Cleopatra: Last Queen of Egypt (12 page)

And it seemed to him that the site was the very best in which to found a city, and that the city would prosper. A longing for the task seized him, and he personally established the main points of the city – where the agora should be constructed, and how many temples there should be, and of which gods, those of the Greek gods and of Egyptian Isis …
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The Alexander Romance
, a legendary account of Alexander’s life collated 500 years after his death, adds further details: the architect of the new city is Deinocrates of Rhodes and he is assisted by the financier Cleomenes of Naukratis.
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Having founded his city, Alexander left Egypt in 331, intending to return. But on the evening of 10 June 323 he died of a fever in Nebuchadnezzar’s palace in Babylon. The ancient doctors were baffled: modern historians have suggested that Alexander may have contracted malaria or typhus, that he drank himself to death or that he was poisoned. As his generals started to wrangle over the succession a magnificent funerary chariot was commissioned and Egyptian embalmers, the best in the world, were summoned to prepare the dead god for his last journey. Alexander was to lie in a golden coffin, possibly an Egyptian-style anthropoid coffin, filled with aromatic spices. His shield and armour were to be displayed on a richly embroidered purple sheet draped over the coffin lid. The chariot, effectively a mobile temple, was to have a high canopy supported by columns, and was to be decorated with a painted frieze depicting scenes from Alexander’s life. A golden olive wreath was to hang above the coffin. The chariot would be pulled by sixty-four mules, each, like the dead Alexander, wearing a golden crown.

Two years after his death, the slow cortège left Babylon for the royal Macedonian burial ground of Aegae (modern Vergina). It drew vast crowds wherever it passed. But it had travelled no further than Damascus when it was diverted. Ptolemy, son of Lagos, Egypt’s new
and highly ambitious governor, had recognised the high propaganda value of heroic mortal remains and had decided that his ‘brother’ Alexander should enjoy permanent rest in Egypt. Officially it was announced that Ptolemy was merely fulfilling Alexander’s own deathbed wishes: a whispered desire (heard by Ptolemy alone) to be buried at the temple of Jupiter-Ammon in the Siwa Oasis. But Siwa was too remote for Ptolemy’s purpose. Alexander’s body was first interred in Memphis, then, probably during the reign of Ptolemy II, transferred to Alexandria. An alabaster chamber within a tumulus – today an open alabaster box half-hidden in the Catholic cemetery of Terra Santa – may have served as the antechamber to Alexander’s first Alexandrian tomb. Later, probably during the reign of Ptolemy IV, he was reinterred in a magnificent mausoleum in the Soma, the Ptolemaic royal cemetery. Here, in a testament to the skill of the Egyptian embalmers, Alexander’s body was housed for 300 years, first in the original gold coffin and then, after the poverty-stricken Ptolemy X had scandalously seized the gold to pay his rebellious troops, in a translucent alabaster replacement.

Alexander’s tomb, the centre of the cult of the deified Alexander, naturally became a place of pilgrimage. Julius Caesar visited his hero while trapped in Alexandria in 47. Octavian visited in 30, soon after Cleopatra’s suicide. Suetonius records his encounter with the god:

