Arsinoe: The Greek City Named After a Queen of Egypt

In the hinterland of western Greece, in Aetolia, on a hill near Angelokastro lies the ancient city of Arsinoe. On 16 October 2026, the Greek Ministry of Culture reported that the first excavation season of a five-year program there is complete. According to the reports it is the first joint field excavation of Greece and China. The team found a building with a courtyard ringed by columns, plus roof tiles, pottery, bronze coins, and an inscription with the name Antifaneos.

The name of the city is what is special. Arsinoe was formerly called Konope and was a village on the bank of the river Achelous. Then a queen who lived far away renamed it: Arsinoe II, a Ptolemaic woman born in Egypt, queen of Thrace and Macedonia, and in the end queen of Egypt at the side of her own brother. In short: the dig is new, the story behind it is not, and it shows how widely the world was connected after Alexander the Great. Open is when exactly the renaming took place and what the newly discovered building was.

The team worked in an area called Kakavaria, where earlier excavations had already found remains of Arsinoe's architecture. It widened the old trench, documented the surviving walls and floors, and looked for clues about how the settlement was laid out. The director is Olympia Vikatou, Secretary General of the Ministry of Culture.

One building drew the most attention. The archaeologist Lazaros Kolonas had uncovered parts of it decades ago, and the new work completed the picture: a square, carefully built structure with an inner courtyard ringed by columns, a so-called peristyle. The walls show traces of repairs and rebuilding, which points to several phases of use. The plan resembles buildings known elsewhere in the region, among them Kalydon.

The finds came out of the ground in good numbers: roof tiles and antefixes, the clay plates at the roof edge, plus pottery, bronze coins, and animal bones. An inscription with the name Antifaneos was also found. Conservators are cleaning and stabilizing the pieces, specialists will identify and date them next. In the reports so far, dates for the coins, pottery, and inscription are missing.

The Greek Ministry of Culture runs the excavation together with the Chinese School of Classical Studies at Athens and the Ephorate of Antiquities of Aetolia-Acarnania and Lefkada. On the Chinese side, Li Xinwei, the director of the school, leads the team. The school belongs to a program of the Chinese Academy of Social Sciences, whose stated goals include excavations on Greek soil. According to the reports, it is the first field excavation that the two countries carry out jointly. The ministry calls the start an important international scientific collaboration.

In Greek archaeology that is not unusual: foreign institutes have long played a fixed role there, since the excavations run in cooperation with the Greek authorities. For example, according to one source, a Greek-Danish project has worked since 2001 at nearby Kalydon, where it investigates, among other things, a house from the Hellenistic period on the lower acropolis. The new program is designed for five years, from 2026 to 2030. In the next seasons the dig is to continue to the city walls and towers, joined by geophysical measurements, remote sensing, surface surveys, and geoarchaeological studies.

The ancient sources know the settlement first as Konope, a village on the east bank of the Achelous. The river separates Aetolia from Acarnania in the west. The region is considered rugged and mountainous, and it lies near Kalydon, the scene of the legend of the Calydonian hunt: the goddess Artemis sent a huge boar that ravaged the land, and the hero Meleager killed it.

According to one report the ancient builders erected Arsinoe on the remains of an older settlement, Konope itself. Later Konope was enlarged and renamed for Arsinoe II. The geographer Strabo, who wrote more than 200 years later, mentions this, and he seems to place the renaming in the time when Arsinoe was married to her brother Ptolemy II, so around 273 BC. Other scholars think the foundation may have taken place earlier, in the lifetime of her first husband Lysimachus, around 285 or 284 BC, because the city lies near Lysimachia, a city that also had to do with Lysimachus. The date is thus not secure, and whether the queen herself or the Aetolians initiated the renaming is also open. What is certain is only that the city was called Arsinoe and that the name recalls the queen. Who gave it, the queen or the Aetolians themselves, is also disputed, more on that in the section on Egypt and Aetolia.

Arsinoe II was born around 316 BC as the first child of Ptolemy I and Berenice I, the founder of the Ptolemaic dynasty in Egypt. Her brother Ptolemy II was born around 309 BC on the island of Kos and ruled from 284 to 246 BC. At about 16 she married around 300 BC Lysimachus, the king of Thrace and Macedonia, who was then about 60. The marriage secured an alliance of her father. She bore him three sons, Ptolemy Epigonos, Lysimachus, and Philip. When Lysimachus's kingdom collapsed and he fell in battle in 281 BC, she married her half-brother Ptolemy Keraunos, who claimed the throne. He had her sons Lysimachus and Philip killed, and Arsinoe fled via the island of Samothrace to Alexandria to her brother Ptolemy II.

There she married him around 273 or 272 BC, a man some years younger. His first wife Arsinoe I, a daughter of Lysimachus, was banished to Koptos in Upper Egypt. The sibling marriage was unusual for the Greeks. Ancient authors thought it Egyptian, but from pharaonic times a marriage between full siblings is hardly attested. The couple was worshiped as the "Theoi Adelphoi," the "sibling-loving gods," and Arsinoe received the epithet Philadelphos, "brother-loving." She died in 270 or 268 BC. After her death she continued to be venerated as a goddess. She was even credited with a share in Egypt's victory in the First Syrian War. Her brother seems to have adopted her son Ptolemy from the marriage with Lysimachus as heir, and made him co-regent in 267 BC, the year after her death. That shows how much weight she had at court.

