Arsinoë IV (Greek: Ἀρσινόη; between 68 and 63 BC – 41 BC) was the fourth of six children and the youngest daughter of Ptolemy XII Auletes. Queen and co-ruler of Ptolemaic Egypt with her brother Ptolemy XIII from 48 BC – 47 BC, she was one of the last members of the Ptolemaic dynasty of ancient Egypt. Arsinoë IV was also the half-sister of Cleopatra VII. For her role in conducting the siege of Alexandria (47 BC) against her sister Cleopatra, Arsinoë was taken as a prisoner of war to Rome by the Roman triumvir Julius Caesar following the defeat of Ptolemy XIII in the Battle of the Nile. Arsinoë was exiled to the Temple of Artemis at Ephesus in Roman Anatolia. Still, she was executed there by orders of triumvir Mark Antony in 41 BC at the behest of his lover Cleopatra VII.
History of Arsinoe IV
Arsinoë was the third, possibly fourth daughter of Ptolemy XII by an unknown woman (presumably since Cleopatra VII’s probable mother, Cleopatra V, had died or been repudiated not long after Cleopatra VII was born.) When Ptolemy XII died in 51 BC, he left his eldest son and daughter, Ptolemy and Cleopatra, as joint rulers of Egypt. Still, Ptolemy soon dethroned Cleopatra and forced her to flee from Alexandria. Julius Caesar arrived in Alexandria in 48 BC pursuing his rival, Pompey, whom he had defeated at the Battle of Pharsalus. When he arrived in Alexandria, he was presented with Pompey’s head. The execution of his long-term rival ended the possibility of an alliance between Caesar and Ptolemy, and he sided with Cleopatra’s faction. He declared that under Ptolemy XII’s will, Cleopatra and Ptolemy would rule Egypt jointly, and in a similar motion, restored Cyprus, which had been annexed by Rome in 58 BC, to Egypt’s rule and gave it to Arsinoë and her youngest brother, Ptolemy XIV.
However, Arsinoë escaped from the capital with her mentor, the eunuch Ganymedes, and took command of the Egyptian army. She also proclaimed herself Queen as Arsinoë IV, executed Achillas, and placed Ganymedes second in command of the military immediately below herself. Under Arsinoë’s leadership, the Egyptians enjoyed some success against the Romans. The Egyptians trapped Caesar in a section of the city by building walls to close off the streets. Then Arsinoë directed Ganymedes to pour seawater into the canals that supplied Caesar’s cisterns which caused panic among Caesar’s troops. Caesar countered this measure by digging wells into the porous limestone that contained fresh water beneath the city. This only partially alleviated the situation, so he sent ships along the coast to search for more fresh water there. Caesar realized that he would need to break out of the city and hoped to do so by gaining control of the harbour. He launched an attack to seize control of the Lighthouse of Alexandria, but Arsinoë’s forces drove him back. Recognizing his imminent defeat, Caesar removed his armour and purple cloak so that he could swim to the safety of a nearby Roman ship.
The leading Egyptian officers, disappointed with Ganymedes and under a pretext of wanting peace, negotiated with Caesar to exchange Arsinoë for Ptolemy XIII. After Ptolemy was released, he continued the war until the Romans received reinforcements and inflicted a decisive defeat upon the Egyptians. Arsinoë, now in Roman captivity, was transported to Rome. In 46 BC, she was forced to appear in Caesar’s triumph and was paraded behind a burning effigy of the Lighthouse of Alexandria, which had been the scene of her victory over him. Arsinoe, along with Juba II, elicited empathy from the crowd. Despite the custom of strangling prominent prisoners in triumphs when the festivities concluded, Caesar was pressured to spare Arsinoë and granted her sanctuary at the temple of Artemis in Ephesus. Arsinoë lived in the temple for a few years, always watching her sister Cleopatra, who perceived Arsinoë as a threat to her power. In 41 BC, at Cleopatra’s instigation, Mark Antony ordered Arsinoë’s execution on the temple’s steps. Her murder was a gross violation of the temple sanctuary and an act that scandalized Rome. The eunuch priest (Megabyzos), who had welcomed Arsinoë on her arrival at the temple as “queen”, was only pardoned when an embassy from Ephesus made a petition to Cleopatra.
