Crown of the Two Lands

For three thousand years — longer than the whole span from Cleopatra to our own day — the land of Egypt was ruled by god-kings: living embodiments of the falcon Horus, lords of the Two Lands, charged with holding up the order of the world. From the shadowy king who first joined the southern valley to the northern delta, through the builders of the great pyramids, the woman who ruled as a man, the heretic who tried to abolish all the gods but one, the boy whose golden tomb the robbers missed, and the relentless self-promoter who covered Egypt with his colossi, the office of pharaoh endured every collapse and absorbed every conqueror — Hyksos, Kushite, Persian, and at last Greek. This is the whole sweep of that astonishing succession, told through the rulers themselves and building to the most famous of them all: Cleopatra VII, the brilliant, cultivated, ruthless Greek queen who learned the language of her Egyptian subjects, presented herself as the living goddess Isis, and gambled an ancient kingdom against the rising power of Rome. She bound the two greatest Romans of the age to her cause, and when she lost, she chose to die a free queen rather than be paraded through Rome in chains — and with her death, three thousand years of pharaohs came to an end. Clear, vivid, and honest about what we know and what we only guess, this is popular history at its most sweeping: the rise and fall of the longest line of kings the world has ever seen, and the unforgettable woman who was the last to wear the double crown.