The coins of Ptolemy I Soter, founder of the Ptolemaic dynasty in Egypt, provide a vivid illustration of the evolution of his ruling ideology. His main concern at first was to secure his control of Egypt, especially vis-à-vis the competing claims of the other successors. Ptolemy legitimized his authority particularly through the figure of Alexander the Great, whose embalmed corpse he hijacked on its way to the royal necropolis in Macedonia and buried in Memphis, the ancient capital of the pharaohs. At the beginning of his rule, Ptolemy continued to issue Alexander's own coins such as the tetradrachm illustrated here (Figure 1), bearing the head of Alexander’s ancestor Heracles, identified by his trademark lion skin headdress.

Soon after Alexander’s sudden death in 323 BCE, the successors began to replace the head of Heracles on their coinage with the head of the deified Alexander (Figure 2), as symbolized by the ram’s horn curling around his ear, an attribute of the Egyptian god Ammon (whom the Greeks equated with Zeus). Alexander’s claim that he was the son of Ammon was allegedly confirmed by the god himself during his pilgrimage to the sanctuary of Zeus/Ammon at Siwah (in the desert to the west of Memphis) following his conquest of Egypt.

Instead of simply replacing the head of Heracles with that of the deified Alexander, Ptolemy was the first of the successors to modify Alexander’s coinage. The image of Alexander that Ptolemy chose to display on his coinage wore an elephant headdress instead of the lion skin (Figure 3), although he did retain the ram’s horn of Zeus Ammon (almost obscured by the elephant scalp), and the aegis (an attribute of Zeus) around his neck. These attributes were potent and polyvalent symbols, designed to confirm Ptolemy as Alexander’s successor to his Greek and Macedonian subjects, while simultaneously presenting him as a legitimate pharaoh to the larger Egyptian population. The elephant and the ram’s horn not only connect Ptolemy to Alexander’s conquest of the east and divine filiation from the god Ammon, but were deliberately chosen to place him into a tradition of representations of the pharaoh that were common in New Kingdom Egypt.

Ptolemy was also the first of the successors to replace Alexander with his own portrait on his coinage. In this gold stater (Figure 4), Alexander is relegated to the reverse, where he stands on a chariot driving an elephant, although Ptolemy continued to display on his coinage attributes associated with Alexander such as the diadem and Zeus’ aegis. By this point in his lengthy reign Ptolemy was less preoccupied with questions of legitimacy and more concerned with transforming his new capital of Alexandria into a suitable royal seat and paving the way for his own eventual deification (following in the footsteps of the pharaohs of the ancient kingdom of Egypt). In my recent research, I have examined how Ptolemy’s coinage reflects his reshaping of the literary tradition on Alexander's visit to Ammon’s shrine at Siwah in order to give it an explicitly Egyptian twist and lay the foundations for the recognition of his dynastic rule by all elements of his subject population.