Cleopatra

by Joyce Tyldesley

  This Graeco-Roman Isis was a healer, a wise woman and a powerful magician. She could cause the River Nile to flood and, undying herself, could bring the dead back to life. She was both the queen of heaven and the fertile soil of Egypt. In the dark night sky she twinkled as the bright star Sothis (Sirius or Sepedet). In Alexandria Isis Pelagia (Isis of the Sea) protected the sailors entering and leaving the safety of the harbour; outside the city, Isis Medica cured the sick in her temple-hospitals. But Isis’s most celebrated role was that of the faithful wife and compassionate mother. The elaborate story of Isis, her husband-brother Osiris and their son Horus is one of Egypt’s most ancient and intricate myths, but no original version survives. To read the story – and we always have to remember that this is just one, late, version of an often repeated tale – we have to turn to Plutarch’s masterpiece, Of Isis and Osiris. Plutarch based his interpretation on stories preserved in the oral tradition, and on fragments of original Egyptian myths preserved in the writings of earlier classical writers. He dedicated it to Clea, a priestess in the cult of Isis at Delphi:

  Many years ago the sky goddess Nut bore two sons, Osiris and Seth, and two daughters, Isis and Nephthys. Osiris was good and true but Seth was troubled and angry, and his birth caused Nut great pain as he forced his way into the world through her side. Osiris ruled Egypt as king with his sister-wife lsis. Osiris taught men how to plant crops, obey laws and worship the gods, while Isis taught women the secrets of weaving, baking and brewing. With Egypt at peace, Isis ruled Egypt alone as Osiris travelled the world, beguiling the people with his songs and his poetry.

  Seth was unhappy. His heart was consumed with jealousy and he had determined that his brother must die so that he might take his place. He planned a magnificent banquet. The food stands were piled high with meat. There was every kind of fowl and fish, pyramids of bread and sweet cakes, heaps of fresh vegetables and succulent fruit, and jars of fine wine and strong beer. Seth had invited seventy-two friends to his banquet, but the guest of honour was his brother Osiris. The guests drank and ate and drank again. Finally, Seth signalled to his servants and a long, narrow chest was carried into the banqueting chamber. Carved from the finest wood, the chest was inlayed with bands of gold and silver and decorated inside and out with ebony, ivory and precious stone. Here was a new game. Whoever could fit inside the chest could keep it. The guests rushed forward and attempted to squeeze into the narrow space. But none fitted. Then the slender Osiris stepped forward to take his turn. He lay down in the chest: it was a perfect fit. Instantly, Seth slammed the lid shut and shot the bolt home. The chest had become Osiris’s coffin. Seth dragged the chest to the mouth of the Nile and threw it in.

  News of the tragedy reached Isis in her palace at Koptos. Refusing to forget Osiris, Isis spent many years wandering the length and breadth of Egypt hoping to find news of her vanished husband. Eventually she heard a rumour that the chest had washed ashore in the faraway land of Byblos. Here it had lain against a young cypress tree, which had grown to envelop the chest so that Osiris became completely hidden within its trunk. The tree had been felled and had been used to hold up the roof in the great pillared hall of the palace of the king of Byblos.

  Isis left Egypt to become nursemaid to the younger son of the queen of Byblos. At night, when no one could see, she set the baby at the centre of a ring of immortal fire so that he might gain eternal life. She turned herself into a bird to fly round the pillar that still held Osiris. And as she flew, she gave great cries of grief. Her cries woke the queen, who rushed to the hall. Seeing her child in the flames, the queen gave a scream of horror. This broke the spell. Isis regained human form and, taking the pillar from beneath the roof, cut into its wood to reveal the coffin. The discarded remains of the pillar would be venerated for ever in the temple of Isis at Byblos.

  Isis took the coffin and set sail for Egypt so that she might bury Osiris in his own land. But Seth, hunting in the moonlight, stumbled across Osiris lying in his coffin in the Egyptian desert. Furious, he hacked his brother into pieces, which he flung far and wide. Isis and the jackal-headed god Anubis searched high and low, recovering the scattered parts until only the penis was missing. This would never be found, for the greedy Nile fish had eaten it.

