Ptolemaic Kingdom

The body of Alexander

formationDrafted from Saavedra, A History of the Ptolemaic Empire (2001)

Alexander died at Babylon in 323 and his generals divided the administration of an empire they all agreed still existed and had a king. Ptolemy son of Lagos, a Macedonian officer of no royal blood, asked for Egypt, which was the least glamorous of the great satrapies and the most defensible: one river, two approaches, and the richest agriculture in the world.

Musée du Louvre, Ma 849 · Saavedra, A History of the Ptolemaic Empire (2001) · Photograph: Marie-Lan Nguyen · Public domain

Two years later the funeral cortege carrying Alexander's embalmed body west towards Macedon was intercepted in Syria — by arrangement or by force, the sources differ — and diverted to Egypt. Ptolemy buried Alexander first at Memphis and then in Alexandria, in a tomb that became the centre of a cult and a tourist attraction for six hundred years. It was among the most effective political acts of the period. A satrap holding a province for a dead man's family had the dead man.

Saqqara, Egypt · Saavedra, A History of the Ptolemaic Empire (2001) · Photograph: Ovedc · CC BY-SA 4.0

Istanbul Archaeological Museums · Saavedra, A History of the Ptolemaic Empire (2001) · Photograph: Kingbjelica · CC BY-SA 4.0

In 305, after the last serious attempt to reassemble the empire failed, Ptolemy took the diadem and the title of king, and the other successors did the same in the same year. The kingdom can be dated from either 323 or 305, both are in use, and the difference between them is exactly the distinction the first twenty years turn on: whether he was holding Egypt for somebody, and when he stopped saying so.

The dynasty he founded lasted two hundred and seventy-five years. Every male ruler of it was called Ptolemy.

Cleveland Museum of Art · Saavedra, A History of the Ptolemaic Empire (2001) · Cleveland Museum of Art · CC0

The city by Egypt

expansionDrafted from Saavedra, A History of the Ptolemaic Empire (2001)

Alexandria was Greek, deliberately and formally. Its official style was Alexandria ad Aegyptum — Alexandria by Egypt, not in it — and the phrase was not a geographical nicety. It had a Greek constitution, Greek magistrates and Greek citizenship that most people living in Egypt could not obtain, and it sat at the edge of the country on a strip between the sea and a lake, connected to the Nile by canal.

Kom el-Dikka, Alexandria · Saavedra, A History of the Ptolemaic Empire (2001) · Photograph: Cmroueche · CC BY-SA 4.0

It was also the largest and richest city in the Mediterranean world for most of three centuries, and the Ptolemies spent on it in a way few dynasties have ever spent on a city. The Museum, a state-funded research institution with salaried resident scholars and no teaching obligations. The Library, whose project was to acquire a copy of every book in Greek and which pursued it by confiscating the scrolls off arriving ships. The Pharos, one of the tallest structures in the world. A royal quarter that covered something like a quarter of the city.

Abusir, Egypt · Saavedra, A History of the Ptolemaic Empire (2001) · Photograph: Einsamer Schütze · CC BY-SA 3.0

Alexandria, Egypt · Saavedra, A History of the Ptolemaic Empire (2001) · Photograph: Vyacheslav Argenberg · CC BY 2.0

What was produced there is wildly disproportionate to the kingdom's political weight: Euclid's Elements; Eratosthenes measuring the circumference of the earth to within a few per cent; Aristarchus proposing that the earth goes round the sun eighteen centuries before it was believed; Herophilus and Erasistratus dissecting human bodies, which almost nobody else in antiquity did; the Septuagint, the Hebrew scriptures translated into Greek for a Jewish community that had stopped reading Hebrew. Callimachus catalogued the library in a hundred and twenty scrolls.

Penn Museum · Saavedra, A History of the Ptolemaic Empire (2001) · OPenn, University of Pennsylvania · Public domain

The Ptolemies paid for it, and it is worth being clear about why. A Macedonian dynasty ruling Egypt needed to be the centre of the Greek world, because the alternative was to be a provincial outpost of it. The Library was a claim to legitimacy as much as a collection, and by the measure of what survived it is about the most successful claim of that kind anybody ever made.

