Ptolemy II Philadelphus

[18] Ptolemy I had originally supported the establishment of his friend Seleucus I as ruler of Mesopotamia, but relations had cooled after the Battle of Ipsos in 301 BC, when both kings claimed Syria.At that time, Ptolemy I had occupied the southern portion of the region, Coele Syria, up to the Eleutherus river, while Seleucus established control over the territory north of that point.The acquisitions of the Ptolemaic kingdom at this time can be traced in epigraphic sources and seem to include Samos, Miletus, Caria, Lycia, Pamphylia, and perhaps Cilicia.[21] Shortly thereafter, Magas invaded Egypt, marching on Alexandria, but he was forced to turn back when Libyan nomads launched an attack on Cyrene.He had hired 4,000 Galatian mercenaries, but soon after their arrival the Gauls mutinied and so Ptolemy marooned them on a deserted island in the Nile where "they perished at one another's hands or by famine.[27] Around 275 BC, Ptolemaic forces invaded Nubia and annexed the northern twelve miles of this territory, subsequently known as the Dodekaschoinos ('twelve-mile land').[28] The conquest was publicly celebrated in the panegyric court poetry of Theocritus and by the erection of a long list of Nubian districts at the Temple of Isis at Philae, near Syene.These settlements allowed the Ptolemies access to the western end of the caravan routes of the incense trade, run by the Nabataeans, who became close allies of the Ptolemaic empire.Ptolemaic naval forces even entered the Black Sea, waging a campaign in support of the free city of Byzantion.[37] Ptolemy was able to pursue this interventionist policy without any challenge because a long-running civil war in Macedon had left a power vacuum in the northern Aegean.The plan seems to have been for him to rendezvous with the Spartan army and then use their combined forces to isolate and expel the Antigonid garrisons at Sounion and Piraeus which held the Athenians in check.The reasons for this reluctance are unclear, but it appears that, especially in the last years of the war, Ptolemaic involvement was limited to financial support for the Greek city-states and naval assistance.Some scholars, such as Hans Hauben, argue that Kos belongs to the Chremonidean War and was fought around 262/1 BC, with Patroclus in command of the Ptolemaic fleet.[53] In Delos, Ptolemy established a festival, called the Ptolemaia in 249 BC, which advertised continued Ptolemaic investment and involvement in the Cyclades, even though political control seems to have been lost by this time.[56] A republican government led by two Cyrenaeans named Ecdelus and Demophanes controlled Cyrene until Berenice married Ptolemy III in 246 BC after his accession to the throne.Following her death around 269 BC, Arsinoe II was honoured with a separate cult in her own right, with every temple in Egypt required to include a statue of her as a 'temple-sharing deity' alongside the sanctuary's main god.One of the Ptolemaia festivals from the 270s BC was described by the historian Callixenus of Rhodes and part of his account survives, giving a sense of the enormous scale of the event.Twenty-four chariots drawn by elephants were followed by a procession of lions, leopards, panthers, camels, antelopes, wild asses, ostriches, a bear, a giraffe and a rhinoceros.The Nesiotic League, which contained the Aegean islands under Ptolemaic control, held its own Ptolemaia festival at Delos from the early 270s BC.[62] As part of his patronage of Egyptian religion and the priestly elite, Ptolemy II financed large-scale building works at temples throughout Egypt.[63] In addition, Ptolemy initiated work at a number of other sites, including (from north to south): Ptolemaic Egypt was administered by a complicated bureaucratic structure.[71][72] The whole of Egypt was divided into thirty-nine districts, called nomes (portions), whose names and borders had remained roughly the same since early Pharaonic times.[73] This decree was followed in 258 BC by a 'General Inventory' in which the whole of Egypt was surveyed to determine the quantity of different types of land, irrigation, canals, and forests within the kingdom and the amount of income that could be levied from it.[73] The Zenon papyri also record experiments by the dioiketes Apollonius to establish cash crop regimes, particularly growing castor oil, with mixed success.In addition to these measures focused on agriculture, Ptolemy II also established extensive gold mining operations, in Nubia at Wadi Allaqi and in the eastern desert at Abu Zawal.[citation needed] Ptolemy II was an eager patron of scholarship, funding the expansion of the Library of Alexandria and patronising scientific research.Poets like Callimachus, Theocritus, Apollonius of Rhodes, and Posidippus were provided with stipends and produced masterpieces of Hellenistic poetry, including panegyrics in honour of the Ptolemaic family.[74] A tradition preserved in the pseudepigraphical Letter of Aristeas presents Ptolemy as the driving force behind the translation of the Hebrew Bible into Greek as the Septuagint.[80] These two friendships were tested in 264 BC, when the First Punic War broke out between Carthage and Rome, but Ptolemy II remained studiously neutral in the conflict, refusing a direct Carthaginian request for financial assistance.[81][79] Ptolemy is recorded by Pliny the Elder as having sent an ambassador named Dionysius to the Mauryan court at Pataliputra in India,[82] probably to Emperor Ashoka: "But [India] has been treated of by several other Greek writers who resided at the courts of Indian kings, such, for instance, as Megasthenes, and by Dionysius, who was sent thither by [Ptolemy II] Philadelphus, expressly for the purpose: all of whom have enlarged upon the power and vast resources of these nations."