This territorial expansion was a means to an end, not an end in itself, for throughout the Ptolemaic lands, trade was at the heart of government policy. As with later world empires, Ptolemaic Egypt grew fabulously wealthy from commercial activity underpinned by extensive natural resources. Early in his reign, Ptolemy II launched a campaign against the Nubian kingdom of Meroë, and succeeded in seizing control of lower Nubia, with its abundant gold reserves. To drive the point home, he founded a gold processing city in the Wadi Allaqi, named Berenike Panchrysos (“all-gold Berenike”) in honor of his redoubtable mother. Control of Nubia also had the added bonus of providing Egypt with a supply of African elephants, to pit against the awesome Indian war elephants of the Seleucid army. In another move, Ptolemy II ordered the Suez Canal, built by Darius some 230 years earlier, to be dredged and reopened to shipping. From ports on the Red Sea coast, ships plied the sea routes to India; riverboats sailed up the Nile to sub-Saharan Africa, while camel trains followed the overland routes west across the Sahara and east to Arabia. Under Ptolemaic rule, Egypt was once again at the hub of a great trading empire.
When it came to trumpeting their fabulous wealth and far-flung imperial connections, the Ptolemies were not given to modesty. In the winter of 275–274, Egypt witnessed one of the most magnificent pageants ever staged in the ancient world. From the cushioned comfort of a vast tent, erected within the walls of the royal citadel, Ptolemy II and 130 specially invited guests watched as a great ceremonial procession filed past. First came the statues honoring the dynasty’s patron deities, Dionysus, Zeus, Alexander, and Ptolemy I and his wife Berenike. Following them, exotic tribute from Africa, Arabia, and India thundered past: twenty-four elephant wagons, antelope, ostriches, wild asses, leopards, a giraffe, a rhinoceros, and countless camels; then Nubians bearing tribute, colorful Indian women, cattle, and dogs (all of them “fauna” in Ptolemy’s eyes). Finally came the military contingent, an essential element of any triumphalist procession, comprising eighty thousand soldiers from the Ptolemaic army. Where the pharaohs of the New Kingdom had merely carved scenes of tribute on the walls of tombs and temples, the Ptolemies staged the real thing.
In a more radical departure from pharaonic precedent, Ptolemy II’s astonishing pomp took place not in Thebes or Memphis but in Alexandria, the jewel in the Ptolemaic crown. Since its foundation on April 7, 331, the city had grown into the leading commercial center of the Mediterranean world. Alexander had personally selected the location, and he had chosen well. Since it was fewer than twenty miles from one of the Nile’s main mouths, yet unaffected by the annual inundation, Alexandria was ideally situated for maritime trade. A double natural harbor, divided by a causeway, provided deep-water anchorage for merchant shipping, and extensive wharfs were built for loading and unloading goods. As well as warehouses, shipyards, and the emporium, the waterfront also provided the perfect location for a theater and a temple to Poseidon, Greek god of the seas. Inland, the main city was laid out on a grid system (another Hellenistic trait), with two broad, hundred-foot-wide avenues intersecting at right angles. Along these boulevards were ranged the principal public spaces, notably the market square and the major temples. Indeed, as befitted an administrative and dynastic capital, precincts and palaces covered between one-quarter and one-third of the city. The royal mausoleum and colossal statuary, law courts, and a porticoed gymnasium: monuments in Egyptian and Greek styles, in polished granite and dazzling marble, stood cheek by jowl in a mesmerizing blend of Hellenistic and pharaonic cultures. Alexandria was a place where two worlds met in a rich and heady mix—even if some native Egyptians insisted on referring to it, contemptuously, as the “building site.”
No institution better demonstrated the Ptolemies’ vision for Alexandria than the Great Library. Ptolemy I had been determined from the outset to steal Athens’s crown and promote his capital as the paramount intellectual center of the Greek world. To this end, he established a scholarly academy within the palace quarter, presided over by a priest of the Muses. The Museum swiftly became a powerhouse of research and teaching, as the Ptolemies sought out the best brains from across the Greek world and lured them to Alexandria with the promise of academic freedom and a guaranteed salary—paid directly from the royal treasury. The Museum buildings had all the necessary elements of a scholarly community: covered arcades with recesses and seats for quiet contemplation; a large dining hall, in which the learned members could meet and discuss ideas; and, of course, a library. Not just any library but the greatest collection of books in the ancient world, acquired by fair means or foul from the best book markets of the day. Ptolemy III was so desperate to acquire original editions of Greek literary classics that he even resorted to outright theft. His ruse was to borrow books from the libraries of Athens, in return for a hefty deposit of fifteen silver talents. As soon as the manuscripts had arrived safely in Alexandria, Ptolemy sent his thanks to the Athenians—they could keep the deposit, he was keeping the books.
