The Rise and Fall of Alexandria (7 page)

It was another astute move on Ptolemy’s part. He had removed a dangerous and wealthy rival and at the same time made himself hugely popular in Egypt for bringing “justice” to bear on a man who had bled the country dry. But Ptolemy had no intention of returning the money. Alexandria was built, the population was moved, and the money in the state (and Cleomenes’) coffers would now be at his command. It was a most fortunate situation for Ptolemy, and he needed good fortune, for war was coming.

 
 
Alexander would have wept to see what followed his death. Perdiccas, his old friend, could not stand by quietly while provoked by Ptolemy. Ptolemy had Alexander’s body and was clearly carving out a piece of his empire for his sole use. And so, in a vain attempt to hold together the whole idea of a unified empire, the regent attacked Egypt with the full might of the Macedonian army—Indian elephants, mahouts, and all. But his high-handed arrogance and his failure to appreciate the impossibility of ruling this vast, messy collection of conquests alone would prove his downfall. Although others of the friends and companions of Alexander marched through Sinai into Egypt with Perdiccas, not all of them still believed that the empire could be maintained. Fewer still believed, or wanted to believe, that it should be maintained by Perdiccas. Thus, the army that burst into the eastern delta was not the happy, all-conquering band of brothers that had only recently fought its way across Asia to India.

On reaching the Nile, Perdiccas ordered his army across, the elephants in the front, then the shield bearers and ladder carriers who were to be the vanguard of his attack on a fort known as the Fort of Camels. However, Ptolemy was not far away, and he and his army dashed to the fort and quickly took up positions, prepared to repel the assault: “At once the shield bearers set up the scaling ladders and began to mount them while the elephant borne troops were tearing the palisades to pieces and throwing down the parapets” (Diodorus Siculus,
Library of History,
book 18, chapter 34).

According to Diodorus, who describes the scene, Perdiccas did not use his war elephants with the tactical brilliance of his old master, and seeing a weakness, Ptolemy personally seized the initiative:

 
His men followed suit and began targeting the Indian mahouts, leaving the elephants out of control and useless, although Perdiccas sent wave after wave of attackers, having the advantage of numbers. The battle (and Ptolemy’s personal heroics) lasted all day, but in the end Perdiccas was forced to call off the assault and retreat to his former camp. Ptolemy was victorious.

We don’t know Diodorus’s source for this episode, but the wild heroics of Ptolemy himself suggest it was somewhat biased. In fact Ptolemy had delayed Perdiccas long enough for something far more powerful to come to the rescue—doubt.

Perdiccas had failed to cross the Nile, and now the whispering campaign began. Ptolemy had secured a jewel for himself—something manageable, defendable. Why shouldn’t Alexander’s other old friends do the same for themselves? Forget the greater empire, forget Perdiccas, and seize something tangible for their own. And so they did. In the late spring of 321 BC a mutiny broke out among those same Macedonian troops who had once conquered the world, and Perdiccas’s own officers assassinated him.

This would not bring an end to the wars among Alexander’s heirs, but it did mark the end of the idea that any of them could rule everything their old master had. By the end of the fighting, which lasted until nearly the end of the century, Alexander’s dreams lay in ruins—his mother, wife, half brother, and infant son all murdered. In their place stood three families. In Greece and Macedon, the Antigonids would rule the old homeland; in the Asian satrapies, the descendants of Seleucus (who had been one of the assassins of Perdiccas) would govern this part of the former Persian Empire; while in Egypt, Ptolemy intended to found his own dynasty.

Ptolemy had set the tone for the new order in Egypt and, fired by the same drive that had taken him and his master to the Indian subcontinent, set about subduing the city-states of North Africa.

By 321 BC the wealthy but isolated city of Cyrene, lying between Egypt and Tunisia, had fallen to him. As one of Alexander’s conquests it was a state Ptolemy rightfully felt was his for the taking, having only recently come under the rule of a Spartan adventurer in the chaos following Alexander’s death. But in retaking the city he showed himself to have learned from his master’s diplomatic mistakes. He did not replace tyrant Spartan rule with a dictatorship of his own but with a liberal constitution. Under the “Ptolemaic constitution” the state was to be ruled by ten thousand privileged citizens arranged into two councils and a popular court, in a plan not dissimilar to that proposed by Hippodamus. He did not go so far as to let the Cyrenians think they could rule themselves alone, of course, appointing himself as their guardian in perpetuity.

In an age which celebrated outright conquest, this defensive imperialism was not only novel, it was successful and sustainable. Ptolemy pushed on farther west beyond Cyrene to take control of the profitable trans-Saharan trade routes bringing gold, ivory, and slaves from Central and West Africa. To the east and north he seized Palestine and parts of Syria, as well as Cyprus and the Aegean islands of the Cyclades. This gave him control of lucrative trade routes but, more important, created a buffer zone where he could contest disputes with his Persian and Macedonian rivals, leaving the Egyptian heartland stable and free from warfare for generations to come. Ptolemy had been the only successor to Alexander not to want to inherit that whole empire. He did not want new territories, just enough friendly or subject states around him to protect the core of his plan—Egypt. He had taken a dependent satrapy and forged it into an independent nation. The physical structure for the Ptolemaic age was now in place; it simply needed to be brought to life.

