Encouraged by the unrest in the north, the citizens of Thebes were the next to rebel. Ever since the fall of the New Kingdom, Upper Egypt in general and the Theban region in particular had harbored secessionist tendencies. The attitude of the Ptolemies, who rarely strayed beyond their northern power base, merely exacerbated Theban resentment at being ruled from distant Alexandria. Sensing the native threat, Ptolemy IV ordered construction to begin on a vast new temple to Horus at Djeba (Greek Apollonos polis), in the far south of Egypt. But it was too little, too late. A contemporary text (the Demotic Chronicle) lambasted the Ptolemaic rulers, accusing them of ignoring maat, and prophesied that a native king would rise up to overthrow the foreigners.
The prophecy was soon fulfilled. In 206, a charismatic rebel leader won an initial victory against the state’s forces. Within a few months, after taking the sacred city of Thebes, he was proclaimed pharaoh and given official recognition by the priesthood of Amun. Horwennefer, “beloved of Amun-Ra, king of the gods,” began his reign in the autumn of 205. From Abdju, in the north, to Inerty (Greek Pathyris), in the south, Upper Egypt was once again under native rule. Land records were destroyed, the hated tax regime was suspended, and Greeks were forced from their homes. Ptolemaic rule was in retreat. For a brief, heady moment, it looked as if the Nile Valley might wrest itself free from foreign domination, as it had at other turning points in its history.
The Ptolemies thought otherwise. At the end of 200, a new king in Alexandria, Ptolemy V (204–180), launched his counteroffensive. Greek troops marched southward from their bases in the delta and the Fayum. By early 199 they had recaptured Ptolemais, and as summer turned to autumn they laid siege to the sacred site of Abdju. Having seized the cult center of the god Osiris-Wennefer from the rebel leader, they pressed on to Thebes, there to win a further victory. Pessimism among the freedom fighters turned to despair as they lost first their capital, then their leader. Horwennefer’s death in mid-autumn 199 might have spelled the end of Theban resistance, but a successor, Ankhwennefer, quickly filled his shoes, continuing the same sequence of regnal years as if nothing had happened. However, with Ptolemaic forces in control of Thebes, and another major Greek garrison dug in at Aswan, Ankhwennefer’s options were severely limited. Daringly, he chose to march northward, perhaps using the desert routes, and targeted the province of Sauty (Greek Lykopolis), 190 miles north of Thebes. By inflicting maximum damage, plundering towns, and disrupting the normal workings of the rural economy, Ankhwennefer’s plan was to isolate the Ptolemaic troops occupying Thebes, deprive them of supplies, and cut their lines of communication with Alexandria. It was a bold move, and a successful one. Before long, the Ptolemaic army was forced to abandon Thebes and retreat southward. The rebel forces were back in the game.
Frustrated by the degree of opposition in Upper Egypt, Ptolemy V decided to direct his firepower against the delta rebels. In 197, his army besieged their fortified and well-stocked headquarters. In the end, the insurgents’ idealism proved no match for the superior strength and weaponry of the Ptolemaic forces. The town was captured and the ringleaders of the uprising were brought to Memphis, there to suffer public execution by impalement as part of Ptolemy’s coronation festivities. This highly charged occasion on March 26, 196, mixing politics and religion in characteristically Egyptian style, was duly commemorated in a great royal decree, inscribed in the country’s two languages (Egyptian and Greek) and three scripts (hieroglyphics, demotic characters , and Greek). This Decree of Memphis survives to this day, more famously known as the Rosetta Stone.
The Rosetta Stone © THE TRUSTEES OF THE BRITISH MUSEUM
Buoyed by his decisive victory in the delta, Ptolemy V turned his attention, once again, to Thebes. First, the Ptolemaic army drove the rebel forces from the province of Sauty in a bloody battle that ravaged the land. Then, in the autumn of 191, Ankhwennefer abandoned Thebes and fled toward the Nubian border. His options were fast running out. Once back in control of Thebes, the authorities, ever concerned with economic matters, held a public auction of land confiscated from the insurgents. The sooner it was returned to profitable cultivation, the sooner the taxes would start to flow again. With Greek troops now converging on Aswan, well supplied with grain from all over Egypt, Ankhwennefer knew that his cause was doomed. Despite receiving military assistance from Nubia, the Egyptian rebels were finally defeated on August 27, 186. Ankhwennefer’s son was killed in battle; he himself was captured and imprisoned. Only the intervention of a synod, held in Alexandria a few days later, spared him an excruciating death. The Egyptian priests managed to persuade Ptolemy V that killing Ankhwennefer would merely create a martyr and that a wiser policy would be to brand him an enemy of the gods but pardon him. The king swallowed hard, accepted the priests’ counsel, and issued a great amnesty decree, instructing all fugitives to return to their homes and fields.
