Cleopatra: Last Queen of Egypt Read Free Page A

Cleopatra’s presence, either in body or in spirit, at the installation of the Buchis bull of Armant. Nowwe find her building a birth house ( mammisi ) within the precincts of the Armant Montu temple. Cleopatra’s birth house was a temple dedicated to the celebration of Harpre’s nativity, a birth which native theology linked both to the daily rebirth of the sun and to the cyclical renewal of kingship. During Ptolemaic times birth houses took the form of a small chapel with an antechamber and a flat roof that could be used for ritual purposes, surrounded by a columned walkway. At Armant the central chapel included an outer hall, an inner hall and a birth room.
    An inscription on the Armant birth-house wall provided Cleopatra with an Egyptian-style titulary, including a cartouche (the oval loop enclosing royal names) and a female Horus name (the first part of the traditional king’s titulary) which classifies her as a female king: ‘the female Horus, the great one, mistress of perfection, brilliant in counsel, Mistress of the Two Lands, Cleopatra Philopator’. Ptolemaic kings bore five formal names or titularies, based on the traditional New Kingdom model (Horus name; Two Ladies name; Golden Horus name; prenomen; nomen) plus a sixth name, a translation of the king’s Greek epithet. The last traditional name, the nomen, was the king’s personal name, introduced by the phrase ‘Son of Re’. The penultimate name, the prenomen, was the name by which his subjects knew him. Both the nomen and the prenomen were written within a cartouche. All five names were used on formal occasions, but when a shorter name was required it was acceptable to use just the nomen and prenomen. By the Ptolemaic period this custom had undergone a slight change and the nomen alone sufficed. This was preceded, not by ‘Son of Re’ but by ‘pharaoh’, literally ‘Great House’. 8
    A cartoon-like series of drawings decorating the inner walls of the Armant birth house showed the birth of Harpre in the presence of divine midwives, the goddess Nekhbet, the god Amen-Re and Cleopatra. The mother of the child is clearly identified as Rat-tawi, but his father is not obvious. Given the situation of the birth house, he should be Montu, but the preserved hieroglyph appears to be that of Amen (divine father of, among others, the earthly kings Hatshepsut, Amenhotep III, Ramesses II the Great and Alexander the Great). Nearby, seated on a couch, two identical cow-headed goddesses each suckle a baby. These identical infants have been identified as Harpre and Caesarion, whose cartouche appears throughout the birth house. In an age eagerly anticipating the arrival of a saviour on earth, Caesarion has clearly been born a god. An educated Egyptian ‘reading’ the scene might also understand that Caesarion, like Horus before him, is a god destined to avenge his assassinated father. Unfortunately the Armant temple was substantially dismantled during the reign of the emperor Antoninus Pius, when its stone was reused in a monumental arch. Later, blocks from the temple would be incorporated into a church and a sugar-cane factory. Cleopatra’s images are fortunately preserved in the form of line drawings made by Napoleon’s scholars following his invasion of Egypt, and by the pioneering nineteenth-century Egyptologist Karl Richard Lepsius.

    Scenes from the sanctuary of the now-demolished Armant temple, recorded by Lepsius (Denkmäler IV, 60a and 59b). Above: the divine mother gives birth to ‘Horus the sun, the child’ in the presence of Amen-Re, Nekhbet and Cleopatra VII. Below: multiple versions of the goddess Hathor suckle a newborn king: the young god of the temple, or the infant Caesarion? The confusion is deliberate.

    The 30th Dynasty temple of Hathor at Dendera had been substantially redesigned by Auletes, who started building works on 16 July 54 and died just four years into the programme. Work at the temple continued throughout Cleopatra’s reign and