The Rise and Fall of Ancient Egypt

by Toby Wilkinson

  The assassination of Caesar on March 15, 44, put paid to his exotic ambitions. Within a month, Cleopatra left Rome and returned home to Alexandria. Another month later, her brother and co-ruler, Ptolemy XIV, was conveniently dead. In his place, Cleopatra elevated Caesarion to the throne as Ptolemy XV, “the father- and mother-loving god.” In Cleopatra’s mind, the parallels between her own life and the life of the gods seemed to grow stronger by the year. Caesar had been murdered, just like Osiris; his son and heir Caesarion was the new Horus. As for the widowed mother, Cleopatra, no one could now doubt her transformation into the living Isis.

  DANGEROUS LIAISONS

  IF CLEOPATRA HAD ACHIEVED APOTHEOSIS, HER FELLOW MEMBERS OF the pantheon were not impressed. Indeed, the gods seemed to have deserted Egypt. A further series of low Niles in 43–41 led to more food shortages. In the big cities and in the countryside, the Egyptians felt increasingly desperate. Hard-pressed and hungry, they ceased even to look forward to the promise of a more comfortable afterlife. Imagining the hereafter as a continuation of their earthly lot, they turned their backs on two thousand years of faith and began to dread what lay beyond the grave. Nobody expressed this fear of death more movingly than Taimhotep. On February 15, 42, at the age of thirty, she died, leaving her husband, son, and three daughters to mourn. As befitted the wife of a high priest, her funerary stela was beautifully fashioned from a slab of fine pale limestone, carved by the country’s finest craftsmen. On its face, underneath a winged sun disk, a delicately carved frieze showed Taimhotep worshipping the cream of Egypt’s traditional deities: Anubis, god of mummification; Horus, son of Osiris; Nepthys and Isis, Osiris’s sisters and chief mourners; the sacred Apis bull of Memphis; and, finally, Sokar-Osiris, god of the dead. If the divine lineup recalled Egypt’s traditional self-confidence, the accompanying inscription, in twenty-one lines of finely cut hieroglyphs, embodied the new, darker zeitgeist:

  Oh my brother, my husband, friend, High Priest!

  Do not weary of drinking, eating, getting intoxicated and making love!

  Make holiday! Follow your heart day and night!

  Let not care into your heart otherwise what use are your years upon earth?

  As for the west, it is a land of sleep; darkness weighs on that place where the dead dwell.5

  Taimhotep’s funerary inscription is the longest and most heartfelt lament from ancient Egypt, a poignant assertion that the old certainties had well and truly disappeared.

  Stela of Taimhotep © THE TRUSTEES OF THE BRITISH MUSEUM

  For the country as a whole, as well as for its individual citizens, the future looked ominous. With the murder of Caesar, Egypt had lost its protector. It was anybody’s guess how his killers on the one hand and his heirs on the other would now behave toward Cleopatra and her realm. To make matters worse, her younger sister Arsinoe, freed from captivity in Rome and now living at Ephesus, provided a natural focus for dissenters within the Ptolemaic lands.

  Cleopatra’s mettle was tested to the full as first Cassius and then Mark Antony and Octavian sought military assistance from Egypt. Deploying all her political acumen, she read the situation correctly and threw her lot in with Caesar’s allies. Antony’s subsequent victory over Cassius and Brutus at the Battle of Philippi vindicated her decision. Egypt was saved—for the moment—but the country’s reprieve came at a price. Its unforeseen, and ultimately tragic, consequence was Cleopatra’s entanglement with a second Roman war hero.

  She may have met Antony for the first time in 55, when he came to Egypt as a young cavalry officer with Gabinius’s army. Antony and Cleopatra must surely have come into contact again during her two-year stay in Rome in 46–44. It was to be a case of third time lucky. In the summer of 41, following the entente between Egypt and Caesar’s heirs, Antony summoned Cleopatra to meet him at Tarsus, in southeastern Anatolia. With the wind in his sails after Philippi, Antony had set his sights on defeating the Parthian Empire, Rome’s last major enemy in Asia. To mount such a campaign he required a forward base in the eastern Mediterranean, and Egypt was ideal. For her part, Cleopatra was in urgent need of a new protector. Mutual advantage thus brought the two together.

