Ptolemaic Kingdom

The Ptolemaic Kingdom was the Greek dynasty that ruled Egypt for three centuries from Alexandria, the last and longest-lived of Alexander's successor states. Ptolemy, son of Lagus, took Egypt in the partition of 323 BC, hijacked Alexander's corpse on its way to Macedon and buried it at Memphis, and in 305 BC proclaimed himself king. His capital Alexandria, laid out by Alexander himself, became the greatest city of the Mediterranean: the Pharos lighthouse, the Mouseion with its Library where Euclid wrote and Eratosthenes measured the earth, and a merchant harbour joining India to Rome. The Ptolemies ruled as pharaohs, brother marrying sister after Egyptian custom, taxing the fellahin through Greek clerks and settling soldiers on military allotments. Ptolemy II and III held Cyrenaica, Cyprus and the Levantine coast; Raphia in 217 BC, won with native Egyptian troops, was the last triumph, for arming the natives taught them revolt. Thereafter the dynasty decayed into palace murder, Alexandrian mobs and Roman brokerage, until only Cleopatra VII remained, who gambled Egypt on Caesar and then on Antony and lost both. In 30 BC Octavian entered Alexandria; the queen died by her own hand, her son Caesarion was killed, and Egypt became Rome's breadbasket. Three hundred years of Greek pharaohs ended, but Alexandria's learning outlived them by half a millennium.