| Arsinoë IV | |
|---|---|
 Rescue of Arsinoe, byJacopo Tintoretto, 1555–1556 | |
| Reign | September 48 BC withPtolemy XIII (December 48 – January 47 BC) |
| Predecessor | Ptolemy XIII andCleopatra VII |
| Successor | Ptolemy XIV and Cleopatra VII |
| Father | Ptolemy XII Auletes |
| Mother | Unknown |
| Born | 68–63 BC Alexandria,Egypt |
| Died | 41 BC Ephesus (modern-daySelçuk,İzmir,Turkey) |
| Burial | Ephesus |
| Dynasty | Ptolemaic dynasty |
Arsinoë IV (Ancient Greek:Ἀρσινόη; between 68 and 63 BC – 41 BC) was the youngest daughter ofPtolemy XII Auletes. One of the last members of thePtolemaic dynasty, she claimed title of Queen ofPtolemaic Egypt and co-rulership with her brotherPtolemy XIII in 48 BC – 47 BC in opposition to her sister or half-sister,Cleopatra VII.[1][2][3][4] For her role in conducting thesiege of Alexandria (47 BC) against Cleopatra, Arsinoë was taken as a prisoner of war toRome by theRoman triumvirJulius Caesar following the defeat of Ptolemy XIII in theBattle of the Nile. Arsinoë was then exiled to theTemple of Artemis atEphesus inRoman Anatolia, but she was executed there by orders oftriumvirMark Antony in 41 BC at the behest of his lover Cleopatra VII.
Arsinoë was the third, possibly fourth daughter of Ptolemy XII by an unknown woman (Cleopatra VII's probable motherCleopatra V had died or been repudiated not long after Cleopatra VII was born, hence it's unclear if she bore her husband's younger children.)[1][2][3][4] When Ptolemy XII died in 51 BC, he left his eldest son and eldest surviving daughter, Ptolemy and Cleopatra, as joint rulers of Egypt, but Ptolemy soon dethroned Cleopatra and forced her to flee fromAlexandria.Julius Caesar arrived in Alexandria in 48 BC pursuing his rival,Pompey, whom he had defeated at theBattle 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 in accordance with Ptolemy XII's will, Cleopatra and Ptolemy would rule Egypt jointly, and in a similar motion restoredCyprus, which had been annexed by Rome in 58 BC, to Egypt's rule and gave it to Arsinoë and her youngest brother,Ptolemy XIV.[5][6]
However, Arsinoë then escaped from the capital with her mentor, the eunuchGanymedes, and took command of the Egyptian army.[7] She also proclaimed herself Queen as Arsinoë IV, executedAchillas, whom she had replaced as the army commander, and placed Ganymedes second in command of the army immediately below herself.[6][8] Under Arsinoë's leadership, the Egyptians enjoyed some success against theRomans. The Egyptians trapped Caesar in a section of the city by building walls to close off the streets. Caesar countered this measure by digging wells into the porous limestone beneath the city that contained fresh water. This only partially alleviated the situation, so he then sent ships out along the coast to search for more fresh water there.[9] Caesar realized that he would need to break out of the city and hoped to do so by gaining control of the harbor. He launched an attack to seize control of theLighthouse of Alexandria but Arsinoë's forces drove him back. Recognizing his imminent defeat, Caesar removed his armor and purple cloak so that he could swim to the safety of a nearby Roman ship.
