Cleopatra the Great

by Joann Fletcher

  Although in his youth Pasherenptah had claimed to be ‘a noble resplendent of possessions of every kind. To me belongs a harem of fair maidens’, subsequent marriage to Taimhotep of Letopolis had failed to produce a son to succeed him. So perhaps the couple had slept in Sakkara’s incubation chambers, whose erotic wall paintings and fertility-god figures were believed to help in such cases. Or they may have spent the night in Ptah’s temple, as had a priest’s barren wife in one Ptolemaic tale, there receiving a dream telling her to give her husband a preparation of melon vine to receive from him ‘the fluid of conception’; the plant’s root was recommended in later Arab pharmacopoia as a powerful aphrodisiac and stimulant to sperm production. But ultimately, Taimhotep and her husband turned to Imhotep, ‘who gives a son to him who has none’, and this time it was Pasherenptah who received the dream, telling him to set up a new statue of Imhotep in his shrine at Sakkara.

  Since the shrine had undergone a makeover following royal approval from Cleopatra, herself probably in Sakkara only two years earlier when she seems to have accompanied the funeral of the Apis bull, she may well have revisited the site with Caesar to view the great tomb of the Mothers of Apis cows whose powers she shared, and no doubt the Serapeum where previous Apis bulls were interred. The sacred spirits of both cows and bulls were honoured with gilded stelae and statuary: Cleopatra’s Ptolemaic predecessors had commissioned superb-quality statues of the creatures in dark serpentine and limestone, setting up figures of themselves at the former sepulchre of Alexander to maintain the royal presence in this most significant of dynastic sites.

  Finally the visitors left Memphis. As they progressed upriver the outlines of successive pyramid fields at Dahshur, Mazghuna, Lisht and Medum dominated the west bank’s horizon to their right, while the valley floor began to narrow and hug the river. Groves of fragrant mimosa gave way to Aphroditopolis, city of Hathor-Aphrodite and her sacred white Hesat cow whose priests proudly declared ‘Know that Hesat is Isis!’ Cleopatra, as Living Isis, may well have undertaken sacred duties at Aphroditopolis.

  Yet the couple’s attention was likely to have been drawn to the opposite bank of the river, where a minor branch of the Nile led to the great Fayum region(the renamed Arsinoite home) around Lake Moeris. The early Ptolemies, employing reclamation schemes several millennia old, had created nearly 500 square miles of extra agricultural land able to produce huge quantities of grain, pulses and wine. Visitors were particularly impressed by ‘its development for it alone is planted with olives, of which there are many large trees bearing fine fruit’. The Ptolemies’ achievements in the Fayum clearly impressed Caesar, who began to contemplate how such a scheme in Rome might allow the city to support itself and free it from its reliance on foreign grain.

  Nevertheless the Fayum, like other parts of Egypt, had clearly suffered during the run of low floods. Patches of stagnating swampy ground increased malaria levels, and medical texts which described those suffering ‘from every shivering fit and fever’ could recommend little more than costly imported black pepper as a remedy. It would therefore have been imperative that Living Isis made her presence felt in the Fayum, just as she had at the very beginning of her reign when, still finding her pharaonic feet, she had been depicted in the guise of a male pharaoh making an offering to Isis. Yet now she appeared in the guise of Isis herself, alongside the region’s chief deity, Sobek the crocodile god, in a kind of double-act, her own charms balanced by those of Sobek as ‘Pneferos’, ‘He with the beautiful face’. Greek hymns in praise of Isis, her crocodile consort and their little-known child Anchoes may have been specially written by the Egyptian priests for the visit of their pregnant monarch and her party. Cleopatra is believed to have initiated new building activity in the northern Fayum at this time and, continuing the royal funding of the sacred crocodiles’ funerary expenses, may well have had direct contact with those of the Fayum, the regional equivalent of the sacred bulls.