  Isis, the divine healer, equipped her husband with a replica penis, bandaged him, then sang the spell that would bring him back to a semblance of life. Transforming herself into a bird, she hovered over her husband’s restored body, flapped her wings and breathed air into his nose. Her magic was very poweful; nine months later she bore Osiris a son. As Osiris retreated to the afterlife to become king of the dead, Isis fled with the baby Horus to the papyrus marshes. Here she protected her son with her potent magic until he was old enough to challenge his uncle and claim his inheritance.7

  The Isis of this tale is the ideal wife for any man, be he king or commoner, and she is the ideal role model for any queen. She is beautiful, wise, faithful and fertile. While things go according to plan, she remains modestly in the background, supporting her husband and attending to the domestic tasks that are traditionally the wife’s lot. When her husband dies, she grieves for him. But we should not underestimate her. Isis is cunning and well versed in magic, and she is quite capable of independent action should the need arise. It is she who poses the greatest threat to Seth’s ambition. Her healing powers, in particular, are unsurpassed, magic being an important aspect of the Egyptian healer’s training. While Osiris takes a sabbatical to travel the world it is Isis, and not Seth, who is left to rule in his absence; the tradition of the wife deputising for the husband is a well-documented one, and we have examples of women from all walks of life directing their absent husbands’ affairs. When Osiris departs to the land of the dead, it is Isis who rules on her infant son’s behalf.

  Osiris quickly came to symbolise all of Egypt’s dead pharaohs. They, mummified like their new sovereign, became eternal kings in the shadowy afterlife, while their successors, the Horus kings, ruled the living Egypt. And, as Isis was the mother and protector of Horus the living king, she naturally became the mother of all of Egypt’s living kings. Two- and three-dimensional images of Horus sitting on his mother’s knee may therefore be ‘read’ as images of the living king sitting on his throne, while images of Isis suckling Horus (or his late variant Harpocrates) may be read as images of any and all Egyptian queens suckling their sons. Conversely, any image of an Egyptian queen with her son may be interpreted as an image of Isis with Horus. Soon after Caesarion’s birth, mother and son were featured on the bronze Cypriot coin already mentioned (page 61). The obverse of this coin shows Cleopatra carrying a sceptre and wearing the raised diadem known as a stephane, a Hellenistic symbol of divinity. Caesarion is an indistinct, featureless blob at his mother’s breast. This is not Cleopatra the queen, but Cleopatra the mother goddess Isis/Aphrodite, suckling the infant Horus/Eros. The reverse of the coin features the double cornucopia, symbol of never-ending fertility, and the legend ‘of Cleopatra the Queen’ (Kleopatras Basilisses).

  No equivalent Egyptian coin was issued, but reliefs carved in the Armant birth house associate Cleopatra with Rat-tawi (Female Sun of the Two Lands; a late form of Hathor) and Caesarion with the infant Harpre-pekhrat (Horus the Sun, the Child; a late version of Horus/Harpocrates). We have already noted Cleopatra’s presence, either in body or in spirit, at the installation of the Buchis bull of Armant. Now we find her building a birth house (mammisi) within the precincts of the Armant Montu temple. Cleopatra’s birth house was a temple dedicated to the celebration of Harpre’s nativity, a birth which native theology linked both to the daily rebirth of the sun and to the cyclical renewal of kingship. During Ptolemaic times birth houses took the form of a small chapel with an antechamber and a flat roof that could be used for ritual purposes, surrounded by a columned walkway. At Armant the central chapel included an outer hall, an inner hall and a birth room.

  An inscription on the Armant birth-house wall provided Cleopatra with an Egyptian-style
titulary, including a cartouche (the oval loop enclosing royal names) and a female Horus name (the first part of the traditional king’s titulary) which classifies her as a female king: ‘the female Horus, the great one, mistress of perfection, brilliant in counsel, Mistress of the Two Lands, Cleopatra Philopator’. Ptolemaic kings bore five formal names or titularies, based on the traditional New Kingdom model (Horus name; Two Ladies name; Golden Horus name; prenomen; nomen) plus a sixth name, a translation of the king’s Greek epithet. The last traditional name, the nomen, was the king’s personal name, introduced by the phrase ‘Son of Re’. The penultimate name, the prenomen, was the name by which his subjects knew him. Both the nomen and the prenomen were written within a cartouche. All five names were used on formal occasions, but when a shorter name was required it was acceptable to use just the nomen and prenomen. By the Ptolemaic period this custom had undergone a slight change and the nomen alone sufficed. This was preceded, not by ‘Son of Re’ but by ‘pharaoh’, literally ‘Great House’.8

