Cleopatra the Great

by Joann Fletcher

  As her royal party progressed further upstream, the valley floor shrank to nothing when the cliffs pulled right up to the Nile as it veered north-east. The point where the river bent back again to resume its southerly course was the site of Iunet, Greek Tentyris (Dendera), the very birthplace of Isis, born to the sky goddess Nut but already ‘older than her mother’. The goddess’ beautiful new temple was certainly one of the places Cleopatra was keen to see following her last visit almost two years before.

  Since Auletes laid the foundation stone on 16 July 54 BC in the company of his female other half, most likely his daughter Cleopatra, work had proceeded incredibly swiftly thanks to generous royal patronage and regular inspections by the regional governor Pa-ashem, or Pakhom to the Greeks. Yet it had not been a straightforward task, since Auletes’ initial plans had been embellished to create what some regard as Egypt’s most complex temple. Its multi-storey interior concealed stairways and secret rooms accessed through a series of sliding blocks in walls and pavements, while the hieroglyphs covering the surfaces were the most decorative of all temple inscriptions. The figure of every female monarch in the interior represented Cleopatra, performing sacred rites, and on the exterior a massive sculpted head of Hathor was covered in precious gold leaf to reflect the goddess’ role as ‘the Golden One’. Cleopatra’s lavish use of gold, silver and precious stones to cover the temple’s wall scenes, shrines and statues was described in first-century BC temple records listing all sorts of building work undertaken on shrines, including ‘the naos shrine of Hathor resplendent in silver, gold and every kind of precious stone without measure’ and ‘the statue of Isis which is hidden, made of finest gold’.

  With Isis-Hathor addressed as ‘Mistress of Wine’ and presented with the appropriate libations, she returned the favour by providing the monarch with the means and power to rule, adding, ‘I give you happiness daily, without distress for your majesty.’ Offering ‘drunkenness upon drunkenness without end’ as a means of communing with the gods, the other key feature of Dendera’s rites was music, particularly the region’s favourite African music or ‘nigro tibicine’ which may well have accompanied the words of a wonderfully evocative hymn to Isis-Hathor inscribed on the walls of the Offering Hall.

  Perhaps a tribute from Auletes’ daughter, the lyrics seem particularly apt given his love of music which he used to express his own devotion to gods Greek and Egyptian. The words describe how ‘Pharaoh comes to dance and comes to sing, Mistress, see his dancing, see the skipping! He offers the wine jug to you, Mistress, see his dancing, see the skipping! His heart is pure, no evil in his body, Mistress, see his dancing, see the skipping! O Golden One, how fine is the song, like the song of Horus himself, which Ra’s son sings as the finest singer. He is Horus, the musician! He hates to see sorrow in your soul, he hates the bright goddess to be sad! Oh beautiful One, Great Cow, Great Magician, Glorious Lady, Gold of the gods, he comes to dance, comes to sing with his sistrum [sacred rattle] of gold and his menat [ritual necklace] of malachite, his feet rush toward the Mistress of Music as he dances for her and she loves all he does!’

  Although she too may have performed such rites, the pregnant Cleopatra must have proceded most carefully on her inspection tour of the temple. She would have slowly ascended the gentle incline of the smooth stone steps to reach the rooftop shrines where the sky goddess Nut, stretched out on the ceiling, prepared to give birth to her divine children Isis and Osiris amid the blood-red of the dawn sky.

  Contemplating her forthcoming labour, the ruler seems also to have visited the temple’s separate Mammisi Birth House, built by the earlier pharaoh Nectanebo I for the rites in celebration of Isis-Hathor’s safe delivery of her child Horus. Its priests would surely have performed protective rites for their monarch, invoking the powers of the dwarf god Bes as chief protector of pregnant women and employing the specially infused amulets of Bes that they were known to produce for women to wear during childbirth.

  Sufficiently primed and protected to continue on her royal progress south, she would have reached the next key site, Koptos, where the safe birth of Isis’ child was marked by an annual flower festival. It was the place where Isis was said to have cut off a lock of her hair in mourning for Osiris, and the very hair was displayed as a holy relic in the temple at Koptos for over a thousand years. One soldier wrote home, ‘I hope that you are in good health, and without cease, for you, I worship close to the hair at Koptos.’ Other pilgrims seem to have been rather more demonstrative, and in the grand tradition of Egyptian fertility worship inebriated women exposed themselves to the accompaniment of temple musicians in honour of Isis’ phallic consort Min, an aspect of Osiris, before Min’s sacred bull and Isis’ dainty gazelle.