The procession

peakDrafted from Naucratis, The Deipnosophists, or Banquet of the Learned, Volume I (1854)

Ptolemy II held a festival at Alexandria and had somebody write down what went past. The account survives because a compiler of dinner-table curiosities copied it out five centuries later, and it is the most complete inventory of a Hellenistic state's claims about itself that exists.

Metropolitan Museum of Art · Naucratis, The Deipnosophists, or Banquet of the Learned, Volume I (1854) · Metropolitan Museum of Art · CC0

The animals first, because they are the argument. Twenty-four chariots drawn by four elephants each. Sixty drawn by pairs of goats, twelve by antelopes, seven by oryxes, fifteen by buffaloes, eight by pairs of ostriches, seven by gnus, four by pairs of zebras and four more by teams of four zebras — each with a boy in charioteer's dress and a broad hat, and a smaller boy beside him with a little shield.

Then the cargo. Camels carrying three hundred minae weight of frankincense, three hundred of myrrh, two hundred of saffron, and two hundred more of cassia, cinnamon, iris and other spices. Ethiopians bearing six hundred elephant tusks, two thousand faggots of ebony, sixty gold and silver bowls and a quantity of gold dust. Two huntsmen with gold-pointed spears and two thousand four hundred hounds — Indian, Hyrcanian, Molossian. A hundred and fifty men carrying trees with birds and animals of every country hung from them, and cages of parrots, peacocks, guinea fowl and pheasants. Two thousand bulls of one colour with gilded horns and gold frontlets and breastplates.

Then the metal. A golden statue of Alexander on a chariot drawn by real elephants, with Victory and Athena beside him. Thrones of ivory and gold, one of them Ptolemy Soter's, carrying a crown made out of ten thousand gold coins. Three hundred and fifty golden censers. A gilded thunderbolt forty cubits long. Eagles twenty cubits high. Three thousand two hundred golden crowns, and one mystic crown of gold studded with stones, eighty cubits high, set at the door of the temple.

Metropolitan Museum of Art · Naucratis, The Deipnosophists, or Banquet of the Learned, Volume I (1854) · Photograph: PHGCOM · CC BY-SA 4.0

Then the army: fifty-seven thousand six hundred infantry and twenty-three thousand two hundred cavalry, with more armour laid out for inspection than anybody could count — though, the source notes, Kallixeinos did make a catalogue of it.

Read the list as a balance sheet and every item is a route. The frankincense and myrrh are the Arabian incense road, tapped at the Red Sea end instead of the Gaza end. The elephants are the Ptolemaic hunting stations down the African coast, built for exactly this animal. The tusks, ebony and gold dust are Nubia. The zebras, gnus and oryxes are country nobody else in the Mediterranean could reach. The Indian dogs and the parrots are the sea route east. And the golden Alexander on the elephant chariot is the claim the whole dynasty rested on, carried past the crowd in the same parade as the spices.

The one number that is not a boast is the accounting. The crowns came to two thousand two hundred and thirty-nine talents and fifty minae, and the treasury clerks had it counted before the spectacle was over.

J. Paul Getty Museum · Naucratis, The Deipnosophists, or Banquet of the Learned, Volume I (1854) · J. Paul Getty Museum · CC0

That is the point at which the display stops being a display. A state that can put eighty thousand soldiers and the produce of three continents through one street, and have the audit finished the same afternoon, is telling its subjects and everybody else's ambassadors the same thing — and the thing it is telling them is not about elephants.

The empire outside Egypt

peakDrafted from Saavedra, A History of the Ptolemaic Empire (2001)

For the first century the Ptolemies were a naval and imperial power, not a kingdom on a river. They held Cyprus, Cyrenaica, southern Syria and Phoenicia, much of the Anatolian coast, and at times the Aegean islands and the ports of Thrace. The fleet was the largest in the Mediterranean. Under Ptolemy III, who reached the Euphrates in the Third Syrian War, the reach was as far as it ever went.