  A cartoon-like series of drawings decorating the inner walls of the Armant birth house showed the birth of Harpre in the presence of divine midwives, the goddess Nekhbet, the god Amen-Re and Cleopatra. The mother of the child is clearly identified as Rat-tawi, but his father is not obvious. Given the situation of the birth house, he should be Montu, but the preserved hieroglyph appears to be that of Amen (divine father of, among others, the earthly kings Hatshepsut, Amenhotep III, Ramesses II the Great and Alexander the Great). Nearby, seated on a couch, two identical cow-headed goddesses each suckle a baby. These identical infants have been identified as Harpre and Caesarion, whose cartouche appears throughout the birth house. In an age eagerly anticipating the arrival of a saviour on earth, Caesarion has clearly been born a god. An educated Egyptian ‘reading’ the scene might also understand that Caesarion, like Horus before him, is a god destined to avenge his assassinated father. Unfortunately the Armant temple was substantially dismantled during the reign of the emperor Antoninus Pius, when its stone was reused in a monumental arch. Later, blocks from the temple would be incorporated into a church and a sugar-cane factory. Cleopatra’s images are fortunately preserved in the form of line drawings made by Napoleon’s scholars following his invasion of Egypt, and by the pioneering nineteenth-century Egyptologist Karl Richard Lepsius.

  Scenes from the sanctuary of the now-demolished Armant temple, recorded by Lepsius (Denkmäler IV, 60a and 59b). Above: the divine mother gives birth to ‘Horus the sun, the child’ in the presence of Amen-Re, Nekhbet and Cleopatra VII. Below: multiple versions of the goddess Hathor suckle a newborn king: the young god of the temple, or the infant Caesarion? The confusion is deliberate.

  The 30th Dynasty temple of Hathor at Dendera had been substantially redesigned by Auletes, who started building works on 16 July 54 and died just four years into the programme. Work at the temple continued throughout Cleopatra’s reign and was eventually finished a decade after her death. Here, on the outer rear wall of the temple, we find the above life-size double scene of Cleopatra and Caesarion mentioned in Chapter 2 (page 65). Mother and son are offering to a line of gods. In the left-hand scene they offer to Osiris, his sister-wife Isis and their son Harsiesis; in the right-hand scene they offer to Hathor, her son Ihy/Harsomtus and the Osirian triad (Osiris, Isis and Horus). Hathor, in this context, may be read as a representative of female royal power and solar authority, while Isis represents the universal mother. Between the two lines of gods, in the middle of the wall, is the head of Hathor, the main goddess of the temple complex.

  Ptolemy Caesar, as king, takes the dominant role in the offering scene, a role which Cleopatra has previously denied both Ptolemy XIII and Ptolemy XIV and which she reverses in the accompanying text, where she is mentioned before Caesarion. The texts, we may assume, follow actual practice, while the illustration follows the time-honoured Egyptian tradition that will always place a ruling king ahead of his supportive mother. Nevertheless, tradition or not, it seems reasonable to assume that Cleopatra approved the temple artwork. Dressed in a long kilt and double crown plus ram’s horns, Caesarion stands in front of his mother to make an offering of incense to the gods. Above Caesarion hover the protective deities Horus (left-hand scene) and the vulture goddess Nekhbet (right); immediately behind him stands a tiny male figure, his ka or spirit. Standing behind her son’s ka, Cleopatra wears a tight sheath dress, tripartite wig and a modius with multiple uraei, solar disc, cow horns and double plumes. She carries a sistrum and the stylised necklace known as the menyt which is associated with Hathor, and she does not have a ka figure. Work on this entirely Egyptian scene started in 30, the year that both Cleopatra and Caesarion died, and was continued under Octavian. The message is not a subtle one. Hathor the mother goddess of the Dendera temple is a single parent: the partner of Horus, who lives in his own temple many miles away at Edfu (Greek Apollinopolis Magna). Each year, at the Festival of the Beautiful Union, the cult statue of Hathor would process to the river and sail to Edfu. Here she would reside in the temple with the father of her child for fourteen days, before returning by river to Dendera. Parallels between the earthly triad of Cleopatra, Caesarion and the absent Caesar, and the divine triad of Horus, Hathor and Ihy/Harsomtus are clear. Meanwhile, at Edfu, scenes carved into the temple walls, and the annual celebration of the victory of Horus over his father’s killer Seth, served to hammer home the message of the avenging royal son.