  With her instinctive skills of presentation and propaganda, Cleopatra turned a diplomatic and political summit into a religious spectacle, arriving by river in the guise of Aphrodite/Isis coming to meet her divine consort, Dionysus. Antony must have been flattered by the analogy, and beguiled by a queen fourteen years his junior. Like Caesar before him, he offered Cleopatra his support in return for her favors. Not even the news of Pasherenptah’s death, on July 14, could cool her ardor. Toward the end of the year, Antony and Cleopatra returned together to Alexandria. Nine months later, their twins were born, Alexander Helios and Cleopatra Selene, the sun and the moon—fitting issue for a match made in heaven.

  Except that it wasn’t. No sooner had the twins come into the world than their father upped and left Egypt. Returning to Rome, he sealed a deal with his great rival by marrying Octavian’s sister (Octavia) and spurning Cleopatra. As for the queen of Egypt, she should have learned from bitter experience that a whirlwind romance with a Roman general meant life as a single mother.

  For the next three years, with Antony off the scene, Egypt enjoyed a brief respite from the wearying succession of wars, intrigues, coups, and countercoups that had plagued it under the Ptolemies’ wayward rule. Imhotep (though only a boy of seven) was appointed high priest of Ptah in succession to his father and forefathers. The Nile inundation returned to accustomed levels, and agricultural production increased. If it had not been for the staggering levels of foreign debt, a legacy of Ptolemy XII’s reign, Egypt’s economy might have returned to prosperity. As it was, the government coffers were running on empty. Silver coinage was debased from 90 percent to 40 percent precious metal, before virtually disappearing from circulation. In its place, most coins were minted in bronze. Egypt’s legendary wealth was going straight into Roman pockets.

  Restless to subdue Parthia and win himself even greater renown, by the autumn of 37 Antony had come to the conclusion that Octavian was not going to assist him. Egypt once again seemed the likeliest ally. So he traveled east once more, to Antioch, and called a second summit meeting with Cleopatra. As a sweetener, Antony gave her the contents of the great library of the kings of Pergamum, said to number two hundred thousand volumes—partial compensation for the holdings of the Alexandrian library destroyed a decade earlier during Caesar’s war against Pompey. Antony also allocated Egypt a host of Roman territories around the eastern Mediterranean. This allowed Cleopatra to pose as an imperialist pharaoh, a ruler who had restored some of the luster to her forebears’ once great empire. To mark this renaissance, she introduced a system of double-dating, proclaiming her sixteenth year on the throne the first year of a new era. But it was all a mirage. The eastern lands were not Antony’s to give. Phony title deeds and a collection of books in return for real troops and supplies was hardly a fair exchange. In the far-off days of the Eighteenth Dynasty, Egypt had been respected and feared as the mighty bull of Asia; now, it was Rome’s milk cow.

  Due to a combination of poor preparation and overconfidence, Antony’s first Parthian campaign was a complete disaster. In the space of a few months, he lost a third of his legionaries and nearly half his cavalry to a fierce and determined opponent. The only good news that year was the birth of another son by Cleopatra, Ptolemy Philadelphus. A second Parthian campaign in 34 saw Cleopatra travel with Antony to the banks of the Euphrates. This time, Antony won a limited victory over Armenia, celebrated with quite disproportionate pomp in the “Donations of Alexandria.” Before an enormous crowd, Antony and Cleopatra appeared together on silver thrones, she in the guise of Isis. He then boldly proclaimed their children to be the rulers of Rome’s eastern provinces. To Cleopatra and Caesarion would be given the traditional Ptolemaic lands of Egypt, Cyprus, and Cyrenaica, together with Coele-Syria; Alexander Helios—attired for the occasion in Persian dress—would be give
n Armenia, Media, and Parthia (ignoring the inconvenient fact that the last remained unconquered); while the two-year-old Ptolemy Philadelphus, dressed in Macedonian garb, received the provinces of Phoenicia, Syria, and Cilicia (southeastern Anatolia). The boys were hailed as “kings of kings,” destined to rule over the entire eastern empire.

  It was a complete pipe dream. By acquiescing in it and siding so publicly with Antony, Cleopatra was risking the wrath of Rome, whose senators and citizens took a particularly dim view of orientalist fantasies.

