Stele of Cleopatra VII Offering to Isis
Unknown · 2 July 51 BC, year 1 of Cleopatra VII
Under a winged sun disc a pharaoh in a kilt and the double crown holds out two vases of offering to the goddess Isis, who sits nursing the infant Horus, Harpocrates, wearing the cow horns and sun disc and the vulture headdress. A table of offerings stands between them. Traces of red paint remain. The figures are carved in raised relief, and beneath them a text is cut in Greek. Read that text and the pharaoh changes identity: the dedication is made in the name of Queen Cleopatra Philopator, and it is dated to the first year of her reign, the second of July fifty one BC.
The queen is Cleopatra the Seventh, then eighteen years old and newly on the throne. In the Egyptian manner the ruler is shown as a man, the pharaoh being a male office, while the Greek inscription, the language of her court, gives her true name. The stele was set up by a devotee of Isis to honour the goddess and the new queen, and it is one of the earliest dated monuments of her reign. The Louvre bought it in May nineteen seventy two.
Did You Know? Cleopatra is shown here as a male pharaoh in a kilt, with the queen's name written only in the Greek text below.
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