Soldier, Priest, and God

by F S Naiden

  Memphis resembled a gigantic royal barge that had run aground. Flood walls protected the Nile side, dominated by the walnut trees of the royal garden, the palace, and the biggest building, the temple of Ptah. On the inland side, a mile or so away, a canal that often overflowed passed through the middle of a plain protected by dikes. Most foreigners lived outside the dikes—Persians, Syrians who worshipped Baal, and Greeks and Carians worshipping Zeus. Many native Egyptians lived beside a necropolis farther to the west. For the first time, the Macedonians saw tombs for animals. Egyptian shrines baffled them. They were not allowed to see most divine statues there, and so they found it hard to know which god was which. Amon-Re was Zeus, but Re was also the sun. Ptah, the god of Memphis, was Hephaestus, the Greek smith god—or was he? Ptah was a potter, not a smith. He had created the world at a potter’s wheel, modeling it on an egg.20

  As in the City of the Sun, priests brought Alexander to holy ground and acknowledged him. Then they took him inside and presented him to Ptah, who was subordinate to Amon-Re but led his own set of gods. Perhaps the coronation occurred here. After being acknowledged in one place, a new pharaoh could be crowned in another. Later, he would be virtually recrowned through the ceremonies that reinvigorated him.

  The coronation centered on Alexander’s receiving some version of each of the five names bestowed on every pharaoh. These names, and not the word “pharaoh” (which meant “great house”), designated the ruler of Egypt. The names mostly involved the gods Horus and Amon-Re. The Horus name, which showed that the pharaoh was the son of Amon-Re, described him as an embodiment of youth and strength, often a bull. The Two Ladies name referred to the goddesses who represented the Nile delta, depicted as a cobra in a basket, and the Nile Valley, depicted as a vulture. This name showed that the pharaoh owned Egypt, and sometimes described him as conquering new lands. The golden Horus name showed that the pharaoh was pure and incorruptible, with mature qualities to balance those of youth. The solar name indicated that the pharaoh succeeded Amon-Re as ruler of Egypt. The personal name came very much last. The priests left this name up to the pharaoh.21

  One script for a pharaonic coronation survives. It describes the enthronement of a much earlier pharaoh, Haremhab, who like Alexander was not of royal stock. To make him ready to receive his names, a priest impersonating Amon purified him with water, and a priestess imparted the divine fluid. Then Amon crowned him and announced his names, and the gods who had assembled for the ceremony (and who were impersonated by more priests) exclaimed to Amon, “Thou hast brought us our savior.” The ceremony concluded as Amon embraced the pharaoh and presented him to priests impersonating another set of characters, the Nine Bows, a traditional group of foreign powers, only one of which was Greek. The Nine Bows humbled themselves, the pharaonic ka arrived, and Haremhab became the last pharaoh of the Eighteenth Dynasty. He had overthrown Tutankhamen. In much the same way, Alexander, who overthrew the Persians, became the 467th king of Egypt.22

  Then Alexander emerged from the temple and the priests coached him through a public, not secret, offering to a bull incarnating Ptah. The bull made his appearance at a window in the temple court, displaying his characteristic white markings on a black coat. After the bull watched the king pray and make the offering, he returned to his stall and private water supply. The priests told Alexander that he had performed well in his first public act as pharaoh; the bad pharaoh Cambyses had supposedly killed Ptah’s sacred bull.23

  Soon after, Alexander made reassuring offerings in the Greek and Macedonian manner. He killed some oxen, and as his holy men and butchers gutted and flayed them, he put the best pieces, thighs wrapped in fat, on a temporary altar. The flame jolted upward for a few minutes, like fireworks, and libations of wine kept the fire burning for another ten minutes, until only the charred bones remained. The king raised his hands, palms outward, and prayed to Zeus as everyone kept still, lest any sound or movement spoil this moment of communion with the patron of the companions.

  Bas-relief of Alexander and Amon-Re, temple sacred to Amon, Mut, and Chonsu, Luxor, 330–323 BC.

  Photograph: Heritage Image Partnership, Art Resource.