  One temple discovered in 1912 had the cult equipment laid out alongside a mummified crocodile reclining on its processional stretcher. Housed in the temple’s sacred lake, each live creature had been adorned by ‘putting rings made of glass or gold into its ears and bracelets round its front feet’; they proved enormously popular with foreign visitors, few of whom had ever seen such a creature. When Cleopatra’s grandfather, Chickpea, had been preparing for the visit of a Roman senator in 112 BC, local officials were told to ‘make ready guest-chambers and landing-stages and presents, and to take every care that he should be satisfied’ with a trip to see the sacred crocodiles at feeding time. Usually they were ‘fed on grain and bits of meat and wine, which are always offered to it by visiting foreigners’, as one Greek tourist reported, going on to say that ‘we came upon the creature as it lay on the edge of the lake and when the priests went up to it some of them opened its mouth and another put the cake in, then the meat, and poured the honey-mixture down’. As the sated crocodile then swam off across the lake, another visitor arrived with offerings and the priests sped round to reach them and repeat their no doubt lucrative performance.

  Since close contact with a crocodile was incredibly risky, some Fayumi temples employed ‘sauretai’ or crocodile keepers. The Romans noted that those living around Isis’ cult centre of Dendera further south were particularly skilled at handling them; they were certainly sufficiently confident to balance on the crocodiles’ backs in a pose skilfully captured in first-century BC marble statuary. It may be more than coincidence that such crocodiles and their fearless handlers who were able to haul them in and out of their tanks first appeared in Rome in 58 BC, the year Auletes and Cleopatra visited the region.

  Isis was believed to be capable of calming and taming crocodiles, as reflected in one of her titles, ‘Wet-nurse of the Crocodile’, and as a result rites which brought together the female monarch and the Fayum’s sacred creature in their roles as Isis and Sobek were deliberately misinterpreted in certain quarters. Much like the monarch’s mystic union with the sacred bulls, such a performance was never going to be understood by those in Rome who regarded Egypt as the home of everything unacceptable, from their bizarre worship of animals to their equally strange ideas of sexual equality. It is therefore unsurprising that oil lamps of Roman manufacture often featured the image of a naked woman with her hair in a bun, holding the palm branch associated with the worship of Isis and squatting on the phallus of a large crocodile, a vulgar portrayal which seems to be ‘a satirical reference to Cleopatra VII of Egypt’.

  Yet, keen to see the place where such behaviour was believed to go on, first-century BC Roman tourists flocked to the Fayum, comparing its main monument, the so-called Labyrinth at Hawara (from ‘Hut-weret’, ‘great temple’), with the Giza pyramids. The Labyrinth was the funerary complex of pharaoh Amenemhat III (1842-1797 BC), completed by his dutiful daughter and successor Sobekneferu whose name appeared as frequently as her father’s throughout the complex. Given its long winding passages and secret subterranean crypts filled with statues of Sobek and the mummies of his sacred crocodiles, the Greek historian Herodotus wrote that this temple was the most amazing thing he had seen in Egypt. Cleopatra’s dynasty added ‘a large statue of Serapis, 9 cubits high, made of smaragdus’, emeralds, whose glistening green associating Serapis with the region’s mighty green crocodile god would almost certainly have been worn by Cleopatra as crocodile consort.

  The hallowed area all around the Labyrinth had long been regarded as the optimum area for burial, and mummification was performed by the hereditary embalmers who lived along Hawara’s King Street. Like many members of Egypt’s mixed population, they were in regular dispute with their Greek neighbours. Hostilities also existed between the Fayumis and their southern neighbours in Henen-nesut, whose ram-headed god Herishef, identified with the Greek Herakles, was the origin of the town’s more familiar name, Herakleopolis.

  The town had been home to kings who had fought a long civil war in 2100 BC against the Thebans further south, its later asso
ciation with Herakles certainly apt for a combative population still demonstrating their rivalries two thousand years later. Demonstrating their devotion to specific sacred animals, whose images would have acted as totems in territorial disputes, the Herakleopolitans honoured the ichneumon, whereas the jackal god Anubis was held in special reverence by their southern neighbours in Kynopolls, ‘Dog City’. They in turn had long-running disputes with those over the Nile who venerated the pike, its distinctive features giving rise to their town’s name Oxyrhynchus, meaning ‘sharp snout’. As the fish believed to have swallowed the phallus of Osiris after he had been dismembered and thrown in the Nile, the sacred Oxyrhynchus fish became closely associated with Isis, who was honoured with one of many temples in a town whose main thoroughfare was Cleopatra-Aphrodite Street.

