Homage to Thee, Ammon-Ra: The Ptolemaic Cult of Alexander the Great and the Egyptian Veneration of the Dead

Throughout the tumultuous shift from ancient Egyptian religious traditions to a typical Hellenistic, newly invented religion (the Ptolemaic Cult of Alexander the Great), the Ptolemaic Egyptians were willing to accept the innovatively established cult of Alexander the Great after Alexander’s death as the formative structure of the cult was quite similar to the ancient Egyptian rituals of the veneration of the dead and the deification of the royal members. The Ptolemaic rulers thus used religion as their political mediums to legitimize their reigns with shrewd sense of controlling of the masses. The cult of Alexander the Great also initiated and impacted the consequent establishments of the cults of Ptolemaic royal members, like the cult of the deceased parents of Ptolemy II. The cult of Alexander the Great also inspired numerous Greek royal cults in Alexandria. However, the reason behind the acceptance of the cult were mostly attribute to the intrinsic similarities between Alexandrian religions or cults and Egyptian traditions.

Ptolemy I Soter invented the cult of Alexander the Great to legitimize his rulership among the successors. It is recorded that Ptolemy I “seized his (Alexander’s) body while Alexander’s funeral procession was on its way to Macedon from Babylon”, and “brought it (the body) to the Egyptian capital at Memphis.” Alexander the Great as deified as a Pharoah and son of the deity Ammon-Ra. Alexander’s body was kept in an Egyptian way to some extent, and Alexander’s body, “and the transferability of charisma and mystique that was implied by closeness of physical proximity with it, was utilized in both the construction and destruction of the legitimacy of the Ptolemaic dynasty.”

The details of the procedures of the cult of Alexander the Great were found throughout the ancient sources and texts. We can be specific about two facts: 1) Alexander the Great was deified and venerated in similar ways as dead Egyptians royal members and gods. 2) Alexander the Great was the center of the cult. As Pausanias (I. 8.6) wrote, “in gratitude for Ptolemy I who had saved their city from Demetrius, the citizens of Rhodes hailed him as Soter (“The Savior” in Greek). Ptolemy Soter I had not only saved the Rhodes from Demetrius, but also argued with Perdiccas and other successors to keep the body of Alexander the Great in Egypt. The body was first kept in Memphis and then transported to its final burial place: Alexandria. The cult of Alexander the Great was extremely popular among citizens in Alexandria as the city was named after Alexander the Great and affected by his legendary stories. Alexander, “we are told, had it (the great serpent at Alexandria) killed, and had a shrine built on the site where it was buried; from the portals of the shrine a number of serpents issued from the ground”, and the serpents were worshipped as “good genii” in ancient Greek text “Agathos Daimon”. This detail of Alexandria indicated that Alexander the Great has already impacted the religious atmosphere of the city even when he was alive. Ancient Egyptians do firmly believe in snake gods, and they have numerous divinities in the forms of various snakes. To notify here, the snake god Nehebkau was considered a funerary god to the ancient Egyptians. This snake god was venerated in the Great Temple of Heliopolis. In Pyramid Texts No. 229, it says “Nehebkau’s spine which stilled the disturbance in Hermopolis”, and in BD spell 17, the deceased says, “I fly as a hawk, I have cackled as a goose, I destroy eternity like Nehebkau.” In no.87 spell, Nehebkau was praised as the deity who “restores people to life with the work of his arms.” Nehebkau, the primal serpent deity in Egyptian mythology, was associated with the power that granted to the deceased as a source of persistence and renewal. In this case, it somehow made the deification of Alexander more feasible to Egyptian citizens that 1) Alexander has already made religious shrines in Alexandria and he did have legitimate rights to affect the religious dynamics in the Ptolemaic region, 2) Alexander the Great was already related to legendary snakes which were regarded as “agathos daimon” when he found the city Alexandria, which correlated him to the ancient worship of the serpent god Nehebkau, who appeared frequently in Egyptian papyri and records as a funerary power for the deceased to gain their eternal lives. Ancient Egyptians have a long-existed tradition of deification of royal members and the monarch was viewed as the physical embodiment of the god Horus. Papyrus FMNH 31324 recorded the ancient postmortem deification and shed light on how people could drink water and eat food after they figured out the methods to navigate the underworld. Ancient Egyptians do believe that once a person is mummified and fulfilled his procedures for afterlife and rebirth, this person could be worshipped as a god and bestow divine power on the living people. Notably, Alexander the Great was mummified in a traditional Egyptian way, this was accountable for the following procedures of deification. Also, his legendary encounter with the good snakes in Alexandria had made his path intertwined with the power of renewal after death and the serpent deity Nehebkau, which made him way more acceptable to the Ptolemaic Egyptians and their perceptions of the world.

