Cleopatra the Great (21 page)

First stop on any itinerary was an astonishing pair of 60-foot-high colossi seated sentinel-like before the ruins of a vast funerary temple of the fourteenth-century
BC
sun king Amenhotep III (‘Amenophis' in Greek). Earthquake damage to the northernmost figure subsequently caused it to emit a musical sound as it warmed up in the morning sun, and the phenomenon clearly struck a chord with the Ptolemies who were familiar with the practice of exposing cult statues to the sunlight to reactivate the spirit within. Although one Greek visitor somewhat shattered the magic by asking if the sound was ‘deliberately made by one of the men standing all around and near the base', or at the very least was enhanced by human effort, Manetho had told the Ptolemies that the sound was a means of communication from Amenhotep III, ‘considered to be Memnon and a talking stone'. The king's throne name was ‘Nebmaatra', pronounced Nimmuria or Mimmuria, and the Greeks had equated him with their own hero Memnon, killed in the Trojan War. The statues' legs had since been transformed into an ancient visitors' book recording appreciative comments including those of subsequent Roman rulers. Cleopatra may well have brought Caesar here to listen to the statue's dawn chorus and explain its links both to her pharaonic predecessors and to Caesar's own family connections with Troy.

Beyond the Memnon Colossi the Ptolemies had clearly been active around the towering cliffs of Deir el-Bahari, where the famous multi-terraced funerary temple of the female pharaoh Hatshepsut was well known for its famous scenes of Amun impregnating Hatshepsut's mother. It had been conserved and expanded by Cleopatra's dynasty: its innermost shrine became a chapel to Imhotep-Asklepios, his daughter Hygeia and the ancient Egyptian sage Amenhotep, son of Hapu. It was also a place where the ailing came to pray and find comfort; a priest would project his voice through a small opening to advise the supplicants beyond. Their grateful graffiti revealed an impressive success rate, from a Macedonian labourer cured on the day of his visit to a dedication by a Greek couple thanking Amenhotep for the birth of their child. The whole area was regarded as holy, and was still used as a burial ground. The nearby funerary temple of Ramses II was similarly described by one of Cleopatra's contemporaries as the ‘tomb of Osymandyas', the Greeks' pronunciation of Ramses' throne name Usermaatre. He was worshipped here after his death, even though the pharaoh himself was actually buried, like virtually every other pharaoh of the New Kingdom era (1550-1080
BC
), in the nearby Valley of the Kings. Even then it was a major tourist destination, described by one Greek visitor as ‘marvelously devised, a spectacle worth seeing', and graffiti left in the tombs agreed that ‘those who have not seen this place have never seen anything: blessed are they who visit this place'. At least six of the royal tombs were easily accessible in Ptolemaic times, although the most popular was the ‘tomb of Memnon' that the Greeks associated with the builder of the great singing colossi but had actually been built by a later pharaoh who, in a confusing act of hero worship, adopted the same throne name, ‘Nebmaatra'.

The valley might have ceased to be a royal burial ground over a thousand years earlier, but it nevertheless remained a most sacred place: the cult statue of Amun of Karnak still made its annual procession across the Nile to visit the tombs and temples of the royal ancestors. It was a place where private individuals had long sought burial in their attempts to capture some of that ancient magic for themselves, and in Cleopatra's time their mummies continued to stack up inside much older tombs. The son of a powerful local official, Menkare, even retrieved the five-hundred-year-old sarcophagus of Psammetichus IFs daughter from her ransacked tomb for his own burial.

Across the river on the east bank, despite the wartime devastation wrought on the city of Thebes many of its sacred shrines remained intact, including Luxor's ‘temple of the divine soul'. With an inner sanctum decorated with scenes of Amun impregnating the mother of yet another mortal king in a story predating the alleged paternity of Alexander by more than a thousand years, the temple's holiest shrine, commissioned by Alexander himself, was covered in his image, making offerings as a traditional pharaoh before his impressively endowed father Min-Amun. Marking the spot where each monarch had come to revitalise his or her spiritual powers through secret congress with his or her spiritual father Amun, the temple muct have held considerable allure for both Cleopatra and Caesar. Their state visit may have continued along the impressive sphinx-lined processional way which connected the temple with the great Karnak complex with its 70-foot-high Ptolemaic gateway — the place where justice was dispensed, executions carried out and offerings made by those unqualified to venture any further into the temple's vast precincts.

