The Rise and Fall of Alexandria (14 page)

The driving force behind this economy was, of course, the immense quantity of grain produced in the Nile Valley. The annual flooding of the Nile, which ran through an almost rainless desert, made this the most productive agricultural land in the known world, where the sun always shone on the crops, but never dried their roots. Such valuable land was largely owned by the crown or the temples and leased to farmers, who were free men and women who often used slave labor to maintain their estates. Such estates produced a vast surplus, much of which the state took. Yet Ptolemy’s system also allowed for a degree of individual enterprise, as banks could handle private financial transactions, provide loans, and broker deals.

Whatever capital was left could be spent in the thriving open markets. Traditionally Egyptians had acquired the necessities of life they couldn’t produce for themselves by direct barter—effectively swapping a loaf for a pint of milk. The Greek immigrants, however, greatly encouraged the development of markets throughout the whole country. These were often held in the precincts of temples, and records exist of the temple taxes levied on the traders. In the town of Oxyrhynchus, for example, had you taken a stroll into the courtyard of the temple of Serapis on market day, a chaotic vista would have opened up as you passed through the first pylon. That day the peace of the temple would have been shattered by the cries of stallholders, all hoping to relieve you of some of the coins in your pocket. Here the local farmers and traders sold local vegetables, wood, olives, rushes, bread, fruit, wool yarn, and plaited garlands from wooden stands, each of which had been licensed (for a fee) by the temple. Among the crowd you might pick out the priests of Serapis, moving between the stalls, checking their goods and imposing the appropriate import duty on everything from olives, dates, cucumbers, squashes, beans, spices, and rock salt to pottery, green fodder, wood, and dung. The throng would also have attracted other traders offering more sophisticated wares, from the bulk grain dealers looking to turn a profit back in Alexandria, to the tailors, leather embroiderers, tinsmiths, butchers, and brothel keepers who always gravitated toward a crowd.

Even in this controlled economy there would be signs of real wealth. Though all land was nominally owned by either the state or the temples, Ptolemy reserved the right to present land to individuals, from which they could collect substantial revenues. These favors were usually accorded to courtiers like Apollonius, Ptolemy II’s finance minister, who was granted 10,000
arourae
(about 6,800 acres) of highly productive land in the Fayyum, giving him a huge income. Here then, dressed in his finery, was a man who could never walk through a market without attracting the attentions of merchants offering the finer things in life, from perfumes to precious stones.

Egypt’s agricultural surpluses were the driving force behind her international trade, whose volume rose enormously under Ptolemy II. But the state also maintained tight control of all of Egypt’s manufacturing industries, either through direct ownership or through highly regulated private enterprise—the nation had a world monopoly on the manufacture of papyrus paper, for example, and was not above manipulating the market. When rivalry between the great libraries in Alexandria and Pergamum reached a peak, Ptolemy II reportedly stopped the export of Egyptian paper in an attempt to stifle the academic work at Pergamum and attract its best scholars to Egypt. Legend has it that the scheme failed, as the ever resourceful scholars of Pergamum began experimenting with writing on fine animal skins, and in the process invented something even better than papyrus—parchment, which gets its name from the Latin word for the city, Pergaminus. It is a fitting though probably apocryphal story, as parchment scrolls from elsewhere are known to have existed before this time.

The center for this thriving economy was Alexandria, where all the grain surpluses and all the money from all the markets across Egypt eventually returned. The city was becoming famous as a home for far more than the necessities of life. Besides papyrus, oil, and linen production, Alexandria itself was becoming renowned for the production of books for export and for works of art. Her glassware, perfumes, and jewelry were especially sought after, as were her superb (Hellenistic) sculptures and mosaics. Even beyond the Necropic Gate in the City of the Dead, art was flourishing in a unique fusion of Greek and Egyptian traditions. Here the wealthy were choosing to be buried in that most Egyptian of ways, mummified, wrapped in elaborate bandages, and placed in a series of brilliantly painted sarcophagi. But there was a difference. Not for these Greco-Egyptian merchants the old formal mummy masks with their stiff features. These are faces full of life and character, individuals who wanted to be remembered as themselves and who now, over two millennia later, still smile out at us with wry amusement from the museum cases that have become their homes.

Nor did Ptolemy II have to depend solely on locally produced materials to fuel his economy. Alexandria was already a major shipbuilding center, and the pharaoh maintained fleets for commerce as well as defense in both the Mediterranean and the Red Sea, linking the two with a canal that ran via the Nile to Alexandria itself. Down that canal came exotic perfumes from Arabia and spices from India. Across the Mediterranean came timber, olive oil, and wine. From the upper Nile came gold, ivory, slaves, ebony, and a steady flow of exotic wildlife from the African interior. From caravan routes that stretched across the Western Desert came Saharan commodities, including valuable salt from the legendary mines of Mali. In Alexandria all these goods could be bought and sold. It was the entrepôt of the world, where leopard skins and the perfumes of Punt could be exchanged for Afghan lapis lazuli and Indian cinnamon, and where warehouses stood piled to their roofs with the fragrant cedarwood of Lebanon, and locked ebony boxes held fortunes in frankincense and myrrh.

 
 
Many of these riches were reserved exclusively for royal use. What then did Ptolemy II spend his massive wealth on? Naturally the humdrum expenses of the court, the museum and its state-sponsored scholars, the books and the ever-growing library, all ate into the royal purse. The maintenance of an enormous civil service was essential to administer and regulate the planned economy, but this still left the pharaoh with substantial surpluses, and these he spent on incredibly ostentatious displays and festivals.