In a further attempt to placate native sentiment, Ptolemy V lavished spending on the temples, resuming the work at Djeba that had been suspended at the outbreak of the insurgency in 206. Yet, hand in hand with these conciliatory gestures, he also took steps to impose absolute military control over the south. For the first time, loyalist Greek soldiers were given land grants in Upper Egyptian communities. The governor resident in Ptolemais was given complete control of civil and military matters, and two new army camps were set up at strategic points near Thebes, at Sumenu (Greek Krokodilopolis) and Inerty. Future rebels would not have it so easy.
Ptolemy V reserved his final act of vengeance for the remaining northern rebels who had started the revolt in the first place. In 185, on the pretext of seeking a negotiated settlement, he lured them to the city of Sais—symbolic center of Lower Egyptian resistance since the far-off days of Tefnakht more than five centuries earlier. Too late they realized the trap. On the king’s orders, they were stripped naked, harnessed to carts like oxen, and forced to pull the carts through the city streets—watched by the city’s terrified inhabitants—before being tortured to death. Ptolemaic mercy had its limits.
The royal family’s appetite for internecine rivalry did not. The internal crises affecting the dynasty grew increasingly serious from the late third century onward, exacerbated by the persistent native rebellions. When Ptolemy V had come to the throne in 204, aged barely six, his mother, due to become regent, had been murdered by powerful court officials. They had then fought among themselves to gain the upper hand, weakening the government still further. Riven by conflict at home, the Ptolemaic state had been trounced abroad, losing its overseas possessions in Syria, Anatolia, and Thrace. By the time of Ptolemy V’s death in 180, a once mighty empire was fatally weakened.
And with Hellenistic power crumbling across the eastern Mediterranean, an ambitious young state was watching developments with hungry eyes.
THE ROAD TO ROME
THE LATINS WERE ONE OF A NUMBER OF ITALIC TRIBES DESCENDED from settlers who had first migrated into Italy around the time of the Sea Peoples. In 753, according to their own tradition, the Latins had established a city by the banks of the river Tiber. This foundation, Rome, had grown steadily in size and influence until, by 338, it had controlled the surrounding province of Latium and within another eighty years the whole of peninsular Italy, ousting Greek colonists in the process. Little wonder that the Ptolemies had wanted to be on friendly terms. So in 273, following his great procession, flush with pride and more confident than ever of his own importance, Ptolemy II had taken the step of arranging a formal exchange of envoys with the rising star of international politics. The treaty of friendship with Rome was the beginning of a long, tortuous, and ultimately fatal attraction.
From the outset, the Ptolemies regarded the Romans with a mixture of haughty condescension and sycophantic fascination, as is the wont of established superpowers with up-and-coming nations. To curry favor with Rome (and despite having a treaty with the Phoenician city of Carthage, on the North African coast), Ptolemaic Egypt sat on its hands during the First Punic War, and received
a delegation of grateful Romans as a reward for its duplicity. Playing the same game, Rome intervened in the endless struggles between the Ptolemaic Kingdom and its Macedonian and Seleucid rivals, posing as a friend of Egypt in order to further its own international ambitions. In such an atmosphere, the Hellenistic dynasties’ bitter feuding led inevitably to the emergence of Rome as the key player in Mediterranean politics.
Like his father, Ptolemy VI (180–145) became king at the age of six. For the first four years of his reign, with his mother acting as regent, some degree of stability was maintained. But after her death in 176, those at court who backed the king’s siblings broke cover and soon forced the proclamation of a triarchy. Ptolemy VI, his sister, and his younger brother Ptolemy VIII would henceforth reign as joint sovereigns. It was a recipe for disaster. A disastrous Sixth Syrian War, during which Ptolemy VI tried to negotiate terms with the enemy, led to his being deposed by the febrile citizenry of Alexandria. The Seleucid king, Antiochos, claiming to represent Ptolemy VI (but interested only in a land grab of his own), besieged the Egyptian capital, before breaking off his campaign to deal with domestic problems. The situation was a typically Macedonian cocktail of sibling rivalry, territorial ambition, and native unrest.
