Continued from the Part I. ...“So Cleopatra, taking only Apollodorus the Sicilian from among her friends, embarked in a little skiff and landed at the palace when it was already getting dark; and as it was impossible to escape notice otherwise, she stretched herself at full length inside a bed-sack, while Apollodorus tied the bed-sack up with a cord and carried it indoors [...]
To modern ears, the name Cleopatra refers to only one woman – the famed last Queen of Egypt who tragically chose the wrong lover and the wrong side in the Roman Civil Wars. However, this famous Cleopatra was actually known as Cleopatra VII, the last in a long line of kings and queens descended from the Macedonian general Ptolemy I Soter. The original [...]
Egyptians never called their river “Nile”. This word comes from the Egyptian “nwy”, which means 'water' – it was mispronounced by Greeks as “Neilos”. But the original and very ancient name of Nile was “Hapi” probably signifying "the hidden". Later, Egyptians started to call the Nile 'the river', and Hapi became the name of river’s god, or, more precisely, the god of the [...]