In its heyday, the Great Library numbered half a million papyrus rolls, representing the sum total of knowledge in every field of inquiry. The wealth of its written holdings was matched only by its glittering array of scholarly talent, as successive directors of the library gathered about them an astonishing array of visiting academics. There were one or two Egyptians—notably Manetho, a priest of Sebennytos (Egyptian Tjebnetjer), who was commissioned to write a history of Egypt—but the vast majority of Alexandria’s intellectuals came from across the Greek world. Euclid, the founder of geometry, was brought from the Platonic School in Athens and organized the entire corpus of Greek mathematical knowledge into a unified system. The engineer Archimedes invented his water-lifting device while he was in Egypt, and the astronomer Aristarchus of Samos advanced the theory of a solar system with the sun at its center. In 245, the geographer and astronomer Eratosthenes was appointed director of the library. During his stay in Egypt, he accurately calculated the circumference of the earth by measuring the length of the shadow cast by a stick at the same time of day in Aswan and Alexandria. His contemporaries in Alexandria included physicians steeped in the Hippocratic tradition who established the basic workings of the nervous, digestive, and vascular systems, while the court poet Callimachus compiled a painstaking catalogue of books in the Great Library, laying the foundations for the survival of Greek learning into later antiquity and beyond.
In a city of such intellectual wonders, one final architectural masterpiece quite literally beamed Alexandria’s achievements to the far horizon. On a rocky islet connected to the mainland by a long breakwater stood the Pharos, towering hundreds of feet into the sky. Commissioned by Ptolemy I and completed by his successor in 280, it was a miracle of engineering. The great tower was built from blocks of stone weighing on average seventy-five tons, and the structure rose in three massive stories, by turns square, octagonal, and cylindrical. At the summit, topped by a gigantic statue of Zeus, was the crowning glory, a beacon that burned day and night. Its light, magnified by mirrors, was visible a vast distance out to sea—to guide people, goods, and ideas from across the Mediterranean into the Ptolemies’ thriving metropolis. A practical landmark for shipping and a powerful symbol of Ptolemaic power, the Pharos epitomized the Greek mastery of Egypt.
ONE COUNTRY, TWO SYSTEMS
THE MARITIME WORLD BEYOND ALEXANDRIA MIGHT HAVE BEEN THOROUGHLY Greek, but the delta and Nile Valley were a different matter. Ptolemaic law recognized only three autonomous cities (poleis) in Egypt: Alexandria itself; the ancient trading center of Naukratis; and the new foundation of Ptolemais, established by Ptolemy I near Abdju, in Upper Egypt, as a counterweight to the traditional hegemony of Thebes. In each polis, the citizens enjoyed special tax privileges and were permitted to elect their own magistrates. Immigrants from across the Greek world came in the thousands to Ptolemaic Egypt, seeing it as a land of opportunity where there were fortunes to be made in finance and commerce. But such immigrants—as immigrants tend to do—naturally gravitated to existing
Greek communities. Alexandria, Naukratis, and Ptolemais rapidly became multiethnic polyglot cities, where Sicilians, Illyrians, and Thracians rubbed shoulders with Ionians and Carians. By contrast, large tracts of the Egyptian countryside, where the native population was dominant, remained relatively immune to immigration.
This cultural and ethnic divide between the Greek cities and the Egyptian countryside ran like a fault line through Ptolemaic society. The Pharos may have been a beacon to a land of opportunity, but it was no Statue of Liberty. A small class of Greek officials, merchants, and soldiers ruled the roost, while the mass of Egyptian peasantry tilled the fields, as they had always done. The Ptolemies showed no hesitation in adopting the autocratic, authoritarian mode of rule perfected by their pharaonic predecessors, while entrusting the reins of power to a small Greek-speaking coterie of royal favorites. Out went the vizier—the head of the Egyptian administration since the dawn of history—to be replaced by a dioiketes. Under him, officials with similarly alien titles controlled every aspect of government, from the chief secretary (hypomnematographos) in Alexandria to the chief administrator (strategos) in each province, appointed by the king to keep a close eye on the native population. The ruling class had their gymnasia, bastions of (male) Greek culture. These men wrote and spoke in Greek, and they continued to think of themselves as Greeks, even after three or four generations in Egypt. They also had their own legal system, imported from their homeland. It operated alongside the native pharaonic system of courts that continued to decide cases between Egyptians. It was quite literally a case of one law for those in power, another law for the rest.
