In November 305 BC, Ptolemy took the plunge. First he adopted the traditional Macedonian title of basileus (‘king’), then a full pharaonic titulary. Once installed as king, he back-dated his reign (in good Egyptian fashion) to the death of Alexander the Great and set about creating a dynamic, hybrid Egypto-Greek civilization on the banks of the Nile. He established a new cult, of Serapis (Osiris-Apis), as the focus for worship by the Egyptian Greeks, many of whom had settled in Egypt under his encouragement. He developed Alexandria as a great cultural, political and religious centre, eclipsing the ancient capital of Memphis and confirming the Mediterranean orientation of Ptolemaic rule. Emulating such illustrious pharaohs as Amenhotep III (no. 52) and Ramesses II (no. 70), he even had himself deified, though at a safe distance from Egypt: the people of Rhodes consecrated a sacred precinct to him, the Ptolemaeum, and gave him the epithet Soter, ‘saviour’. Finally, he restored the age-old institution of co-regency to ensure a smooth succession for his preferred heir. Ptolemy II Philadelphus (his younger son by his third wife, Berenice) was crowned in 284 BC. Eighteen months later, at the age of eighty-four, Ptolemy I died, the only one of Alexander’s heirs to pass away from natural causes.
To historians of the Greek world, Ptolemy’s greatest achievement was his magisterial account of Alexander the Great’s battles, still one of the major sources for these momentous events. To Egyptologists, he was the founder of a new dynasty, and the instigator of a new age that witnessed the final flowering of Egyptian civilization – albeit with a Greek flavour.
99 | Manetho
T
HE FATHER OF
E
GYPTIAN HISTORY
Manetho is a paradox: his chronological system for ancient Egypt’s rulers is still widely used and his name is famous to this day among Egyptologists, yet none of his writings survives intact and virtually nothing is known about his life. He seems to have been born at the end of the fourth century BC, at Sebennytos (modern Sammanud) in the central Delta. His career flourished in the reigns of the first two Ptolemies. Like so many of his time, he entered the priesthood, perhaps serving in the temple of Ra at Heliopolis, one of the most important cults in Egypt. His name in its Egyptian form, Meryen-netjeraa, meant ‘Beloved of the Great God’, suggesting that piety ran in the family. In his priestly capacity, he may have been involved with the foundation of the cult of Serapis by Ptolemy I, since a statue base inscribed with Manetho’s name was found in the temple of Serapis at Carthage. Beyond these few scanty details, however, Manetho the man remains a mystery.
His enduring fame rests not on the incidents of his life, but on his writings. The temples were Egypt’s centres of learning, their archives the nation’s repositories of knowledge. Manetho evidently had access to one or more temple libraries and used them as the source material for a number of treatises: on Egyptian religion, cult practice, medicine, and natural history. He seems to have written primarily for the (substantial) non-Egyptian population, especially the new Macedonian ruling class; perhaps he saw it as his duty to inform them of the culture and customs of their new realm. His lasting achievement was in the same vein: a monumental, three-volume history of Egypt, the Aegyptiaca. It is tempting to associate its composition with the foundation of the great library at Alexandria by Ptolemy II. Certainly, Manetho’s work was encyclopedic in scope. In it, he organized the innumerable kings of Egypt since the foundation of the state into more easily manageable groupings, based upon presumed family links. Manetho’s thirty dynasties, the 1st starting with Menes (Narmer) and the 30th ending with Nectanebo II (Nakhthorheb), have remained the basic chronological scheme for ancient Egypt ever since.
Like most authors of the time, Manetho was keen to entertain as well as to educate his readership. So, to the basic outline of dynasties, he added the length and principal events of each reign and observations on each king’s character. Here, though, he departed from the temple records and included anecdotes drawn from folklore, and perhaps also from the works of his fellow historian, Herodotus. Manetho’s more whimsical and outlandish statements about pharaonic peccadilloes have discredited his reputation in the eyes of later scholars. However, none of his works has survived intact – the Aegyptiaca is known only from fragments quoted in the works of later authors – so it is impossible to make an accurate and objective assessment of his scholarship. Whatever his level of accuracy, few authors could hope to have their central thesis used throughout the world two millennia after their death. That is the scale of Manetho’s achievement.