Enter the coolheaded Romans to restore order. When Antiochos moved against Alexandria again in the spring of 168, having already captured Cyprus and Memphis and begun issuing royal decrees as ruler of Egypt, Rome intervened decisively to prevent a unification of the Seleucid and Ptolemaic kingdoms. A few months later, in early July, the Roman envoy Popilius met Antiochos in a suburb of Alexandria called Eleusis. With showstopping chutzpah, the envoy demanded an immediate cessation of hostilities and the complete withdrawal of Seleucid forces from Egypt and Cyprus without delay. Overawed, Antiochos meekly complied, and left with his tail between his legs. The Day of Eleusis went down in history as the moment when Rome saved Egypt. It was a Faustian pact.
For the remaining 130 years of Ptolemaic rule, Roman, not Greek, power was the key factor in the destiny of the Nile Valley. As family disputes between Ptolemy VI and his siblings wore out the kingdom, Rome was increasingly asked to intervene on one side or another, and the Romans strengthened their stranglehold on the country’s fate. To make matters worse, opportunistic rebellions continued to break out in Upper Egypt, insurgents taking advantage of the power vacuum at the center. In 165, Thebes erupted in revolt. Serious clashes spread to the Fayum, where rebels burned land documents in a direct challenge to the authorities; farmers left their villages; and fugitives sought sanctuary in the temples. Ptolemy VI responded with a decree making the leasing and cultivation of land compulsory, but the measure proved so ineffective and unpopular that he was forced to go into exile. It is not surprising that he headed straight for Rome.
Ptolemy VIII fared no better. Within a year, his tyrannical rule led to calls for his brother’s return and he found himself turning to Rome for support. Exiled in Cyrenaica, desperate to regain power, and unsettled by an attempt on his life in 156–155, Ptolemy VIII made a will promising his kingdom to Rome if he should die without a legitimate heir. It had the desired effect of frightening his political opponents—better the devil you know, they concluded—but it merely weakened Egyptian independence still further. Only with the death of Ptolemy VI in 145 did the younger brother finally regain his throne.
On returning to Alexandria, Ptolemy VIII married his brother’s widow (and his own sister), and it is said that he had her son by Ptolemy VI murdered during the wedding celebrations. It was entirely typical of his wanton barbarity. He carried out harsh reprisals against the Jewish troop commanders who had risen up against his regime, and he banished many Greek intellectuals from Alexandria. As a counterbalance to the many enemies he was making among the immigrant population, Ptolemy VIII deliberately curried favor with his Egyptian subjects, patronizing their temples and issuing amnesty decrees. It was a shameless bribe, but it worked. Well used to brutal rulers, the native population turned a blind eye to Ptolemy’s atrocities and rallied to his side.
The dynasty’s domestic affairs—never straightforward—then turned increasingly bizarre. Ptolemy began an intimate relationship with his sister-wife’s younger daughter, marrying her in 141 and making her queen. As a result, mother and daughter became the fiercest of rivals. Those seeking to oust the despotic king could now count on his older wife’s full support. When civil war broke out between the two camps in 132, Ptolemy fled to Cyprus, taking his younger consort with him and leaving his estranged wife to be acclaimed sole ruler in Alexandria. Fearing that his son by her would be proclaimed king, Ptolemy had the young boy kidnapped, brought to Cyprus, and murdered before his own eyes. He then dismembered the body and had the pieces sent back to the boy’s mother to arrive on the eve of her birthday celebrations. Never one to put personal grief before political gain, she put the remains on public display in Alexandria, to arouse the people’s wrath against the tyrant Ptolemy. But the native Egyptian population remained steadfastly loyal. His cruel calculation had paid off.
