Women In Egyptian Ptolemies

Greek leaders in traditional Egyptian garb and adornments. Such procedures were done in order to assimilate the Ptolemies into the culture of their kingdom and legitimize their reign as true pharaohs. Even women, who were usually omitted from ancient works, are captured in Ptolemaic art. This represents a gradual acceptance and reevaluation of the female as an individual, as depictions of Ptolemaic queens in Egyptian headpieces were carved into stone tablets. Poetry became another effective medium that the Ptolemies used to bolster their image. Ptolemy I and Ptolemy II discovered budding authors through the Library of Alexandria, and they selected three scholars to serve as court poets: Callimachus, Apollonius, and Theocritus. These men were subsidized by the Ptolemies in exchange for the composition and performance of poems. The Ptolemies even made appearances in the poems they had crafted. The Idyll of Theocritus, for example, presented its characters praising the Egyptian rulers: “I will say, you’ve done us many a favor, Ptolemy, since your father joined the immortals.” The …show more content…
This stele was particularly unique from other stone tablets issued at the time because it was a trilingual text, containing three written scripts: Demotic, Egyptian hieroglyphs, and Greek. The decree was issued by a group of Egyptian priests in the city of Canopus to commemorate the Ptolemaic monarch for the acts he had done for his subjects. This included the donation of gifts and subsidies to the temples, the remission of taxes during a time of famine, and the maintenance of peace within Egypt during times of hardship. This decree would be one of the media responsible for decoding the ancient languages of the Hellenistic Period, as well as boosting the reputation of the Ptolemies and solidifying their identities as distinguished, capable