The House of Colonna presently hold the hereditary position of Prince Assistants to the Papal Throne at the Vatican. They claim to be the Julio-Claudian dynasty of ancient Rome and directly descend from Peter de Columna and the Counts of Tusculum which took the name Ptolemy. Christopher Columbus was a relative of the Colonna family and he claimed America for Rome. The Julio-Claudian dynasty ruled Rome during the conquering of Ptolemaic Egypt and the Julio-Claudian family also married in with the Ptolemaic Dynasty. Alexander the Great, the King of the Ancient Greek kingdom of Macedonia, conquered Persian-controlled Egypt in 332 BC. After Alexander's death in 323 BC, his empire quickly unraveled amid competing claims by the diadochi, his closest friends and companions. Ptolemy, a Macedonian who was one of Alexander's most trusted generals and confidants, won control of Egypt from his rivals and declared himself King of Egypt. The Ptolemies were the rulers of the final dynasty of 3,000 years of ancient Egypt during the Hellenistic Period. Ruling for nearly three centuries, the Ptolemies were the longest and most recent Egyptian dynasty of ancient origin. Following the Syrian Wars with the Seleucid Empire, a rival Hellenistic state, the Ptolemaic Kingdom expanded its territory to include eastern Libya, the Sinai, and northern Nubia. The Ptolemies progenitor was a Macedonian Greek by birth. The Ptolemies broke millennia of tradition when they based the capital of their Egyptian empire in Alexandria, a newly constructed Mediterranean port city founded by Alexander in Egypt. In the 3nd century BC, King Ptolemy II assigned to translate the Hebrew bible from Aramaic to Greek at the legendary Library of Alexandria. They cunningly replaced this obscure tribal leader "Faraon" with the mighty Egypt and her King. With this malicious distortion of ancient history, the Septuagint Bible (Greek version) has been the source for all translations of the Bible worldwide ever since.