Cleopatra

by Joyce Tyldesley

  Robert Graves’s 1950 more down-to-earth translation of this same text clarifies the description to a moon-disc crown held in place by twin snakes (evolved cow horns?), and a multicoloured robe with an embroidered hem of fruit and flowers covered with a pleated black mantle tied in an Isis knot. Plutarch confirms this: ‘the robes of Isis are variegated in their colours, for her power is concerned with matter which becomes everything and receives everything, light and darkness, day and night, fire and water, life and death.’12 Faced with a choice of two very different costumes, it seems likely, then, that Cleopatra would choose the dress, either Greek or Hellenistic, which would best suit her intended audience.

  The Ptolemies never neglected Egypt’s traditional temples. Their support for the native priesthood ensured that the elite Egyptians were in turn able to support the artists and craftsmen who preserved Egypt’s cultural heritage. Kings continued to maintain and restore the cult temples of the state gods, while the elite used their wealth to build stone tombs and commission statues and stelae just as their predecessors had always done, but everything now had a distinct Hellenistic twist. The walls of the elite tombs show Greek-inspired figures participating in traditional Egyptian scenes and accompanied by hieroglyphic texts. The temples which the Ptolemies raised, rebuilt or substantially enhanced at Philae (Ptolemies II and VIII), Edfu (Ptolemies III, VIII and XII) and Dendera (Ptolemy XII) were based on ancient beliefs and designs, yet are instantly recognisable today, even to the non-expert, as Ptolemaic. Their walls are decorated with an increasing amount of hieroglyphic text, almost as if the priests realised the need to preserve their heritage in stone. It is ironic that these, Egypt’s atypical but best-surviving temples, heavily influenced by contemporary Hellenistic architectural thought, have to be used to reconstruct the rituals conducted in Egypt’s ‘purer’ and now vanished dynastic temples.

  Their obvious interest in the native gods earned the Ptolemies valuable propaganda points and encouraged national stability. Thebes was far less likely to rebel if the influential priests were happy with their lot. But this was not necessarily their primary consideration. The Ptolemies ran Egypt outside Alexandria as a profitable business and their decision to invest in the temples was a part of their wider decision to keep the traditional bureaucracy functioning. For many centuries the cult temples of the state gods had played an important role in Egypt’s redistributive economy. The system was a simple but effective one. The crown both generated its own income (farming its own lands, operating mines, quarries and workshops, etc.) and collected taxes and rents in both coin and kind. This income was used to pay the crown’s expenses, and any surpluses were stored in the large warehouses within the local palace complexes, where they offered a shield against future bad harvests. Part of the royal income was used to provide offerings to the local temples. Here the god, in the form of a statue, lived in the sanctuary. He was served by priests who cared for him as they might care for a child: he was roused in the mornings, washed, dressed, fed, entertained, fed again and put to bed at night.

  The temple, the house of the god, was the one place where the mortal could communicate with the divine, but this communication could be achieved only via the king and his deputies. It was, in theory, the king and the king alone who supplied the god with regular offerings of food, drink, clothing, incense and recitations. The god was capable of accepting or rejecting these offerings, but he could not physically consume anything. His leavings were therefore redistributed among the temple staff (essentially, they paid the temple staff), with any surpluses being stored in the temple warehouses, which also housed the revenue from the temple’s assets. These assets, for a prosperous temple, might include land, peasants, mines, workshops and ships which, distributed throughout Egypt, were either owned outright or leased from the crown. The temple priests administered and accounted for these assets and the gods paid tax on their income and duty on the goods that they manufactured in their workshops. An investment in Egypt’s temples was therefore a thinly disguised investment in the Egyptian economy and it comes as little surprise to find Ptolemies VIII and XII, kings whose reigns were characterised by uncertainty and civil unrest, donating generously to the traditional gods. Cleopatra lacked the time and resources to be the great temple builder that her father had been. However, as well as completing her father’s work at Edfu and Dendera, she built the now-demolished birth house in the Armant temple of Montu, and the barque or boat shrine of Geb at Koptos. She also, as we noted in Chapter 2 (pages 42–3), showed an interest in Egypt’s bull cults.