  The Dendera Cleopatra is a deliberate mixture of queen, mother and goddess. In 1873 the novelist and journalist Amelia B. Edwards hired the Philae – a large flat-bottomed dahabeeya boat – and embarked upon a lengthy, leisurely cruise along the River Nile. Four years later she published an eminently readable account of her travels.9 Visiting Dendera, she despaired at the damage wrought by the early Christians, who had hacked away at the stonework in an attempt to erase all trace of the temple’s pagan gods:

  …one can easily imagine how these spoilers sacked and ravaged all before them; how they desecrated the sacred places, and cast down the statues of the goddess … Among those which escaped, however, is the famous external bas-relief of Cleopatra on the back of the Temple. This curious sculpture is now banked up with rubbish for its better preservation, and can no longer be seen by travellers. It was however, admirably photographed some years ago by Signor Beati; which photograph is faithfully reproduced in the annexed engraving. Cleopatra is here represented with a headdress comprising the attributes of three goddesses; namely the vulture of Maut [Mut] (the head of which is modelled in a masterly way), the horned disk of Hathor, and the throne of Isis … It is difficult to know where the decorative sculpture ends and portraiture begins in a work of this epoch. We cannot even be certain that a portrait was intended; though the introduction of the royal oval in which the name of Cleopatra (Klaupatra) is spelt with its vowel sounds in full, would seem to point that way …

  There was a good reason why Miss Edwards could not see the famous Cleopatra portrait in situ. It did not exist. The ‘queen’ beneath the complicated crown (a vulture headdress topped by a modius crown with multiple uraei, a solar disc, cow horns and the ‘throne’ symbol of Isis) was actually the goddess Isis herself. The Cleopatra cartouche was a modern enhancement, added to a plaster cast of the original scene by an enterprising curator at Cairo Museum.10 Unfortunately, Miss Edwards had allowed her assumed knowledge to influence her perceptions:

  Mannerisms apart, however, the face wants for neither individuality nor beauty. Cover the mouth and you have an almost faultless profile. The chin and the throat are also quite lovely; while the whole face, suggestive of cruelty, subtlety and voluptuousness, carries with it an indefinable impression not only of portraiture, but of likeness.

  A good description of Cleopatra perhaps, but less appropriate for the healing mother goddess Isis.

  The classical authors are agreed that Cleopatra occasionally dressed in the ceremonial robes of Isis. Quite what these robes might have been is not made clear. The tradi
tional Egyptian Isis, as seen at Dendera, wore a simple white linen sheath dress, an assortment of jewellery, a heavy tripartite wig and either her ‘throne’ sign or the vulture headdress, modius, double plumes, cow horns and solar disc borrowed from Hathor. This image may be compared with a marble statue recovered from Alexandria and dated to the mid-second century AD (and now in the Graeco-Roman Museum, Alexandria) which shows a Hellenic Isis wearing a wig of corkscrew curls, a crown composed of a solar disc, cow horns and double plumes, and a flowing woollen chiton or robe covered with a rectangular mantle or shawl tied with a distinctive knot which, as a symbol of magical power, had come to symbolise the goddess. A colourful Graeco-Roman Isis is described in The Golden Ass, written by Lucius Apuleius in c. AD 155. Here, in Adlington’s 1566 translation, Isis, Queen of Heaven, appears to Lucius in a dream:

  I purpose to describe her divine semblance, if the poverty of my humane speech will suffer me, or her divine power give me eloquence thereto. First shee had a great abundance of haire, dispersed and scattered about her neck, on the crowne of her head she bare many garlands enterlaced with floures, in the middle of her forehead was a compasse in fashion of a glasse, or resembling the light of the Moone, in one of her hands she bare serpents, in the other, blades of corne, her vestiment was of fine silke yeelding divers colours, sometime yellow, sometime rosie, sometime flamy, and sometime (which troubled my spirit sore) darke and obscure, covered with a blacke robe in manner of a shield, and pleated in most subtill fashion at the skirts of her garments, the welts appeared comely, whereas here and there the starres glimpsed, and in the middle of them was placed the Moone, which shone like a flame of fire, round about the robe was a coronet or garland made with flowers and fruits. In her right hand shee had a timbrell of brasse, which gave a pleasant sound, in her left hand shee bare a cup of gold, out of the mouth whereof the serpent Aspis lifted up his head, with a swelling throat, her odoriferous feete were covered with shoes interlaced and wrought with victorious palme.11