Cyrene, Libya · Saavedra, A History of the Ptolemaic Empire (2001) · Photograph: User:MM · Public domain

The empire existed for reasons that were fiscal and material rather than prestigious. Egypt has no timber. A naval power that grows no trees needs Lebanon, and holding Coele-Syria — the coast and hinterland from Gaza to the Orontes — is what made a Ptolemaic navy possible at all. The overseas possessions also produced silver, which Egypt does not have, and the harbours that carried the grain trade.

Alexandria National Museum · Saavedra, A History of the Ptolemaic Empire (2001) · Photograph: Carole Raddato · CC BY-SA 2.0

Six Syrian Wars were fought with the Seleucids over that territory between 274 and 168, and the two dynasties are about as close as history comes to a permanent structural rivalry between successors of the same empire. Neither succeeded the other and neither ever quite beat the other. They were partitioned from the same parent and spent two centuries arguing about the division, which is a relationship with a name pointing backwards at Alexander and no name at all pointing at each other.

The outward-facing kingdom is also where the ruler cult was for. Ptolemy II deified his parents, then himself and his sister-wife Arsinoe as the Theoi Adelphoi, with a dynastic priesthood at Alexandria whose holder's name dated every document in the kingdom. Greeks in Cyprus and the Aegean were being asked to be loyal to a god, because they could not be asked to be loyal to an Egyptian king and would not have been loyal to a Macedonian one at that distance.

Smithsonian National Museum of American History · Saavedra, A History of the Ptolemaic Empire (2001) · Photograph: Daderot · CC0

Ruling through

aside?What aside meansDrafted from Manning, The Last Pharaohs: Egypt Under the Ptolemies, 305-30 BC (2010)

The old account of Ptolemaic Egypt was a Greek administration imposed on a passive Egyptian population, extracting grain through a bureaucracy of unprecedented reach — a command economy with a foreign ruling caste. Manning's argument is that this describes the paperwork rather than the state.

Manning, The Last Pharaohs: Egypt Under the Ptolemies, 305-30 BC (2010) · Photograph: Rama · CC BY-SA 2.0 FR

What he calls bargained incorporation is the observation that the Ptolemies governed through Egyptian society rather than over it, because they had no instrument capable of anything else. The people who could actually collect a tax, register a field, settle a dispute or produce a harvest were Egyptian priests, village scribes and local notables, and every one of them could withhold cooperation. So the kings negotiated: with the temples, which kept their land, their revenues and their courts; with the priesthoods, in synods whose decrees the kings then had carved on stelae in three scripts; with soldiers, by settling them on land they came to treat as their own.

Walters Art Museum, Baltimore · Manning, The Last Pharaohs: Egypt Under the Ptolemies, 305-30 BC (2010) · Walters Art Museum · Public domain

The Rosetta Stone is the document of that arrangement and is almost never read as one. It is a decree of the priests of Egypt assembled at Memphis in 196 BC, listing what the boy-king Ptolemy V had granted them — remitted taxes, released prisoners, temple revenues confirmed — and specifying in return the honours the priests would pay him in every temple in the country. It is a settlement between a weakened crown and the institution that could legitimate it, published in hieroglyphic, demotic and Greek because all three audiences had to be able to read it. The stone that gave the modern world Egyptian is a receipt for a political bargain.

British Museum · Manning, The Last Pharaohs: Egypt Under the Ptolemies, 305-30 BC (2010) · Photograph: Hans Hillewaert · CC BY-SA 4.0

It also makes the dynasty's claim to rule hard to state in one sentence. Divine sanction and descent were both real and both public — but they were public in different languages to different audiences, one in Greek to Greeks and one in hieroglyphs to Egyptians, and neither audience was the intended reader of the other's version. A single formula for what the Ptolemies claimed would have to pick one of them and lose the arrangement that made the kingdom work.

Edfu, Egypt · Manning, The Last Pharaohs: Egypt Under the Ptolemies, 305-30 BC (2010) · Photograph: Olaf Tausch · CC BY 3.0

Raphia, and what it cost to win

contractionDrafted from Saavedra, A History of the Ptolemaic Empire (2001)

In 217 Antiochus III invaded southern Syria and Ptolemy IV met him at Raphia, near Gaza, with an army that included about twenty thousand native Egyptians trained and equipped as phalangites. The Ptolemaic army had been Greek and Macedonian by design for a century; arming Egyptians in that number was a departure made because the kingdom did not have enough Greeks.

