Ptolemy I Founds the Ptolemaic Kingdom
Ptolemy took Egypt after Alexander's death and his family held it for 275 years. He was a Macedonian noble and one of Alexander's bodyguards, took the satrapy in the first division of 323 BC because he judged Egypt defensible and easily held, and made himself king in 305 BC when the fiction of a single empire had collapsed. His first political act was a theft. He intercepted the funeral cortège carrying Alexander's body to Macedonia and took it to Egypt, where it was housed in a tomb in Alexandria — possession of the founder's corpse being a claim to be his heir. The state he built was Greek at the top and Egyptian underneath, and it was administered with an efficiency the pharaohs had not managed: a monopoly on oil, salt, papyrus and banking, a land survey, a bureaucracy that recorded everything, and a coinage of its own weight. Alexandria received the Museum and the Library, which paid scholars to work full time — Euclid, Eratosthenes, Archimedes for a while, and the editors who established the texts of Homer. The Ptolemies married their own sisters on the pharaonic model, presented themselves as pharaohs in the temples and as Greek kings in the city, and almost none of them learned Egyptian. Cleopatra VII was the exception, and the last of them. Egypt became a Roman province in 30 BC and fed Rome for the next four centuries. The Rosetta Stone is a Ptolemaic document, a priestly decree of 196 BC in hieroglyphic, demotic and Greek, and it is a fair image of the kingdom. A Greek dynasty maintained an Egyptian priesthood that recorded its favours in three scripts, and the Greek is what made the other two readable again.
- Year: 305 BCE
- Category: Political
