Cleopatra, one of the most renowned rulers in the history of mankind, has, of late, been
at the center of outrage the world over, leading to online scuffles and offline indignation
- and even a lawsuit against Netflix.
So today, we intend to get to the bottom of this debate, and when someone argues with
you about the origin of Cleopatra, you’ll be armed with that indispensable weapon known
as “The Truth.”
Cleopatra was the last pharaoh of Ancient Egypt, who ruled for 21 years between 51-30
BC.
She was a very intelligent woman, studying philosophy, math, history, astronomy, medicine,
and oratory.
It’s said she learned to speak nine languages, including Greek, Egyptian, Ethiopian, Aramaic,
Syriac, Median, and Parthian.
Languages will be a matter of importance later in the show.
The ancient historians liked to praise her beauty, which some argue may be undermining
her skills as a ruler.
Her beauty may have been exaggerated, but she was almost certainly attractive, charming,
and possibly even irresistible.
That’s what the Greek biographer Plutarch said.
He wrote, “Her beauty, as we are told, was in itself not altogether incomparable,”
but he also mentioned her “irresistible charm.”
He added, “There was sweetness also in the tones of her voice, and her tongue, like an
instrument of many strings, she could readily turn to whatever language she pleased.”
Still, there was so much more to this woman than charm and beauty, which is partly why
there’s been a raging debate about her origin.
She understood how to play the game of power politics.
When she was 21, she had a fling with the great Julius Caesar, the man who said, “I
came, I saw, I conquered.”
He certainly didn’t conquer young Cleopatra.
To cut a long story short, she needed Caesar to help her defeat her brother/husband, and
he wanted her wealth to finance his return to Rome after his Civil War scrap.
She got what she wanted and became the ruler of Egypt with her other brother, Ptolemy XIV.
She later teamed up with Marc Antony after Caesar was stabbed multiple times and killed
in the Theatre of Pompey.
Antony and Cleopatra had three children and became a powerful force together, but the
story ends with them both dead.
That’s maybe the biggest abridgment of a story we’ve ever done, but just understand
she was a smart ruler with outstanding political savvy.
She got the most powerful men in Rome on her side.
She promoted the arts and sciences and was an excellent military leader.
She tragically died; the Romans conquered Egypt, and the Ptolemaic dynasty died with
her.
She's been extolled as one of history's great rulers, in a league table occupied mostly
by men.
Ok, so now you understand a few things about why everyone wants a piece of Cleopatra and
why some people have accused others of rewriting history.
You can understand why there’s an Egyptian lawyer on the case, suing Netflix, something
we’ll explain soon.
The series, “African Queens: Queen Cleopatra,” is narrated and executive produced by Jada
Pinkett Smith, the American actress and talk show host, who’s married to the actor Will
Smith.
She has said it’s important to tell “stories about black queens.”
Not many people would disagree, but which black queens is she talking about?
In the series, we see that Cleopatra is undoubtedly depicted as a black woman.
Now you need to hear some more backstory.
We’ll refer to Cleopatra not as Cleopatra VII but just Cleopatra, and we’ll add the
numerals to her ancestors named Cleopatra.
Some of you probably know that Alexander the Great conquered Egypt in 323 BC.
Alexander was the king of the ancient kingdom of Macedon.
The Macedonians lived in the northeastern part of mainland Greece.
Their kingdom goes back to the 8th century BC.
They were essentially Greeks, although that’s been a cause for debate in terms of culture
and language.
Still, ethically, which is what you need to know today, they were classed as white Europeans.
Alexander installed his friend and bodyguard, General Ptolemy Soter, to rule over the newly
conquered Egypt.
Hence we get the Ptolemy dynasty of Egypt, which is a long list of the descendants of
Ptolemy Soter, aka Ptolemy I.
Ptolemy I was a Greek Macedonian; there’s no doubt about that.
He had a lot of kids, 12 in all, to four different women, one Persian (Iranian), and the rest
Greek, although he had no known children with his Persian wife.
His children had children, and so on and so forth.
The Ptolemy dynasty saw a lot of incest over the years, which back then was nothing out
of the ordinary since Ptolemy rulers believed that maintaining a pure bloodline was important.
But it should be known some Ptolemies sometimes copulated and procreated with their slaves
and concubines.
That’s how we might get some non-Greek into the mix.
We should just say here that ancient Egyptians were a diverse lot, so the kingdom of Egypt
at the time was host to a range of ethnicities, going from the nearby Middle East and southern
Europe to the far reaches of Africa.
A study we found revealed that the “mitochondrial DNA composition of Egyptian mummies has shown
a high level of affinity with the DNA of the populations of the Near East.”
There were certainly black folks in Egypt before the Greeks conquered it, but your average
Egyptian dude and dudess looked more Middle Eastern.
Moving on, Cleopatra’s father was Ptolemy XII Auletes.
His father was Ptolemy IX Soter, who was the son of Ptolemy VIII Physcon and Cleopatra
I.
All Greeks.
Ptolemy XII might have married Cleopatra V, who is said to have been his sister or cousin.
She’s thought to be the mother of Cleopatra.
It’s likely, say many historians, that Cleopatra was the daughter of Cleopatra V because had
she been illegitimate, her enemies in Rome would have made a song and dance about it.
You have to remember that back then if someone was illegitimate, it was usually used as a
weapon against them by their enemies.
You can never be 100 percent sure about these things, but historians agree, for the most
part, that Cleopatra was very likely the offspring of Cleopatra V and Ptolemy XII.
The question remains, though, who were Cleopatra V’s parents?
