The Ptolemaic Period: Overview

With a full-time professional army, the Macedonian king Philip extended his control over Thrace and much of Greece. His son Alexander was only 20 years old when Philip was assassinated in 336 bc, and the new king soon faced the revolt of the Greek state of Thebes, which he put down. Subsequently, Alexander was elected ruler of the Greek states, except for Sparta, and took his army into Asia Minor (what is now Turkey), where he fought the Persian army at the Granicus River. Freeing the Greek cities in Asia Minor from Persian rule, Alexander continued eastward. In 333 bc he defeated the Persian army, led by the last Achaemenid king Darius III, at Issus. Alexander refused a treaty with Darius and took his army south along the eastern coast of the Mediterranean. Conquering the Phoenician port cities there, he cut off the Persian fleet from their homeland. Persian control of Egypt ended in 332 bc when Alexander and his army entered the country.

In Egypt Alexander supposedly had himself crowned king in Memphis. He founded the city of Alexandria, and visited Siwa Oasis in the far west, where he was declared the son of Amen/Zeus by its oracle. Alexander left Egypt in 331 bc, continuing his conquests eastward. The Persian army was defeated in northern Mesopotamia and Alexander later destroyed their capital, Persepolis. He took his victorious army as far east as what is now Pakistan. But ill with a fever, he died in Babylon in June 323 bc - only 33 years old.

After Alexander’s death a series of wars broke out between factions: those who wanted to hold the huge empire together and those who sought to carve out territories for themselves, and later between the emerging independent powers. Three great kingdoms eventually formed: Macedon, the Seleucid Empire (in Syria and Mesopotamia), and the Ptolemaic kingdom (in Egypt and Cyrenaica, now northern Libya). These three kingdoms were to be in competition and conflict with each other for well over a century until matters came increasingly to be decided by the Romans.

The Ptolemaic kingdom in Egypt was founded by Alexander’s governor, Ptolemy, son of Lagus, who became King Ptolemy I in 305 bc. Rulers of the Ptolemaic Dynasty were all his descendants who ruled as pharaohs and did not intermarry with Egyptians. The last ruler of this dynasty was Cleopatra VII, who committed suicide in 30 bc, after which Egypt became a province of the Roman Empire.

Initially the Ptolemaic kingdom was the most powerful of the three principal kingdoms of Alexander’s former empire, expanding their control outside of Egypt to include Palestine, Phoenicia, Cyprus, Cyrenaica, and parts of the Aegean and Anatolia. To control the eastern Mediterranean - and the lucrative trade routes there - the Ptolemies needed a large navy, which required access to Lebanese cedars for shipbuilding. This brought the Ptolemies directly in conflict with the Seleucids. After a series of six Syrian wars, the only foreign regions that the Ptolemies controlled were Cyprus and Cyrenaica.

Map 10.1 Greco-Roman Period sites in Egypt, Libya, and the Eastern and Western Deserts

The Ptolemaic army consisted of Macedonians and people of many different Greek areas, and increasing numbers of mercenaries and Egyptians. Alexander had learned from the Indians to fight with elephants, but Indian elephants were not available to the Ptolemies, who sent expeditions to the Horn of Africa for African elephants. Transported to Egypt on ships called “elephantagoi,” the animals were used in assaults more or less like tanks in modern warfare. The cost of continued large-scale Ptolemaic military activity abroad, on both land and sea, was of course enormous.

The development that took place in the Ptolemies’ royal city, Alexandria, was also very costly. In Alexandria the Ptolemies built many conspicuous monuments, including a sumptuous palace complex (the Brucheion). A royal architect planned the city on a grid, 30 stadia long (5 km) and 7-8 stadia wide, on a stretch of land wedged between the Mediterranean on the north and Lake Mareotis on the south. The great lighthouse of Alexandria, possibly as high as 135 meters, was built on the western side of the harbor entrance on Pharos Island, which was connected to the city by a long man-made causeway. A main east-west processional road through the city extended eastward to the city of Canopus. Fresh water was supplied to underground cisterns in Alexandria by a canal from the Canopic branch of the Nile.