… he had the sarcophagus containing Alexander the Great’s mummy removed from its shrine and, after a long look at its features, showed his veneration by crowning the head with a golden diadem and strewing flowers on the trunk. When asked, ‘would you now like to visit the mausoleum of the Ptolemies? He relied: I came to see a king, not a row of corpses.
’
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An element of humour creeps into Dio’s account of the same visit as he
describes how Octavian, over-eager to touch the god, accidentally snapped off a piece of his mummified nose.
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The Roman emperor Caracalla visited Alexander in 215, then we hear no more. The Soma, Alexander’s tomb and Alexander’s body were lost during the late third or early fourth centuries
AD
, at a time when Alexandria, now a Christian city, was suffering civil unrest and rioting. But archaeologists, scholars and Alexander enthusiasts have not given up hope. Today the search for the lost tomb of Alexander has become a mission with more than a passing similarity – abundant theories, counter-theories and intricate conspiracy theories – to the quest for the Holy Grail.
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In 304 General Ptolemy, son of Lagos, officially assumed the throne of Egypt, vacant since the murder of the young Alexander IV, posthumous son of Alexander the Great. He became King Ptolemy I Soter (the Saviour), and Alexandria became Egypt’s capital city. It was, at first sight, a curious choice. Lying on the very edge of the western Delta, Alexandria was far from
the Nile Valley and far from the Sinai land bridge that formed Egypt’s busy north-eastern border. But Alexandria’s ports allowed her ships to participate in the valuable Mediterranean trade routes, while the city itself had the distinct advantage of being young and unsullied, with a new population and no lingering loyalties to earlier regimes or gods. Alexandria attracted residents from many parts of the world. From the earliest times there were three main cultural groups: the Egyptians, the Greeks and the Jews. Although historians have tended to regard Alexandria as the supreme ‘melting pot’, a city where all races and creeds mingled happily together, there is growing evidence to suggest that, as happened outside the city, these three main factions tended to keep themselves to themselves.

Silver tetradrachm of Ptolemy I.

The majority of the original Egyptian Alexandrians arrived under duress. Faced with the problem of populating an empty city, the astute Cleomenes simply gathered a ready-made workforce from neighbouring towns and villages, and relocated it in the old Rhakotis district. Those unwilling to move to Alexandria had to pay a large bribe to gain exemption.

Educated Greeks were tempted to Alexandria with offers of a new and prosperous life; a sensible policy of recruiting throughout Greece and Macedon ensured that Alexandria was not tied to the traditions of one mother city. The Greeks were the only Alexandrians allowed to become full citizens and it seems likely that (in theory at least) Greeks and Egyptians were forbidden to intermarry.

Egypt had a significant Jewish population long before the arrival of the Ptolemies. Late Period papyri written in Aramaic and recovered from the island of Elephantine (by modern Aswan) confirm the existence of a well-established Jewish colony at Egypt’s southern border. The Jews of Elephantine retained their traditional names, laws and religious beliefs while, occasionally, marrying into the native Egyptian community. In 410 their temple was destroyed by Egyptians loyal to the local cult of the ram-headed creator god Khnum: the Egyptians
had been angered by the Jews’ friendly attitude towards the Persians and, perhaps, by what may have been interpreted as their anti-Egyptian celebration of the Passover, a festival which included the sacrifice of the Paschal Lamb. The Elephantine temple was eventually rebuilt, but the community had already started to disintegrate. Now, under the Ptolemies, Jews were being encouraged to settle in Egypt. Two major phases of Jewish immigration can be distinguished, one during the empire-expanding reign of Ptolemy I, when prisoners captured at Jerusalem were relocated in Egypt, and one during the reign of Ptolemy IV, when Egypt received a wave of political refugees following the revolt of Judas Maccabaeus against the Seleucid empire. Eventually Ptolemy VI would celebrate decades of peaceful coexistence by allowing the construction of a magnificent Jewish temple in the Delta town of Leontopolis (modern Tell el Yahudeyeh), and by granting the Alexandrian Jews a form of demi-citizenship. In return, Jewish support would help keep first his widow, Cleopatra II, and then his daughter, Cleopatra III, on their thrones. This did not please everyone, and Josephus tells a chilling tale of Ptolemy VIII rounding up the Alexandrian Jews, stripping them naked and chaining them up to be trampled by drunken elephants. Happily, a miracle occurred, and the elephants turned instead on Ptolemy’s soldiers. Ptolemy VIII was well aware that the people of Alexandria could make or break a king, and was prone to take drastic action against anyone perceived as supporting his estranged sister-wife Cleopatra II. In one notorious incident he even sent his troops to a busy gymnasium with orders to kill anyone inside. Nevertheless, the story of the murderous elephants is highly unlikely to be true.
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Ptolemy I, his son and grandson ploughed money into developing Alexandria, which quickly became the largest city in the Mediterranean world, with an estimated population of between a quarter and half a million inhabitants by 200. But, despite its dazzling facilities, the links to Lake Moeris and the Nile beyond, and the constant influx
of traders, Alexandria ad Aegyptum or Alexandria-next-to-Egypt was always seen as a city somehow apart from Egypt proper. The old pharaohs, recognising the dangers of isolation, had spent many months travelling up and down their long, thin land, visiting temples, administering justice and generally reminding their people of their presence. The Ptolemies, seemingly content to live apart from the majority of their people, did not. In consequence, while the people of the Nile Valley gradually lost any sense of personal connection with their monarchs, the people of Alexandria developed an abnormally close relationship with their kings, and a fine disregard for anyone who lived outside their city. Initially this was a blessing: the Alexandrians of the third century were, broadly speaking, prepared to work with their royal family and to respect their policies. But the Alexandrians of the second and first centuries considered themselves to be kingmakers.
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Volatile and prone to riot, they murdered the supporters of Ptolemy IV, drove out Ptolemies IX and XII, and killed Ptolemy XI. Ultimately, in their determination to reject any form of Roman interference, the Alexandrians drove their kings further into the Roman embrace.