  Having established her own presence within Min and Isis’ temple with a limestone statue of herself wearing the crown of double plumes, sun disc and cow’s horns, Cleopatra also commissioned a new stone shrine for Isis’ cult statue; a small crypt or ‘priest hole’ at the rear of the shrine enabled priests to conceal themselves in order to make divine pronouncements on the deity’s behalf. It was decorated with images of herself leading the rites as sole monarch with no male consort, and the accompanying hieroglyphs named her ‘Lady of the Two Lands, Cleopatra Philopator, beloved of Min of Koptos, King’s Daughter, King’s Wife’ in the only acknowledgement of the formal union with her youngest brother, Ptolemy XIV. In a further innovative touch, the shrine’s rear wall featured a uniquely realistic view of Isis’ sacred barque as it would have appeared within the shrine, viewed from the front rather than the traditional profile view.

  During her time at Koptos, Cleopatra is likely to have followed tradition by presenting Isis and Min with gold and agate vessels containing myrrh and cinnamon oil, part of the wealth imported through the eastern desert they guarded. For Koptos was the place where the main Red Sea trade route connected with the Nile valley, and its priests had become very powerful from their cut of the wealth which came into their temple.

  Politically aligned to Thebes, the Koptos clergy operated a kind of clerical exchange system in which their god Min-Osiris was worshipped in Thebes, and Theban priests were in charge of the Osiris cult in Koptos. Similar arrangements covering other temples in the region allowed the Theban priests to control much of the south from their base at Karnak, and as Cleopatra and Caesar came nearer to Thebes they would have come first to its outpost at Madu (Medamud), sacred to the great war god Montu whom they must have wished to thank for their recent success in the Alexandrian War.

  From the temple quayside they would have seen an avenue of sphinxes leading up to Montu’s great temple, its facade built by Cleopatra’s father Auletes, its fine portico by her grandfather Chickpea and its multi-columned hypostyle hall by her great-grandfather Physkon. Lively wall scenes depicted the temple musicians playing their harps, lutes and barrel drums for the dancers, the accompanying lyrics of an ancient XVIII-dynasty favourite, ‘Come, Golden Goddess’, proclaiming, ‘it is good for the heart to dance! Shine on our feast at the hour of retiring, and enjoy the dance at night. Come! The procession takes place at the site of drunkenness, drunks play tambourines for you in the cool night, and those they awaken bless you.’

  Further within the temple’s depths, a series of Minotaur-like statues with bull’s heads on human bodies represented Montu, paired with companion figures of his human-featured consort Rattawy, ‘Female Sun of the Two Lands’. Caesar now came into his own as the living embodiment of the war god alongside his goddess consort Cleopatra. They must have paid their respects to Montu’s Buchis bull in its sacred area immediately behind the temple. Its epithet ‘lord of Medamud, Thebes, Tod and Hermonthis’ reveals that the same bull did the rounds of a ritual circuit encompassing Montu’s four cult sites, so this would not have been Cleopatra’s first encounter with the shaggy black and white creature she had rowed between Thebes and Hermonthis in her first act as monarch four years earlier.

  Although such divine journeys traditionally too
k place on the Nile, it seems that the 3-mile journey between Medamud and Thebes could also be undertaken along the ceremonial canal which connected Montu’s Medamud temple with his shrine at Karnak. Yet the likely dimensions of Cleopatra’s royal ship suggest that, on this occasion at least, her arrival in Thebes would have been by river.

  Once Thebes’s political power had been finally smashed by her grandfather Chickpea, the ninth Ptolemy, back in 88 BC after decades of conflict with the crown, the formerly great city had been reduced to little more than a series of scattered villages. But as a known supporter of the region’s cults from the very start of her reign, Cleopatra had been given refuge in the region when ousted from power by her eldest brother, Ptolemy XIII. Now, restored to her throne, she would have received the same positive welcome from the powerful military commander Kallimachos, who controlled the entire Theban region on her behalf.

