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style, Zeus-Ammon was essentially a Greek oracle famed for his accurate pronouncements. After eight days wandering in the desert – contemporary histories tells us that he was guided on his way by friendly crows and a succession of talking snakes, and sustained by unexpected rains – the weary Alexander arrived at the temple and entered the sanctuary with the chief priest, leaving his entourage outside. No one knows what questions Alexander asked; indeed, no one knows how he asked them or how the god responded. But the whole world soon knew how the chief priest had greeted Alexander as the son of Zeus-Ammon himself. The living Alexander was definitely, undeniably, divine.
    Ptolemy I developed the link between the royal family and the gods by promoting the cults of Serapis and Alexander, and by instigating a Ptolemaic programme of temple building and restoration which, initially confined to northern Egypt, soon spread southwards. Ptolemy II took things further. His incestuous marriage with his sister mirrored the unions of Osiris and Isis and Zeus and Hera, and led directly to the deification of his late parents. Ptolemy I and Berenice I, descendants of both Dionysos and Heracles, were to be worshipped together as the Theoi Soteres (‘Saviour Gods’). The royal ancestor cults, a new and entirely Graeco-Egyptian focus for worship, were to prove aneffective means of channelling the loyalty of the elite of Alexandria and the southern city of Ptolemais Hormou, whose sons were happy to serve as eponymous priests for a year and whose daughters were eager to become priestesses in the cults of the deified queens. Outside the Greek cities the royal cults were quietly absorbed into the traditional theology, as many other gods had been before.
    In 272/1 the Ptolemies acquired an enhanced divinity, as Ptolemy II and Arsinoë II were officially designated living gods. Together they became the Theoi Adelphoi (‘Brother-Sister Gods’). Arsinoë II, sister-wife of Ptolemy II, was queen consort of Egypt for less than seven years. Within the royal family she entirely supplanted her husband’s divorced first wife, Arsinoë I, and at Karnak we can see her stepson Ptolemy III making offerings to the dead Arsinoë II as if she had been his birth mother. A gold coin issued between 285 and 246 made Arsinoë the first Egyptian queen to be featured on her husband’s coinage. She was also the first Ptolemaic queen to be shown accompanying her husband as he offered to the gods, the first to wear the double uraeus which distinguished her from her predecessor, Arsinoë I, and the first to design her own Egyptian-style crown: an elaborate combination of the king’s red crown (the crown of Lower or northern Egypt), a solar disc, two tall feathers, the cow horns associated with Hathor and Isis, and the ram horns associated with Amen. The crown, which somewhat resembles the one worn by the earth god Geb, suggests an interest in Egypt’s dynastic history and, maybe, some understanding of traditional Egyptian solar theology, which is reinforced by references to Arsinoë as a ‘daughter of Amen’ and ‘daughter of Shu’. A colossal granite statue of Arsinoë recovered from the Gardens of Sallust, Rome, shows her as an entirely Egyptian queen with a now-vanished crown and a double uraeus still on her brow. The statue inscription confirms that she is:
    The princess, inherent; daughter of Geb, the first, the daughter of thebull, the great generosity, the daughter of the king, sister and spouse, woman of Upper and Lower Egypt, image of Isis, beloved of Hathor, Mistress of the Two Lands, Arsinoë, who is beloved to her brother, beloved of Atum, Mistress of the Two Lands. 15
    Arsinoë’s image, both Greek- and Egyptian-style, living and posthumous, spread throughout the Ptolemaic empire on coins, cult vases, statues and reliefs, while back home her name was celebrated in the growing number of towns named, or renamed, Arsinoë. By 256 the reclaimed land of