Ptolemy I founded the Mouseion, a Greek institution of learning which included the famous library, where Greek works were zealously collected from all over the Greek world. Papyri in Egyptian were also collected and the library eventually contained hundreds of thousands of works. Important works were translated into Greek from Egyptian and other languages, including the Hebrew Old Testament, the Septuagint, so called because 70 scholars were supposed to have each made translations. Under Ptolemaic patronage, scholars made advances in science (physics and astronomy), medicine, geography, mathematics (Euclid’s geometry), and engineering, and Greek philosophy and literature were also studied there.

Although many pharaonic monuments were relocated by the Ptolemies to Alexandria, the dominant culture of the city was Greek. Alexandria was renowned throughout the Hellenistic world for its art and monuments, its centers of learning, and an impressive festival called the “Ptolemaieia,” which aspired to be as important as the Olympic Games. The Ptolemies were buried there along with Alexander the Great, whose body was appropriated by agents of the later Ptolemy I and never reached the intended royal place of burial in Macedon. The location of Alexander’s tomb remains unknown.

The Ptolemaic kings were absolute rulers, legitimized as descended from Zeus through Alexander of Macedon, whose bloodline was manipulated to include Ptolemy I. Queens became important co-rulers in this dynasty, in which full brother-sister royal marriages became a regular practice. A kind of cult of the ruler, mainly of the deceased kings, developed in Alexandria, with significance for the Greek subjects of this dynasty.

The Ptolemies actively supported the cult temples of Egyptian gods. In antiquity gods were local, and in a foreign country immigrants needed to relate to the gods of that country. Thus the adoption of local gods by the Ptolemaic rulers was probably the normal course of events. But assuming the Egyptian role as pharaoh - and its ideology - may also have been a means by which the Ptolemies gained a certain amount of socio-political control over the Egyptian population, and the Egyptian cults legitimized them as pharaoh. Through support of the gods’ temples and their rituals, the Ptolemaic pharaoh could expect the gods’ reciprocity - prosperity and well being for Egypt - as did the Egyptian pharaohs before. But there were also pragmatic reasons for the Ptolemies to support Egyptian cult temples, which were important centers of indigenous support with large-scale economic functions. A large class of priests and temple personnel existed, some of whom had a fair amount of political power, especially the high priests in Memphis.

Notable temples were built and decorated by Ptolemaic kings in formal Egyptian style, with some innovations in details. Some of the best preserved temples in Egypt today, such as Edfu and Dendera, were built in Ptolemaic times, as was much of the complex at Philae, at the First Cataract. This was the cult center of the Egyptian goddess Isis, which gained great prominence during the Ptolemaic Period. The Serapeum in Memphis (see 9.6) became a focus of the important cult of Serapis, in which the Egyptian god Osiris, closely associated with the sacred Apis bull, was anthropomorphized as a bearded Zeus-like figure. A Serapeum was also built in Alexandria, and became an important cult center there. Thus a new triad of deities was invented in what successfully syncretized important Greek and Egyptian deities: Serapis (the supreme god and ruler of the underworld), his wife Isis, and their son Harpocrates (the child Horus), all of whom were associated with healing. The cult of Serapis spread throughout the Mediterranean, as did that of Isis.

Perhaps the most famous ancient Egyptian inscription, the Rosetta Stone, was a decree by priests in Memphis in 196 bc honoring King Ptolemy V upon his coronation. Essentially it was an agreement between the Egyptian priesthood and the king (who was 13 years old then) aimed at ending rebellions in the country. The king gave donations to temples and tax remissions, which the priests reciprocated by pledging to erect statues and stelae honoring the king in Egyptian temples.

