The Last Pharaoh — Cleopatra and the Death of Ancient Egypt | The Ashen Archive

There is a wall in the temple of Hathor at Dendera, in Upper Egypt, that carries a relief carving of a woman in the double crown of the pharaohs. She is the last pharaoh. Behind her stands her son — who will be killed three weeks after her death. The tradition that produced this carving had been continuous for three thousand years. This is not the story of Cleopatra the seductress. It is the story of what ended with her: the hieroglyphs, the temples, the theology, the living knowledge of Ma'at that thirty centuries of priests had maintained and that died, slowly, in the centuries after Rome swallowed Egypt. The last hieroglyphic inscription was carved in 394 CE. The man who carved it was a priest of Thoth, the god of writing. He did not know he was the last. Settle in. Let the night be quiet.