  Having produced a succession of powerful dynasties in the past, the Thebans had always had difficulty taking orders from their nominal masters in the north. They regarded themselves as a people apart and expressed the north-south divide with their own customs, even piercing their left ears to mark themselves out in contrast to the Alexandrians and certainly the Romans, who considered earrings for men effeminate and a sign of slavery. Rightly proud of their past glories, the Thebans were quite used to the tourists who came to see their sights, sailing down the ancient canal route towards the Theban hills and the temples and tombs of the ancient pharaohs.

  First stop on any itinerary was an astonishing pair of 60-foot-high colossi seated sentinel-like before the ruins of a vast funerary temple of the fourteenth-century BC sun king Amenhotep III (‘Amenophis’ in Greek). Earthquake damage to the northernmost figure subsequently caused it to emit a musical sound as it warmed up in the morning sun, and the phenomenon clearly struck a chord with the Ptolemies who were familiar with the practice of exposing cult statues to the sunlight to reactivate the spirit within. Although one Greek visitor somewhat shattered the magic by asking if the sound was ‘deliberately made by one of the men standing all around and near the base’, or at the very least was enhanced by human effort, Manetho had told the Ptolemies that the sound was a means of communication from Amenhotep III, ‘considered to be Memnon and a talking stone’. The king’s throne name was ‘Nebmaatra’, pronounced Nimmuria or Mimmuria, and the Greeks had equated him with their own hero Memnon, killed in the Trojan War. The statues’ legs had since been transformed into an ancient visitors’ book recording appreciative comments including those of subsequent Roman rulers. Cleopatra may well have brought Caesar here to listen to the statue’s dawn chorus and explain its links both to her pharaonic predecessors and to Caesar’s own family connections with Troy.

  Beyond the Memnon Colossi the Ptolemies had clearly been active around the towering cliffs of Deir el-Bahari, where the famous multi-terraced funerary temple of the female pharaoh Hatshepsut was well known for its famous scenes of Amun impregnating Hatshepsut’s mother. It had been conserved and expanded by Cleopatra’s dynasty: its innermost shrine became a chapel to Imhotep-Asklepios, his daughter Hygeia and the ancient Egyptian sage Amenhotep, son of Hapu. It was also a place where the ailing came to pray and find comfort; a priest would project his voice through a small opening to advise the supplicants beyond. Their grateful graffiti revealed an impressive success rate, from a Macedonian labourer cured on the day of his visit to a dedication by a Greek couple thanking Amenhotep for the birth of their child. The whole area was regarded as holy, and was still used as a burial ground. The nearby funerary temple of Ramses II was similarly described by one of Cleopatra’s contemporaries as the ‘tomb of Osymandyas’, the Greeks’ pronunciation of Ramses’ throne name Usermaatre. He was worshipped here after his death, even though the pharaoh himself was actually buried, like virtually every other pharaoh of the New Kingdom era (1550-1080 BC), in the nearby Valley of the Kings. Even then it was a major tourist destination, described by one Greek visitor as ‘marvelously devised, a spectacle worth seeing’, and graffiti left in the tombs agreed that ‘those who have not seen this place have never seen anything: blessed are they who visit this place’. At least six of the royal tombs were easily accessible in Ptolemaic times, although the most popular was the ‘tomb of Memnon’ that the Greeks associated with the builder of the great singing colossi but had actually been built by a later pharaoh who, in a confusing act of hero worship, adopted the same throne name, ‘Nebmaatra’.

  The valley might have ceased to be a royal burial ground over a thousand years earlier, but it nevertheless remained a most sacred place: the cult statue of Amun of Karnak still made its annual procession across the Nile to visit the tombs and temples of the royal ancestors. It was a place where private individuals had long sought burial in their attempts to capture some of that ancient magic for themselves, and in Cleopatra’s time their mummies continued to stack up inside much older tombs. The son of a powerful local official, Menkare, even retrieved the five-hundred-year-old sarcophagus of Psammetichus IFs daughter from her ransacked tomb for his own burial.

  Across the river on the east bank, despite the wartime devastation wrought on the city of Thebes many of its sacred shrines remained intact, including Luxor’s ‘temple of the divine soul’. With an inner sanctum decorated with scenes of Amun impregnating the mother of yet another mortal king in a story predating the alleged paternity of Alexander by more than a thousand years, the temple’s holiest shrine, commissioned by Alexander himself, was covered in his image, making offerings as a traditional pharaoh before his impressively endowed father Min-Amun. Marking the spot where each monarch had come to revitalise his or her spiritual powers through secret congress with his or her spiritual father Amun, the temple muct have held considerable allure for both Cleopatra and Caesar. Their state visit may have continued along the impressive sphinx-lined processional way which connected the temple with the great Karnak complex with its 70-foot-high Ptolemaic gateway — the place where justice was dispensed, executions carried out and offerings made by those unqualified to venture any further into the temple’s vast precincts.