  Then the little drama gave way to a traditionally raucous barbeque. Alexander staged games that attracted the best talent in the army’s entourage and in Egypt. A panel of generals judged a competition among tragic poets.24

  In spite of these touches of home, the companions found Alexander’s position ambiguous. First he stood beside Ptah, in secret, and then he stood before them, in the open. First he was a demigod, and then a master of ceremonies. He worshipped a bull, and then he killed oxen. Was he a butcher and a hunter or a stable boy?

  Alexander left the troops at Memphis and sailed upriver with his senior companions. None of the surviving accounts says how far they went, but a likely destination was the shrine of Amon at Thebes. The royal party had seen other shrines of this god in Memphis, and they knew about Amon because Macedonians and Greeks worshipped him under the double name Zeus-Amon. Alexander had heard about him from his mother, whose family controlled the oracle of Zeus-Amon at Dodona. Above all, Amon had just made Alexander pharaoh, and Thebes was Amon’s home. The Greeks called this city “the City of Zeus,” as though it were Zeus’s home. Alexander would not want to miss this, the shrine of shrines.25

  The voyage to Thebes must have disconcerted the companions. They had left the Mediterranean, with its rocks, woods, and clear streams, for a landscape of sand, palms, and the brown waters of the Nile. At the City of the Sun the companions had stayed in the visitors’ compound used by Plato, and they knew Greeks had lived in Memphis for centuries, but now the Macedonians docked at temple after temple with little sign of Greeks or foreigners. Instead of the pyramids they had seen earlier, they spotted enormous tombs cut into the cliffs on the western side of the river.

  Alexander traveled in a different spirit from the rest. A calendar of rituals obliged him to be here, there, and everywhere. He could land at a shrine like the one at Luxor, near Thebes, and envision priests impersonating him there at a festival months earlier or later. He could also foresee that he would be present in shrines through pictures. He was already making plans to build and refurbish shrines, and so he could imagine new temple friezes that would show the pharaoh Alexander making offerings to the gods—those family-style offerings that only a pharaoh could make, since only the pharaoh could approach gods as though they were relatives.

  A frieze built at Luxor during Alexander’s reign describes these rites in a series of forty-two panels. Each panel contains the name of the king, some of his titles, some instructions, and a statement by Amon-Re. The first panel says,

   The perfect god, the lord of both lands, Alexander

  and turns to the rite:

  Lead the king into the temple.

  This instruction is for Amon, who turns to Alexander and says,

  I have put the nine peoples with bows in your power. I have given you all life, happiness, and health.

  Alexander carries out his instructions:

  Mount the steps. Approach the throne. … For the sake of your father, kiss the ground. Do homage with the holy pitcher. Burn incense for your father. Gaze on him. Bring lotus blossoms. … Give milk. Bring the god to his meal. Purify the shrine with natron balls. … Put makeup on Amon’s eyes. Apply ointment.

  More instructions appear on other panels.26

  A Macedonian worshipper would not know about natron, a compound of salt and soda ash, or about makeup for men. He might give milk to Zeus, but he would not see the god drink it. A god was a horrific being, manifest in lightning, like Zeus, or in a pillar of fire, like Yahweh. Amon should be that way, too, for the sun in Egypt could be destructive. Yet Alexander, a man like any other, bashed in the head at the Granicus, stabbed in the thigh at Issus, and stuck in the ribs at Gaza, would touch the sun and dress it. He had the blessing of a pharaonic ka. The Luxor shrine where he dressed Amon was dedicated not just to the god but to this special k
a. When Alexander was shown worshipping there, he was in some sense worshipping himself.27

  So far, the companions were only beginning to grasp this relationship. They could not enter temples, just the courtyards outside, and so they did not see Alexander officiate, or see pictures of other pharaohs whom Alexander would imitate. They could not fully understand the claims the priestly impersonators made on Alexander’s time, his self-image, and his purse.28

  “The city of Zeus,” or, as the Greeks sometimes said, “the greatest city of Zeus,” proved to be a mere string of neighborhoods on the western bank of the Nile. A few residences clustered around temples, but Thebes lacked a marketplace or a stronghold like an acropolis. The deserts beyond the Nile Valley walls provided the only defense, and the river the only highway.