  Like most big towns, Oxyrhynchus featured ‘a mixture of religious buildings in traditional Egyptian style rubbing shoulders with the classically designed public buildings that defined the Greek polis — the bath complex, the gymnasium and the theatre. But on leaving the centre, one would have moved into a large and dirty Egyptian village showing comparatively little change from previous eras’ and reflecting the dusty surroundings of life as it has always been lived on the desert edge. As the couple sailed deeper into the heart of Egypt, the ever-observant Caesar must also have noticed how the towns and villages had started to change: the Greek influence, which radiated so strongly from Alexandria and reached as far as the Fayum, was becoming far less obvious the further south they sailed.

  When they reached the ancient site of Khmun, main cult centre of Thoth whose affinity with Hermes led to its Greek renaming as Hermopolis, this great focus of pilgrimage for both Egyptians and Greeks must have witnessed Cleopatra disembarking to pay her respects to the deity whose reputation for learning she is known to have honoured. Having brought knowledge and writing to humans, Thoth had also taught the magical arts to Isis, whose fine Ptolemaic shrine was part of Thoth’s great complex filled with his sacred bird the ibis, bred on specialist farms or ‘ibiotrophion’ and fed on clover. A series of colossal quartzite baboons, representing Thoth’s other sacred creature, led to a large column-filled hypostyle hall planned by Alexander. Here a classical ‘Ptolemeion’ with a cylindrical altar formed the focus of a ruler cult so strong that Cleopatra would be venerated here for four hundred years in rites administered by the priestly Petosiris family, whose burials in the nearby cemetery accompanied the mummified remains of thousands of Thoth’s sacred ibis and baboons (Papio hamadryas anubis), their souls honoured by the Ptolemies with offerings of lavish jewellery.

  Just to the south of Hermopolis, where the distinctive eastern hills formed an unusual landscape which appeared to give birth to the sun each dawn, the open plain held a cemetery of sacred dogs or jackals whose living counterparts could occasionally be seen slipping through ruins stretching far into the distance. Curious statues in the hillside flanked royal decrees ordering the burials of the royal family and the sacred Mnevis bull to be relocated to this remote place, while rows of tombs further along the hillside were covered in extensive Greek graffiti. The presence of elaborate goldwork of Ptolemaic date in the very valley containing the tombs of Mnevis and former royals was intriguing evidence that the wealthy of Ptolemaic times were clearly familiar with a site now known as Amarna, city of Akhenaten and Nefertiti.

  Caesar and Cleopatra and their entourage pressed on upriver to Cusae, where earlier Ptolemies had embellished the temple of Golden Hathor, the sun god’s daughter whom the Greeks knew as Aphrodite Ourania, the ‘heavenly one’. Here the hillsides, dotted with the rock-cut tombs of previous generations, gave way to subterranean caves housing many thousands of mummified crocodiles stacked up in huge piles. They ranged in length from 12-inch babies to giants of over 30 feet, wrapped singly, in family groups or even in the mating position, and their combined souls were venerated by priests wearing cuirass-like costumes of crocodile skin, presumably to take on some of the creatures’ sacred powers.

  The splendid progress would then have reached two large settlements on either side of the river. Athribis, on the east bank, was a corruption of the ancient ‘Hut-Repyt’, literally ‘house of Repyt’, the lioness goddess whose 230-foot-wide temple had been built by Cleopatra’s father and grandfather. Keen to follow them, she commissioned another wave of building work to expand the goddess’ complex as a fitting balance for that of Repyt’s consort Min which lay across the river.

  The priapic nature of the fertility god Min meant that the Greeks regarded him as their own god Pan; his cult centre of Khent-Min (modern Akhmim), dubbed Panopolis by the Greeks, was the home town of an influential family whose intermarriage with the royals had led to the so-called Amarna period. The family’s cliffside shrine had been embellished by a daughter of the later pharaoh, Nectanebo I, and paralleled by a shrine of Auletes. The centre of the ritual activity, however, was Min’s great temple, whose facade, nearly 300 feet wide, fronted a mazelike layout of such magnitude and complexity that later visitors were warned that ‘only by loud screaming can one lead one another’s way’ — a practice far removed from the peaceful, ordered routine of the ancient clergy. At the heart of its echoing interior of columned halls, corridors, ramps and staircases lay the mystical ‘House of the Moon’ where Min received his leonine consort Repyt for their annual union, her statue being carried in festive procession in the same way that Cleopatra would have been carried aloft in her gold carrying chair before performing the sacred rites.

