Episode 11: Cleopatra, A Beautiful Mind
The Seventh of Her Name
The story of pharaohs and kings and queens of Egypt has fascinated the world since the time of Caesar. Keep in mind when the Romans ruled the world, the pyramids had already been around for more than 2000 years.
With no one to speak ancient languages or decipher cuneiform from thousands of years ago, many of these kings and queens were lost to most of our historical records. It is only now, in the last 100 years, that Egyptology and proper archeology have begun to recognize these antediluvian rulers.
In Cleopatra: Last Queen of Egypt, Joyce Tyldesley writes: In approximately 3100 B.C., the independent city-states of the narrow Nile Valley and the broad Nile Delta united to form one long realm. Lines of heroic, semi-divine kings emerged to rule this new land. Three thousand years of dynastic rule were to see at least 300 kings claiming sovereignty. Those 300 kings were married to several thousand queens, of whom Cleopatra VII was the last.
One group of rulers was, however, never forgotten. The Ptolemies, the last dynasty of independent Egypt, enjoyed three centuries of rule sandwiched between the conquest of Macedonian Alexander the Great and the conquest of the Roman Octavian.
Cleopatra’s story starts with Alexander the Great, who dies in 325 B.C. One of his generals, Ptolemy 1, took over the rule of Egypt from the great city of Alexandria. For the next 275 years, these Greek-speaking rulers would reign as gods among the Egyptian people.
Before we dive into Cleopatra’s remarkable story, we need to highlight a few things about ancient Egypt. First, it was incredibly wealthy, in large part because of its greatest asset, the Nile River.
The ancient Egyptians called it Ar, meaning "black," a reference to the rich, dark sediment that the Nile's waters carried from the Horn of Africa northward and deposited in Egypt as the river flooded its banks each year in late summer. That surge of water and nutrients turned the Nile Valley into productive farmland and made it possible for Egyptian civilization to develop in the midst of a desert.
Tyldesley writes: Egypt’s phenomenal wealth derived from her abundant natural resources: the gold in the deserts, the papyrus in the marshes, and, above all, the rich agricultural land. The Ptolemies made some improvements, including new iron tools, new crops, new harvesting policies, new methods of irrigation, and vast tracts of newly reclaimed land.
The other thing to know about the Ptolemy dynasty is that they were big believers in incest marriage, which was not taboo for the time.
In Cleopatra: Last Queen of Egypt, Joyce Tyldesley writes: the Kings and Queens of Egypt allied themselves with the gods, who at the very beginning of time, had been more than happy to marry their sisters. This kept non-royals at arm’s length, restricted the number of potential claimants to the throne, and ensured the future queen could be trained from birth to understand her demanding role.
More than a dozen of Cleopatra’s ancestors tied the knot with cousins or siblings, and it’s likely that her own parents were brother and sister. In keeping with this custom, Cleopatra eventually married both of her adolescent brothers, each of whom served as her ceremonial spouse and co-regent at different times during her reign.
Incest may not be a surprise, but the Ptolemies also really liked killing each other to take the throne. Their 300-year history is filled with double-crosses and regicide by sons over fathers, sisters over brothers, even mothers over children.
Against this backdrop of wealth, murder, international intrigue, and deification, Cleopatra is born in early 69 B.C. She was the seventh Cleopatra, whose name meant literally “Renowned in Her Ancestry”.
But despite the nomenclature, history has lost the other Cleopatra’s and only this one remains in its importance. Because during her brief life, she will bring the world to her orbit, not just with her beauty, but with her guile, international machinations, and most of all, her intelligence.