The leading Egyptian officers, having become disappointed with Ganymedes, and under a pretext of wanting peace, negotiated with Caesar to exchange Arsinoë for Ptolemy XIII.[10][11] After Ptolemy was released he continued the war until the Romans received reinforcements and inflicted adecisive defeat upon the Egyptians. Arsinoë, now in Roman captivity, was transported toRome, where in 46 BC she was forced to appear in Caesar'striumph and was paraded behind a burning effigy of theLighthouse of Alexandria, which had been the scene of her victory over him.[12] Arsinoe, along withJuba II, elicited sympathy from the crowd.[13] Despite the custom ofstrangling prominent prisoners in triumphs when the festivities concluded, Caesar was pressured to spare Arsinoë and granted her sanctuary at thetemple of Artemis inEphesus. Arsinoë lived in the temple for a few years, always keeping a watchful eye on her sister Cleopatra, who perceived Arsinoë as a threat to her power.[14] In 41 BC, at Cleopatra's instigation,Mark Antony ordered Arsinoë's execution on the steps of the temple.[15] Her murder was a gross violation of the temple sanctuary and an act that scandalised Rome.[16] 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.[17]
Arsinoë's year of birth is generally regarded as being between 68 and 63 BC: TheEncyclopædia Britannica cites 63 BC, making her 15 at the time of her uprising and defeat againstJulius Caesar and 22 at her death,[18] while the researcher Alissa Lyon cites 68 BC making her 27 at her death.[19]Joyce Tyldesley places her birth date as between 68 and 65 BC.[20] 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 may be Arsinoë,[16] however it has turned out since then that body in fact belonged to a male (see below).
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 strongest evidence that she was in fact exercising her own authority is that Caesar, after the Pharos debacle, was prepared to release Ptolemy XIII — a male, who continued the war against Caesar — just to get his hands on her.[21][22]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.[23]
In 1904 an octagonal monument situated in the centre ofEphesus was discovered. Although no inscripitions remained on the tomb, it was dated to have been built between 50 and 20 BC and was considered a heroon immediately due to its prominent location and building style.[24][4][25]
When the tomb was first accessed in 1929, a marble sarcophagus was found inside the burial chamber. The skeletal remains discovered inside it were left on site while the skull was removed by Austrian archaeologistJosef Keil, one of the archaeologists who had worked on the excavation of the tomb. He suggested that the remains belonged to a female about 20 years of age who had been a “very distinguished personality”, without providing sufficient data to support his claims.[24][25]
Several decades laterJosef Weninger, then head of the Anthropological Institute at the University of Vienna, got hold of the skull and published a study on its morphology in 1953, similarly assessing the remains to belong to a female individual around 16-17 years of age; a “refined type of human”.[26]
In the 1990s the octagonal monument that had housed the remains was hypothesized by Hilke Thür of theAustrian Academy of Sciences to be the tomb of Arsinoë IV.[16] Thür had re-entered the tomb at Ephesus in 1993 and examined the post-cranial remains that had been left inside the burial chamber. Her hypothesis regarding the skeletal remains was based on the shape of the tomb, which was octagonal like the second tier of the Lighthouse of Alexandria, the radiocarbon dating of the bones (between 200 and 20 BC), the individual’s sex, and the age at their death.[27][28][29]
A DNA test of the post-cranial skeleton was also attempted to determine the identity of the young individual. However, it was impossible to get an accurate reading since the bones had been handled too many times.[30] The skull was not available for analysis at the time as it was thought to have been lost decades prior. Thür alleged that the skeleton displayed signs of African ancestry mixed with classical Grecian features[16] – however Boas, Gravlee, Bernard and Leonard, and others have demonstrated that skull measurements are not a reliable indicator of race,[31] and the measurements were jotted down in 1920 before modern forensic science took hold.[32] Arsinoë and Cleopatra shared the same father (Ptolemy XII Auletes) but may have had different mothers,[33][34] with Thür claiming the alleged African ancestry came from the individual’s mother.[27]
In 2009 Kanz, Großschmidt & Kiesslich presented a morphological analysis of the post-cranial skeleton and a soft tissue reconstruction of the head performed byforensic anthropologistsCaroline Wilkinson and Christopher Rynn to show what the individual may have looked like.[35] The reconstructions were done with images and measurements from Weninger’s 1953 publication only, as the scientist still did not have access to the skull itself seeing as it was long presumed lost.[36][37] Age was estimated to be between 15 and 17 years and sex was concluded as female on examination of the post-cranial skeleton and interpretation of Weninger’s notes on the skull. DNA analyses were carried out but did not yield conclusive results.[37]
English classicistMary Beard criticized Thür’s conclusions as well as the belief that the Ephesus skeleton belonged to Arsinoë, originally Thür’s idea that had been revived by Kanz and colleagues. In an online essay she pointed out that the tomb lacked any surviving inscription of name and the skull upon which conclusions were partly founded had not even been available to Thür or Kanz. Furthermore, she suggested that the individual’s age at the time of death as estimated by Kanz from the post-cranial remains might be too young for them to have belonged to Arsinoë as she is thought to have been in her mid-twenties when she died.[4]
As it stood, the only thorough examination of the skull had been done half a century ago. Although it was evident that the Ephesus tomb had been built for a high status individual such as Arsinoë (time, place and style all support this hypothesis), without the skull it was impossible to truly identify the remains.