Year of birth
Arsinoë’s year of birth is generally regarded as being between 68 and 63 BC: The Encyclopædia Britannica cites 63 BC, making her 15 at the time of her uprising and defeat against Julius Caesar and 22 at her death, while the researcher Alissa Lyon cites 68 BC making her 27 at her end. Joyce Tyldesley places her birth date as between 68 and 65 BC. An alternate hypothesis was in the docudrama “Cleopatra: Portrait of a Killer”, in which it was alleged a headless skeleton of a female child between the ages of 15 and 18 might be Arsinoë.
Her actions in the brief war against Caesar naturally suggest that she was older than that and, thus, would make it impossible for her to be the headless female child buried in the tomb. Perhaps the most substantial evidence that she was exercising her authority is that Caesar, after the Pharos debacle, was prepared to release Ptolemy XIII — a male who continued the war against Caesar — to get his hands on her. Stacy Schiff, who places Arsinoë’s age at around seventeen during the events of 48-47 BC, notes that Arsinoë “burned with ambition” and was “not the kind of girl who inspired complacency,” writing that once Arsinoë escaped the royal palace, she became more vocal against her half-sister and that she assumed her position as head of the army alongside anti-Caesar courtier Achillas.
Tomb at Ephesus
In the 1990s, an octagonal monument situated in the centre of Ephesus was hypothesized by Hilke Thür of the Austrian Academy of Sciences to be the tomb of Arsinoë. Although no inscription remains on the tomb, it was dated between 50 and 20 BC. In 1926 the skeleton of a female estimated to be between the ages of 15 and 18 years at the time of her death was found in the burial chamber. Thür’s identification of the skeleton was based on the shape of the tomb, which was octagonal, like the second tier of the Lighthouse of Alexandria, the carbon dating of the bones (between 200 and 20 BC), the gender of the skeleton, and the age of the child at death. It was also claimed that the tomb boasts Egyptian motifs, such as “papyri-bundle” columns.
A DNA test was also attempted to determine the identity of the child. However, it was impossible to get an accurate reading since the bones had been handled too many times, and the skull had been lost in Germany during World War II. Hilke Thür examined the old notes and photographs of the now-missing skull, reconstructed using computer technology by forensic anthropologist Caroline Wilkinson to show what the woman may have looked like. The measurements were jotted down in 1920 before modern forensic science took hold. Thür alleged that it shows signs of African ancestry mixed with classical Grecian features – even though Boas, Gravlee, Bernard and Leonard, and others had demonstrated that skull measurements are not a reliable indicator of race. Furthermore, Arsinoë and Cleopatra shared the same father (Ptolemy XII Auletes) but had different mothers, with Thür claiming the alleged African ancestry came from the skeleton’s mother.
Mary Beard wrote a dissenting essay criticizing the findings, pointing out that, first, there is no surviving name on the tomb and that the claim the tomb is alleged to invoke the shape of the Pharos Lighthouse “doesn’t add up”; second, the skull doesn’t survive intact, and the age of the skeleton is too young to be Arsinoë’s (the bones said to be that of a 15-18-year-old, with Arsinoë being around her mid-twenties at her death). Third, since Cleopatra and Arsinoë were not known to have the same mother, “the ethnic argument goes largely out of the window.” Furthermore, as used by Thür to determine race, craniometry is based on scientific racism that is now generally considered a pseudoscience that supports the exploitation of groups of people to perpetuate racial oppression and distorted future views of the biological basis of race.
A writer from The Times described the identification of the skeleton as “a triumph of conjecture over certainty”. It has never been definitively proven the skeleton is that of Arsinoë IV. If the monument is the tomb of Arsinoë, she would be the only member of the Ptolemaic dynasty whose remains have been recovered.
