Cleopatra the Great Read Online Free Page B

of the sacred animals headed by the Apis bull of Memphis. And although the Persians invaded again in 373 BC , they were defeated once again.
    Nectanebo I was distinctly pro-Greek and, having married a Greek woman named Ptolemais, a relative of Chabrias, produced a daughter sufficiently powerful to be sent as his representative heading an expedition south to Akhmim to obtain new sources of building stone. Although her name is lost, her official titles are preserved in a rock-cut chapel originally decorated by the fourteenth-century BC pharaoh Ay, father of the famous female pharaoh Nefertiti, whose inspirational titles were duplicated by Nectanebo Fs daughter: ‘hereditary princess, held in high esteem, favoured with sweet love, the mistress of Upper and Lower Egypt, of gracious countenance, beautiful with the double feather, great royal consort, Lady of the Two Lands’.
    Nectanebo I was briefly succeeded by his son Djedhor, the first pharaoh to issue coins in Egypt’s barter-based economy, but he was deposed by his cousin Nectanebo II (360-343 BC ). After beating back a vast Persian invasion force in 350 BC with help from Athens and Sparta, Nectanebo II was worshipped throughout Egypt. His attempts to restore his country’s glories by resurrecting the power of its past were part of a nationwide effort to create ‘a magic defence’ against the Persian menace. Yet for all this ritual protection, the legendary Nectanebo II was finally defeated in 343 BC and Egypt taken back into the Persian empire. Cities such as Heliopolis and Mendes were destroyed, along with the tombs of the kings who had rebelled against Persian rule, and many members of the ruling classes were deported to Persia. Nectanebo himself managed to flee south into Nubia, although it was rumoured that at some stage during his reign he had also sailed to northern Greece. Having predicted that the Macedonian queen Olympias would soon give birth to the son of Zeus, greatest of the gods of Greece, Nectanebo then donned the mask of the god and himself fathered her child, which was very much in the Egyptian tradition of divine conception legends. The myth also neatly claimed the child, whom she named Alexander, to be the successor of the last native pharaoh.
    Despite the harshness of their regime, the Persians remained in Egypt for little more than a decade before Alexander himself arrived in Egypt in 332 BC to claim his fabled birthright. Welcomed as a saviour and the rightful heir of Nectanebo II by a populace desperate to be rid of the hated Persians, he initiated three centuries of Greek rule which would culminate in the extraordinary figure of Cleopatra herself.
    Born in Egypt of Macedonian descent, Cleopatra had a traditional Macedonian name which, in its original Greek form, began with a ‘k’. And although the name is generally translated as ‘glory to her father’, its meaning may be more accurately understood as ‘renowned in her ancestry’. And it was quite an ancestry. At least thirty-three Cleopatras are known from ancient times, and with the origins of her famous name rooted in myth and the forces of nature, the first Cleopatra was daughter of the North Wind Boreas. The name’s mythological origins are also associated with a daughter of the legendary King Midas, and the first historical Cleopatra may have been a sister of the real Midas, King of Phrygia (central Turkey), who married Macedonia’s first historical king Perdikkas (670-652 BC ). Considered to exist at the very edge of the civilized world, both geographically and culturally, the Macedonians originated in the northernmost part of Greece, close to the lands of Scythia and Thrace where tattooed warriors still collected severed heads. When not participating in warfare themselves, Macedonia’s elite indulged in hunting, feasting and drinking bouts that lasted days at a time.
    Still ruled by Homeric-style kings when much of Greece had adopted