An Egyptian visitor to Alexandria would have felt that he or she had stepped into another world. Egyptian cities invariably lay inland, sandwiched between the Nile and the desert, but long, thin Alexandria had two wide fronts, one opening on to Lake Moeris and one opening on to the Mediterranean Sea. While Thebes and Memphis were hot, dry and dusty, Alexandria had salty sea breezes, a cooler climate and winter rains, and, unlike the rest of Egypt, Alexandria did not flood in the summer. Traditionally the Egyptians built their houses and palaces from mud brick and their temples and tombs from stone. With mud brick plentiful and cheap, towns and cities grew organically, sprawling along rivers and canals without any overall plan. But walled Alexandria was a planned city of straight, wide streets and gleaming white stone buildings (the local limestone plus, perhaps,
some imported marble) decorated with elegant touches of pink and grey granite. As the water in Lake Moeris was not suitable for human consumption, drinking water was supplied by a canal that, stretching from the Canopic branch of the Nile, emptied into over 700 vast underground cisterns connecting directly to the elite houses.

Alexandria’s main thoroughfare, ‘Canopus Street’, was a colonnaded processional way covered with awnings, running west to east from the Necropic Gate to the Canopic Gate. At right angles to Canopus Street ran ‘Soma Street’. The grid system allowed the city to be divided into five districts named after the first five letters of the Greek alphabet (Alpha, Beta, Gamma, Delta, Epsilon); this in turn gave the residents of Alexandria easily comprehensible addresses. The precise boundaries of these districts are now unclear, although Josephus quotes Apion in asserting that the Delta district, the Jewish quarter, lay in the eastern part of the city near the Palaces, and it seems that there were also substantial numbers of Jews living in Beta. The Greeks lived in the city centre, while the Egyptians lived in the western quarter in the area of the old Rhakotis.

Strabo lived intermittently in Alexandria from
c
. 25–20. His
Geography
therefore provides us with a near-eyewitness view of Cleopatra’s city, and is worth quoting at length:

… the city has very fine public sanctuaries and ‘The Palaces’, which form a quarter or even a third of the entire enclosure [the city]. For each of the kings added some adornment to the public dedications [shrines and statues] and also added privately further residential blocks to those already existing, so that now, in the words of the poet, ‘From others grow’; but all are continuous to each other and to the harbour and what lies outside it. Within ‘The Palaces’ lies the Museion, which has a covered walk and an exedra and a block in which are the refectory and mess of the scholars who belong to the Museion … The monument known as the Sema [Soma] is also part of ‘The Palaces’. This was an enclosure containing the tombs of the kings and of Alexander …
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