  THE END OF THE AFFAIR

  A REMARKABLE DOCUMENT ON PAPYRUS SUMS UP EGYPT’S RAPID DECLINE in the last, tragic years of Cleopatra’s reign. Dated February 23, 33, it records an Egyptian royal decree granting extraordinary tax privileges to a Roman general. Not just any general, but Antony’s right-hand man, Publius Canidius. Cleopatra’s edict gave him permission to export ten thousand sacks of wheat from Egypt—not for nothing was the country called the breadbasket of the Roman Empire—and import five thousand amphorae of wine each year, duty free. If that were not enough, Canidius was also exempt from all tax on his Egyptian landholdings, as were his tenants. In effect, he was declared to be outside the normal tax system. As a political bribe, it must rank as one of the biggest and boldest in history. The decree was addressed to a high-ranking government official in Alexandria, whose job it was to notify other bureaucrats in the administration. To give the measures effect, the Greek word “ginesthoi,” “make it happen,” was added at the bottom of the papyrus. It may just be in Cleopatra’s hand. If so, she was not so much passing a tax measure as signing her own death warrant.

  During the course of 33, it had become obvious for a second time that the Roman realm was not big enough for two leaders. Antony, with the eastern provinces at his disposal and friends in the Senate, looked the better bet. But Octavian, Julius Caesar’s great-nephew and legal heir, was equally determined. As with Caesar and Pompey sixteen years earlier, the clash of two mighty egos led all too readily to civil war. Cleopatra’s close identification with Antony made it easy for Octavian to brand her as public enemy number one, using her to create a distinction between himself, the true Roman, and Antony, the dissolute traitor. No matter that Cleopatra’s co-regent (Ptolemy XV Caesarion) was Caesar’s own son. In Octavian’s eyes, she stood conveniently for everything that was alien and detrimental to Rome’s interests. Her fate, and the fate of Egypt, now rested on the outcome of Rome’s internal conflict.

  As the feud between the two Roman factions intensified, Cleopatra and Antony sailed from Alexandria with an armada of two hundred Egyptian ships. After stopping at Ephesus and Samos, they finally reached Athens. There, Antony publicly repudiated Octavia and cut all ties with his rival’s camp. When winter gave way to the milder weather of spring 31, formal hostilities broke out. It soon became apparent that Antony’s delusions of grandeur were not matched by his tactical ability. By the beginning of September, his land forces were pinned down in western Greece and his warships were blockaded in a large bay. A naval breakout under fire seemed the only remaining option. The Battle of Actium, on September 2, 31, was more a flight than a military spectacle. Antony and Cleopatra escaped with their lives and 60 of their 230 ships. He fled to Libya, she to Alexandria.

  History had taught her that defeated leaders usually did not last long, so she took pains to dress her ships as if she had been victorious. When Antony joined her in the royal palace a few days later, the two of them tried hard to create an impression of normality. A huge festival was organized to celebrate Caesarion’s coming of age, royal spectacles always being guaranteed crowd-pleasers and welcome distractions from bad news. On a more mundane level, the wheels of the administration continued to grind, government edicts to be issued, and taxes collected (unless you were Canidius). In the Upper Egyptian town of Gebtu, a guild of linen manufacturers drew up a detailed contract with two local priests to provide for the expenses of the local bull cult. Bureaucracy and animal worship—a quintessentially Egyptian combination. To some, pharaonic civilization must have seemed immortal, impregnable.

  But beneath the public display of business as usual, Cleopatra was making feverish preparations for permanent exile. She had the remains of her naval fleet hauled overland from the Nile to the Red Sea, intending to send Caesarion away to India. But the local Nabataean Arabs literally burned her boats, and she found herself trapped in Alexandria with no escape route. As Octavian closed in from Syria and another of his divisions closed in from Cyrenaica, Cleopatra sent him a desperate embassy, offering to abdicate in favor of her children if he would only spare Egypt. Octavian did not reply.

