Stela of Callimachos with Cleopatra VII and Caesarion

By 39 BC Thebes had lived through two hungry years. One harvest failed, and then the Nile flood fell short and the famine grew worse. Callimachos, the general who governed the Theban region under Cleopatra VII, kept the temples going and fed the people from his own generosity, as the inscription tells it, and the city answered with a decree. The priests of Amun-Ra, the elders and all the other inhabitants named him Saviour of the city, voted him three statues in the temple, and made his birthday a yearly feast, with sacrifices, wreaths and banquets.

The decree is cut in Greek and in Demotic, the everyday script of Egyptian, and the stone it is cut on was already old. The new carving replaced most of the earlier images and texts, but it kept the central scene of the Theban gods Amun and Montu, which the museum dates, probably, to the 25th Dynasty, more than 600 years earlier. Beside the gods were added Cleopatra and her son Ptolemy XV, known as Caesarion, the presumed son of Julius Caesar and then a boy of about eight, both named in hieroglyphs.