  The dynastic Egyptians had embalmed a wide range of animals (including fish, mice, snakes, crocodiles and bulls) prior to burial in dedicated animal cemeteries. However, during the Late and Graeco-Roman periods, at a time when the traditional Egyptian culture was threatened by foreign influences, interest in the animal cults blossomed. Diodorus Siculus tells the story of one Roman unfortunate, lynched for inadvertently offending against Graeco-Egyptian superstition:

  … Once, at the time when Ptolemy [XII] their king had not yet been given by the Romans the appellation of ‘friend’ and the people were exercising all zeal in courting the favour of the embassy from Italy which was then visiting Egypt and, in their fear, were intent on giving no cause for complaint or war, when one of the Romans killed a cat and the multitude rushed in a crowd to his house, neither the officials sent by the king to beg the men off nor the fear of Rome which all the people felt were enough to save the man from punishment, even though his act had been an accident. And this incident we relate, not from hearsay, but we saw it with our own eyes on the occasion of the visit we made to Egypt.13

  Greeks and the Romans, misreading the situation, dismissed the animal cults as a primitive form of animal worship. The theology was, as we might expect, far more complicated. The ‘animal’ aspect of a god represented his or her essential nature expressed in easily recognisable terms. To show Hathor as a cow stressed her placid, nurturing nature; it did not mean that Hathor was to be imagined looking or behaving exactly like a cow, and nor did it mean that each and every cow was to be equated with Hathor. Most of Egypt’s deities could be depicted in several equally valid ways, and in many cases a god’s appearance was dependent upon context. Thoth, the scribe of the gods, for example, could appear as either a baboon or an ibis, while Amen of Thebes, who normally appeared in human form, could also be represented by the goose or the ram. Hathor could appear either as a beautiful woman or as a cow. If she was required to participate in a set-piece scene, to sit on a throne to receive an offering, or to rattle a sistrum, she had to have the conventional female body that would allow her to perform these actions – but there was no reason why that human body could not be topped by a cow’s head complete with horns and a crown. Realism was never an issue: in all their work, Egypt’s artists set out to convey the essence of their subjects and, in a land where words were pictures and pictures were words, the image of a cow-headed woman told its own story.

  It was perhaps inevitable that animals specifically linked to gods would become imbued with an aura of divinity. Initially only a few animals from each species were singled out. While some temple geese may have symbolised Amen within the precincts of the Karnak temple, for example, most dynastic geese were bred as food. Gradually, however, the idea developed that any animal from a ‘sacred’ class might have its own divine attributes, and Egypt’s temples came to resemble informal zoos. The temple of Thoth at Hermopolis Magna became a sacred safari park, with hundreds of baboons and thousands of ibises wandering around, while the Bubastis temple of Bast was soon overrun with cats. At death these temple animals were mummified, packed into miniature coffins or purpose-made pots, and interred in their thousands in galleries in the nearby desert cemeteries.

  The Apis bull, the living embodiment of the Memphite creator god Ptah, had been revered from the beginning of the dynastic age, but little is known of his cult before the New Kingdom, when the 19th Dynasty Khaemwaset, priestly son of Ramesses II,
constructed the ‘lesser vaults’, an underground gallery to house the Apis burials in the Sakkara cemetery. The cult grew in popularity until, by the Ptolemaic period, it had assumed a huge significance. By now the bulls were being buried in enormous stone sarcophagi in the ‘greater vaults’, the focus of modern tourist visits to the Memphite Serapeum. At a time when standards of human mummification were declining, increasing attention was being paid to the mummification of sacred animals, and the dead Apis underwent a sixty-eight-day stay in an embalming house in the precincts of the Ptah temple, followed by a series of elaborate rituals (including a journey to the sacred temple lake and a visit to the tent of purification, where the opening of the mouth ceremony was performed) leading to the funeral on the seventieth day. The Ptolemies made a financial contribution to these expensive ceremonies, with Cleopatra donating 412 silver coins plus food and oil at the death of the Apis, son of the cow Ta-nt Bastet.

