Octavian 'Named' as Egyptian Pharaoh

[Melvadius]

I checked the dates first before posting this but a 31 Mar 2010 item in the Heritage Key claims that:

 

A new translation of a Roman victory stele, erected in April 29 BC, shows Octavian Augustus

[caldrail]

Octavian was not officially crowned pharoah then, but accorded that status as the de facto ruler of Egypt. A sense of continuity must have been important to priests - as it usually is - and so the Roman emperors effectively formed a new dynasty of foreign kings. A stable regime in Egypt would have been very important and hence the continuity worked for Octavian. A simple example of realpolitik. In any case, Egypt was a land of barbarians so where was the harm in assuming the role of a king there? Actually, a clever Roman rival could have made much of that, given the criticism levelled at Marc Antony over his love affair with ambitious and crafty (not to mention ruthless) Cleopatra. Perhaps then it was wiser not to make any big deal of it, and if the Egyptians wanted him to have that status, well.. They were barbarians after all.

[Melvadius]

Personally I would question the extent to which Octavian or even his deputies in Egypt knew that his name had been added in a cartouche on this particular stele - how many of them passed where this stele had been erected and of those how many would have been able to read Egyptian hyrogliphics?

 

An alternative hypothesis could simply have been the priestly class trying to carry on as normal and by tradition needing to put athe current pharoh's name into a standardised formula for the declaration. In these circumstances turning Octavian's name into a cartouche and adding it in at the appropriate point, as the next best thing being their current Roman overlord, could have been seen as a nice 'bureaucratic' solution that no one who could read the stele would have felt it appropriate to complain about to the Roman authorities.

Edited April 13, 2010 by Melvadius