Free The Rise and Fall of Alexandria by Justin Pollard

like Egyptians.”
     
 
All of this was known to Ptolemy as he prepared the final parts of his plan for a new Egypt. Back in Alexandria, the first phase of Alexander’s—and now Ptolemy’s—dream was nearing completion. In the Brucheum the great wealth of Egypt had been put to good use building palaces suitable for her new ruler. The mud brick of the early buildings had been encased in polished stone and alabaster. The Ptolemaic household was furnished with chairs and beds in the Egyptian style, carved from cedar of Lebanon and inlaid with ivory from equatorial Africa. Outside, royal parks with their marble fountains and shimmering lakes proclaimed the largesse and power of this “pharaoh in all but name.”
    But that was just the problem. Alexander had already been a great king when he appeared in Egypt, and the confirmation from the oracle at Siwa that he was a son of Ammon told the Egyptians everything they needed to know to crown him pharaoh. For Ptolemy it was different. He could declare himself a Greek king—a basileus —indeed, that was an essential part of making his claim to Egypt as one of the successors of Alexander. But that title meant precious little to the Egyptians he intended to rule, and regardless of what esteem he held those native people in, he knew that they drove the economy that would make or break his dream.
    What Ptolemy needed was a means of combining Greek and Egyptian religious traditions in a way that would leave him a king in Greek eyes but a god in Egyptian ones—no mean feat when one considers the trouble Herodotus had coming to terms with the differences between their cultures. But in the Apis bull he saw an opportunity, and he seized it.
    His plan was to create a new cult, one that combined elements of Greek and Egyptian practice and symbolism, that would serve to tie together seamlessly the fates of the Greek rulers and their Egyptian subjects. It would clearly be extremely difficult to impose himself upon ancient native beliefs, and equally the Egyptians were unlikely simply to throw away thousands of years of religion to turn to Greek beliefs. But if he could invent a new religion that combined the two, then he could insert his family into the heart of it, granting them the godlike rights due to the heirs of Alexander and the heirs of the pharaohs.
    To do this Ptolemy needed the help of local Egyptian priests and Greek thinkers, and he was quick to foster connections between the two. He began by encouraging Greeks to write Aegyptica —Egyptian histories which drew on the centuries-old traditions of the priests of Memphis and Thebes. Of course this required the active cooperation of those priests. The historian and Skeptic philosopher Hecataeus of Abdera, who accompanied Ptolemy on a Nile journey as far as Thebes (Diogenes Laertius 9, 6I), was one of the first to take up the challenge, and he tells us that Ptolemy ordered the priests to “provide the facts from their sacred records” (reported in Diodorus Siculus, Library of History, book 1, chapter 46.8). Another papyrus document from around this date (c. 300-298 BC), known as Hibeh Papyrus 27, records in Greek how the writer spent five years as a disciple of a “wise man,” almost certainly an Egyptian astronomer-priest, who taught him how the Egyptians measured time with an instrument called a gnomon—a staff for measuring the length of shadows cast by the sun. Clearly the lesson was well learned, for within a hundred years a Greek scholar at Alexandria would use this simple tool to make a far more spectacular measurement—the circumference of the earth.
    This cultural exchange program between Greek and Egyptian scholars had a number of benefits. Not only did it provide Ptolemy with detailed information about how Egypt was run, but it gave his Greek academics access to the centuries of scientific (particularly astronomical) and religious thinking of the Egyptians. It also encouraged exchange the other way, helping to