ABSTRACT
With new rulers from a foreign culture came innovations in the presentation of the Egyptian royal family, and within this sphere the women played an important and leading role. Within the Greek tradition these developments included the association of the queens with an established deity, which is manifested in inscriptions where, for instance, the goddess, or goddesses, Arsinoe Aphrodite, are invoked; then there is the dynastic cult, in which Arsinoe appeared as a sibling god along-side her brother Ptolemy II. Finally, the queens were deified in their own right, initially posthumously but later in the dynasty, as we shall see, queens were worshipped as goddesses during their lifetime. In this latter capacity the queens became temple-sharing goddesses – in other words, their statue would be placed in every temple in Egypt and they would effectively lodge in the temple of that god.