  The king disembarked at the riverside neighborhood of Karnak. The street leading from the dock led immediately to the largest shrine the Macedonians had ever seen or heard of. As priests led him through the gate, Alexander discovered the first of the temple’s secrets. A 1,000-year-old composite, the shrine was deteriorating at different rates in different spots.29

  Alexander and the priests walked past the outside walls, twelve yards thick and about fifty yards high, built by Nakhtnebef, and then past the inside walls built a thousand or so years earlier by the conqueror Djehutymes, the Thutmosis of the Greeks. A colossal stone entryway ushered them into a forecourt as long as a football field. Next, a colonnaded court built before the supposed date of the Trojan War. Only now did they reach the temple. The grandfather of Thutmosis erected it around 1520 BC, generations before the supposed lifetime of Heracles. Thutmosis built the inner sanctum, the Akhmenou. Pharaohs communed here with Amon during one of the festivals that restored their powers.

  Alexander had now walked about 600 yards, a longer distance than most running events at the ancient Olympics. Temple walls blocked any view of the outside and any sound other than that of the royal party. Hundreds of wall paintings of pharaohs and gods bombarded him, as did far more epigraphical text than in any Greek shrine or precinct. Many of these pictures and inscriptions identified pharaohs performing the same duties as Alexander’s. “He, too, is Alexander,” said these images—but “he” was Egyptian.

  Some of the priests could not go farther. Only a select few guided Alexander into a ceremonial hall forty yards long. On one side stood nine chambers for ritual foods, unguents, perfumes, and vestments, and three chapels occupied the other side. At the far end stood a chapel for the obscure god Sokar, a room housing the boat used by Amon to sail the Nile, and another for Amon’s image. Alexander had reached Thutmosis’s Akhmenou.

  He cannot have had time to examine it. Perhaps the priests led him to one unremarkable, typical spot in an antechamber past the storage rooms and the god’s boat. In a frieze on the lower part of a wall, the first scene showed the pharaoh purifying Amon-Re with water from a vase. In another scene, the pharaoh gave the god four pieces of incense, and in a third scene he opened the mouth of the ithyphallic form of the god with an adze. On the upper part of the wall, the pharaoh, accompanied by the personified Nile River, announced offerings listed on a tablet.30

  After more than a month in Egypt, Alexander would find this frieze familiar. The priests, though, could point out an odd feature. The pictures were out of kilter. The water in the vase flowed erratically from one piece of the frieze to the next, and the Nile River split in two. Would the new king repair these damaged pieces? If Alexander agreed to make the repair, his cartouche would go into a prominent spot over a nearby door.

  Alexander agreed, and the priests made the repair sometime during his reign. Perhaps he agreed without having entered the shrine. Then a priest made the decision on the king’s behalf. Or perhaps the king did enter but made no decision, and the priest did later. No matter which of these things happened, the effect was the same. One course of events merged with another, the nominal with the actual, the way tributaries merged with the Nile.

  Alexander or his ministers went up and down the country, building mostly for Amon and especially near Thebes. Outside the temple of Amon-Re, Alexander consecrated a chapel to the Egyptian Heracles, Chonsu. He also restored the pictures and inscriptions on a gate in a Chonsu temple erected around 1050 BC. New pictures depicted him in a leopard skin, the garb of Chonsu’s priests.31

  In recompense, the priests of Amon gave Alexander a set of titles that may have differed slightly from those bestowed elsewhere. These titles were:

  Ruler of Rulers of the Entire Land

  The Lion, Great in Might, Who Takes Hold of Mountains, Lands, and Deserts

  The Bull, Who Protects Egypt, the Ruler of the Great Green

  And of What the Sun Encircles

  The King of Upper and Lower Egypt, Beloved by Amon and Chosen by Re,

  Alksandros.32

  The priests had called the Persian Darius “Ruler of Rulers.” They had called Thutmosis a bull, and many rulers lions. They had never called any pharaoh world ruler and lord of the sea and sky. Only gods like Horus had ever received these titles. Since the titles would be part of the pharaoh’s cartouche, the evidence of deification would appear throughout Egypt. It would, of course, be written in hieroglyphics that only priests could read.33

  The priests knew their man: regal, ambitious, and increasingly megalomaniacal. They did not want anyone else to know him. The companions no longer knew their man. He had become not just a new kind of priest but a new kind of king.