100 | Cleopatra VII
T
RAGIC QUEEN WHO BECAME A LEGEND
Cleopatra: the very name conjures up images of unimaginable luxury and opulence, of love and betrayal, of beauty and tragedy – of the exoticism and mystery that are the enduring hallmarks of ancient Egypt. The story of Cleopatra and her entanglement with the Roman empire has been told and re-told, from Shakespeare to Hollywood, reflecting the prejudices and predilections of each generation. Yet at its heart is the life of a real woman, an uncommonly gifted ruler, who tried in vain to defend her land, Egypt, against the unstoppable might of Rome. Her tragedy was the tragedy of an entire civilization.
Cleopatra was born in 69 BC, the third child of Ptolemy XII. The identity of her mother is not certain but, given the Macedonian dynasty’s preference for consanguineous marriages, she was probably one of Ptolemy’s own sisters. Egypt was a rich country, but under Ptolemy XII it lacked political stability. When Cleopatra was just ten years old, she had to witness the indignity of her father travelling to Rome to beg for its support. It was the beginning of a doomed relationship between the ancient world’s most venerable civilization and its newest upstart. Not only did Ptolemy have to pay a huge sum of money for the promise of Roman backing – the equivalent of Egypt’s entire annual revenue – but his absence also prompted the outbreak of factional fighting back home. His two eldest daughters, Cleopatra VI and Berenice, were alternately proclaimed monarch in opposition to their father. Berenice went one stage further, marrying a foreign prince and raising an army to support her claim. It was only defeated with Roman assistance, and Berenice was executed for her treachery. At the age of fifteen, Cleopatra VII thus became heir-apparent. She had experienced an early lesson in the internecine rivalry that would plague her for the rest of her life.
Three years later, Ptolemy XII died, leaving the throne jointly to Cleopatra and her eldest half-brother, Ptolemy XIII. She was seventeen, he a child of ten; in effect, therefore, she was sole monarch. In the first year of her reign, 51 BC, she made it clear that she intended to honour Egypt’s religious traditions by attending the funeral of the Apis bull at Memphis. She also adopted the vulture-headdress of Egyptian queens, and further endeared herself to the Egyptian people by her ability to speak their language. But cultural solidarity alone was not enough to guarantee stability. A bad harvest in 50 BC put Cleopatra’s government under pressure, and her brother’s supporters tried to have her removed from power. Warned in time, she escaped to Syria and raised an army to win back her birthright. Her forces marched on Egypt and engaged her brother’s troops at Pelusium. The encounter ended in a stalemate, but drew the intervention of a Roman army under Julius Caesar – not out of any particular interest in Cleopatra’s fate, but to settle a grudge with his rival Pompey who had sought sanctuary with Ptolemy XIII. Having entered Alexandria, Caesar acted as judge and jury in the dynastic dispute, summoning the warring siblings and coming down in favour of Cleopatra. Ptolemy XIII’s supporters were not going to give up without a fight, and they besieged the royal party on the off-shore island of Pharos. A complicated struggle ensued which ended with the defeat of the Egyptian rebels and Ptolemy’s death by drowning. Resisting the temptation to annex Egypt, Caesar instead had Cleopatra marry her surviving half-brother, Ptolemy XIV, and he proclaimed them joint rulers, maintaining the custom of co-regency. His interest was not entirely altruistic, however: he and Cleopatra had become lovers.
Despite the myths, Cleopatra was no beauty; her coin portraits show her with a hooked nose and jutting chin. But she was intelligent and sharp-witted, and she had at her disposal the greatest prize of all: Egypt. For an ambitious man like Caesar, that was an irresistible combination. At his invitation, she visited Rome in 46 BC, with her brother-husband, her retinue, and her young child by Caesar, whom she had named Ptolemy Caesarion. The royal party stayed for more than a year. Cleopatra’s departure was prompted by Caesar’s assassination on the Ides of March, 44 BC. She left the city immediately and was back in Alexandria by July. Two months later, Ptolemy XIV was also dead. Although Cleopatra’s guilt cannot be proved, the finger of suspicion points clearly at her, since she had most to gain. She adopted her young son as her co-regent (Ptolemy XV), not least to secure his future. For Caesar’s will had named his great-nephew Octavian as heir.