Ptolemy VIII’s popularity among his Egyptian subjects gave him the perfect springboard, and he recaptured the country from his wife’s backers. He further capitalized on his native support by promoting Egyptians to high office for the first time in two centuries. Men such as the royal scribe Wennefer spouted the same self-aggrandizing hyperbole as their predecessors from the golden age of Egyptian civilization—“I was one honoured by his father, praised by his mother, gracious to his brothers.… I was one praised in his town, beneficent in his province, gracious to everyone. I was well-disposed, popular, widely loved, cheerful.”3 But alongside the self-congratulation, there was an equal measure of dissipation that signaled the decay of pharaonic mores: “I was a lover of drink, a lord of the feast day … singers and maidens gathered together … braided, beauteous, tressed, high-bosomed … they danced in beauty, doing my heart’s wish.”4 Such decadence was a sign of the times. The people of Egypt were taking their cue from their rulers. Once Ptolemy VIII had retaken Alexandria, to teach his opponents a lesson he had the gymnasium surrounded and torched, burning everyone inside alive. Such senseless violence in the pursuit of power, combined with rampant corruption, only accelerated Egypt’s decline.
In the summer of 116, Ptolemy VIII breathed his last in Alexandria, leaving his throne to his young wife and whichever of her two sons she preferred. At the same time, seven hundred miles upstream, a group of Romans came to visit the temple of Isis at Philae and carved their names on the temple wall, leaving behind the oldest surviving Latin inscriptions in Egypt. The two incidents nicely summed up the past and future of the Nile Valley. The dynastic strife of an old and tired regime looked increasingly irrelevant in the face of Roman expansionism. Twenty years later, Rome inherited Cyrenaica, leaving Cyprus as the only overseas Ptolemaic possession. History repeated itself as two royal brothers (Ptolemy IX and X) vied for power and there was further unrest in Upper Egypt. A second Ptolemy willed his kingdom to Rome in return for military support, and there were more outrages in the capital.
The Ptolemaic temple of Horus at Djeba (modern Edfu) WERNER FORMAN ARCHIVE
Of all the old certainties that had given Egypt its self-confidence, only a belief in the traditional gods remained. For that reason, if for no other, great were the celebrations in 70 when the vast new temple of Horus at Djeba was finally consecrated, 167 years after Ptolemy III had performed the foundation ceremony. Thoroughly Ptolemaic in design but undeniably pharaonic in dedication, the towering edifice of sandstone, with its pylon gateways and columned halls, was the epitome of the hybrid Hellenistic-Egyptian culture that successive generations of Greek pharaohs had struggled to create. The crowds who gathered that day to enjoy the colorful pageantry must have hoped, in their heart of hearts, that they were witnessing a new dawn, a promise of future harmony and prosperity.
Similar sentiments, no doubt, accompanied the birth a few months later of the king’s newest child. Of mixed ancestry, P
tolemy XII’s baby daughter carried on her tiny shoulders the hopes and expectations of her diverse countrymen. Her life would be devoted to maintaining their independence; her death would signal the end of pharaonic Egypt. Her name was Cleopatra.
CHAPTER 24
FINIS
CREDIT CRUNCH
FROM THE BEGINNING OF EGYPTIAN HISTORY, THE HIGH PRIEST OF Ptah had been one of the most important men in the kingdom. Since the unification of the country, Memphis had been the national capital, and Ptah was the city’s principal deity. So Ptah’s chief officiant was in the very top echelon of clergy, one of a handful of high priests responsible for guarding Egypt’s revered religious traditions. In theory, the high priest of Ptah—or the “greatest of craftsmen,” to give him his ancient and esoteric formal title—was a royal appointee. But the notion of the royal prerogative had a habit, throughout Egyptian history, of conflicting with the even more deeply ingrained hereditary ideal, whereby fathers passed their offices to their sons. So it was that, under the Ptolemies, the top job in the Memphite priesthood had been held by a single family, son succeeding father in unbroken succession for more than 260 years. As generation followed generation, the high priests of Ptah skillfully combined hereditary office with ultraloyalty to the sovereign, to become the most powerful and influential native family in the land. In the great southern city of Thebes, once the religious capital of the Egyptian Empire, the high priests of Amun had displayed lukewarm enthusiasm toward their Greek rulers. Not so the high priests of Ptah, who had been resolute supporters of the Ptolemies, eagerly bestowing the stamp of divine authority in return for royal favor. Their southern compatriots may have regarded such collaboration with disgust, but in truth nothing could have been more Egyptian.
The Rise and Fall of Ancient Egypt Page 52