Ptolemy I Soter

Of all the generals who carved up the conquests of Alexander the Great, Ptolemy was the most cautious and among the most successful. Given Egypt as a governor in 323 BCE, he made it his own kingdom, took the titles of king and pharaoh, and founded a dynasty that ruled from Alexandria until the death of Cleopatra almost three centuries later.

Ptolemy was born in Macedon around 369 or 368 BCE, the son of a nobleman named Lagus and a woman called Arsinoe. Some ancient writers later claimed he was really an illegitimate son of King Philip II, which would have made him a half-brother of Alexander the Great, but this is generally seen as dynastic propaganda. He served Alexander from the start of the Persian campaign, fought at Issus, became one of the king's seven personal bodyguards and held commands in Afghanistan and India.

When Alexander died in 323 BCE, the generals meeting at Babylon divided the provinces among themselves, and Ptolemy was made satrap of Egypt. He quickly added Cyrenaica to the west without permission. In late 322 or early 321 BCE he intercepted Alexander's funeral cortege in Syria as it headed for Macedon and brought the body to Egypt, burying it first at Memphis and later in a great tomb at Alexandria. Possession of the corpse was a powerful claim to legitimacy, and the regent Perdiccas invaded Egypt in response. His attempt to cross the Nile failed with the loss, by one account, of 2,000 men, and his own officers murdered him in 321 or 320 BCE. Ptolemy turned down the regency that was then offered to him, preferring to secure his own base.

For two decades Ptolemy fought to hold Egypt and to control its approaches: Cyprus, Cyrenaica and southern Syria, including Judea. In 312 BCE, together with Seleucus, he defeated Demetrius, son of Antigonus the One-Eyed, at Gaza, using caltrops and light troops against the enemy elephants. In 306 BCE Demetrius smashed his fleet off Salamis in Cyprus and took the island, and that year Antigonus and Demetrius declared themselves kings. Ptolemy and the other leading generals followed suit. When Ptolemy sent help to Rhodes, besieged by Demetrius in 305 and 304 BCE, the grateful Rhodians honoured him as a god and gave him the name Soter, "saviour". After the allied victory over Antigonus at Ipsus in 301 BCE, Ptolemy occupied southern Syria, although his partners had promised it to Seleucus; the quarrel led to a century of wars between the two dynasties. He recovered Cyprus in 295 or 294 BCE.

Ptolemy governed through a mixture of Egyptian and Greek institutions. He kept the old provinces, the nomes, but placed Greek-speaking officials over them, and settled soldiers on grants of land in return for military service. He made Egypt a closed currency zone where foreign coins had to be exchanged at the border, and from around 299 BCE issued gold coins bearing his own portrait. He courted the Egyptian priesthood, restoring temple lands, and promoted Serapis, a god combining Egyptian and Greek features, as well as a state cult of the deified Alexander.

Ptolemy is credited with starting the Library and Museum of Alexandria and with commissioning the Pharos, the lighthouse later counted among the Seven Wonders, though both were completed under his son. He wrote his own eyewitness history of Alexander's campaigns, now lost but used heavily by the later historian Arrian. According to a later anecdote, he asked the mathematician Euclid for an easier way to learn geometry and was told there was no royal road.

In 285 BCE he made his son by Berenice co-ruler as Ptolemy II, passing over his elder son Ptolemy Keraunos. He died in January 282 BCE, in his mid-eighties. His dynasty ruled Egypt until Cleopatra died in 30 BCE.

Our 300 BCE map shows the Ptolemaic Kingdom of present-day Egypt beside the Seleucid Empire, soon after the break-up of Alexander's empire, which appears on the 323 BCE map.