Predecessors of Cleopatra

by Leigh North

One cannot help thinking of the homely phrase, “Give a dog a bad name,” in connection with this ancient king, all the ruin that occurred for hundreds of years seems set down to the credit of Cambyses, who, with the most evil intent in the world, could hardly have accomplished all that was claimed for him. He is said to have left nothing unburnt in Thebes that fire would consume. “An earthquake and Cambyses,” says Curtis, “divide the shame of the partial destruction of Memnon.” An old inscription at the base of the statue reads: “I write after having heard Memnon. Cambyses has wounded me, a stone cut into the image of the sun king. I had once the sweet voice of Memnon, but Cambyses has deprived me of the accents which express joy and grief.”

Tradition also says that Cambyses threw down the magnificent statues set up to adorn the temple of victory, built by Seti I at old Quernah, yet Pliny has preserved a story that the same king was so struck by the beauty of a certain statue that he ordered the flames which he had kindled extinguished at its base.

It is probable that all his other crimes paled into insignificance in the eyes of the Egyptians before his murder of their sacred bull. For this his memory would have been execrated forever had it been his only deed of violence. But whereas the Persians spoke of Cyrus as “Father” they called Cambyses “Despot” or “Master”; ferocity and cruelty seemed to distinguish most of his actions.

Both the hawk and the bull appeared as emblems of royalty and divinity among the Egyptians from the earliest times. But the bull was also highly regarded in Assyria, India and among other ancient nations. The hawk was sacred to the sun, the Apis bull, the living image of Osiris, the incarnation of a source of life and creative energy. Upon this animal, so revered and worshipped, Cambyses dared to lay what was deemed a sacrilegious hand; in the eyes of his new subjects he could have committed no greater crime. Says one writer: “At Memphis the Apis bull was bred, nurtured and honored with all the devotion that Asiatic superstition lavished upon the representative of their miscalled deities.”

It was said of the god Apis that “his glory was sought for in all Egypt,” and an inscription reads: “He was found after some months in the city of Ho-shed-abot. He was solemnly introduced into the temple of Ptah, beside his father, the Memphian god Phthah of the South Wall by the high priest in the temple of Phthah, the great prince of the Mashuash Petise, the son of the high priest of Memphis and great prince of the Mashuash, Takelut and of the princess of royal race, Thes-bast-per.”

The priests would search through the land for the new Apis, which must have certain marks upon it. The rules required that the young bull should be black, with a white triangle on his forehead, the likeness of a vulture on his back, a crescent moon on his side, two kinds of hair in his tail and an excrescence under his tongue like the sacred beetle. Naturally it took a long time to find just such an animal, and the time between the death of one and the finding of another was kept as a period of fasting and mourning. It is said that when the old Apis outlived twenty-five years he was quietly drowned by the priests, and the bodies of the dead bulls were embalmed and buried with royal honors in tombs in the desert. When the new bull was found it was a period of great rejoicing. The mother and calf were brought to the temple and housed with all honor and regard. The bull was consulted as an oracle by offering it food, and the omen was favorable or the reverse, as it accepted or refused it. This doubtless gave opportunity to the priests and care-takers to direct the matter as they saw fit. A hungry bull would be much more apt to give a favorable response, as one may well perceive than an already satiated one.

Memphis, the “City of the White Wall” which was to the Greeks as Cairo is to us now, the typical Oriental city, was especially celebrated for its worship of Apis or Hapi and was selected for its residence because one of the limbs of Osiris, killed by Typhon, the evil spirit, were found there. One pauses to wonder at the curious mingling of power and powerlessness which the ancients attributed to their gods. Proof against all dangers and performing miracles of all sorts they yet at times, even the very greatest of them, suffered and “died like men.”

Thus the sacred bull, selected by certain particular marks and guarded and cared for with special reverence, was looked upon as the incarnation of the god. It is in the Serapium (or bulls’ burying place), a word regarded as a contraction of Osiris-Apis, that various tablets and inscriptions were found which give the chief dates and information which we possess as regards the reigns of certain kings. The records of the Apis bulls are more complete than the Mnevis bulls, and he is spoken of as “a fair and beautiful image of the soul of Osiris.”

It was upon this adored treasure that Cambyses cruelly and unwisely vented his evil temper. After the conquest of Egypt he again engaged in other aggressive wars and, returning unsuccessful from one of his expeditions against Nubia and even more morose and ill-natured than usual, he found the people celebrating one of their religious festivals, and, thinking, or pretending to think, that they were deriding him and rejoicing at his ill-success, he poured out the viols of his wrath. “Oh stupid mortals!” he exclaimed. “Are these your gods? Creatures of flesh and blood and sensible to the touch of steel!” and he caused the sacred bull to be brought forth and stabbed it in the thigh and put several of the priests to death.

One of the most interesting events of modern times was the discovery by Mariette of the long lost Serapeum in 1850. The temple had been described by Strabo, but the lapse of years and the drifting sands of the desert had obliterated it from memory and hidden it from sight. Wandering in the neighborhood of the Step Pyramid of Sakkarah, the oldest in the world, believed to have been erected only eighty years after the time of Menes, this noted archaeologist stumbled against an object which proved to be the head of a sphinx, and immediately the description of Strabo came into his mind. At once, with characteristic patience and determination, he set his men to work and had the immense satisfaction after innumerable difficulties of discovering the avenue of sphinxes which led to the Serapeum and the buried temple itself. It extended 640 feet into the solid rock, with long galleries, sixty-four vaulted chambers on either side and a vaulted roof twenty feet high, while the breadth of the gallery was about the same. In one chamber he discovered the Apis, who died in the sixtieth year of Rameses II, so fresh and undisturbed did this seem that the finger marks could be seen on the walls and footprints in the sand. A human mummy, which Mariette at first took to be an Apis, was also discovered, and proved by the inscription to be that of the favorite son of Rameses II Kha-em-uas, high priest of the temple of Ptah and governor of Memphis. The body was covered with jewels, gold chains and amulets, precious and gold washed, all of which are now in the Louvre. Huge granite sarcophagi were discovered in twenty-four cells, bearing the name of the king on the throne at the time the Apis was buried. The most recent mummies discovered were from the time of Psammetichus II of the Twenty-sixth Dynasty, 660 B. C., to a Ptolemy Dynasty 500 years later.