I attended this fascinating lecture about Alexander
the Great in Egypt. It was given by Prof. Olaf Kaper at the Allard Pierson Museum in Amsterdam.
He had my undivided attention since he has been working on the site of Siwah for
several years, and he managed to give me the information I wasn't aware of before.
He started introducing Alexander the Great with his itinerary
from Pella across the
Hellespont, mentioning the battlefields of Granicus and Issus and the siege of Tyre and Gaza
until he arrived in Pelusium, his first city
in Egypt. From here, he went to Memphis, the capital of Egypt in his days, where he received a
delegation from Cyrene that brought him
horses among their gifts. When I was in Cyrene (now in Libya), I
remember how their horses in antiquity were praised for their stamina,
especially on a battlefield, so it felt like meeting up with old friends. The
speaker speculated that this may have been an invitation for Alexander to
visit Cyrene, a Greek colony at
that time. In any case, it has to be clarified whether Alexander was
heading for Cyrene or already for Siwah
when he left Memphis for the northern
coastline when he chose the location to build Alexandria. He must have
traveled along the mainstream of the Nile to Naucratis, another Greek
city that lived off the commerce with the Egyptian hinterland, before turning
westward.
The choice for the location of Alexandria is,
geographically speaking, excellent, with the natural outline of a harbor and an
inland lake with fresh water. Strangely enough, I heard from Richard Miles
on BBC that these waters were brackish, a huge mistake of Alexander. It
would have been Ptolemy's doing to
build a 30 km
long canal to the Nile and appropriate
underground cisterns to provide the necessary water for the city! I can't
believe Alexander would make such a mistake, for whoever in his right
mind would found a city where there is no water? Certainly not Alexander!
Besides, the cisterns shown in this documentary looked Roman to me. Back to the
lecture, though, we are shown a few pictures with temple remains of Paraetonium,
another Greek colony on the Mediterranean, from where Alexander turns south
towards Siwah – leaving Cyrene for what it was.
Olaf Kaper then draws a comparison and parallel between the Temple
of Zeus-Ammon in Cyrene, built in Greek
style (note that this temple in Cyrene is larger than the Parthenon
in Athens!),
and the Temple of Ammon-Zeus in Siwah, built in Egyptian
style. Yet the temple
of Siwah shows
several Greek characteristics, like the intermittent use of large and small
stones in the walls and the half-Doric columns at the entrance, for instance.
He assumes that Greek architects from Cyrene were hired to build
the Siwah temple. Then follow a couple of views of the empty
desert landscape, a stretch of 300 kilometers which Alexander and his
close companions covered on horseback in eight days, getting lost a couple of
times, as we know… Then there are some great pictures of the Siwah oasis,
which turns out to be more than 60
km wide! I had no idea of the size!
We know that Alexander entered the Temple of Siwah
alone, but now I'm told that the temple was used only to ask the question(s) to
the god, whereas the answer(s) was(were) given in the temple on the opposite
hill! The announcements there were a public affair, so Alexander's entourage
must have heard the god's answers, although they may not have known the
questions … There was a holy road connecting both hills of which little or
nothing remains today. The temple on top of the hill across the temple of Siwah itself is almost
entirely gone, except for a few low walls. They were relatively complete until
the end of the 19th century when the local governor decided to blow them up to
use the stones for his own house. Yet, don't know where that was or is …
I also learned something new about the picture of Zeus with the ram's
horns. It seems that this custom was born in Cyrene for Ammon-Zeus
(Ammon, the Libyan god, is spelled with double mm, while the Egyptian Amon is
written with one m). The idea has traveled from Cyrene to Egypt and has
reached Alexander in the process. When I later returned to the Hermitage Museum, I noticed a coin of the “old”
Ammon-Zeus with horns that looked something like these examples:
And there is more exciting news, at least for me. When
Alexander left Siwah, he traveled East towards the Nile along a known road, which he was told was shorter.
That road runs from one oasis to the next. In the second oasis after Siwah,
archaeologists have recently discovered a Greek Temple
dedicated to Alexander with several inscriptions and pictures related to
the great man! Unbelievable and unexpected.
My knowledgeable speaker also mentions Alexander's
instructions to rebuild the "bark" area of the temples of Karnak and Thebe,
in fact, the sacred inner area of the temple that held the bark in which the
god was carried around on heydays. He also had beautiful photographs of some
walls in Karnak where
hieroglyphic inscriptions referred to King Philip Arrhidaeus. I have
no idea why he is being mentioned here, and I forgot to ask Olaf Kaper…
sorry.
And to conclude, Olaf Kaper warmly recommends
the book Sunset Oasis by Bahaa Taher, a contemporary story in the oasis of Siwah and gives an excellent idea of
the location. So more reading material is to be put on my wish list!
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