heavily Hellenized, to the extent that Egypt’s own demotic script came to be replaced by Coptic script – still in liturgic use to this day – in just over a century: Horwennefer/Hurganophor, an Upper Egyptian who launched the largest native rebellion against Ptolemaic rule between 205 and 197 BC, left behind a graffito written in Egyptian using Greek letters, the oldest testimony of a development which would end in the creation of Coptic script.