The Decline and Fall of the Ptolemies by John D Grainger

Author:John D Grainger
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: HISTORY / Ancient / Egypt
Publisher: Pen and Sword
Published: 2024-12-30T00:00:00+00:00

Chapter 9

The Tribulations of Ptolemy XII

The existence of an Egyptian priestly branch of the Ptolemaic royal family was descended from the marriage of Berenike, probably a sister of Ptolemy Apion, and the chief priest of Ptah of Memphis, Pasherenptah II, as noted in the last chapter. This is mirrored by the emergence, a generation or two earlier, of Egyptians in high positions in the administration and the military. The army that Ptolemy X Alexander gathered and posted to Syria and to Pelusion to defend the country against Ptolemy IX’s Cypriot army was composed in part, possibly in large part, of Egyptian troops, as the letters sent home from there to Pathyris show. Add to this the probability that Ptolemy XII’s second wife, the mother of four of his children, including Kleopatra and two sons, was probably Egyptian, maybe from the same priestly family as that into which Berenike had married two generations earlier, and which had formed the dynastic link.

There was thus a visible process of intermarriage at the highest social level between Egyptians and royal Macedonians between the Ptolemaic royal family and the family of the priests of Ptah at Memphis, and there is evidence of the enlistment or conscription of Egyptians into the Ptolemaic army, and the possibility of Egyptians rising to the highest ranks. Also, there were Egyptians who rose through the bureaucratic ranks to the highest levels of the government apparatus, to governor general of the Thebaid, one of the most important posts in the bureaucracy. This was an erratic process, interrupted by the great revolts by Egyptians in the south.1 It is clear therefore that the pressure of integration into one ethnicity was under way, if with difficulty, and at long last. It had, of course, been under way from the beginning of the Macedonian conquest, at the lower levels of the social situation, by the marriage of Greeks with Egyptian women. Of course, the great Egyptian revolts were also an aspect of such integration, in that they were protests at the existence of the general oppression of the native Egyptians. The new aspect of the integration process, at the official level and at the royal, existed mainly between the royal family and the Egyptian priestly class, not at that of the peasantry, for among the latter it had happened already.2

There is no doubt, nevertheless, that the majority of those in high social and administrative positions were still of Greek or other European descent in the first century BC. The royal family was also still essentially Macedonian in origin, and had, by its system of incestuous intermarriages managed to preserve intact its blood heritage as Macedonian for more than two centuries from the first Ptolemy to Ptolemy IX and X. The royal out-marriages that had taken place, however, since the marriage of Kleopatra Thea to Alexander Balas, and then to the Seleukid kings Demetrios II and Antiochos VII, had resulted in two developments: first, the export of Ptolemaic princesses in the next generation (Tryphaina, Kleopatra

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