Apart from the funerary god Nehebkau, ancient Egyptians also believed in the royal uraeus, which was also associated with the form of snake. It refers to cobra specifically and is a symbol for the goddess Wadjet, the patroness of the Nile Delta and the protector of all Lower Egypt. Technically, Alexandria and Memphis are both belong to the Nile Delta area and was under the protection and control of goddess Wadjet. Egyptians worshipped Wadjet as the god of sand and water and the nurse to the infant sun god Horus, therefore, Wadjet was the patroness of the living monarch as a spiritual entity to the citizens. The association of Alexander the Great with Agathos Daimon “serpents”, the shrines of the serpents, Nehebkau and Wadjet cohered him with the religious perception and rooted cosmology of the Egyptians. Without these adherences to the traditional Egyptian deities and spiritual symbols, Alexander the Great would have no means to be accepted by the majority of the Egyptian citizens as the land of Egypt used to have a precedented history of cursing foreign deities and rituals. Egyptians used to be hostile to cultures that could not be condensed into their own perceptions of the world. There were vivid records of people cursing foreign religions in Egypt: The priests chanted against the foreign king Hyksos during the Fifteenth Dynasty. However, Egyptian people was not malicious towards the foreign rulership of Alexander the Great as he has displayed the highest piety of reverence to the Egyptian religious traditions and invented his own divine impacts in an acceptable way. Ptolemy I Soter was brilliant at melting the Babylonian and Hellenistic essences in the vast ideological sea of Egyptian worships. As scholar notified, “on the death of Alexander Ptolemy had seized power in Egypt”, and he was “lacking any basis for his rule apart from force he sought to provide himself with a tradition by placing great emphasis on his own links with Alexander.” Under this motive, Ptolemy I Soter eagerly invented the cult of Alexander the Great.

Alexandria was named Rhakotis before the formal foundation of the city by Alexander the Great. The port Pharos was part of the Rhakotis area. Egyptian religion has a resistible impact on the port Pharos and Serapis, was thought to be the protector god of Alexandria. The Ptolemaic Kingdom aimed to combine Greek worships and Egyptian worships. Ptolemy I Soter had precise intuitive towards the design and innovation of old religions, and he was endeavored to unify the worship of Egyptian Osiris and Apis in the worship of Serapis. The cult of Seraphis whose original name is “the cult of Osiris-Apis (the bull deity)” has become widely accepted in Alexandria as it coped with Alexandrian citizens’ perception of the world and religion. Coincidentally, the earliest mention of “Serapis” appears after the death of Alexander the Great. Ptolemy I Soter was willing to establish a new type of religion that would please both ethnic groups: the Egyptians and the Greeks. The worship of Serapis was not only derived from the worships of Osiris and Apis, but also descended from the worship of Babylonian god Ea. Ptolemy I Soter was so shrewd at utilizing religion as primary political tools and mediums that he introduced Hellenistic and Babylonian elements to the original religion around Alexandria, as a result, he kept both foreigners and remaining citizens satisfied about the religious atmosphere at Alexandria. Also, Alexander the Great was quite prepared and talented at inventing religions as he worshipped the agathos daimon “serpents” as the divinity force of the city Alexandria.

