Deifying a Monarchy: The Ram's Horns of Arsinoe II

After the death of Arsinoe II, queen of Ptolemaic Egypt, ca. 268 BCE, her brother-husband Ptolemy II had her deified and minted a new set of coins in her honor. These coins depict the now divine Arsinoe, with youthful, idealized features and various divine symbols, including the stephanē crown and lily scepter of Hera. Perhaps most interestingly, a ram’s horn curls around her ear. I argue that this horn has been misunderstood in terms of its nature and of its cultural implications.

First, this paper examines the horn itself, and argues that is in fact hair styled to resemble a horn. This paper further examines the interplay between masculinity femininity, Egyptianness and Greekness of Arsinoe’s ram’s horns, which occur both on these coins and in Egyptian portraits. I argue that the horns on the coin portrait are part of an iconographical rhetoric that mixes Greek, Egyptian, masculine, and feminine imagery to set apart Arsinoe as a liminal goddess, whose divine influence spans beyond normal social and cultural categories. This liminality caters the message of royal authority to different audiences and demonstrates the universality of Ptolemaic power.

 Although scholars have written about these coins and noted the horn in their descriptions, this iconographical element has gone mostly unstudied. Poole (1969), Smith (1988), Mørkholm (1991), Ashton (2001), Müller (2009), and Carney (2013) note that these horns recall certain coin portraits of Alexander the Great and the legend that his father was the horned Greco-Egyptian god Zeus-Ammon. These scholars briefly note that these horns are otherwise unique to Arsinoe II, whom Demotic sources similarly called the daughter of Amun, but that is the extent of their discussion. These assertions are correct, but insufficient.

I argue that Arsinoe’s horn is in fact a braid of hair that has been deliberately styled to resemble Alexander’s horns. Brunelle (1976) hypothesized that the horn might in fact be a type of earring, and Svensen (1995) that it might merely be a lock of hair, and not a horn at all. They are right to notice that the horn is not the same in nature as Alexander’s. The horn does recall Alexander’s, but they are not identical. Alexander’s jumps out as the most prominent aspect of his image, even obscuring the royal diadem. Arsinoe’s is much subtler than Alexander’s and is overshadowed by her regalia, and upon close examination its texture is noticeably different.

Finally, this paper examines the Egyptian context of Arsinoe’s horns. Additionally, as noted above, these also appear in her Egyptian images. Ram’s horns carry important resonances in Egyptian religious and royal iconography, being associated with the gods Amun, Khnum, Horus, and Osiris. As Vassilika (1989) notes that these horns are used in pharaonic imagery to represent the deification of the (male) pharaoh. These contexts create a symbol of masculinity and the virile masculine elements of (re)creation. The coin portraits take this image and feminize and, to an extent, Hellenize it.