Cleopatra the Great (20 page)

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'.

In 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.

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 took 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.