In the towns and villages of rural Egypt, especially in the Fayum, with its concentration of Greek military settlers, the native population had no choice but to accommodate this new, alien culture in their midst. Many in the lower ranks of the bureaucracy adopted double names, using higher-status Greek names in the exercise of their official duties but reverting to their Egyptian names for private matters. In a typical village such as Kerkeosiris, Greek shrines dedicated to Zeus and the two heavenly twins, Castor and Pollux, jostled for space with native shrines where people still worshipped the old deities Isis, Thoth, Bastet, and Amun. Even in Memphis, with its thriving port and its long tradition of cultural mixing, each ethnic group lived in a separate quarter of the city.
The question for the Ptolemies was how to bind together such disparate elements into a unified kingdom, how to prevent the country from fragmenting along ethnic and cultural lines. The answer, as so often in Egyptian history, was religion. Animal cults had been a characteristic feature of ancient Egyptian religion for centuries, and Ptolemy I took great pains to honor them. He paid particular devotion to the most ancient and revered of all such cults, the Apis bull of Memphis, not least because of its strong connection with divine kingship since the First Dynasty. To complement the bull’s cult center at Saqqara, Ptolemy I built a second complex at Alexandria, dedicated to Osiris-Apis (“Serapis” in Greek). Pilgrims came from all over the Greek world to visit the two Serapeums. The native Egyptians, however, remained distinctly underwhelmed. They knew traditional deities when they saw them. Serapis, represented as a Greek hero god, was not one of them. Eventually, the Ptolemaic state withdrew its funding for the cult of Serapis, having failed to win over the Egyptian population.
Rather more successful was the Ptolemies’ attempt to combine the Hellenistic and Egyptian concepts of monarchy into a single countrywide ruler cult. Alexander’s life and death had demonstrated the potency of the Hellenistic version, and the Ptolemies understood the unifying force of Egyptian divine kingship, a doctrine that had been the country’s defining belief for most of its history. Combining the two strands—Hellenistic and pharaonic—seemed to promise a result that would be irresistible to both communities. At first, it was the Hellenistic cult of the basileus, “king,” that took precedence. Ptolemy I deliberately promoted the cult of Alexander, associating himself with it and establishing it in Alexandria to give his dynasty legitimacy. He elevated his former boss to the position of state god and made Alexander’s priest—an office denied to native Egyptians—the highest ranking clergyman in the land. Not that Ptolemy was overcome with modesty when it came to self-deification. Beyond the shores of the delta, on the island of Rhodes, he was only too happy to be worshipped as a god during his lifetime. After his death, he was formally deified in Egypt, and a festival in his honor, the Ptolemaia, was celebrated in Alexandria every four years, accompanied by processions, sacrifices, banquets, and sporting competitions.
Ptolemy II went even further, founding cults for numerous members of his family, including his mistresses. His great procession of 275–274 proclaimed the material and military basis of his (Greek) kingship, and at the same time, he took steps to polish his credentials as pharaoh. Soon after his accession, he visited many of Egypt’s most important sanctuaries, especially those devoted to the indigenous animal cults, to fulfill his religious duties as an Egyptian ruler. He had images of himself and members of his dynasty placed in the Serapeum at Saqqara, alongside the statues of the Apis bull and other Egyptian gods. Above all, like all good pharaohs before him, he honored the gods by commissioning spectacular new temple buildings. A complex dedicated to Isis was begun on the island of Philae, at the first cataract; work was also undertaken at Ipetsut, Gebtu (Greek Koptos), Iunet (Greek Tentyris), Saqqara, and in the delta at Per-hebit (Greek Iseum).
The native temples were bastions of Egyptian culture, proudly independent institutions that made a point of rejecting external influences, as a way of maintaining pharaonic religion and customs. So, by acting the royal patron, in time-honored fashion, Ptolemy II hoped to reconcile the native population to foreign rule. The temples were also important landowners and centers of economic activity, so they offered the king material as well as spiritual gain. To tap into this vital source of wealth, Ptolemy forced the temple estates to accept crown agents, trusted officials who were tasked with looking after the government’s economic interests.
