Page 5 - Kleopatra

Alexandria. This would make no sense. Obviously Cleopatra gives prominence in her new titulature to
her Macedonian ancestry and her links to the Macedonian aristocracy...The queen implicitly alludes
to her ancestor, the Macedonian Ptolemy, who first reigned from Alexandria over a vast empire, in
which Egypt was not a homeland, but a strategic base and a land to be exploited economically. She
calls attention to the relationship of blood, specifically of Macedonian blood, that united Ptolemies
and Seleucids. The word even echoed the prestige of the Macedonian hero par excellence, Alexander
the Great, the conqueror who opened Egypt to the Macedonians and who was buried in Alexandria
but was also the founder of a broader more ephemeral Macedonian Empire.
15 Bearzot (1992) does not help us here....I would not follow Bearzot when she considers that the
Macedonians, because of their small number, merged with Greeks. As we have just said, in Egypt,
Makedon, ethnic, and Hellen, social qualification, are semantically and juridically situated on two
different levels.
In Hellenistic Egypt, the most prestigious patris is that of Makedon, which for a while survived the
elimination of ethnic designations in the reorganisation by the Roman conquerors of the official mean
of expressing identity.

The children of Antony...To the youngest child, Ptolemy Philadelphos...This new Seleucid destiny of the
young boy is symbolised by the Macedonian insignia of his power, the chlamys of purple, the diadem
and the Macedonian head-dress kausia. A limestone head of the prince wears the kausia decorated
with a small uraeus, signs of his Alexandrian and Macedonian royal ancestry.
In fact, in the documents Hellenes are not apposed to Macedonians or Thracians (such a scheme
would be anachronistic in Ptolemaic Egypt). When ethnic is needed, Greeks are designated by a Greek
local origin at the same level as the Thracian or Macedonian generic ethnics. The notion of ‘Greek
register’ which I use above is only a shortcut of the modern historian, and has no ethnological
character, but reflects only socio-political allegiance to the basileus and membership in the immigrant
structures - as opposed to the socio-religious Egyptian system and its own religious feelings about the
nature and the role of the king as pharaoh.

Noch weiter bietet uns das Werk von Bingen und Bagnall Argumente an (im Zitat oben blau
markiert), um etwaige Propaganda zu entkräften. So bei dem Versuch Kleopatra und die Ptolemäer
zu gräzisieren. Wie wir sehen sprechen die Autoren davon, dass die Bezeichnungen "Grieche" (als
auch "Ägypter") zu jener Zeit einen "Sozialen Status" bezeichnen. Wohingegen die Bezeichnung
"Makedonier" eine ethnische Bezeichnung darstellt.