  The Memphite Serapeum lies in the sacred animal cemetery in the Sakkara necropolis, to the north-west of the step pyramid built by the 3rd Dynasty king Djoser. This is a complicated site incorporating a ruined Ptolemaic temple complex, a sphinx-lined processional avenue, a temple built by the Late Period king Nectanebo, and a series of sacred-animal catacombs and cemeteries including the galleries dedicated to the Apis bulls. The Isis cows, the mothers of the Apis bulls, had their own cemetery nearby, with the last cow being interred during Cleopatra’s Year 11. Further catacombs were dedicated to ibis, baboon and falcon burials, while the neighbouring Anubeion (dedicated to the jackal-headed god of mummification, Anubis) and Bubasteion (dedicated to the cat goddess Bast) housed dog and cat burials. The scale of these animal interments is extraordinary: excavations at Sakkara have so far yielded an estimated four million ibis mummies and 500,000 hawks, plus many domestic artefacts and papyri which make it clear that the Ptolemaic Serapeum was a living community with accommodation for priests and lay workers, a palace for the frequent royal visits, and a library and archive second only to the Great Library of Alexandria.

  A curious Ptolemaic construction, the exedra, built along the processional avenue of the sphinxes close by the Serapeum entrance, has yielded a semicircular podium displaying seated statues of the more important Greek philosophers and poets. The statues are unlabelled and in a poor state of preservation, but various experts have identified Homer, Hesiod, Plato, Xenophon and Aristotle among the figures. Nearby, lining the avenue, is a collection of statues and reliefs connected with the cult of Dionysos: the young Dionysos riding various wild animals; peacocks bearing grapes; mythological creatures including female sphinxes and sirens. The age of the exedra is uncertain, with some scholars dating it as early as the reign of Ptolemy I, others as late as the reign of Ptolemy XII. Its purpose is equally obscure, although there has been some speculation that the Greek sages and Dionysiac beasts may have been charged with guarding the entrance to the original Egyptian burial place of Alexander the Great.

  Parallel to the native temples and the animal cults were the Hellenistic temples and the new royal cults, which were primarily designed to appeal to Egypt’s Greeks. The Ptolemaic interest in royal divinity was by no means a new phenomenon. Egypt’s living kings had long been recognised as mortals transformed by the powerful coronation rituals into demigods. At death, mummification made them fully divine. Rising into the heavens, they would twinkle as undying stars in the velvet night sky, sail across the heavens in the flaming sun-boat of Re, or descend to the underworld to rule at one with the king of the afterlife, Osiris. Egypt’s last native king, Nectanebo II, had been profoundly interested in his own divinity. But he lived in difficult times, his throne constantly under threat from the Persians. He set out to prove his piety by building and restoring the cult temples of the state gods; this was a traditional and very obvious means of bringing maat to chaos, establishing links with Egypt’s glorious past, raising finances and boosting national morale.14 Within the temples Nectanebo placed royal statues which had their own priesthoods and were financed by their own endowments. For the first time, it seems, Egypt’s kings were considered worthy of sharing the houses of the gods. Nectanebo simultaneously emphasised his own role as the one true pharaoh by promoting the image of Nectanebo the Falcon: a direct reference to the falcon god Horus, who represented all of Egypt’s living kings. Following the 343 Persian invasion led by Artaxerxes III, Nectanebo fled Egypt, probably heading south, to Nubia. He left behind the impression of a mysterious, semi-legendary figure whose mythology grew with time. Nectanebo appears in The Alexander Romance as a wily magician who befriends Olympias of Macedonia. Aware of the queen’s penchant for snakes, Nectanebo turns himself into a serpent, sleeps with the queen and fathers Alexander the Great. Thus Alexander, son of Nectanebo, was justified in claiming the throne of Egypt.

  Alexander appreciated the importance of Egypt’s gods and the priests who served them. The Alexander Romance tells us that Alexander chose to be crowned King of Upper and Lower Egypt by Egyptian priests in the temple of the creator god Ptah of Memphis. This – if true – was a wise move. His conspicuous coronation, an abbreviated version of the traditional Egyptian ceremony, made clear Alexander’s acceptance of the time-honoured rituals and responsibilities of Egyptian kingship while demonstrating the priesthood’s acceptance of Alexander as king. Lest there be any doubt over his sincerity, the new king selected a throne name, Meryamen Setepenre (Beloved of Amen, Chosen of Re), that confirmed his commitment to the Egyptian pantheon. Impressive, and very public, sacrifices in the temples of Memphis and nearby Heliopolis followed. Traditional Greek-style games were held at Memphis, while, 400 miles upriver, the walls of the splendid new barque shrine in the Luxor temple were carved with images of Alexander offering to the gods of his new land. Shown in profile, shaven-headed, bare-chested and dressed in a kilt and crown, the Greek Alexander was indistinguishable from all the pharaohs who had gone before.

