Cleopatra the Great Read Free Page B

down through Syria and Palestine and eventually reaching Egypt. Dubbed ‘Peoples of the Sea’ by the Egyptians, their reports of Greek ‘Ekwesh’ Achaeans, ‘Denyen’ Danaans and piratical ‘Lukka’ of Lycia reveal they joined forces with the Libyans to invade Egypt on several fronts.
    Although repelled by the last great warrior pharaoh, Ramses III, many of the invaders settled in Egypt’s Delta region and were redeployed as mercenaries by an increasingly ineffectual monarchy. When Egypt finally split in two in 1069 BC , the pharaohs relocated north to the Delta city of Dja’net (better known in its Greek form, Tanis), opting for burial within the precincts of the city’s main temple where their gold-filled tombs remained intact. Yet their predecessors’ sepulchres in the Valley of the Kings far to the south in Thebes were plundered apparently with the collusion of the local priests of Amun, who now controlled the south as self-styled priest-kings. Reburying the royals in more secure parts of the Valley, they used the opportunity to enhance their own status, holding some mummies back for burial alongside themselves while settling old scores on others, damaging the bodies of those monarchs who had in life undermined their priestly authority.
    When the northern pharaohs came to a power-sharing arrangement with their southern counterparts, their former Libyan adversaries who had settled in the Delta eventually took the throne for themselves. Their northern location gave them direct access to the Mediterranean, a region so dominated by Greek trading colonies the Egyptians called it ‘the Sea of the Greeks’. Egypt began to appear in Greek literature, and the eighth-century BC epic poems the Iliad and the Odyssey claimed that ‘hundred-gated Thebes’ was the place ‘where the houses are furnished in the most sumptuous fashion.’
    Greeks routinely travelled over to Egypt to see its splendours for themselves, but the two cultures were also drawn together in mutual defence against the Assyrian empire as it expanded west from the region of modern Iran. Having invaded Egypt in 671 BC , the Assyrians returned two years later to execute all local rulers except Necho I of Sais, retaining him as a client king to rule Egypt on Assyria’s behalf. His son Psamtek I, better known by his Greek name Psammetichus, built up his power with thirty thousand Greek mercenaries permanently stationed along Egypt’s eastern frontier, forming a vital defence against foreign invasion and repelling one launched by the Babylonian king Nebuchadnezzar II in 601 BC .
    Psammetichus’ son Necho II (610-595 BC ) created Egypt’s first navy with Greek triremes, the most up-to-date warships of their time, and forced Egypt’s inward-looking culture to face out across the Mediterranean. Supporting Greek trading colonies in the Delta, this Saite monarch transformed Egypt’s stagnant economy with a great canal linking the Nile to the Red Sea, and is even said to have sent an expedition to circumnavigate Africa. His successor despatched an expedition of Greek, Egyptian and Jewish troops to the far south of Egypt in 592 BC , and after founding a temple to Isis on the island of Philae travelled on to the ancient rock-cut temple at Abu Simbel where his soldiers’ graffiti is the oldest Greek inscription in Egypt.
    Their visit to a monument already over six hundred years old underlines the Saite practice of revisiting a time when Egypt had been a world power second to none, and, in obvious reaction to the succession of foreign invasions which had destroyed much of Egypt’s heritage and pride, the Saites did all they could to restore its former glories. They revived ancient titles and rituals, created exact replicas of ancient tomb scenes and restored ancient monuments, even the pyramids and the fabled monarchs buried within. Mummified remains found inside Sakkara’s Step