  Beyond Min’s stronghold lay Ptolemais Hermiou, something of a Greek oasis in an otherwise Egyptian desert and founded as a counterbalance to Thebes. It soon developed into one of the largest cities in the region, from where royal officials kept the monarchy informed of events. Cleopatra’s own ‘men on the ground’ were her key officials Hephaistion and Theon, and their regular correspondence revealed that a temple of Isis had been built at Ptolemais Hermiou in Cleopatra’s honour. Perhaps she and Caesar paid a visit on their progress south, for in a letter dated the following year, 7 March 46 BC, she wrote, ‘To Theon. Let the relevant persons be told that the temple of Isis built on behalf of our well-being by Kallimachos the military commander south of Ptolemais is to be tax-free and inviolable together with the houses built around it as far as the wall of the city. Let it be done!’

  Business concluded, the royal party would have carried on to Abedju (Abydos), home of the famous temple of Osiris which, like many others, was linked to the Nile by a small canal. Groves of acanthus gave way to the paved quayside of the temple, a ‘remarkable structure of solid stone’ that was yet another great draw for Greek and Roman tourists who called it the Memnonion after the throne name of its builder, the thirteenth-century BC pharaoh Seti I ‘Menmaatra’.

  Certainly royal names were of tremendous importance in a temple housing the cult of Seti’s royal predecessors. The so-called Chamber of Ancestors, which listed all the monarchs from the beginning of Egypt’s history c.3100 BC down to Seti’s own day, revealed how his nononsense militaristic dynasty had rewritten Egypt’s history to suit their own agenda. Although it omitted the names of such undesirables as the female pharaohs Hatshepsut, Nefertiti and her fellow ‘heretics’ Akhenaten, Tutankhamen and Ay, Abydos’ list was still an important part of the ancestor rituals which seem to have been familiar to Cleopatra. Now, carrying her own successor, she may well have visited the temple with Caesar to view and indeed read out the royal ancestor list for herself. The place was certainly a tourist highlight, with hundreds of graffiti in Greek, Cypriot, Carian, Aramaic and Phoenician paying homage to famous pharaohs of the past, to Osiris, Serapis and all ‘the gods in Abydos’. Pilgrims were allowed to sleep within the temple’s incubation area to receive therapeutic dreams, but it seems that some pilgrims had dreams of a rather different nature. One of the graffiti outlining the charms of a local working girl was amended in a second hand, verifying the initial comments but adding that ‘to my mind, she is too short’.

  I
n the vast desert necropolis beyond the temple of Abydos lay Egypt’s last-known royal pyramid. It was a cenotaph to Queen Tetisheri, honoured down the centuries as the founder of the XVIII royal dynasty and mother to married brother-and-sister rulers Tao II and Ahhotep. And as the final resting place of Egypt’s earliest kings, the necropolis was still in the burial business in Ptolemaic times.

  Yet its greatest tomb was the mythical burial site of Osiris, Lord of the Underworld, making this a place of pilgrimage for many centuries. It was always packed out during the annual ‘Mysteries of Osiris’, which took place amid the tombs during the Egyptian month of ‘Koiakh’ (from ‘Ka-her-ka’ or ‘soul-upon-soul’, ancient Egypt’s equivalent of ‘All Hallows’). It remained one of the most important festivals in the Ptolemaic calendar, when Osiris’ death and resurrection were commemorated by the living remembering their own deceased relatives.

  The priests undertook secret nocturnal rites within the temple’s innermost sanctum before stepping out into the darkness of the great desert graveyard. As their torch-lit procession commemorating Isis’ search for Osiris was echoed by lamps lit in homes across Egypt, it was believed that she reunited his dismembered body parts through mummification and, using her great magic, raised the dead god to conceive her son Horus. With Osiris’ burial on 21 December followed by Horus’ birth on 23 December, linked to the winter solstice and similar cross-cultural legends of death and resurrection, both the site and the story would have held tremendous resonance for Cleopatra whose impending motherhood was only a few months away. Perhaps she ventured down into Osiris’ subterranean Osireion temple, whose monolithic construction was intentionally sited below ground level to receive the annual floodwaters, in order to invoke the waters as Living Isis.