Ptolemaic Kingdom

• 1. Introduction

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  The Ptolemaic Kingdom was founded in 305 BC by a Macedonian Greek general who had stood at Alexander the Great's side and watched the greatest empire the world had ever seen fall apart in a matter of years. His name was Ptolemy I Soter, and what he built from the wreckage lasted nearly three centuries. For almost three hundred years, his descendants ruled Egypt as pharaohs while calling themselves Greek kings, prayed to Egyptian gods while hosting the greatest library and research institution in the ancient world, and forged a civilization that was neither purely Greek nor purely Egyptian but something entirely new. How did a dynasty of Macedonian outsiders become the longest-ruling rulers of ancient Egypt? How did they hold together a society of Greek elites and millions of Egyptian farmers, priests, and soldiers? And what caused a kingdom that had been the greatest power in the Mediterranean to fall, in the end, not to a foreign conqueror but to a Roman civil war it had no hope of controlling?

• 2. A Kingdom Born from Chaos

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  Alexander the Great arrived in Egypt in 332 BC not as a stranger but as a liberator, freeing the country from Persian rule. He visited Memphis, traveled to the oracle of Amun at the Siwa Oasis, and received a declaration from that oracle that he was the son of Amun himself. He respected Egyptian religion, founded the city of Alexandria on the site of a Persian fort called Rhakortis, and then left. He never returned. When Alexander died in Babylon in 323 BC, his generals began competing for the pieces of his empire in a long and bloody series of conflicts known as the Wars of the Diadochi, which ran from 322 to 301 BC. Ptolemy was named satrap of Egypt by the regent Perdiccas. He ruled nominally on behalf of Alexander's half-brother Philip III and later Alexander's infant son Alexander IV, but he quickly established himself as master of Egypt in his own right. In 321 BC he successfully defended Egypt against an invasion by Perdiccas himself. By 305 BC, with Alexander IV dead and the fiction of a unified Macedonian empire finally abandoned, Ptolemy took the titles of both basileus and pharaoh. He named himself Ptolemy I Soter, meaning Saviour, and declared a new dynasty. Every male ruler that followed would take the name Ptolemy, while the women of the line gravitated toward the names Cleopatra, Arsinoe, and Berenice.

• 3. Greek Kings, Egyptian Pharaohs

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  Ptolemy I Soter recognized something that other Macedonian rulers of his era failed to grasp: you cannot rule Egypt by ignoring Egypt. The Ptolemies adopted the local title of pharaoh alongside their Greek title of basileus. They had themselves depicted on public monuments in Egyptian style and dress. Beginning with Ptolemy II Philadelphus, the dynasty adopted Egyptian customs such as sibling marriage, following the Osiris myth, and active participation in Egyptian religious life. New temples were built and older ones restored. Ptolemy II also began the practice of marrying his own sister, Arsinoe II, following Egyptian royal tradition, which, as the source puts it plainly, had serious consequences in later reigns. Ptolemy III Euergetes patronized native Egyptian religion even more liberally than his predecessors, leaving larger traces among Egyptian monuments. The gradual Egyptianization of the Ptolemies that began under Ptolemy III continued throughout the dynasty. Despite all this, the monarchy strictly maintained its Hellenistic character. Greeks held virtually all political and economic power. Native Egyptians generally occupied only the lower ranks of government and could advance further only if they Hellenized. Over time, a bilingual, bicultural social class emerged that blurred the boundaries between the two worlds. Within a century of the founding, Greek influence had spread across the country and intermarriage had produced a large Greco-Egyptian educated class, but the Greeks always remained a privileged minority.

• 4. The Peak of Ptolemaic Power

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  Ptolemy II Philadelphus, who succeeded his father in 283 BC, was no soldier. Yet three years of campaigning in the First Syrian War turned the Ptolemaic Kingdom into the master of the eastern Mediterranean, controlling the Aegean islands, coastal districts of Cilicia, Pamphylia, Lycia, and Caria. In the 270s BC, Ptolemy II defeated the Kingdom of Kush in war, gaining access to Kushite territory and control of important gold deposits south of Egypt known as the Dodekaschoinos. He sent raiding parties containing hundreds of men as far south as Port Sudan in search of war elephants. At its height under Ptolemy II, the Ptolemaic navy may have had as many as 336 warships, with more than 4,000 ships including transports and allied vessels. Ptolemy III Euergetes, who succeeded his father in 246 BC, launched the Third Syrian War against the Seleucid Empire when his sister, Queen Berenice, and her son were murdered in a dynastic dispute. He marched as far as Babylonia while Ptolemaic fleets made conquests reaching north to Thrace. Ptolemy III also began construction of the Temple of Horus at Edfu on the 23rd of August 237 BC. That temple, one of the masterpieces of ancient Egyptian architecture, would take more than a century to complete; the main temple was finished in 212 BC under Ptolemy IV, and the full complex was only completed in 142 BC under Ptolemy VIII. It remains the best-preserved of all Egyptian temples.