  On July 29, 30, the high priest of Ptah, Imhotep, died at age sixteen years and three weeks. He was the casualty either of a weak constitution or, more likely, of a foe determined to eradicate all vestiges of Ptolemaic rule. For three centuries his forebears had successfully safeguarded Egypt’s ancient religious traditions, the country’s very soul. No more. Three days later, on August 1, Egypt fell to the might of Rome. As Octavian’s forces bore down on Alexandria by land and sea, Antony led his own army and navy through the city’s gates for one last battle. But, after years of campaigning, he was a spent force. Antony was comprehensively defeated and, as Octavian entered the city, Cleopatra fled to her fortified treasury-cum-mausoleum in the royal quarter of Alexandria. Subsequent events have passed into legend. Misinformed that his lover had already taken her own life, Antony fell on his sword. At Cleopatra’s anguished insistence, his weak and almost lifeless body was hoisted up into her apartment, where he expired at her side. She in turn was tricked into leaving the building and promptly incarcerated in the royal palace.

  Just ten more golden sunsets over Alexandria and, on August 12, the last queen of Egypt followed her Roman paramour to the grave. In her comparatively short but turbulent life, she had seen one of her sisters overthrown and killed, another paraded as a Roman trophy. Suicide must have seemed a better ending than being lynched or than living the rest of her life in captivity. Whether it was an asp hidden in a basket of figs or a poisoned comb, “the truth about the manner of her death no one knows.”6

  Cleopatra died. Her memory lived on. Four centuries later, a worshipper still lovingly tended her cult statue in Rome. Twenty centuries later, re-creations of her life and loves grip the Western world. She is still with us.

  So, too, is her world. In the centuries since her death, the Nile Valley has been fought over by Romans and Arabs, Christians and Muslims. The unrelenting Egyptian sun has bleached the gods’ once gaudy temples into romantic sand-colored tumbledown ruins. Tombs have been stripped of their treasures, pyramids of their shimmering capstones. But the allure of pharaonic civilization, embodied in the Western consciousness by its last queen, has proved altogether more resilient.

  In physical terms, Cleopatra’s enduring monument, her most extravagant architectural legacy, is the temple of Hathor at Iunet. From its porticoed façade, the benign half-human, half-bovine face of the ancient mother goddess still peers down in concerned protection, as it has for two thousand years—as it did over the graven image of Narmer, Egypt’s first king, at the dawn of pharaonic history. The iconography and ideology of divine kingship, arguably the ancient Egyptians’ greatest inventions, were there at the end, just as they were at the very beginning.

  As heir to this extraordinarily ancient tradition, Cleopatra wished, above all, for her dynasty to have a future. On the rear wall of the temple, she was depicted side by side with her son Ptolemy XV Caesarion, making offerings to the gods as her royal forebears had done for three millennia. If she was Isis-Hathor, the divine mother, he would be Horus—the avenging son of a murdered father who would rise in glory and rule Egypt as a great king.

  As with so many of Cleopatra’s hopes, fate had other ideas. Caesarion was eliminated by Octavian within days of Alexandria’s fall. There would be no future for the Ptolemaic Dynasty—for any dynasty of pharaohs.

  Yet alongside the last, bold assertion of
divine kingship, the stones of Cleopatra’s monument proclaim a deeper, more enduring truth. Next to the figure of the very last Ptolemy are carved four simple hieroglyphs: a sandal strap, a snake, a loaf of bread, and a stretch of alluvial land. The quintessence of pharaonic civilization. Together they form an epithet that had been applied to kings since time immemorial: ankh djet—“living forever.”

  It is a fitting epitaph, not just for Cleopatra but for ancient Egypt.

  EPILOGUE

  THE DEATH OF CLEOPATRA DELIVERED EGYPT INTO THE HANDS OF Rome, just as she had feared. With her demise, the proud three-thousand-year-old tradition of pharaonic independence was snuffed out, once and for all, and Egypt became the personal property of a foreign emperor, to be plundered at will. For the next four centuries, Augustus and his successors exploited Egypt’s fabled wealth to serve their own interests. Grain ships from Alexandria fed Rome’s teeming population; gold from the Eastern Desert filled the imperial coffers; vast columns and architraves of stone were hewn from the Red Sea hills to adorn public buildings in the Roman Forum; and the remote quarry of Mons Porphyrites kept the empire’s finest sculptors supplied with the most precious of all materials, the deep purple imperial porphyry.