Herodotus called Egypt “the gift of the Nile” and the ancient Afro-Asian nation founded upon the mighty river has fascinated for millennia.
The Guinness Book of Records has 14 November 1152 BC as the world’s first recorded strike. From what fragments there are, it appears that on this day, the artisans attached to the royal tomb in the Valley of the Kings began what we would call a rolling strike, citing inadequate and overdue rations.
The strike took place in the reign of Ramses III. His birth name means “Ra has fashioned him”. To this was added “heqaiunu”, or ruler of Heliopolis, and his throne name was Usermaatre Meryamun, or “Powerful is the justice of Ra, beloved of Amun”.
820 years later, Alexander the Great passed through Heliopolis, the home of the temple of Ra, the sun god which protected the pharaoh. It may have been here that on 14 November 332 BC Alexander was crowned the new pharaoh, receiving the throne name Setep en Ra Meryamun, or “Chosen by Ra and beloved of Amun”.
This event is best understood alongside Alexander’s well-known detour to the Libyan desert to consult the oracle of Ammon, as the Greeks knew Amun. This extraordinary man had already exhibited a pathology of self-deification and the Egyptian experience appears to have cemented his intention to be regarded as the son of Zeus-Ammon. In later centuries, he has been depicted on coinage with the two horns of Ammon.
Upon Alexander’s death, his general Ptolemy kidnapped Alexander’s corpse on its way home to Macedon and took it to Egypt. Ptolemy himself founded the last dynasty of the pharaohs, a dynasty which survived until Octavius defeated his sometime colleague Mark Antony and the Egyptian queen Cleopatra at the Battle of Actium in 31 BC.
Roman control of Egypt survived the demise of the western empire and continued under the rule of the Byzantine emperors. The historian Procopius wrote in the time of Justinian the Great, and records the emperor’s efforts at Augila, not too far from the oracle visited by Alexander 800 years or so before:
Here in ancient times were temples dedicated to Ammon, and to Alexander of Macedon, to whom the inhabitants used to offer sacrifice down to the reign of Justinian, and there was in them a large number of persons called Slaves of the Temple: now, however, our Emperor, who not only provides for the security of the bodies of his subjects, but is also careful to save their souls, took all necessary measures for the benefit of those who dwelt here, making liberal provisions for them in all respects, and above all teaching them the true religion, so that he made them all Christians in a body, and turned them from their pagan ancestral customs.
Justinian died on 14 November 565. Within decades, Egypt fell to Arab Muslims. The significant battle was the Battle of Heliopolis while the formal surrender took place at Alexandria in November 641.
There is some speculation that the Qur’an incorporates a reference to Alexander the Great. The 18th Surah, al-Kahf or the Cave, is the story of Dhul-Qamayn, the two-horned one:
They said: ‘O Dhul-Qamayn! Lo! Gog and Magog are spoiling the land. So may we pay thee tribute on condition that thou set a barrier between us and them?’
Whether this is so remains hotly debated. Meanwhile, the late King Hussein of Jordan, whose family claims direct descent from the Prophet and who was schooled in Alexandria, was born on 14 November 1935.
As for the Jews, Egypt and Alexander, there is a curious symmetry. The identity of the pharaoh of the time of Moses is hotly debated but often supposed to be Ramses II, who ruled in the century before Ramses III. He feared the growing population of the Israelite slaves and ordered the death of each son. As the Book of Exodus records, one child was hidden in an ark of bulrushes upon the Nile until he was discovered by the pharaoh’s daughter:
And Pharaoh’s daughter said unto her, Take this child away, and nurse it for me, and I will give thee thy wages. And the woman took the child, and nursed it. And the child grew, and she brought him unto Pharaoh’s daughter, and he became her son. And she called his name Moses: and she said, Because I drew him out of the water.
When, centuries later, Alexander elected not to destroy the Temple in Jerusalem, Jewish tradition has that the high priest or the sages decreed that in thanks for a year any sons be named “Alexander”.
While Alexander’s role in the history of Egypt has remained controversial in each of the Abrahamic systems, the European focus during its own African engagement in more recent centuries was on the Nile. On 4 November 1770 the Georgian explorer James Bruce commenced his final march to what he believed to be the source of the great river and 10 days later, on 14 November, he drank a number of toasts from a spring at Gish Abay in Ethiopia. One was to “His Majesty King George III and a long line of princes”, a fortuitous effort considering George’s descendant King Charles III was born on 14 November 1948.
Bruce in fact had only found the source of the Blue Nile. The true source of the White Nile became a fascination for Victorian England, a fascination personified in the antipathy between Richard Francis Burton, the famed explorer, and his sometime travelling companion John Hanning Speke.
In 1863, Speke sent a telegram from Khartoum to the Royal Geographical Society stating “The Nile is settled”. Burton vehemently disagreed. Essentially, Speke had opted for Lake Victoria while Burton, at least by this time, pushed for Lake Tanganyika.