One event connects Arsinoe II and the Aetolians. Around 279 BC, Celtic warrior bands under a leader named Brennus invaded Greece. At the pass of Thermopylae they defeated a force that included, among others, Aetolians, Boeotians, Athenians, and Phocians, and moved on to Delphi, where they wanted to plunder the famous sanctuary but were completely beaten. Aetolia played an important part: the Gauls destroyed the Aetolian town of Kallion, and the resistance of the entire Aetolian population at Kokkalia dealt the threat the decisive blow. In the same year Arsinoe's second husband, Ptolemy Keraunos, fell in Macedonia in battle against the Gauls.

The Aetolians had already been involved in the struggles of Alexander's successors: in 313 BC an envoy of Antigonus won them to his side, and in 301 BC they allied with Boeotia. For the Aetolians, repelling the Gauls was the start of a rise. The Aetolian League, whose beginnings probably lie in the early 4th century BC and whose religious center Thermos existed from at least the 7th century, an association of cities and tribes with an annually elected general and an assembly of all men of military age, became one of the great powers of Hellenistic Greece and controlled Delphi for about a century. The rugged land that had long kept the Aetolians on the margin of Greek history did not stop them from expanding aggressively in the 3rd century. A city named for a queen from Alexandria fits this time: Aetolia in the 3rd century BC was part of a web of alliances and rivalries that stretched from Macedonia to Egypt.

That a city bears the name of a queen often has political reasons, and in the case of Arsinoe there is research on it. In the 3rd century BC the Ptolemies, who ruled Egypt as pharaohs and as Hellenistic kings, maintained close relations with the Aetolian League. They took an interest in the Aetolians' lively activity in the Aegean, and in the Chremonidean War (267 to 261 BC) a coalition of Greek cities fought together with the Ptolemies against the Macedonian royal house of the Antigonids. The war ended in a Macedonian victory. According to research, the role of the Aetolians around this war points to particularly close relations with Ptolemy.

Later, after 240 BC, Ptolemy III concluded an alliance with the Aetolian League. When Macedon in 224 BC united almost all of Greece under one roof, Athens and Aetolia stayed hostile and held even closer to Ptolemy III. Athens honored him with a new tribe named Ptolemais, and a city Ptolemais probably existed in Aetolia too. The Ptolemies supported the Aetolians in the war against the Macedonian kings. The dedications the Aetolians set up at Delphi for Ptolemy might also illustrate the good relationship, even if they were private gifts.

There is therefore a surprising reading of Arsinoe. According to a study of Ptolemaic foundations in Asia Minor and the Aegean, cities like Arsinoe and Ptolemais may owe their names to the Aetolians themselves, who thereby honored kings who were friendly to them and supported them in various conflicts. Then the renaming would not have been a gift of the queen but a gesture of the Aetolians toward Egypt. Another possibility is that it was connected with an early cooperation of Ptolemy II with the League. Which reading is right is open. Nor do the sources say what the queen did for the city: whether she gave money or ever saw the city is not documented.

Even after the first season much remains open. First, the date of the renaming: around 285 or 284 BC or around 273 BC, depending on how one reads Strabo. Second, the building at Kakavaria: what it was, a house, an administrative building, or something else, the ministry has not said. Third, the dating of the finds: so far there are no published dates for coins, pottery, and the inscription with the name Antifaneos.

Fourth, the city itself: how Arsinoe was laid out, how large it was, and whether it had walls and towers, the dig of the next years is to clarify. Fifth, who gave the name: the queen, the Aetolian League, or both together. Sixth, the meaning of the building plan: the layout resembles buildings at Kalydon, but what that means, whether they come from the same builder, from the same time, or just reflect a similar taste, is not known. After one season it is too early to say more. That the reports hold back on dating is appropriate.

To wrap up, the short version, so fact and story don't blur.

Arsinoe shows how many threads converge in a single name. That's why every season in HistoryBytes is split into five categories, and this story touches all five: Arsinoe II as a person, Arsinoe in Aetolia as a place, the repelling of the Gauls at Delphi in 279 BC as an event, the idea of naming cities for queens as an idea, the bronze coins from the dig as an object. That's how the Echoes of Olympus season builds the whole picture of a world that after Alexander was bigger and more closely connected than before.

Arsinoe II died in Alexandria, and Aetolia was far from her. But her name stayed with a city that had been a village on the Achelous, and it stayed there for more than 2,000 years. That Chinese and Greek archaeologists now work together at its walls is a coincidence of the present that fits the story: the world of Hellenism was connected, and archaeology has become so too. What lies there under the ground, the next four seasons will show. Until then we know that there was a columned courtyard, a man named Antifaneos, and a royal name that came from Egypt.