British Museum · Saavedra, A History of the Ptolemaic Empire (2001) · Photograph: Marie-Lan Nguyen · Public domain

The battle was won. Antiochus withdrew and Coele-Syria stayed Ptolemaic for another seventeen years. And within a decade Upper Egypt was in open revolt, the Thebaid had seceded, and two Egyptian pharaohs — Horwennefer and his successor Ankhwennefer — were ruling from Thebes with priestly backing and their own regnal years. It took the crown twenty years to recover the south.

Egyptian Museum, Cairo · Saavedra, A History of the Ptolemaic Empire (2001) · Plate from Gauthier and Sottas, 1925 · Public domain

Ancient and modern writers have connected the two events, cautiously and in different ways: the men who fought at Raphia went home having discovered something about the relation between the Greek army and Egyptian manpower. The connection is not provable and the revolt had its own causes — taxation, the grain price, temple grievances that Manning's account puts at the centre. What is not in dispute is the sequence, and that the dynasty drew a conclusion from it. Native troops were used again, but never again in that proportion, and never again decisively.

Luxor, Egypt · Saavedra, A History of the Ptolemaic Empire (2001) · Photograph: Vyacheslav Argenberg · CC BY 4.0

Raphia is the kingdom's last victory over a Seleucid army, and it belongs in the record as a hinge rather than as a triumph, because of what followed it. What Raphia altered was the crown's confidence in its own country.

The circle in the sand

contractionDrafted from Saavedra, A History of the Ptolemaic Empire (2001)

Ptolemy IV died in 204 and left a six-year-old. Antiochus III and Philip V of Macedon are said to have agreed to divide the overseas possessions between them, and whether or not the pact was real the partition happened. At Panion in 200 Antiochus destroyed the Ptolemaic field army and took Coele-Syria permanently. The timber, the silver, the ports and the land frontier went with it, and what remained was Egypt, Cyprus and Cyrenaica.

Saavedra, A History of the Ptolemaic Empire (2001) · Photograph: Classical Numismatic Group · CC BY-SA 2.5

Thirty-two years later Antiochus IV invaded Egypt itself, defeated the Ptolemaic army, took Memphis and the king, and was preparing to besiege Alexandria. He was met outside the city by Gaius Popillius Laenas, a Roman envoy carrying a decree of the senate requiring him to leave. Antiochus asked for time to consult his advisers. Popillius drew a circle in the sand around him with a stick and told him to answer before he stepped out of it. He agreed, and withdrew.

Staatliche Münzsammlung, Munich · Saavedra, A History of the Ptolemaic Empire (2001) · Photograph: ArchaiOptix · CC BY-SA 4.0

That is the Day of Eleusis, 168 BC. The Ptolemaic kingdom lasted another hundred and thirty-eight years afterwards — longer than most states manage in total — and it lasted because Rome had decided a weak Egypt was preferable to a Seleucid one. The dynasty's independence became a Roman policy rather than a Ptolemaic achievement, and everyone involved understood it that way immediately.

What follows is a century of civil war inside the family, conducted with Rome as the referee and eventually as the creditor. Brothers and sisters ruled jointly and deposed each other; Alexandrian mobs killed kings; Cyrene was left to Rome in a will and Cyprus annexed on a pretext; Ptolemy XII was restored to his own throne by a Roman army he had borrowed the money to hire, at interest, from a Roman financier. By the time Cleopatra VII inherited, the kingdom's independence was a question of which Roman.

A box sent on her birthday

contractionDrafted from Mahaffy, The Empire of the Ptolemies (1895)

Ptolemy VI Philometor spent much of his reign as a captive of circumstance rather than a ruler of anything. Seleucid Antiochus IV overran Egypt in 170, captured Philometor at Memphis, and had himself crowned Pharaoh over him - only for Alexandria to raise Philometor's own teenage brother to the throne in his place as a rival the invader could not simply co-opt. That younger brother took the name Euergetes, and history remembers him as Euergetes II, or by the nickname his own cruelty earned him later: Physcon, "the Potbelly."

