After Alexander’s untimely death in Babylon in 323 bc his empire was inherited by his mentally deficient half-brother Philip III Arrhidaios and by his posthumous son Alexander IV. These absentee kings were accepted in Egypt as the new rulers and recorded as such in papyri and on temple walls. Real power, however, rested with the military elite, the Diadochs or ‘‘Successors’’ of Alexander, who fought each other in a series of wars (Errington 2008). Three independent powers eventually came into being: Macedonia, the Seleucid kingdom based on Syria and Mesopotamia, and the Ptolemaic empire. When in 306 bc Antigonos Monophthalmos laid claim to Alexander’s empire by assuming the title of king, the other Diadochs soon followed, though becoming kings of their personal territory only. With the defeat of Antigonos at Ipsos in 301 bc the last defender of a unified empire dropped out of the picture, but peace remained utopian.
The Diadoch Ptolemy, son of a Macedonian nobleman Lagos, had been one of Alexander's most trusted generals, the man who captured Bessos, murderer of the Persian king Darius III. In 323 bc he went to Egypt and ruled as satrap (governor) for almost 20 years before he was acclaimed king by his army in 306 bc and crowned on January 12, 304 bc, the anniversary of Alexander’s death according to the Macedonian calendar (Grzybek 1990: 96). A new dynasty was founded, that of the Ptolemies, also called the Lagids after Ptolemy's father.
Figure 9.1 Egypt and the Near East. From Erskine (ed.), A Companion to the Hellenistic World (Blackwell, 2009).
The male representatives of the dynasty all bore the name of Ptolemaios. In antiquity they were distinguished from one another through their cult names created from Ptolemy II onwards. (Ptolemy I became Soter (Savior).) The Roman numerals I-XV attached to the kings are a device of modern scholars. Since the seventh, the boy-king and co-regent Ptolemy, should be eliminated from the list of rulers (Huss 2001; already Bouche-Leclerq 1963; Bevan 1968), the later Ptolemies should be renumbered, but for the sake of clarity most scholars stick to the prevailing numbering, and Ptolemy Euergetes, brother of Ptolemy VI, remains number VIII. The names of the queens are more varied: Arsinoe, Berenike, and Kleopatra, the Kleopatra of Caesar and Antony being the seventh Ptolemaic queen to bear that name. These are typical Macedonian names, taken over in the Graeco-Macedonian elite groups in Ptolemaic Egypt.
World History