CHAPTER THREE

EGYPT REBORN

Herodotus,
The Histories

 
 
D
uring Ptolemy’s lifetime, the body of Alexander was not the only god resting in Memphis. Apis, the bull god of the city, was, at least to the native Egyptians, easily as important as the mummified remains of the conqueror of the world, and the representation of this deity was a living bull kept in its own temple and treated with the respect due to the earthly manifestation of a god.

It was a peculiarly Egyptian idea. The Apis bull had been a powerful symbol in Egypt since the very first dynasties well over two thousand years earlier. Originally it had represented the power and will of the pharaoh himself, later being thought to represent the god Ptah, whose center of worship was at Memphis. By Ptolemy’s day, however, the animal had come to represent the incarnation of Osiris, the lord of the dead, who was usually depicted in human form, wrapped and mummified for burial. According to Plutarch, the bull was then the living aspect of this dead god or, as he put it, “the beautiful image of the soul of Osiris” (Plutarch,
Isis and Osiris,
chapter 20, in
Moralia
).

To Egyptians the presence of this living creature was a manifestation of a god on earth, more holy than the sacred cows that walk unmolested through the streets of Indian cities. When the bull died, the whole of Egypt went into seventy days of mourning and fasting, during which time the carcass of the huge animal was mummified and prepared for a lavish funeral. The body was then carried down the sphinx-lined processional way from Memphis to the great funerary complex at Saqqara, where some of the earliest pharaohs had been buried. Here the line of sphinxes directed the mourners to a temple and catacomb where the dead Apis, now known as the Osiris Apis or Serapis, would be laid to rest—the Serapeum. Today the majority of the site lies buried deep under the sand, something that was already a problem in 24 BC, when Strabo paid a visit:

 
After Strabo the sands seem to have continued to pile up and the complex disappeared from historical view for 1,875 years until, in a scene that could have come from a children’s adventure book, the French archaeologist Auguste Mariette stumbled upon those same sphinxes that Strabo had recorded disappearing beneath the sand:

 
The tantalizing line of sphinxes led to one of the most important funerary sites in Egypt, into the presence of animals whom the Egyptians, at least, believed to be gods. Mariette was transfixed by thoughts of what lay beneath his feet:

 
What Mariette found as he dug was that the line of sphinxes led to a sand-filled courtyard in which sat one of the most exquisite Egyptian statues in existence—the Squatting Scribe. Beyond this, behind a rockfall of rubble which he removed with explosives, lay seemingly endless subterranean galleries cut into the living rock beneath Egypt’s oldest pyramids, which had once contained the mortal remains of the Apis bulls. Each one had been buried in a giant sarcophagus, cut from a single piece of granite and weighing sixty to eighty tons. Inside had lain the doubtless bejeweled and gilded bodies of the bulls themselves, though Mariette noted that all the coffin lids had been pushed aside and the remains robbed.

Two millennia before, in the time of the Ptolemies, few would have dared enter the catacombs where Mariette now walked, and none would have disturbed the sleep of the recently deceased Apis. After their lavish, almost pharaonic burial, word would have gone out to the priests that a new Apis had to be found, and the Nile Valley would be scoured in the search for a calf born under just the right circumstances. Herodotus says the priests were looking out for the “calf of a cow which is never afterwards able to have another. The Egyptian belief is that a flash of lightning descends upon the cow from heaven, and this causes her to receive Apis” (Herodotus,
The Histories,
book 3 [Thaleia], chapter 27).

In practical terms this meant a black calf with a white diamond on its forehead, an eagle on its back, a scarab mark under its tongue, and double the usual number of tail hairs. When such an animal was found, there was rejoicing through the country because the living god had returned to them. The calf’s mother was immediately revered as the Isis Cow, while her calf was transported down the Nile to Memphis, housed in a golden cabin on its own barque.

From now on the bull would live like a king, appearing to an adoring public during the seven days of the annual Apis festival, being led through the crowds by his priests. It was said that a child who smelled the breath of the Apis would be granted the gift of foreseeing the future, as the bull was an oracle. Those without access to such a fortunate child could ask the bull itself about their future by holding out food for it. If it took the offering, then their future was bright; if it refused, then the omens were bad.

To the Greek Herodotus, this worship of a farmyard animal seemed strange, to say the least. Although the Greek gods might take on animal form when it suited them, there were no sacred animals in their pantheon. Most Greeks had enough trouble with the idea of a living human taking on the characteristics of a god, as we’ve seen in their response to Alexander’s claim of divinity, so a living animal god was simply ludicrous to them.

But antagonizing Egyptians’ millennia-old beliefs was a foolish undertaking, as Ptolemy well knew. The Apis rituals were a link with that unimaginably long Egyptian history that this country’s people held so dear, and Ptolemy saw that this could make or break his attempt to rule successfully here. Herodotus went on in his description of the Apis cult to describe how the hated Persian rulers of Egypt had mocked the cult. Their king Cambyses had heard of the birth of a new Apis and demanded that this living god be brought before him. The priests of Apis had duly done this, but