Abstract
The worship of the sacred animals became an important aspect of Egyptian culture in the Late Period and especially during the Ptolemaic rule. For the first time the idea of care about the sacred animals was widely used for purposes of propaganda. This article examines these propaganda messages to understand in which ways the kings showed their care about the sacred animals. It seems that the kings often visited the sacred animals, enthroned the new ones and paid for their burials and temples. That begs the question why Ptolemies used this aspect of propaganda so frequently. Reasons for it are twofold. On the one hand, in the Late Egypt and especially in the time of Persian rule over it, it became quite popular to spread the stories of sacrileges done by Persian rulers. It often involved mutilation of the sacred animals, their killing and eating. Ptolemies who did not commit such atrocities but just the other way round cared about the animals and treated them well could be favorably compared with foreign rulers of old and thus could be viewed as legitimate rulers of Egypt. On the other hand, this aspect of propaganda could be well understood by Ptolemies’ Greek subjects and by the members of the dynasty themselves. It is well known that Herodotus in his works described in detail the importance of the sacred animals for Egypt.
Keywords
Ancient Egypt, Hellenism, Ptolemies, sacred animals, Apis, Egyptian clergy.
Mikhail S. Apenko
Lomonosov Moscow State University, Moscow, Russia;
Institute of World History of the Russian Academy of Science, Moscow, Russia
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