Cleopatra the Great Read Online Free

Pyramid were rewrapped and reburied in the belief that they were those of its builder, King Djoser, while a mummy within the third pyramid at Giza which they identified as Mycerinus was reburied in a brand-new coffin. Such face-to-face contact with long-dead predecessors clearly inspired the Saites as they transformed mummification practices for both humans and animals. Although individual creatures such as sacred bulls had long been embalmed, the practice was vastly expanded as literally millions of each god’s sacred creature were transformed into mass-produced, linen-wrapped offerings for purchase by the devout. An important part of Egypt’s economy, animal mummies soon became the means of demonstrating a unique culture to foreigners in a vigorous if somewhat peculiar demonstration of patriotism.
    Yet links with Greek culture remained strong, particularly under the Saite king Amasis. Described as a man ‘fond of his joke and his glass, and never inclined to serious pursuits’, he was dubbed the ‘Philhellene’ after marrying a Greek woman, expanding the navy with Greek help and moving the thirty thousand Greek mercenaries into Egypt’s traditional capital, Memphis. Within this great city at the apex of the Delta Amasis extended the great temple of the creator god, Ptah. Its name, Hut-ka-Ptah (‘house of Ptah’s soul’), pronounced ‘Aiguptos’ by the Greeks, provided the modern name Egypt.
    Amasis also embellished his home town of Sais, where the tombs of his dynasty were built within the temple complex of Neith, the creator goddess. Worshipped as mother of the sun, who had created the world with her laughter and could at any time destroy it with her ear-splitting voice, Neith was also worshipped at the Greek trading settlement of Naukratis, where her cult received 10 per cent of all goods coming into Egypt via the only officially sanctioned route from abroad.
    Not only the centre of trade with a monopoly on Greek imports, Naukratis was also a magnet for foreign visitors. Some of the biggest names in Greek history travelled to Egypt to learn something of its fabled wisdom. They included statesmen such as the Athenian lawgiver Solon and the Spartan Lycurgus, the literary giants Pindar and Euripedes, and the philosophers Pythagoras, Eudoxos, Plato and Anaxagoras, the last-named particularly interested in the phenomenon of the annual Nile flood. It is therefore most appropriate that the Greeks were the ones to name Egypt’s great river, which until then had been called just that, ‘the great river’ or ‘pa iteru aa’. At the Delta it divided up into smaller branches to become ‘the rivers’, na-iteru, from which the ‘t’ was eventually dropped and the Egyptian ‘r’ replaced with the Greek T. The result, ‘Neilos’, formed the river’s eventual name. Even the over-used phrase ‘Egypt is the gift of the Nile’ was composed by the Greek historian Hekataios, who, in his lost work Aegyptiaca , was the first to observe that Egypt’s Delta region was ‘the gift of the river’.
    Like many of Hekataios’ observations repeated by his fellow Greek Herodotus some fifty years later, both men visited the same sights where they were shown around by the native priests, the custodians of the ancient culture who were able to interpret the mysterious picture writing which curious Greeks dubbed ‘sacred carvings’, or ‘hieroglyphs’. Both men had been shown the ‘Hall of Statues’ at Karnak temple, where figures of each high priest had been set up in an unbroken lineage: the priests claimed there had been 341 generations since the first pharaoh, Menes. Stressing such antiquity to imply cultural superiority, the priests at Sais even told one Athenian politician that he and his countrymen were merely children since their own history was so short.
    Although the Greeks continued to regard Egypt as