Egypt’s famed wealth had always been based upon its agricultural productivity, and from the start, the Ptolemies were determined to exploit their new domain to the full. The founder of the dynasty established his eponymous city, Ptolemais, in an area renowned for its arable cultivation. He launched an even more ambitious project in the Fayum, reclaiming vast tracts through irrigation and trebling the region’s cultivable land in the process. Under Ptolemy II, in a miracle of civil engineering, an artificial lake with a capacity of 360 million cubic yards was created in the southern Fayum; it held enough water to irrigate about sixty square miles of arable land. Because these estates had been created anew from barren desert, they lay outside any preexisting land claims, and their produce was channeled straight into the state’s ample coffers.
Similarly, in every rural community throughout Egypt, the lowliest official in the government hierarchy, the village scribe, concerned himself first and foremost with land use and farm yields. His main task was to work out how much land could be rented out by the state to tenant farmers and how much revenue it would produce. Scribes were summoned to their provincial capital to meet with the Greek governor in the state records office twice a year—once in February, to prepare for the annual survey of agricultural production, and again four weeks later to report on the survey’s findings. Later in the year, in the early summer, village scribes from across Egypt gathered in Alexandria to answer to the dioiketes. It was a stark reminder that, whether the country was ruled by an Egyptian or a Greek, the economy remained at the heart of the state’s concerns.
Like colonial rulers before and since, the Ptolemies were concerned with squeezing every drop of profit out of their territory, regardless of the consequences. They levied a land tax on Lower Egypt and a harvest tax on Upper Egypt, and charged high fees for holding government office. Even a village scribe had to pay a commission on appointment (and reappointment), and was compelled, as a condition of service, to lease land from the crow
n at a very high annual rent. Little by little, the state imposed a new economic regime throughout Egypt, turning ever more land over to wheat production, using intermediaries to collect revenue, and maximizing taxation by every means possible. As a result, Ptolemaic Egypt outshone every other Hellenistic state in wealth and power. But these policies also bred instability and insurrection. Subservient in their own country, the native Egyptians would not stay silent and uncomplaining forever.
REBELLION!
THE PTOLEMIES MAY HAVE SOUGHT TO PROJECT AN IMAGE OF DIVINE authority, but their view of themselves as benevolent rulers was by no means universally shared. After only two generations of Greek rule, elements of the Egyptian population decided to vent their frustration at the punitive economic policies imposed by their foreign masters. In 245, Ptolemy III was forced to break off his campaigning during the Third Syrian War to deal with a native revolt. It was a minor and short-lived insurrection but the harbinger of worse to come. Resentment festered for another three decades, kept at bay by the Ptolemies’ machinery of repression.
Ironically, the last straw was a famous military victory. In 217, after the Fourth Syrian War had been raging for two years, the forces of Ptolemaic Egypt and the Seleucid Kingdom reached a decisive moment and faced each other across the border near the town of Raphia. To finance the war effort, Ptolemy IV (221–204) had increased taxes still further, imposing a heavy burden on an already hard-pressed population. He had also put aside the Ptolemies’ long-standing contempt for non-Greek soldiers by recruiting a large force of Egyptian troops (albeit armed in Macedonian style). On the eve of battle he addressed his forces, acting the part of a traditional pharaoh, but the pretense fooled nobody, especially as he had to use an interpreter to translate from Greek into Egyptian. The Battle of Raphia resulted in a narrow Ptolemaic victory, and Ptolemy IV had himself immortalized on the walls of Egyptian temples as a war hero and “ruler of Syria.”2 It was the last time a Ptolemy would display such confidence in his own sovereignty. Armed and battle-hardened, the twenty thousand Egyptian troops seized the opportunity to mutiny, feeding a widespread revolt throughout the delta. Peasants left their villages in droves and lived as outlaws, roaming the countryside. Bandits attacked a Greek garrison and an Egyptian temple, both symbols of repression. The Macedonian and Seleucid kings offered their assistance to Ptolemy IV, putting aside their dynastic rivalry in face of this native insurrection, but to little effect. Within a few years, civil war raged through Lower Egypt.
The Rise and Fall of Ancient Egypt Page 51