An Armenian papyrus recorded that there was a “yearly selection of the priesthood for the celebration of the cult of Alexander”, which showed a high frequency of this celebration of the Egyptian people. Alexander was mentioned as Mochylos in Codex A during the cult (of some Persian celebrations). What’s more, Rufus Curtius gave him strong distinction by the name “Itaque Aegypto praefecit < Alexander > Aeschylum Rhodium et Peucesten Macedonem.” There was an ungrounded hypothesis that the tomb of Alexander the Great was the center place for the veneration of the cult. The date that Alexander was dead was celebrated mostly as people presupposed that Alexander entered the realm of Heaven as a new god on that day.

People in both Memphis and Alexandria have long been believing in the notion that they didn’t believe in abstract beings but believed in personifications of the cosmos and natural forces. The correlation of Serapis and Alexander the Great displayed a pattern that a Greek or Macedonian King, no matter how fierce his earthly military conquer was, had to be associated with supernatural powers to be accepted and venerated by the Egyptian people. To be regarded as a prominent god in the Egyptian heaven, the body of Alexander the Great had to be mummified and prepared to the Egyptian gods, which could be the only approach to convince the Egyptians that Alexander the Great was deified successfully and was greeted by the long-existed gods. Alexander the Great was memorized as the son of Ammon-Ra, who was among the oldest and the most powerful Egyptian gods. Amun was one of the eight primordial deities that were worshipped in Hermopolis, who were called “the Ogdoad”. His name means “the invisible” and “the hidden one”. Ammon (Amun)-Ra was a fusion after the cult of Amun. Notably, the cult of Amun was largely revised and re-developed after the expelling of the foreign king Hyksos, and then the fusion of deities, Amun-Ra showed up in the timeline. In my opinion, as Alexander the Great was a Macedonian and was also viewed as a foreign king instead of a local Pharoah, Ptolemy I Soter intentionally employed Amun-Ra as Alexander’s godly father to further legitimize his own reign and prevent the tragedy of the expelled Hyksos to reoccur.

The most significant reason that Alexander the Great needed to experience mummification was that only through the procedures of physical mummification. Without the formal transformation of mummification, a deceased person’s ka and ba would not be preserved fully. Ka, the person’s double, lives with the deceased while ba leaves the tomb as “a bird”. Nehebkau, the serpent deity as a funerary god, generally offered the deceased ka and nourished ka to navigate people in the underworld “Duat”. Nehebkau also guarded the gates of Duat and welcomed the souls entering the realm of Egyptian underworld. Duat is quite different from Greek and Babylonian heavens and Osiris, Thoth, Anubis, and many subsequent Egyptian deities sometimes resided in Duat. The ideology that Alexander the Great entered “heaven” and then became a new god was a mixture of blissful, delightful, mythological perceptions of the Greeks and the Duat&Mummification beliefs of the Egyptians. Ptolemy I Soter took advantage of this religious syncretism and promoted both the cult of Alexander the Great itself and other religious activities (like the worship of Serapis, the guardian god of Alexandria) related to Alexander the Great among the Egyptians, especially those in Alexandria and Memphis. The providential encounter of Alexander with the snakes, the construction of the shrines in Alexandria, the mummification of Alexander the Great’s body, the mixture of Greek, Babylonian and Egyptian religions, were all utilized by Ptolemy I Soter as a feasible political transition from Alexander’s catastrophic death to his own family’s long-lasting rulership.

Bibliography

North Ryde, The Alexander Cult and Ptolemaic Ruler Worship, Vol. 19, Iss. 2, (Jan 1, 1989): 82.

Lily Ross Taylor, The Cult of Alexander at Alexandria, Classical Philology, Vol. XXII, no.2, (April 1927): 163, 164.

Andrew Erskine, ‘Culture and Power in Ptolemaic Egypt: The Museum and Library of Alexandria’, Greece and Rome, vol. 42, no.1, (1995): 41.

Pyramids Text, No. 229 (The Pyramid of Unas, Utterance 229).

BD Spell 17 (Book of the Dead), around 1500 BC to around 50 BC.

BD Spell 87 (Book of the Dead), around 1500 BC to around 50 BC.

Papyrus FMNH 31324, acquired on May 24, 1894.

Armenian Codex A, developed in the 5th century AD.

Rufus (iv. 8.4).