For Ptolemy such festivals were more than simply an opportunity to spend money, however. Although he was an Egyptian ruler—a pharaoh—he was also a Greek king—a basileus—and from a Greek perspective a basileus must demonstrate his power and success through lavish displays which often bordered on megalomania. And in Egypt there were the appetite and the money to take this to new extremes.

When Ptolemy II became king he celebrated his accession with an enormous festival in Alexandria. In instituting the “Ptolemaieia,” in honor of his family and in particular his father, Ptolemy II devised an enormously elaborate pageant, deliberately designed to rival the other great four-yearly event in the Mediterranean world, the Olympic Games. An observer named Callixeinus of Rhodes made a detailed account of the procession.

Some 485 years later, the writer Athenaeus of Naucratis produced a book called
The Learned Banquet,
probably for his patron, a Roman called Larensis. The book describes a party lasting several days, during which the guests discussed law, medicine, literature, and philosophy with Larensis. During this time the guests remembered other famous celebrations from the past, quoting from some 1,250 authors. This is the real value of the work, a gold mine of quotations from plays and books most of which are now lost, and among them is the description of Ptolemy’s procession.

The parade was a celebration of the Greek god Dionysus, whom the Ptolemies had elegantly associated with their new Egyptian deity, Serapis. At its center came “a four-wheeled wagon fourteen cubits [twenty-one feet] high and eight cubits [twelve feet] wide[;] it was drawn by one hundred and eighty men. On it was the image of Dionysus—ten cubits [fifteen feet] high” (Athenaeus of Naucratis,
Deipnosophists, or The Learned Banquet,
book 5).

If the sheer scale of this statue were not impressive enough, it also appeared to the crowd to be magical, moving of its own accord:

 
More wagons laden with gilded bowls and tripods followed, along with a display from the royal menagerie consisting of twenty-four chariots drawn by four elephants each, twelve chariots drawn by antelopes, fifteen by buffaloes, eight by pairs of ostriches, eight by zebras, and twenty-four by lions. There was also one final scene of conspicuous consumption. A wagon forty feet long and fifteen feet wide trundled down the granite road drawn by six hundred men:

 
At the time of the above translation in 1998 that quantity of gold would have cost the modern equivalent of roughly $35 million—a sizable amount to spend on a single parade.

These parades also carried political messages—in this case Ptolemaic solidarity with the Grecian city-states of the Corinthian League—and were deliberately designed to impress the local diplomatic corps as well as visiting delegations with the raw wealth and power of the new rulers of Egypt. In all this they were highly successful, and Ptolemy II, with his immaculately harnessed economic machine, could well afford them. He seems not to have recognized, however, that such ostentatious displays have a certain addictive quality—once you’ve done a few, everybody expects the delightful new tradition to continue indefinitely, with disastrous consequences for later, less financially adroit Ptolemies and their decadent, pleasure-addicted courts.

A further pull on the royal purse strings came from the priests and temples of the Egyptian state religion. The Egyptians in Ptolemy’s kingdom did not require him simply to put on impressive shows, however much they may have enjoyed them. For them their ruler had a far more spiritual role, mediating between the gods and men. A pharaoh had to perform the vital religious rituals which ensured that maat—harmony or stability—remained in Egypt, so one of his greatest financial obligations was toward the temples.

But maintaining buildings was never enough for true Egyptian pharaohs. Egypt was a country defined by its monumental buildings, where kings had turned whole cliff faces into statues, where the Great Pyramid still remained far and away the largest and to many the most mysterious structure on earth. If the Ptolemies wanted to rule this country in a way that inspired Egyptians and overawed Greeks, they would have to build temples.

Building temples was also about building bridges. The introduction of the Serapis cult had ushered in a small reformation in Egyptian religion, which must have left many temple priests on edge. The government’s shift from Memphis to Alexandria must also have rankled. But like Alexander before them, both Ptolemy I and his son knew that their positions ultimately depended on retaining harmonious relations with the Egyptian priesthood, as the priests influenced the will of the people. Temple building eased this pressure by investing state funds in the priestly caste and by reminding the guardians of Egyptian religion that their new Greek masters respected and needed them.

Little wonder then that all the Ptolemies were powerful supporters of religious institutions, right through to the great Cleopatra VII, whose image, along with that of her son by Julius Caesar, appears carved in bas-relief on one of the pylons of the temple of Hathor at Dendera. In fact, their programs of temple building and restoration were so extensive throughout Egypt that most of the buildings which tourists visit today and assume to be of “ancient” Egypt were either built or restored under the Ptolemies. When walking through the almost perfectly preserved first pylon of the temple of Horus at Edfu, we are not walking into the world of Rameses and Tutankhamen, but into a creation of Ptolemy II’s son. The temple of Isis at Philae, so spectacularly saved by UNESCO from the rising waters of Lake Nasser, stands on remains from more ancient times but is itself a work of the later Ptolemies and was decorated in the time of Roman rule. The temples at Esna and Kom Ombo likewise were not even thought of when Ptolemy II paraded through the streets of Alexandria. Although these buildings have become our image of ancient Egypt, they are themselves just a dream—imaginings by Greek rulers of what were already the long-lost days of the pyramid builders.

But if the new temples springing up across Egypt in Ptolemy II’s reign were simply harking back to older times, they were certainly not without value to their native audience. In preserving and developing their religious patronage, these places also kept indigenous art traditions and scholarship alive. All over Egypt today you can see pharaohs and their queens, carved in traditional stances, wearing traditional Egyptian clothing and jewelry, brandishing traditional weapons and adornments and “smiting the enemy” in entirely traditional manners. They might in fact be images of Greek-speaking Macedonians, but to the ultraconservative Egyptians they were good enough, reminding them of their illustrious past and offering the tantalizing possibility that those days had now returned.