Cleopatra the Great (2 page)

Ultimately only a saga covering several millennia, three continents and a whole range of diverse evidence could ever hope to make sense of this incredibly complex yet endlessly fascinating woman. Rightly dubbed a ‘great potentate' by Yorkshireman George Sandys in 1615, writing soon after the reign of Elizabeth I, even his contemporary William Shakespeare was forced to acknowledge that the great Cleopatra truly had been ‘a lass unparalleled'.

Yorkshire
2007

In March 51
BC
, with the death of her father the pharaoh, the girl must have contemplated her situation as she stared through the hazy crystal glass into the face of the mummified god. It was well known that his blood ran through her veins, and although she was a mere seventeen years old he had been even younger when he led the first of his military campaigns which ultimately conquered the known world. By reviving his empire to its former greatness, she would prove herself his true heir.

As light from the flickering torches of the burial chamber hit the crystal coffin, Alexander's distinctive features would have been plainly visible as she contemplated past and future. Although the man before her had been dead for almost three hundred years, the skill of the embalmers had ensured his permanent physical presence, while the rites of mummification had reunited his soul with his body according to ancient lore in which he himself had so passionately believed.

The greatest prize of ancient times, his body had been fought over by successors unable to function without him until eventually he had been laid to rest here in Alexandria in a splendid tomb close to the palace. Following Egypt's long tradition of venerating royal remains he was worshipped as Alexander Ktistes, ‘Founder of the City', whose body contained the city's ‘daimon' or spirit attended by its own priesthood. He was the focus of the reigning dynasty and its source of inspiration, and his royal descendants who led these rites were incredibly proud of their shared blood — something which Cleopatra felt more keenly than any of her predecessors.

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 stationed 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'.