"Ho! Stranger! OHO! Ignorant One! YOU have been such a long time in coming! You are so very late in time! YES! it is YOU. Because I think YOU know nothing of Ptolomaios ----Ptolemy----The Greek who was pharaoh of Egypt, or of the terrible tragedy of his house. You do not know who Ptolemy is, do you? You have never heard of him, have you? You cannot so much as pronounce his name( do not say the P, reader!) Truly, what you deserve just now is a beating on the soles of your feet. Yes, I think you have forgotten every last thing about the black land and the red, the two lands that I called Kemet---The land the Greeks are pleased to call Aigyptos, that you may have heard called Egypt. You have forgotten Ra, the sun god.You have forgotten Anubis, the dog headed god, who is pharaoh of the underworld. You have not a clue who is Sobek, the crocodile god. Your ignorance is disgraceful---disgraceful---and the only pharaoh you have heard of is the feeble Tutankhamen! Truly, THOTH will have to teach you everything. But do not fear. Be not afraid. Calm yourself, reader; we shall save up the beating for later. Thoth will be pleased to be your guide. For you must know that I am THOTH. " Duncan Sprott from his book, "The Ptolomies" PTOLEMY SON OF LAGOS His early years are obscure in part because he took great pains to create a politically favorable public image of himself. We can cull some sketchy facts and interpolate learned speculations, but they remain speculations. It cannot be doubted that he was an exceptional soldier and a shrewd strategist. It is only through these qualities that Ptolemy survived from his beginnings. He was born in Eordaia, a rural backwater of Macedon. His mother was Arsinoë, perhaps a distant relative of the king, Philip II. She was said to have been already pregnant when she married Lagos who would become the father of Ptolemy, but always there would be sly speculation. It was forever whispered that it was Philip himself, who was the father of Ptolemy and that he had married her off to Lagos, a commander in his army, with the promise of great advancement. This of course, promulgated the lasting suspicion that Ptolemy was the half brother of Alexander, a rumor which Ptolemy used to his own advantage throughout his later life. We know of Ptolemy that he arrived in Pella, the capital of Macedon, when he was 14 years old. He was a barefoot and uncouth boy from the farm, handpicked by the king to be trained with the sons of the aristocrats in the royal school of the pages.He was laughed at by the other boys for his backward manners, but not for long. Ptolemy was a fighter among fighters. He rose to be a bodyguard and companion to the young prince, Alexander and became a valued general in Alexander's conquering army. The awkward barefoot boy derided by his peers went on to be a general over them and in the end, Pharaoh and god in Egypt. I shall make no effort here to re write the biography of Ptolemy. There are many already available to you. I provide only a link bibliography to web sites where interested Egyptians and Hellenes may learn about the life of the founder of the last dynasty to rule Egypt before it became a part of Rome. The tale of the family of Ptolemy who ruled for the next 300 years is a grotesque litany of ritualized incest and murder which continued unchecked until it was effectively ended by the suicide of Cleopatra VII. The story of the barefoot boy from the hills of Macedon ends in the tomb of a queen of Egypt who dared to play the great game to win the world and lost. Web Bibliography click on the scarab to visit a site The House Of Ptolemy is the one stop page with a directory which will lead you to a wealth of information all over the web. Wikipedia has an extensive page about Ptolemy with many links Livius has a detailed history of all the facts known for certain aboutPtolemy. A transcript of the 1927 book about the house of Ptolemy by E,R.Bevan. You can read it all on line for free thanks to The University Of Chicago. Ptolemy in The Wiki Classics Dictionary. If you have information about other sites, please share them with others on this thread by posting. Read any good books about the Ptolemies? let's hear about them. The Great Cleopatra VII is an integral part of the tale. Was she a cunning ruler out to get the world or a foolish woman in love? What do you think?