For a long time only Greeks held the top government positions in Alexandria and the country was administered through its approximately 40 provinces, which in Greek were called nomes, with Egyptians in the local offices. From its inception Ptolemaic Egypt was a country of two different cultures, Greek in Alexandria and the newly founded cities/towns in the Faiyum region, and Egyptian in the rest of the country. There were also increasing numbers of Jews in Egypt, with a large influx around the mid-2nd century bc. Greek and Egyptian law were practiced in different courts. Decreeing laws, the Ptolemaic king also had judicial authority through the highest judge.

Ptolemaic state bureaucracy was well organized, especially for extracting revenues. The economic base of the state remained cereal agriculture, which was elaborately controlled by the government. Although theoretically the king owned all the land in Egypt, temples were also major land-owners. But there were other types of land holdings, including land allotted to soldiers and government officials in reward for their services.

Introduced into Egypt after Alexander’s conquest, free-threshing wheats began to replace emmer wheat. During Ptolemy Il’s reign large-scale land reclamation was undertaken in the area around the Faiyum lake, and new towns were founded there. The water wheel, which was introduced into Egypt in late Ptolemaic times, made it possible to lift much greater volumes of water to higher elevations than the bucket and lever lift mechanism (shaduf) introduced in the 18th Dynasty. More intensive cultivation and control of yields thus helped to assure substantial royal revenues.

Foreign trade was another important source of revenue for the Ptolemies. The Delta canal of the Persians was restored and Ptolemaic ships sailed to the southern Red Sea region, not only for war elephants, but probably also for the exotic raw materials that pharaonic Egypt had obtained from Punt. Some ships also ventured to regions along the Indian Ocean, and Alexandria became a major consumer as well as a trading center of exotic imported goods.

Ptolemaic crafts were desired throughout the Mediterranean world and beyond. A type of fused glass bead from Ptolemaic Egypt, made with the design of a human face, has been found in burials at Meroe and at Aksum (in northern Ethiopia). Papyrus grew in Egypt and, as earlier, the manufacture of this plant into a writing material was an important industry in Ptolemaic times. With a higher degree of literacy and writing in the Greek world, papyrus was the most desirable writing material. The English word “paper” is derived from the Greek “papyrus,” which is possibly derived from an Egyptian term for this material.

As in pharaonic times, mining and quarrying in the desert regions were controlled by the state. Although historical sources report that the gold mines in the Wadi Allaqi (to the east of Lower Nubia) were reopened in Ptolemaic times, investigations of these sites have demonstrated that Ptolemaic gold mining was confined to the central Eastern Desert of Egypt, at sites mined in the New Kingdom. Two Ptolemaic coins have been found at the site of Deraheib in the eastern Wadi Allaqi (in the Eastern Desert to the east of Lower Nubia and only 75 km from the Red Sea). There is much evidence of gold mining in this region, but pottery at the site suggests that it was occupied later, mainly in Byzantine times (post-3rd century ad). Remains include a planned settlement and two fortresses.

The decline of Ptolemaic rule in Egypt occurred gradually. Power conflicts between Ptolemaic siblings sometimes led to murder, and the mob in Alexandria played a role in this. Increasingly, Rome intervened in the Ptolemies’ conflicts. Civil unrest, civil war, economic breakdown, corruption - all occurred during the reigns of the later Ptolemies. Nonetheless, temple building and decoration continued in Egypt on a large scale.

Rome gained control of Cyrenaica in 96 bc, and of Cyprus in 58 bc, although these countries briefly reverted back to Egyptian control during what was supposed to be the co-regency of Cleopatra VII and her brother Ptolemy XIII. But Ptolemy XIII died in battle against Julius Caesar, who had a relationship with Cleopatra. Ptolemy XIV was made co-ruler with his sister Cleopatra, but after Caesar’s assassination in Rome, she had this brother murdered. With the defeat of Cleopatra’s lover and political ally Marc Antony at Actium in 31 bc, this female ruler and her son by Caesar, Ptolemy XV Caesarion, both perished. They were the last Ptolemaic rulers of Egypt.