Caesar’s death prompted a chain of events that ensnared Cleopatra in the power-politics of the Roman world. She was courted by his friends and murderers alike, eventually throwing in her lot with Mark Antony who had inherited control of Rome’s eastern provinces. History repeated itself as Cleopatra became the lover of a second powerful Roman leader. She offered Mark Antony funds for his Parthian campaign in return for his political support – which even extended to the murder of her sole surviving sister and dynastic rival, Arsinoe. In 40 BC, now in her late twenties, Cleopatra bore Mark Antony twin children, a boy named Alexander Helios and a girl, Cleopatra Selene. In Egypt, a period of relative peace and prosperity followed, during which a third child (Ptolemy Philadelphus) was born. Meanwhile, Mark Antony’s military adventures turned from disaster – against the Parthians – to victory against the Armenians. The latter was celebrated with a spectacular ceremony, the Donations of Alexandria, in which Mark Antony proclaimed Cleopatra ‘Queen of Kings and of her Sons who are Kings’, made symbolic grants of land to their three children, and publicly recognized Ptolemy XV as Caesar’s true heir. His clear intention was to see all Roman lands ruled by his lover and her children, with himself as the puppet-master.
The inevitable confrontation with Octavian was not long in coming. Rome’s new strong-man declared war on Cleopatra in 32 BC, and the two sides came to blows the following year. The decisive battle, at Actium off the west coast of Greece, was a disaster for the Egyptian forces. Cleopatra and Mark Antony fled back to Alexandria. Her plot to escape with Ptolemy XV to India was foiled, and she resigned herself to her inevitable fate. With her former allies defecting to Octavian, she offered to abdicate in favour of her children if it would save her life and Egypt’s destiny, but to no avail. Octavian reached the outskirts of Alexandria and accepted the surrender of the Egyptian fleet; on 1 August 30 BC he entered the royal capital.
Thinking Cleopatra had been killed, Mark Antony stabbed himself. She tried to commit suicide on learning of her lover’s death, but was overpowered and taken prisoner. Octavian allowed her to attend Mark Antony’s funeral, and then to take her own life. The two were buried side-by-side in the royal mausoleum. Octavian promptly had Ptolemy XV murdered and he formally annexed Egypt to Rome: the fate that Cleopatra had tried so hard to avoid.
Three thousand years of Egyptian independence were at an end. The land of the pharaohs would now be plundered as the grain-basket of the Roman empire. Cleopatra herself, however, achieved the sort of immortality of which her pharaonic predecessors could only have dreamed. In the age of celluloid, she has become the personification of ancient Egypt. Her story has beguiled audiences across the world and will undoubtedly continue to do so for generations to come, a symbol of our enduring fascination with the lives of the ancient Egyptians.
Chronology and King List
The dates of ancient Egypt are generally assumed to be among the most secure in the ancient world – accurate to within two centuries c. 3000 BC; accurate to within two decades c. 1300 BC; and precise from 664 BC. But this still means that there are no precise dates for most of the period covered by this book. Different books give different dates for the same event, with the result that, for example, Narmer might have become king in 3100, 3050 or 2950 BC and the Battle of Kadesh might have taken place in 1297, 1286 or 1275 BC. Nevertheless, although there is not complete agreement among experts, there are options which are widely favoured. The dates used in this book are listed below, alongside the names of the kings of ancient Egypt.
Egyptologists normally employ a method of dividing the kings of ancient Egypt into 31 dynasties, following the practice of the Egyptian priest, Manetho, who wrote a history of his nation shortly after 300 BC. In general these dynasties correspond to particular ruling families, although in the more obscure eras of history some dynasties appear to be little more than convenient groupings of kings, some of whom were contemporary rulers in different parts of Egypt. In fact, Manetho is quite clear about this last point – that often there was more than one line of kings in Egypt.
Modern Egyptologists have grouped the dynasties into broader periods known as ‘Kingdoms’, when, normally, there was only one king throughout Egypt. The Old Kingdom (c. 2575–2125 BC) is the age of the Great Pyramid and the Great Sphinx. The Middle Kingdom (c. 2000–1630 BC) was an age of renewed national unity, and of a great flowering of art and literature. The New Kingdom (c. 1539–1069 BC) is often described as the imperial, or golden, age of ancient Egypt – the time of Amenhotep III, Akhenaten and Ramesses II, when Egypt was the richest and most powerful nation in the world. The Late Period (664–332 BC) became the final assertion of ancient Egyptian independence in the wider world, after which the country was conquered by Alexander the Great and later was absorbed by the Roman empire.
Early Dynastic Period
‘Dynasty 0’ c. 3100 BC
Existence uncertain
Ka (?)
Scorpion (?)
1st Dynasty c. 2950–c. 2775
Narmer
Aha
Djer
Djet
Den
Anedjib
Semerkhet
Qaa
2nd Dynasty c. 2750–c. 2650