  Alexander counted Zeus among his remote ancestors, and his mother had for many years dropped strong hints that her son was no ordinary boy. Traditional Greek theology, however, did not accept that a living person could be divine. Now, following his Egyptian coronation, Alexander was officially semi-divine in Egypt, where he was recognised as the son of Amen-Re, father of all of Egypt’s kings. But to be half divine was not enough. Soon after his coronation ceremony Alexander made a 300-mile trek across the Libyan Desert to consult the oracle of Zeus-Ammon in the remote Siwa Oasis. Zeus-Ammon was a ram-headed hybrid of the Greek Zeus and the Egyptian Amen, tinged with more than a hint of the native Libyan god who had originally been celebrated at Siwa. Worshipped in the Egyptian style, Zeus-Ammon was essentially a Greek oracle famed for his accurate pronouncements. After eight days wandering in the desert – contemporary histories tells us that he was guided on his way by friendly crows and a succession of talking snakes, and sustained by unexpected rains – the weary Alexander arrived at the temple and entered the sanctuary with the chief priest, leaving his entourage outside. No one knows what questions Alexander asked; indeed, no one knows how he asked them or how the god responded. But the whole world soon knew how the chief priest had greeted Alexander as the son of Zeus-Ammon himself. The living Alexander was definitely, undeniably, divine.

  Ptolemy I developed the link between the royal family and the gods by promoting the cults of Serapis and Alexander, and by instigating a Ptolemaic programme of temple building and restoration which, initially confined to northern Egypt, soon spread southwards. Ptolemy II took things further. His incestuous marriage with his sister mirrored the unions of Osiris and Isis and Zeus and Hera, and led directly to the deification of his late parents. Ptolemy I and Berenice I, descendants of both Dionysos and Heracles, were to be worshipped together as the Theoi Soteres (‘Saviour Gods’). The royal ancestor cults, a new and entirely Graeco-Egyptian focus for worship, were to prove an effective means of channelling the loyalty of the elite of Alexandria and the southern city of Ptolemais Hormou, whose sons were happy to serve as eponymous
priests for a year and whose daughters were eager to become priestesses in the cults of the deified queens. Outside the Greek cities the royal cults were quietly absorbed into the traditional theology, as many other gods had been before.

  In 272/1 the Ptolemies acquired an enhanced divinity, as Ptolemy II and Arsinoë II were officially designated living gods. Together they became the Theoi Adelphoi (‘Brother-Sister Gods’). Arsinoë II, sister-wife of Ptolemy II, was queen consort of Egypt for less than seven years. Within the royal family she entirely supplanted her husband’s divorced first wife, Arsinoë I, and at Karnak we can see her stepson Ptolemy III making offerings to the dead Arsinoë II as if she had been his birth mother. A gold coin issued between 285 and 246 made Arsinoë the first Egyptian queen to be featured on her husband’s coinage. She was also the first Ptolemaic queen to be shown accompanying her husband as he offered to the gods, the first to wear the double uraeus which distinguished her from her predecessor, Arsinoë I, and the first to design her own Egyptian-style crown: an elaborate combination of the king’s red crown (the crown of Lower or northern Egypt), a solar disc, two tall feathers, the cow horns associated with Hathor and Isis, and the ram horns associated with Amen. The crown, which somewhat resembles the one worn by the earth god Geb, suggests an interest in Egypt’s dynastic history and, maybe, some understanding of traditional Egyptian solar theology, which is reinforced by references to Arsinoë as a ‘daughter of Amen’ and ‘daughter of Shu’. A colossal granite statue of Arsinoë recovered from the Gardens of Sallust, Rome, shows her as an entirely Egyptian queen with a now-vanished crown and a double uraeus still on her brow. The statue inscription confirms that she is: