Cleopatra the Great Page 2

  Although her plans to take sole possession of the throne would have been easier to implement if she too had been male, she was fully aware that many other women had ruled Egypt before her. Indeed, from the fabled female pharaohs of ancient times to the women of her own dynasty her half-sister had ruled as sole monarch until their deposed father had regained his throne and ordered her immediate execution. By a very early age, Cleopatra knew all too well that within the royal house of the Ptolemies one’s closest family were the most dangerous enemies of all. And at that moment, the main obstacles to her own ambition were two small boys and a young girl, her remaining siblings, who thoroughly despised their elder sister. Although all of them had been considered divine since birth, she had always been their father’s favourite and, prior to his death, he had named her his heir alongside the elder of her two brothers as family tradition dictated. Yet her decision to seize sole control and ignore the ten-year-old boy and the ambitious advisers who controlled him meant that even now they were busily plotting her downfall.

  If life inside the labyrinthine palace with its intrigues of cliques and courtiers posed a constant hazard for all four children, life beyond its fortified walls was little better. The volatile citizens of Alexandria had repeatedly demonstrated their feelings for previous rulers through rebellion, revolution and regicide, on several occasions storming the palace and removing the royals by force. Only seven years earlier they had driven Cleopatra’s father from his throne; his eventual return, with Rome’s military backing, had drained most of the contents of Egypt’s treasury. And given the Alexandrians’ hatred of Roman intervention, not to mention the money it was costing them, only the permanent presence of Roman troops within the palace had been able to guarantee the survival of the newly restored king.

  With its forces already in place, Rome was simply biding its time before Egypt fell into its hands as easily as the rest of the Mediterranean kingdoms of Alexander’s once mighty empire had done — Macedonia and Greece in 146 BC, Cyrene in 96 BC, Asia Minor and Syria in 65 BC and finally Cyprus in 58 BC. And following the recent death of the Egyptian king during a partial solar eclipse, surely a most terrible omen, all that stood between mighty Rome and world domination was a teenage girl and her young brother.

  Against such ridiculous odds, this was the moment when the seventeen-year-old first revealed her right to the epithet ‘Great’. Determined at all costs to keep her country independent, she began by taking power directly into her own hands with the support of her closest advisers. Although the Alexandrians wanted the expulsion of all Roman troops stationed in their city, such a blatant move would simply have led to all-out military conflict which an impoverished Egypt was in no position to win. With no choice but to maintain the status quo, Cleopatra became a collaborator in the eyes of the anti-Roman Alexandrians, and as unpopular as her father had been. Yet she also realised that true power lay beyond this volatile Greek city on the Mediterranean, and was to be found at the heart of her antique kingdom. And so began the enduring relationship between Cleopatra the Great and the people of Egypt.

  The new monarch’s ability to win hearts and minds had been greatly enhanced by her ability to speak to them directly in their own language, and as the first of her dynasty to learn Egyptian she had a deep understanding of their ancient culture. Brought up in a palace where education had been raised to an art form, she was well versed in a heritage which would help unlock the vast resources necessary to rebuild Egypt’s capabilities and restore its fortunes. Guided by her close circle of Greek and Egyptian advisers, Cleopatra’s opportunity to demonstrate her devotion to native tradition arose only days into her reign with the auspicious birth of the divine Buchis bull, the sun god’s earthly incarnation, far to the south at Thebes. The installation of the god in his temple was an event that had been celebrated for over a thousand years. And although it was something of a formality for many of her predecessors, who understood little of the esoteric proceedings and were present in name only, Cleopatra decided she would not only attend the ceremony but would lead the rites in person.

  She was the first monarch in several centuries to take such an active part in the rituals which gave Egypt its strength, and her decision had been inspired by Alexander’s own attitude. He too had celebrated traditional rites during his six months’ stay in Egypt, honouring the ancient deities and paying homage to the sacred creatures that contained the souls of the very gods themselves. Yet Alexander had also brought his own Greek culture with him, establishing his city on Egypt’s Mediterranean coast and filling it with all the elements of traditional Greek culture, which gradually filtered south to transform the entire country for ever.

  Although Greek culture took permanent root in Egypt under Alexander, cross-cultural contact had first begun over two thousand years earlier between Egypt and Crete. Foreign influences gradually penetrated south along the Nile valley, as long-haired Minoans in bright-coloured kilts had appeared as far south as Thebes by 1500 BC, bearing Greek-style gifts in tribute and taking home Egyptian concepts of architecture, technology and animal-based religion.

  Egypt’s royal family even claimed dominion over parts of the Greek world, from the warrior queen Ahhotep (c. 1550 BC), named ‘Mistress of the Shores of the Northern Islands’ of the Aegean, to the fourteenth-century BC Amenhotep III, ‘Amenophis’ in Greek, who laid claim to Knossos, Rhodes and Mycenae. Imported Mycenean pottery found at his family’s royal city, Amarna, enabled early archaeologists to date the site to c. 1350 BC, while the presence of such pottery on Egypt’s western Mediterranean coast revealed a thriving trading colony around the end of the second millennium BC.

  Following the end of the Bronze Age around 1200 BC, widespread unrest around the Mediterranean led to displaced populations migrating through Asia Minor, down through Syria and Palestine and eventually reaching Egypt. Dubbed ‘Peoples of the Sea’ by the Egyptians, their reports of Greek ‘Ekwesh’ Achaeans, ‘Denyen’ Danaans and piratical ‘Lukka’ of Lycia reveal they joined forces with the Libyans to invade Egypt on several fronts.

  Although repelled by the last great warrior pharaoh, Ramses III, many of the invaders settled in Egypt’s Delta region and were redeployed as mercenaries by an increasingly ineffectual monarchy. When Egypt finally split in two in 1069 BC, the pharaohs relocated north to the Delta city of Dja’net (better known in its Greek form, Tanis), opting for burial within the precincts of the city’s main temple where their gold-filled tombs remained intact. Yet their predecessors’ sepulchres in the Valley of the Kings far to the south in Thebes were plundered apparently with the collusion of the local priests of Amun, who now controlled the south as self-styled priest-kings. Reburying the royals in more secure parts of the Valley, they used the opportunity to enhance their own status, holding some mummies back for burial alongside themselves while settling old scores on others, damaging the bodies of those monarchs who had in life undermined their priestly authority.

  When the northern pharaohs came to a power-sharing arrangement with their southern counterparts, their former Libyan adversaries who had settled in the Delta eventually took the throne for themselves. Their northern location gave them direct access to the Mediterranean, a region so dominated by Greek trading colonies the Egyptians called it ‘the Sea of the Greeks’. Egypt began to appear in Greek literature, and the eighth-century BC epic poems the Iliad and the Odyssey claimed that ‘hundred-gated Thebes’ was the place ‘where the houses are furnished in the most sumptuous fashion.’

  Greeks routinely travelled over to Egypt to see its splendours for themselves, but the two cultures were also drawn together in mutual defence against the Assyrian empire as it expanded west from the region of modern Iran. Having invaded Egypt in 671 BC, the Assyrians returned two years later to execute all local rulers except Necho I of Sais, retaining him as a client king to rule Egypt on Assyria’s behalf. His son Psamtek I, better known by his Greek name Psammetichus, built up his power with thirty thousand Greek mercenaries permanently s
tationed along Egypt’s eastern frontier, forming a vital defence against foreign invasion and repelling one launched by the Babylonian king Nebuchadnezzar II in 601 BC.

  Psammetichus’ son Necho II (610-595 BC) created Egypt’s first navy with Greek triremes, the most up-to-date warships of their time, and forced Egypt’s inward-looking culture to face out across the Mediterranean. Supporting Greek trading colonies in the Delta, this Saite monarch transformed Egypt’s stagnant economy with a great canal linking the Nile to the Red Sea, and is even said to have sent an expedition to circumnavigate Africa. His successor despatched an expedition of Greek, Egyptian and Jewish troops to the far south of Egypt in 592 BC, and after founding a temple to Isis on the island of Philae travelled on to the ancient rock-cut temple at Abu Simbel where his soldiers’ graffiti is the oldest Greek inscription in Egypt.

  Their visit to a monument already over six hundred years old underlines the Saite practice of revisiting a time when Egypt had been a world power second to none, and, in obvious reaction to the succession of foreign invasions which had destroyed much of Egypt’s heritage and pride, the Saites did all they could to restore its former glories. They revived ancient titles and rituals, created exact replicas of ancient tomb scenes and restored ancient monuments, even the pyramids and the fabled monarchs buried within. Mummified remains found inside Sakkara’s Step Pyramid were rewrapped and reburied in the belief that they were those of its builder, King Djoser, while a mummy within the third pyramid at Giza which they identified as Mycerinus was reburied in a brand-new coffin. Such face-to-face contact with long-dead predecessors clearly inspired the Saites as they transformed mummification practices for both humans and animals. Although individual creatures such as sacred bulls had long been embalmed, the practice was vastly expanded as literally millions of each god’s sacred creature were transformed into mass-produced, linen-wrapped offerings for purchase by the devout. An important part of Egypt’s economy, animal mummies soon became the means of demonstrating a unique culture to foreigners in a vigorous if somewhat peculiar demonstration of patriotism.

  Yet links with Greek culture remained strong, particularly under the Saite king Amasis. Described as a man ‘fond of his joke and his glass, and never inclined to serious pursuits’, he was dubbed the ‘Philhellene’ after marrying a Greek woman, expanding the navy with Greek help and moving the thirty thousand Greek mercenaries into Egypt’s traditional capital, Memphis. Within this great city at the apex of the Delta Amasis extended the great temple of the creator god, Ptah. Its name, Hut-ka-Ptah (‘house of Ptah’s soul’), pronounced ‘Aiguptos’ by the Greeks, provided the modern name Egypt.

  Amasis also embellished his home town of Sais, where the tombs of his dynasty were built within the temple complex of Neith, the creator goddess. Worshipped as mother of the sun, who had created the world with her laughter and could at any time destroy it with her ear-splitting voice, Neith was also worshipped at the Greek trading settlement of Naukratis, where her cult received 10 per cent of all goods coming into Egypt via the only officially sanctioned route from abroad.

  Not only the centre of trade with a monopoly on Greek imports, Naukratis was also a magnet for foreign visitors. Some of the biggest names in Greek history travelled to Egypt to learn something of its fabled wisdom. They included statesmen such as the Athenian lawgiver Solon and the Spartan Lycurgus, the literary giants Pindar and Euripedes, and the philosophers Pythagoras, Eudoxos, Plato and Anaxagoras, the last-named particularly interested in the phenomenon of the annual Nile flood. It is therefore most appropriate that the Greeks were the ones to name Egypt’s great river, which until then had been called just that, ‘the great river’ or ‘pa iteru aa’. At the Delta it divided up into smaller branches to become ‘the rivers’, na-iteru, from which the ‘t’ was eventually dropped and the Egyptian ‘r’ replaced with the Greek T. The result, ‘Neilos’, formed the river’s eventual name. Even the over-used phrase ‘Egypt is the gift of the Nile’ was composed by the Greek historian Hekataios, who, in his lost work Aegyptiaca, was the first to observe that Egypt’s Delta region was ‘the gift of the river’.

  Like many of Hekataios’ observations repeated by his fellow Greek Herodotus some fifty years later, both men visited the same sights where they were shown around by the native priests, the custodians of the ancient culture who were able to interpret the mysterious picture writing which curious Greeks dubbed ‘sacred carvings’, or ‘hieroglyphs’. Both men had been shown the ‘Hall of Statues’ at Karnak temple, where figures of each high priest had been set up in an unbroken lineage: the priests claimed there had been 341 generations since the first pharaoh, Menes. Stressing such antiquity to imply cultural superiority, the priests at Sais even told one Athenian politician that he and his countrymen were merely children since their own history was so short.

  Although the Greeks continued to regard Egypt as the cradle of civilization whose priests held powers passed down from the gods themselves, they nevertheless found certain things completely unfathomable, for ‘the Egyptians themselves in their manners and customs seem to have reversed the ordinary practices of mankind’. This was particularly so in the case of women, for in contrast to the restrictions imposed on respectable Greek women who only went out of the house as a last resort and even then fully covered, their Egyptian sisters were not only allowed out, but attended market and ‘are employed in trade while the men stay at home and do the weaving’. Further unnatural practices meant that Egyptian ‘women pass water standing up, men sitting down’, with similarly amusing overtones in the Greeks’ descriptions of the Egyptians as ‘crocodiles’ and ‘papyrus eaters’. The characteristic triangular tomb structure ‘mer’ was dubbed ‘pyramis’ after the small Greek cake, and the tall stone monolith ‘tekhen’ became an ‘obelisk’, or kebab skewer.

  Yet as the massive Persian empire, successor to Assyria and Babylon, began its inexorable expansion west, the scattered peoples of southern Europe and the eastern Mediterranean suddenly became very aware of their ‘Greekness’. They assumed superiority over all non-Greek-speaking ‘barbarians’, so that the Persians became denigrated as effeminate trouser-wearing cowards and the Trojan War wheeled out as proof of Greek superiority over their weaker eastern neighbours. On occasion these even included Egypt, whose mystique had been undermined by long-term familiarity, although there remained the need for mutual support against a common enemy.

  When the Persian king Cambyses invaded Egypt in 525 BC and executed the last Saite king, he exhumed the mummy of his predecessor Amasis to have it tortured and beaten, but since ‘the corpse had been embalmed and would not fall to pieces under the blows, Cambyses ordered it to be burnt’ to deprive the pharaoh’s soul of its physical home. He then ridiculed the sacred Apis bull, asking the priests, ‘Do you call that a god, you poor creatures?’ before mortally wounding the beast and having the priests flogged.

  Despite such Greek accounts, the Persians successfully ruled Egypt through an efficient civil service, leaving most officials in their posts and replacing the pharaoh by a governor ruling on the Persian king’s behalf. Military garrisons were installed as far south as Elephantine, and with the Saite canal between the Nile and Red Sea reopened and camels used in increasing numbers, trade and communications were greatly enhanced.

  Although Persia also took over Greek colonies in Asia Minor, the city-state of Athens pulled off an amazing victory at the battle of Marathon in 490 BC and, despite their city being sacked in a revenge attack, struck back to defeat the Persians soundly by land and sea. The Greeks then assisted Egypt to throw out its Persian occupiers, as commemorated by the Egyptians in Homeric-style battle epics, but the Persians soon came back. With the Greeks embroiled in their own internal conflicts as Athens and Sparta slugged it out during the Peloponnesian War of 431-404 BC, an isolated Egypt slipped back under Persian control and suffered serious cultural decline until renewed Greek help once this war was over gave the Delta courage to rise again.

  The c
ities of Sais and Mendes declared independence, fighting off Persian attacks with assistance from Athenian forces headed by the Greek general Chabrias. In 380 BC a real renaissance began when the Egyptian general Nakhtnebef — better known by his Greek name, Nectanebo — proclaimed himself pharaoh (380-362 BC). From its base at the Delta town of Sebennytos this last native dynasty restored national pride, revived ancient art forms, built an astonishing number of temples and promoted the cults of the sacred animals headed by the Apis bull of Memphis. And although the Persians invaded again in 373 BC, they were defeated once again.

  Nectanebo I was distinctly pro-Greek and, having married a Greek woman named Ptolemais, a relative of Chabrias, produced a daughter sufficiently powerful to be sent as his representative heading an expedition south to Akhmim to obtain new sources of building stone. Although her name is lost, her official titles are preserved in a rock-cut chapel originally decorated by the fourteenth-century BC pharaoh Ay, father of the famous female pharaoh Nefertiti, whose inspirational titles were duplicated by Nectanebo Fs daughter: ‘hereditary princess, held in high esteem, favoured with sweet love, the mistress of Upper and Lower Egypt, of gracious countenance, beautiful with the double feather, great royal consort, Lady of the Two Lands’.

  Nectanebo I was briefly succeeded by his son Djedhor, the first pharaoh to issue coins in Egypt’s barter-based economy, but he was deposed by his cousin Nectanebo II (360-343 BC). After beating back a vast Persian invasion force in 350 BC with help from Athens and Sparta, Nectanebo II was worshipped throughout Egypt. His attempts to restore his country’s glories by resurrecting the power of its past were part of a nationwide effort to create ‘a magic defence’ against the Persian menace. Yet for all this ritual protection, the legendary Nectanebo II was finally defeated in 343 BC and Egypt taken back into the Persian empire. Cities such as Heliopolis and Mendes were destroyed, along with the tombs of the kings who had rebelled against Persian rule, and many members of the ruling classes were deported to Persia. Nectanebo himself managed to flee south into Nubia, although it was rumoured that at some stage during his reign he had also sailed to northern Greece. Having predicted that the Macedonian queen Olympias would soon give birth to the son of Zeus, greatest of the gods of Greece, Nectanebo then donned the mask of the god and himself fathered her child, which was very much in the Egyptian tradition of divine conception legends. The myth also neatly claimed the child, whom she named Alexander, to be the successor of the last native pharaoh.