  To spread word of his apotheosis, Alexander needed an oracle from the highest authority. Zeus gave oracles only at Dodona, near Macedon, at the rural shrine familiar to his mother. For Alexander to return there and make an inquiry would be inconvenient, and for Olympias to ask on his behalf might not lead to the desired result. By contrast, Amon gave oracles throughout Egypt. Sometime during his trip to Thebes, or afterward, when Alexander sailed downriver, he learned about these oracles.

  As pharaoh, Alexander could speak to Amon directly. Many shrines provided a station reserved for exchanges between the god and the pharaoh. In this intimate setting, the king would not even need to ask a question. Instead, the god would anticipate his request and render judgment in an epiphany.34

  Or the king might do as other Egyptians did, and wait outside a temple for the moment when Amon’s statue, or some other image of the god, left one shrine on the way to visit another. Then the worshippers could ask a question and the statue would answer by moving side to side. This sort of oracle resembled the oracle at Dodona, where Zeus caused leaves to rustle and the priestesses listened for a message. Elsewhere in Greece, divine statues did not budge or tilt, but they did express themselves by dropping tears or bursting into flame.35

  Both methods appealed to Alexander. He would speak privately to Amon, and the god would acknowledge him as a son. Priests would announce this conversation. His companions would wait outside the shrine and approach a tilting statue or other divine image. They would ask whether they should worship Alexander, and the priests would say yes. Alexander would obtain a twofold oracle, partly Egyptian, partly quasi-Greek. He would disseminate the quasi-Greek oracle and eventually adapt it for subjects who were not Greek-speakers.36

  Alexander and his advisers knew which Amon shrine would serve this purpose. In the Libyan Desert, in the oasis at Siwah, a ten-day march from central Egypt or the Mediterranean coast, an oracle of Amon served Egyptian and Greek clientele. The Egyptians came from the Nile valley and traveled west to Siwah via other oases. The Greeks came from coastal cities in Cyrene, on the Libyan coast, and traveled south into the desert. They knew about Amon thanks to a temple of Zeus-Amon in Cyrene that ranked as the largest Greek building in Africa. Jason and the Argonauts had made the trip from Cyrene to Siwah. Alexander believed that Cambyses had tried to attack the Siwah shrine. As always with Cambyses, Alexander would do the opposite, and go there as a pilgrim.37

  Small though Siwah was, it did have a shrine where Alexander could speak to Amon in private, a
nd it also had a satellite shrine a quarter mile away. Since Amon liked to travel, he regularly went from the main shrine to the satellite and back again, and since he preferred to travel by boat, the priests put him in the form of a solar disk on a small sailing vessel that they carried on their shoulders. Alexander’s followers could wait for the boat and disk to make this journey and then ask the priests their question. The bobbing of the boat on the priests’ shoulders would give them their answer.38

  In return for the help he received at Siwah, Alexander would build a shrine to Amon at another oasis, Bahariya. Siwah would have been a better spot, but Thutmosis and others had already built everything that Siwah required. At neglected Bahariya, Alexander could make more of an impression. He could outbuild Darius I, who had decorated the fifty-by-twenty-yard temple of Amon at a third oasis, Kharga. Alexander would also top Darius II, who had put an inscription on the wall of the Kharga temple in the late 400s. Alexander’s Darius, who was the third, had done nothing comparable.39

  Alexander struck a bargain. With the help of the Egyptians, Alexander would speak to god, and an oracle would recommend that he be worshipped. With Alexander’s help, the pious would get a new shrine. He did not make this bargain cynically. For him, Amon was a very real being.40

  for the trip to Siwah, Alexander selected a force of top companions and some infantry and cavalry—no extras. His group headed west from the edge of the Nile delta via the coastal road. The next big city, Cyrene, lay hundreds of miles away. In spite of the distance, the Greeks there feared an impending attack, and sent emissaries to Alexander. After receiving Cyrene’s submission, the expedition replenished its supply of fresh water, and in early 331 it headed southwest into the Sahara.

  For comfort and safety, the new pharaoh and his companions dressed like the Berbers who were guiding them. At some oases, the Macedonians saw camels grazing and learned that nomads brought them over from the delta in the winter. If it was hot enough, the travelers got bread by starting fires with twigs and camel dung that made the sand hot enough to bake on. It might still be cold enough at night to sleep beside the camels, much as they stank. The officers and cavalry rode, and the infantry walked.