• 5. Alexandria: Capital of the World

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  Alexandria was founded in 331 BC, positioned 30 km west of the Nile's westernmost mouth, a location chosen specifically because it was immune to the silt deposits that choked harbors along the river. A man-made causeway over three-quarters of a mile long extended north to the island of Pharos, forming a double harbor, east and west. On the eastern harbor stood the lighthouse, built around 280 BC, which was reckoned as one of the Seven Wonders of the World; it stood perhaps 140 metres tall and was topped with a metal fire basket and a statue of Zeus the Savior. Ptolemy I, perhaps with advice from Demetrius of Phalerum, founded the Library of Alexandria as a research center in the royal sector of the city, with a mandate to collect all books in the inhabited world. During Alexandria's literary golden period, roughly 280-240 BC, the Library supported three poets: Callimachus, Apollonius of Rhodes, and Theocritus. Among other thinkers associated with Alexandria's patronage were the mathematician Euclid around 300 BC, the inventor Archimedes (287 BC to around 212 BC), and the polymath Eratosthenes, most noted for his remarkably accurate calculation of the circumference of the world. Ptolemy III supplemented the Great Library with a second library built in the Serapeum and was said to have seized and copied every book unloaded at the Alexandria docks, returning copies to their owners while keeping the originals. He reportedly borrowed the official manuscripts of Aeschylus, Sophocles, and Euripides from Athens and forfeited the deposit he had paid rather than return them.

• 6. Revolt, Decline, and Roman Grip

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  Ptolemy IV Philopator, who came to the throne in 221 BC, was a weak king whose reign opened with the murder of his own mother. His ministers managed to secure a major military victory at Raphia in 217 BC, but a series of native Egyptian rebellions stripped the kingdom of over half its territory for more than twenty years. A priest named Hugronaphor proclaimed himself pharaoh in 205 BC and ruled Upper Egypt until his death in 199 BC; his son Ankhmakis nearly drove the Ptolemies from the country entirely. The Great Revolt was finally suppressed in 186 BC, and the stele celebrating its defeat became historically significant as the Rosetta Stone. After Ptolemy IV, a century of civil wars and dynastic feuds followed. Ptolemy VIII was described as a cruel tyrant. Ptolemy XI was lynched by the Alexandrian mob in 80 BC after murdering his stepmother, who was also his cousin, aunt, and wife. By this point Egypt had become a de facto protectorate of Rome. Ptolemy XII, nicknamed Auletes or the flute-player, was driven out by the Alexandrian mob in 58 BC; the Romans restored him to power three years later. To secure his throne after a rebellion led by his own daughters Tryphaena and Berenice IV, both of whom he had killed, he declared the Roman senate the guardian of the Ptolemaic Dynasty in his will, naming Rome as executor and handing over the fate of Egypt to a foreign power.

• 7. Cleopatra and the End

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  Cleopatra VII ascended the Egyptian throne on the 22nd of March 51 BC upon the death of her father Ptolemy XII. She inherited a kingdom bound by more than 150 years of alliance with Rome, but what she faced was something her predecessors had not: a Rome descending into civil war. Stripped of authority by her brother Ptolemy XIII's advisors and forced into exile, she attempted to raise an army to reclaim the throne. Julius Caesar arrived in Alexandria in 48 BC to prevent a war that would have disrupted Rome's supply of grain, and 22-year-old Cleopatra was reportedly carried to him in secret wrapped in a carpet. Caesar supported her claim; Ptolemy XIII's forces were ultimately defeated at the Battle of the Nile, and the king drowned in the Nile while attempting to flee. In the summer of 47 BC, Cleopatra and Caesar traveled together for two months along the Nile, visiting Dendara, where Cleopatra was being worshiped as pharaoh. They had a son, Caesarion. After Caesar's murder in 44 BC, Cleopatra aligned with Mark Antony. In the autumn of 34 BC at the donations of Alexandria ceremony, Antony announced that Tarsus, Cyrene, Crete, Cyprus, and Judaea would be given as client monarchies to his children by Cleopatra. Their naval forces met Octavian's commander Marcus Vipsanius Agrippa at Actium and were defeated. Cleopatra and her handmaidens committed suicide on the 12th of August 30 BC. Caesarion was captured and reportedly executed in the weeks that followed. Their daughter Cleopatra Selene was eventually married by Octavian's arrangement into the Mauretanian royal line, and through her offspring the Ptolemaic bloodline continued to intermarry with the Roman nobility for centuries.

• 8. A New God and the Faith That Held It Together

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  When Ptolemy I made himself king of Egypt, he created an entirely new deity to bridge his two worlds. Serapis combined the Egyptian gods Apis and Osiris with the Greek deities Zeus, Hades, Asklepios, Dionysos, and Helios, and held powers over fertility, the sun, funerary rites, and medicine. Ptolemy I also promoted the cult of the deified Alexander, who became the state god of the Ptolemaic kingdom. Under Ptolemy II, his wife Arsinoe II was deified as a stand-alone goddess, given her own sanctuaries and festivals in association with both Egyptian and Hellenistic gods, depicted as Aphrodite wearing the crown of lower Egypt with ram's horns and ostrich feathers. Cleopatra VII was often depicted with the characteristics of the goddess Isis, wearing either a small throne as a headdress or the traditional sun disk between two horns. Throughout the dynasty, the Ptolemies built and restored temples across Egypt. Memphis, while no longer the center of power, became the second city after Alexandria; its High Priests of Ptah held considerable sway among the priesthood and even with the Ptolemaic kings. The cippus, a distinctive stele type of the Ptolemaic period, was produced to protect individuals from harm, featuring the child form of Horus called Horpakhered. These objects were made from limestone, chlorite schist, and metagreywacke. The faith was never simply a cynical tool of governance; temples became genuine centers of learning and literature in the traditional Egyptian style, and the worship of Isis and Horus grew in popularity throughout the period, a tradition that would outlast the dynasty and spread across the Roman world.