Living Isis, however, would almost certainly have been carried through her ancestor's great gateway in her carrying chair, quite possibly towards the subterranean ‘tomb of Osiris' built by Ptolemy IV and decorated by scenes of the same king performing resurrection rites before the Apis bull. This may well have been the southern counterpart of the Soma burial chamber in Alexandria completed by the same king. The nocturnal vigils held in the Karnak chamber hint at attempts to revive Alexander's soul at the cult centre of his divine father Zeus-Amun using the power of Egypt's supreme funerary deity, Osiris. And with Isis taking a starring role in such rites, the Karnak chamber must have been a key place for Cleopatra to visit with Caesar, both of whom were familiar with its counterpart burial chamber in Alexandria.

Despite the damage inflicted on parts of Karnak during the earlier civil war, sufficient had remained of its northerly precinct of Amun-Montu for Cleopatra to have personally installed Montu's sacred Buchis bull there, imbuing the event with her divine presence before rowing him to Hermonthis. Now, with her return visit to Hermonthis' ‘magnificent' temple allowing an inspection of new wall scenes naming her ‘King of Upper and Lower Egypt' and ‘Female Horus', Cleopatra would also have seen the images of herself worshipping Buchis, Montu and Rattawy, whose name was literally ‘Female Sun of the Two Lands'. Reflecting Cleopatra's own title ‘Lady of the Two Lands', Rattawy was a deity she seems to have cultivated, for at Hermonthis she ‘was there because Cleopatra wanted her to be there'.

Clearly an important element in Cleopatra's grand design, a new Mammisi Birth House was commissioned behind the exisiting temple in a layout corresponding exactly with that of the Birth House and temple at Dendera. Certainly Cleopatra's Hermonthis Mammisi was a superb building whose ‘luxuriant decoration represented an excellent example of the baroque style of [Ptolemaic] architecture'. As work began on its three chambers surrounded by a colonnade of slim columns, ‘the play of light and shadows at the capitals, and the effect of the huge, windowlike openings that created beautiful connections between interior and exterior spaces, must have been stunning'. Statues of Montu's sacred bull adorned an interior featuring unprecedented scenes of the actual birthing process. To complete the Mammisi there would be a sacred lake with its own Nilometer for measuring the annual flood levels, a wide stone staircase rising directly from the lake to the Mammisi entrance allowing those who were performing ritual ablutions to rise untainted into the temple to perform their rites in a purified state.

Leaving the sacred lands of the Buchis bull, Caesar and Cleopatra would have reached Tasenet (modern Esna), a site the Greeks called Latopolis or ‘Fish City' after its sacred
Lates niloticus
fish. Yet its main temple, built by the Ptolemies, was dedicated to the ram-headed creator god Khnum, the god long believed to have caused the Nile to flood and to have fashioned humans on his potter's wheel — the very wheel still displayed in its own shrine. Khnum's annual ceremonies were listed on the surrounding temple walls. The ‘Mystery of the Birth' contained the ‘Spell for establishing the Wheel in the bodies of all female beings' which involved placing ‘the egg in the bodies of women, to provide the country with younger generations for the favour of the King of Upper and Lower Egypt, beloved of Khnum'. This was followed by a rite involving a trio of young women representing the various stages of pregnancy.

As the couple sailed south to Nekheb (El-Kab), the birth theme intensified at the great labyrinth-like temple of the vulture goddess Nekhbet, one of the principal assistants at royal births. Embellished by the Ptolemies, who had also added to Nekhbet's shrines in the surrounding hills, this temple was where Cleopatra III had built her own rock-cut shrine to the local lioness goddess Shesmetet. Appearing alone as ‘Female Horus, Lady of Upper and Lower Egypt and Mighty Bull', the sweeping amalgamation of king, queen, god and goddess would not have been lost on her great-granddaughter Cleopatra VII.

If Cleopatra and Caesar did venture as far south as the ancient sources claim, they would certainly have reached Horus' cult centre, Edfu. As a site of incalculable importance for the Ptolemies, Edfu was the preeminent place to celebrate the cult of the royal ancestors in which each dead king was represented by Osiris, and the living pharaoh by Osiris' son Horus. It was founded by the third Ptolemaic couple and inaugurated by the eighth, while Cleopatra's father had also made a very definite mark at the site with his huge front pylon gateway. A maze of internal stairways recalled those of Dendera, while its facade was adorned with massive figures of Auletes smiting the enemies of Egypt alongside two pairs of huge flagpoles of imported Lebanese cedar, which set the pennants of the gods fluttering 130 feet above the ground. Then, at the centre, a pair of 45-foot-high doors of the same timber, covered in highly polished copper, reflected the sunlight and literally dazzled all who approached.