Staatliches Museum Ägyptischer Kunst, Munich · Mahaffy, The Empire of the Ptolemies (1895) · Photograph: ArchaiOptix · CC BY-SA 4.0

Two brothers and a sister sharing one throne

Rome's intervention - Popillius Laenas's circle drawn in the sand at Eleusis in 168 - saved Philometor's throne from Antiochus, but it did not resolve the rivalry between the brothers. For years Philometor, Physcon and their sister Cleopatra II ruled jointly, an arrangement that satisfied nobody and produced open warfare between the brothers more than once. When Philometor died in 145, Physcon inherited alone - and moved immediately to secure his position by marrying his own sister and former co-ruler Cleopatra II, and then, not content with that, marrying her daughter Cleopatra III as well while remaining married to the mother.

A birthday present sent in a box

Physcon's fifteen-year reign grew so hated for its cruelty that in 130 he fled Alexandria for Cyprus, taking with him his own teenage son by Cleopatra II, a boy named Memphites. The Alexandrians promptly restored Cleopatra II to the throne in his absence. Physcon's revenge was recorded by multiple ancient sources with something close to disbelief: he had his own son murdered, the body cut into pieces, and the box delivered to Cleopatra II as a gift for her birthday. Cleopatra raised an army against him regardless, lost the resulting battle, and fled to Syria - while Physcon, remarkably, was eventually reconciled with the same sister he had mutilated her son to spite, ruling alongside her again in his final years as though the crime had never happened.

American Numismatic Society · Mahaffy, The Empire of the Ptolemies (1895) · American Numismatic Society · CC0

A kingdom bequeathed away in pieces

Physcon's death in 116 opened decades of fragmentation rather than stability. Cyrenaica, ruled separately since Physcon willed it to an illegitimate son, Ptolemy Apion, passed to Rome outright when Apion died childless in 96 - the first piece of the old Ptolemaic empire formally annexed rather than merely dominated. In Alexandria itself the throne passed between rival siblings and cousins - Ptolemy IX, expelled and restored twice; Ptolemy X, drowned at sea fleeing a mutiny his own mercenaries raised over unpaid wages; and finally Ptolemy XI, sent back from Rome by Sulla to marry his own stepmother and co-ruler, Berenice III, and murder her nineteen days into the marriage - a crime the Alexandrian mob answered within hours by dragging him from the palace to the gymnasium and killing him in turn, ending the dynasty's legitimate line in a single year, 80 BC.

Mahaffy, The Empire of the Ptolemies (1895) · Photograph: Classical Numismatic Group · CC BY-SA 3.0

What the century actually settled

By the time Ptolemy XII "Auletes" - an illegitimate claimant whose own right to rule rested more on the absence of any better candidate than on any clean succession - took the throne the mob had left vacant, the question that mattered was no longer which Ptolemy would rule but which Roman faction would back him. Auletes borrowed the money to buy Julius Caesar's recognition at ruinous interest from a Roman financier, and spent much of his reign servicing a debt his own kingdom's revenues could barely cover. His daughter, Cleopatra VII, inherited a throne whose independence had already become, in every way that mattered, a question of Roman convenience rather than Ptolemaic strength.

The last of them

endDrafted from Saavedra, A History of the Ptolemaic Empire (2001)

Cleopatra VII was the seventh of her name and, according to Plutarch, the first ruler of the dynasty who learned Egyptian. Three hundred years of ruling the country in Greek had not required it.

Münzkabinett, Staatliche Museen zu Berlin · Saavedra, A History of the Ptolemaic Empire (2001) · Photograph: ArchaiOptix · CC BY-SA 4.0

Antikensammlung, Altes Museum, Berlin · Saavedra, A History of the Ptolemaic Empire (2001) · Photograph: Louis le Grand · Public domain

Her policy was the only one available and she pursued it further than her father had: attach the kingdom to whichever Roman was going to win, and get from him what could not be got any other way. With Julius Caesar she got the throne back from her brother and, at Rome's expense, kept Cyprus. With Mark Antony she got territory no Ptolemy had held since Panion — parts of Phoenicia, Coele-Syria, Cilicia, Cyrenaica, Crete — handed to her and her children at the Donations of Alexandria in 34, which is the largest Ptolemaic empire in a hundred and seventy years and existed entirely by Roman grant.

