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By Root 633 0

transitory reflection of greatness which appeared during the Twenty-sixth Dynasty, the aging giant on the Nile stumbled ever faster down the ignominious path to annihilation. It is a depressing subject for Egyptophiles, and very confusing; for those reasons, most general works, including this one, tend to pass rapidly over the details. Assyria fell, but Babylon took its place as a conquering power; the last pharaohs of Egypt fought their hopeless battles with the aid of mercenaries, Greeks who had settled in large numbers in the Delta. Toward the end of the dynasty the decline of Babylon left Egypt temporarily at peace, but Babylon had fallen to the conqueror Cyrus, the Achaemenid. Cyrus left a far-flung empire to his son Cambyses; it included most of the known world—except Egypt. Cambyses remedied this lack. In 525 B.C., at the Battle of Pelusium, he broke the back of Egyptian independence. The country became a province of the vast Persian empire, and Manetho’s Twenty-seventh Dynasty consists of Persian kings. The Twenty-eighth through Thirtieth Dynasties were “native” again, feeble princes who took advantage of Persia’s preoccupation with other areas to attain an illusory independence. In 343 B.C., the Persians found time to remember Egypt. As a result we have a Thirty-first Dynasty, another Persian one, which was later combined with Manetho’s Thirtieth—to make them symmetrical, I suppose. The last king of pharaonic Egypt was Nectanebo, and that is probably all you need to know about him.

Meanwhile, in the barbaric backwaters of Macedonia, a new Great Man was coming of age. Alexander is one of those overpowering personalities who leave a mark not only on history but on the imagination. He added Egypt to his growing empire in 332 B.C. There’s a legend that he took the long desert road west to Siwa Oasis, to consult the oracle of Amon located there—and that Amon, predictably, named him son and pharaoh. After Alexander’s premature death in 323 B.C., his empire, the greatest known until then, was eventually divided. Egypt fell to Ptolemy, one of his generals, whose descendants held sway for over two centuries. Being polytheists anyhow, the Greek pharaohs had no problem honoring the Egyptian gods. The temples were maintained, and new ones built. Many of the most famous religious edifices popular with tourists date in whole or in part from this and the following Roman period—Philae, Denderah, Edfu. It isn’t difficult to distinguish Ptolemaic art and architecture; art forms became a strange (and in the views of many, awkward) amalgam of Greek and Egyptian techniques. Ptolemaic hieroglyphs are hard to read, even for a student of classical Egyptian.

However, political and cultural institutions were maintained. The Ptolemies were divine pharaohs, their names written in cartouches, their images prominent on temple walls, paying homage to the ancient gods. The city of Alexandria became a magnificent capital and a center of learning; its library was world famous and its prestige was enhanced by the tomb of Alexander himself. The conqueror had died in Babylon; his embalmed body was being taken back to Macedonia for burial when it was “hijacked,” as one scholar has put it, by General Ptolemy. Much of ancient Alexandria lies underwater today, and Alexander’s tomb has never been found. It is unlikely that people will stop looking for it, though.

The Ptolemies continued the ancient royal custom of brother-sister marriage. They were not a loving family. The last two Ptolemies, numbers thirteen and fourteen, were brothers; they and their sister Cleopatra the Seventh were constantly at one another’s throats. She is the Cleopatra we all know, the lover of Mark Antony, who tried in vain to hold off the mighty power of Rome. Under Octavian, better known as Augustus, Egypt became a province of the Roman empire, and one of the first to adopt Christianity. The Greeks and the Romans had respected the old gods and adopted some of them; the cult of Isis spread through the empire. But mono the ism is by its very nature intolerant; the Coptic Christian