Far more than a colossal gateway, Auletes' pylon and adjoining court beyond had been skilfully designed to exploit the use of light and dark, so that the pylon's shadow at the winter solstice on 21 December covered the courtyard in darkness, while at midsummer on 21 June it cast no shadow and instead acted ‘as a giant sundial'. This subtle exploitation of sunlight was also employed within the temple, and in an ancient form of special effects designed to heighten the atmosphere the light decreased towards the darkness of the innermost santuary, where a monolithic shrine of highly polished syenite dating back to Nectanebo II had been retained as a link with the last native pharaoh. It held within it a smaller gilded shrine whose delicate doors opened to reveal Horus' gold cult statue set with semi-precious stones. A live falcon was housed alongside as the living incarnation of both Horus and the current monarch. Kept well fed with meat provided by the crown, and presumably with its wings well clipped, the sacred falcon was worshipped alongside its sculpted equivalent in daily rites each morning, noon and dusk, and every year both were taken up to the roof to unite with the sun.

Falconry duties aside, Edfu's clergy were also employed in the temple's small perfume laboratory' whose walls were inscribed with the costly materials once housed within, from the frankincense used as the gods' wake-up call in the morning ceremonies, via the sixteen different kinds of myrrh burned at the main midday service, to kapet, the Greek ‘kyphi', a sweet, cinnamon-based incense employed in evening rites. Then there were specific perfumes designed to anoint the gods' statues, from the ‘best quality oil' used to illuminate the face of the sculpted Horus to the traditional ‘sacred oils' which had been in use since the Pyramid Age. By Ptolemaic times there were nine of these, ranging from the frankincense and fir seeds of ‘Festival Scent' to the carob, lotus and white frankincense of ‘Madjet'.

While other side rooms housed sacred vestments and equipment, the temple library held such ancient works as
The Book of Conducting the Cult, The Secret Forms of the God
and
Knowing the Periodic Return of the Stars
, along with scripts for the sacred drama
The Triumph of Horus
in which the god avenges his father Osiris by slaying his murderer Seth. The drama was performed to a musical accompaniment which no doubt appealed to the Ptolemies' love of theatre, and the story was replicated in highly detailed scenes on the temple walls alongside those of Horus' sacred marriage to the goddess Hathor.

For a ceremony known as the ‘Festival of the Beautiful Union', Hathor's golden statue was brought 110 miles south from Dendera to Edfu each year. Surrounded by flowers and doused in her signature ‘tisheps' unguent used exclusively ‘for anointing the Golden Goddess Hathor', she was carried in stately procession towards the darkness of the temple's inner sanctum and joined to Horus in sacred marriage.

It certainly seems possible that the ‘Festival of the Beautiful Union' was repeated for Caesar and Cleopatra, earthly representatives of the divine couple Hathor, the Roman Venus, and Horus ‘the faraway conquering god'. Perhaps they exploited the gods' atypical marital arrangements, in which they retained their independent status and continued to live some distance apart despite their union. The iconography of Hathor also fitted Cleopatra's requirements. In keeping with Egyptian tradition the goddess was both Horus' partner and his mother, to emphasise the endless cycle of regeneration. The name Hathor, ‘Hut-Hor', meaning the ‘house' or ‘womb' of Horus, highlighted Cleopatra's pregnant state, which the Edfu priesthood would have done all they could to safeguard through traditional protection rituals. For, as the temple's god declared, ‘I am Horus whom Isis has brought forth and whose protection was guaranteed in the egg.'

Protection ceremonies formed a key part of most ceremonials, from coronations, jubilees and gods' installations to ensuring safe delivery of the next generation of royals. As described in the temple's
Book of the Magical Protection of the Ruler in the Palace
, a lengthy rite required the monarch to be covered with protective amulets and surrounded by the same kind of seal images of previous rulers found in storage at the site. Then, with the accumulated powers of gods and ancestors forming a kind of divine force field, a live falcon, goose, hawk and vulture were each made to spread their wings around the ruler, who was also anointed with tears extracted from the falcon's eyes — the Eye of Horus was the most potent of the amulets found throughout Egyptian culture. With such spells as the ‘Formula for Repelling the Evil Eye' read out, execration rites were performed to neutralise harmful forces. The ceremony ended with the birds being taken up to the temple roof and released to the four cardinal points to mark the renewal of royal protection.