Dendera, Egypt · Saavedra, A History of the Ptolemaic Empire (2001) · Photograph: Olaf Tausch · CC BY 3.0

Then Actium, in 31, and Octavian at Alexandria the following August. Antony killed himself; Cleopatra, after a delay in which she seems to have tried and failed to get terms for her children, killed herself too. Caesarion, her son by Caesar and the last Ptolemy, was hunted down and executed, on the reported advice that it was bad to have too many Caesars.

Royal Institution of Cornwall · Saavedra, A History of the Ptolemaic Empire (2001) · Portable Antiquities Scheme · CC BY 2.0

Saavedra, A History of the Ptolemaic Empire (2001) · Photograph: Classical Numismatic Group · CC BY-SA 2.5

A name inside the cartouche

afterlifeDrafted from Saavedra, A History of the Ptolemaic Empire (2001)

Egypt did not become an ordinary Roman province. It became the personal possession of the emperor, governed by a prefect of equestrian rank, closed to senators without permission, and run as the grain supply of the city of Rome — which is what the Ptolemies had built the apparatus to do, working for somebody else. The temples kept operating and the priests kept carving the pharaoh's titulary on the walls, with a Roman emperor's name inside the cartouche. The last hieroglyphic inscription anyone cut was at Philae in the fourth century AD, more than four hundred years after the last Ptolemy died.

What that means

Two things end at different times, and the gap between them is the whole point.

Kom Ombo, Egypt · Saavedra, A History of the Ptolemaic Empire (2001) · Photograph: Olaf Tausch · CC BY 3.0

The dynasty ended in 30 BC. The state it had built did not end at all. The Ptolemies had spent three centuries constructing an apparatus for extracting a grain surplus from the Nile valley and moving it out through Alexandria — surveyors, granaries, tax registers, a monetised economy sealed off behind a closed currency, a priesthood paid to certify the ruler. Rome took the apparatus intact and pointed it at Rome.

That is why Egypt was not made an ordinary province. An ordinary province had a senatorial governor and could be used as a power base; Egypt was too valuable and too easy to hold, so the emperor kept it personally and let no senator enter it without permission. The machine that had fed the Ptolemaic court fed the city of Rome for the next six hundred years, and the men running it were the same class of Greek-speaking officials working from the same kind of documents.

Esna, Egypt · Saavedra, A History of the Ptolemaic Empire (2001) · Photograph: Olaf Tausch · CC BY 3.0

And the other end

The temples are the stranger survival, because nobody made them continue.

Egyptian priests had been carving a pharaoh's five-part titulary on temple walls for three thousand years, and they had done it for Persian kings and Macedonian ones without much apparent difficulty. They went on doing it for Roman emperors who never came, whose names went inside the cartouche in hieroglyphs, in a script the emperors could not read, in a ceremony asserting that the man in Rome was the son of Ra and had defeated chaos on Egypt's behalf.

New York Public Library · Saavedra, A History of the Ptolemaic Empire (2001) · Lepsius, Denkmäler, 1849 · Public domain

New York Public Library · Saavedra, A History of the Ptolemaic Empire (2001) · Lepsius, Denkmäler, 1849 · Public domain

The last hieroglyphic inscription anyone cut was at Philae, in the fourth century AD. That is more than four hundred years after the last Ptolemy died, and something over three thousand years after the convention began.

Philae, Egypt · Saavedra, A History of the Ptolemaic Empire (2001) · Photograph: Carole Raddato · CC BY-SA 2.0

The Ptolemies were the last dynasty to take that system seriously enough to be crowned inside it. What outlasted them was not their kingdom, which Rome absorbed in an afternoon, but the two machines they had inherited and kept running: the one that counted the grain, and the one that told the walls who the king was.