The Society in due course asked that a public debate take place. Before it could happen, Speke died from what Wikipedia calls “a possibly self-inflicted gunshot wound”. So it was left to Burton to give a paper headed “Lake Tanganyika, Ptolemy’s Western Lake-Reservoir of the Nile”. The Society’s report of the paper opens:
The author commenced by expressing his recognition of the many noble qualities of Captain Speke; his courage, energy, and perseverance. But he could not accept his ‘settlement’ of the Nile.
Burton delivered his paper on 14 November 1864. In fact, history in the form of Henry Morgan – “Dr Livingstone, I presume?” – Stanley vindicated Speke. The “Ptolemy”, by the way, was not a pharaoh but the Roman mathematician and geographer Claudius Ptolemy who lived in Alexandria.
Speke’s own writing on the source of the Nile included speculation of what was known as the curse of Ham. In loose terms, some Jewish, Muslim and Christian scholars had extrapolated Biblical stories of Ham’s relationship with his father Noah to justify the proposition that darker skinned people were descended from and therefore carried the curse of Ham. This speculation itself was revisited in the 19th century – against a backdrop of a challenge to Biblical narrative by evolution – and the curse of Ham was reworked by the descendants of those same scholars to produce a new argument that Ham’s descendants had themselves migrated to and developed an ascendancy over, places inhabited by Negroid races.
Whatever the difficulties of that narrative, the importance of Speke to its development is that his writing reveals the inconsistency of Ham’s role in it. In his introduction to his The Discovery of the Source of the Nile, Speke wrote in general terms:
If the picture be a dark one, we should, when contemplating these sons of Noah, try and carry our mind back to that time when our poor elder brother Ham was cursed by his father, and condemned to be the slave of both Shem and Japheth; for as they were then, so they appear to be now—a strikingly existing proof of the Holy Scriptures. But one thing must be remembered: Whilst the people of Europe and Asia were blessed by communion with God through the medium of His prophets, and obtained divine laws to regulate their ways and keep them in mind of Him who made them, the Africans were excluded from this dispensation, and consequently have no idea of an overruling Providence or a future state; they therefore trust to luck and to charms, and think only of self-preservation in this world.
Later in the work, Speke develops a history of the Wahuma, reuniting Ham with his – in Biblical terms – more acceptable brother:
My theory is founded on the traditions of the several nations, as checked by my own observations of what I saw when passing through them. It appears impossible to believe, judging from the physical appearance of the Wahuma, that they can be of any other race than the semi-Shem-Hamitic of Ethiopia. The traditions of the imperial government of Abyssinia go as far back as the scriptural age of King David, from whom the late reigning king of Abyssinia, Sahela Selassie, traced his descent…
Believing, as they do, that Africa formerly belonged to Europeans, from whom it was taken by negroes with whom they had allied themselves, the Wahuma make themselves a small residue of the original European stock driven from the land—an idea which seems natural enough when we consider that the Wahuma are, in numbers, quite insignificant compared with the natives.
Although Speke’s own journeys were to the east and the north of Rwanda, it is generally accepted that the Tutsi of that nation are within the Wahuma people. No few scholars of the modern era have seen the Rwanda tragedy in the last decade of the 20th century as one influenced by European ideas of race and Speke’s views are frequently cited.
On 14 November 1922 Boutros Boutros-Ghali was born in Egypt into a prominent Coptic Christian family. Boutros-Ghali’s grandfather had been prime minister of Egypt until his assassination. Boutros-Ghali later recalled that he was largely brought up by his Slovenian nanny. Many Slovenian women had sought work in Egypt from the time of the building of the Suez canal and were known as “the Aleksandrinke”, settling in the Graeco-Egyptian capital marked out by Ptolemy in celebration of his leader over two millennia before.
Boutros-Ghali’s tenure as secretary-general of the UN was a difficult one. The US opposed his tenure and the time was marked by the Rwanda genocide and also the effect of the disintegration of Yugoslavia.
Just as identity – or perhaps western ideas of identity – have played a central role in western understanding of Rwanda, so it has proved with Yugoslavia.
One peculiar aspect of the latter has been the emergence of North Macedonia, a largely Slav nation which has attempted to forge an identity alongside Serbian, Bulgarian and Greek nationalisms.
One means that North Macedonia has embraced is a policy of Antiquisation. In bald terms, statues of Alexander and of his father Philip have been erected in various places to reflect an historical continuity which southern neighbour Greece says is a nonsense.
The most potent example of Antiquisation is the 22-metre statue of Alexander the Great erected in Skopje, North Macedonia’s capital. A former foreign minister was famously recorded in 2011 as saying “This is our way of saying [up yours]” to the Greeks.
One piece of antiquity is not in doubt. The same Justinian who closed down the cults of Alexander and of Zeus-Ammon was born in the town of Tauresium, not 20km away from Skopje, some 1,500 years before the erection of Alexander’s statue. In the words of the same former foreign minister “Alexander the Great, in fact, had no passport or birth certificate”.
for there were no more worlds to conquer.” Plutarch