  Living Isis, however, would almost certainly have been carried through her ancestor’s great gateway in her carrying chair, quite possibly towards the subterranean ‘tomb of Osiris’ built by Ptolemy IV and decorated by scenes of the same king performing resurrection rites before the Apis bull. This may well have been the southern counterpart of the Soma burial chamber in Alexandria completed by the same king. The nocturnal vigils held in the Karnak chamber hint at attempts to revive Alexander’s soul at the cult centre of his divine father Zeus-Amun using the power of Egypt’s supreme funerary deity, Osiris. And with Isis taking a starring role in such rites, the Karnak chamber must have been a key place for Cleopatra to visit with Caesar, both of whom were familiar with its counterpart burial chamber in Alexandria.

  Despite the damage inflicted on parts of Karnak during the earlier civil war, sufficient had remained of its northerly precinct of Amun-Montu for Cleopatra to have personally installed Montu’s sacred Buchis bull there, imbuing the event with her divine presence before rowing him to Hermonthis. Now, with her return visit to Hermonthis’ ‘magnificent’ temple allowing an inspection of new wall scenes naming her ‘King of Upper and Lower Egypt’ and ‘Female Horus’, Cleopatra would also have seen the images of herself worshipping Buchis, Montu and Rattawy, whose name was literally ‘Female Sun of the Two Lands’. Reflecting Cleopatra’s own title ‘Lady of the Two Lands’, Rattawy was a deity she seems to have cultivated, for at Hermonthis she ‘was there because Cleopatra wanted her to be there’.

  Clearly an important element in Cleopatra’s grand design, a new Mammisi Birth House was commissioned behind the exisiting temple in a layout corresponding exactly with that of the Birth House and temple at Dendera. Certainly Cleopatra’s Hermonthis Mammisi was a superb building whose ‘luxuriant decoration represented an excellent example of the baroque style of [Ptolemaic] architecture’. As wo
rk began on its three chambers surrounded by a colonnade of slim columns, ‘the play of light and shadows at the capitals, and the effect of the huge, windowlike openings that created beautiful connections between interior and exterior spaces, must have been stunning’. Statues of Montu’s sacred bull adorned an interior featuring unprecedented scenes of the actual birthing process. To complete the Mammisi there would be a sacred lake with its own Nilometer for measuring the annual flood levels, a wide stone staircase rising directly from the lake to the Mammisi entrance allowing those who were performing ritual ablutions to rise untainted into the temple to perform their rites in a purified state.

  Leaving the sacred lands of the Buchis bull, Caesar and Cleopatra would have reached Tasenet (modern Esna), a site the Greeks called Latopolis or ‘Fish City’ after its sacred Lates niloticus fish. Yet its main temple, built by the Ptolemies, was dedicated to the ram-headed creator god Khnum, the god long believed to have caused the Nile to flood and to have fashioned humans on his potter’s wheel — the very wheel still displayed in its own shrine. Khnum’s annual ceremonies were listed on the surrounding temple walls. The ‘Mystery of the Birth’ contained the ‘Spell for establishing the Wheel in the bodies of all female beings’ which involved placing ‘the egg in the bodies of women, to provide the country with younger generations for the favour of the King of Upper and Lower Egypt, beloved of Khnum’. This was followed by a rite involving a trio of young women representing the various stages of pregnancy.

  As the couple sailed south to Nekheb (El-Kab), the birth theme intensified at the great labyrinth-like temple of the vulture goddess Nekhbet, one of the principal assistants at royal births. Embellished by the Ptolemies, who had also added to Nekhbet’s shrines in the surrounding hills, this temple was where Cleopatra III had built her own rock-cut shrine to the local lioness goddess Shesmetet. Appearing alone as ‘Female Horus, Lady of Upper and Lower Egypt and Mighty Bull’, the sweeping amalgamation of king, queen, god and goddess would not have been lost on her great-granddaughter Cleopatra VII.