In 2022 Ernst Rudolf and Peter Scherrer, archaeologists of theUniversity of Graz were able to locate the skull at the Department of Evolutionary Anthropology, University of Vienna. Old notes and photographs made its identification possible. The archaeologists hoped that enough DNA had been preserved in the petrous part of the temporal bone for further analysis and finally uncovering the truth behind the Ephesus skull.[37][38]
In 2025 a subsequent study[25] led by anthropologists of the Department of Evolutionary Anthropology,University of Vienna, new findings about the skull were revealed.Weber, G.W., Šimková, P.G., Fernandes, D.et al. re-investigated not only sex and age at death, but looked into the individual’s geographic origins, identifying traits and anomalies of the specimen. Modern methods such asgeometric morphometrics were applied for the first time, making it possible to analyse the skull’s 3D shape and size.
Radiocarbon dating was performed once again on the skull supporting earlier findings, placing the skeletal remains of the Ephesus tomb between 200 to 35 BC. With advanced methods that had not yet been available at the time of their discovery (ancient DNA protocols), DNA was now able to be extracted from the skull and analysed successfully. Additional DNA-samples of the post-cranial skeleton (femur and rib fragment) remaining in Ephesus were made available by the Austrian Archaeological Institute and sent to the anthropological team in Vienna for further analysis. The DNA analyses from the cranium as well as the femur (the rib fragment was insufficient) were able to demonstrate that the Ephesus skeletal remains did in fact not belong to Arsinoë IV but a male individual.[25]
Population genomic analyses were performed to narrow down the individual’s geographic origin. Results suggest that he was likely from the central region of the Italian peninsula or Sardinia (Nuragic Sardinians).
Both the dental age assessment and the condition of the sphenobasilarsynchondrosis (also: sphenooccipital synchondrosis) were congruent with an age at death of the individual between 11 and 14 years. The sphenobasilar synchondrosis was still open in the Ephesus skull whereas it closes in male individuals after the age of 13.[39]
During further analyses the team surroundingGerhard Weber realized that earlier investigations of the skull’s morphology had not been comprehensive. Many apparent anomalies of the cranium had never been described in earlier publications[26]. The left occipitomastoid suture was already obliterated (which normally fuses around the age of 65[40]), whereas it remained open on the right side. Thiscraniosynostosis (a premature closure of a cranial suture) could partly explain the deformity/asymmetry of the skull. Most striking was the underdeveloped and abnormally vertically inclined maxilla. Both the obliteration of the suture and the strong inclination of the maxilla pointing downwards were not recognized earlier, though apparent macroscopically.[25]
Developmental stress could have played a role for the asymmetry of the skull and underdevelopment of the maxilla, but these findings do not align with earlier ones on the post-cranial skeleton where no stress markers such asHarris-lines were found.[35] Causes for the anomalies found on the skull could be multifarious;Vitamin-D-deficiency, a number of other metabolic disorders[41] as well as genetic disorders such asTreacher Collins Syndrome[42] might have led to the developmental disturbances. Further DNA-analyses might be able to positively identify them.
Why an unknown boy with severe developmental defects was buried inside such an elaborate monument amidst Ephesus remains unclear – just like the whereabouts of Arsinoë IV’s remains.
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Arsinoe IV Born: 68–63 BC Died: 41 BC | ||
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| Preceded by | Pharaoh of Egypt (claimant) 48–47 BC withPtolemy XIII | Succeeded by |
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