Her lineage is not mentioned in the ancient texts (papyri), so we really don’t know
for sure.
She could have been the illegitimate daughter of Ptolemy IX.
He was the son of Ptolemy VIII and his sister-wife Cleopatra III.
Cleopatra V's mother is said to be Cleopatra Selene I, sister and husband of Ptolemy IX.
If this is confusing, don’t worry, we almost had a breakdown trying to figure out this
bloodline but rest assured, those Ptolemies were somewhat overly concerned with keeping
it in the family.
One thing that seems sure is Cleopatra comes from a very Macedonian-Greek bloodline.
So, how did we reach this point of contention?
The confusion starts because we can’t always be 100 percent certain of the bloodline since
those Ptolemy men, as you know, had the occasional illegitimate kid.
For instance, there’s the theory that Cleopatra's paternal grandmother was a concubine.
She may have been Alexandrian or Nubian, which could make her ethnicity non-Greek, or perhaps
she might have been black.
It’s a long shot, to say the least, and there’s not really much to back it up.
It’s worth noting that Strabo, one of the very few contemporary sources that wrote about
Cleopatra, once said Cleopatra’s grandfather did have a few wives.
Still, he said they were of a significant status, which means they weren’t slaves
or concubines.
There’s a chance that Cleopatra’s grandfather got it on with an Egyptian.
It’s telling that Cleopatra could speak the Egyptian language.
She was the first in her line who could do that.
This might suggest a close connection to an Egyptian bloodline.
Still, some scholars have said she likely had no Egyptian blood, stating that there’s
only one piece of evidence that says a Ptolemaic king had an Egyptian mistress, and that was
Ptolemy II in the 3rd century BC.
Nonetheless, it’s really hard to know how many mistresses these men had.
One thing we don’t have are any descriptions talking about the color of Cleopatra’s skin.
Nonetheless, an important factor in this debate regarding looks was mentioned by the Egyptian
archaeologist Zahi Hawass.
He certainly doesn’t think Cleopatra was black.
Incidentally, he wrote that he’d once sat at a dinner table in New York with Will and
Jada Pinkett Smith, and later, the Smith family, minus Jada, did visit Egypt.
In the same article, Hawass said he’d unearthed coins in temples, and Cleopatra’s face on
those coins is certainly not that of a black woman.
He said he’d found other images of her, too, which also made her look European.
But importantly, he wrote, “Luckily for historians and archaeologists, the ancient
Egyptian artists were sticklers for detail – examine the faces and the racial characteristics
of each of the figures are clearly shown.”
He goes on to say that he and his team excavated the tomb of Ramses II in the Valley of the
Kings, and they found a scene of the sun god Ra on his boat standing in front of Egyptians,
Africans, Libyans, and Asiatics.
Hawass said the ethnicities of all four were “clearly identifiable.”
He added, “Netflix is trying to provoke confusion by spreading false and deceptive
facts that the origin of the Egyptian civilization is Black.”
There is an early Roman bust from 40 to 30 BC, which is in the style of a Greek woman.
Greek and Roman art and coinage present her as having traditional Mediterranean ethnicity.
She is depicted as having a large nose and olive skin.
It should be noted that some of these artifacts were made many years after she died.
While we can’t be 100% sure of her exact bloodline, we need to understand why she has
been called a black African woman – something people started writing about as early as the
19th century.
Some of these theories were easily refuted, such as when it was claimed in a book that
Cleopatra said she was black in the New Testament's Book of Acts.
She clearly didn’t, and no historian would say that now.
There’s also a BBC documentary titled “Cleopatra: Portrait of a Killer,” in which scholars
try to reconstruct her skull.
The conclusion was that she might have been black, but experts have debunked what little
evidence there was.
The speculation was based on a skeleton found in a tomb, which led the team to think the
half-sister of Cleopatra was possibly black, but this was also debunked by scholars.
The conclusions in the series were later referred to as pseudoscience.
It’s worth noting that people back then had no concept of race, but they did think
about ethnicity.
In fact, it’s written that the Ptolemy dynasty was xenophobic toward what you might call
outsiders.
This is another reason why Cleopatra is very unlikely to have been black.
As you know, the Ptolemies did not like mixing their blood with the outsiders.
There really isn’t any compelling evidence we can find that says she was black.
The evidence makes her almost certainly Greek with perhaps distant Persian blood.
She could have had mostly Macedonian Greek blood and perhaps some Egyptian blood, but
there’s absolutely nothing that tells us she had black African blood.
One historian said there’s “no room for anything else, certainly not for any black
African blood.”
He also said Egyptian mistresses were very much a rarity within the Ptolemies.
Even if Cleopatra did have some Egyptian blood, all the evidence tells us she certainly regarded
herself as Greek in terms of culture and traditions but was born in Egypt and ruled Egypt.
We actually can’t find a modern scholar in any news articles right now that does say
she was black, though some do talk about the possibility of vaguely mixed blood.
Most say she was most definitely Greek with possibly some Egyptian/Persian blood.
It seems impossible to the vast majority of academics we’ve read online that she’d
look anything as she does in the Netflix production.
After all the commotion, Smith said, “If you have a problem with the series, don't
watch it.”
People countered, saying they were only pointing out historical facts.
She explained later, “We don’t often get to see or hear stories about Black queens,
and that was really important for me, as well as for my daughter, and just for my community
to be able to know those stories because there are tons of them!”
She called the blackness of Cleopatra still “highly debated” but as far as we can
see, it’s not, at least it isn’t in the vast majority of the academic community.
You might ask, why would people care?
Is there some nastiness in all of this?
No doubt some people did say untoward things, but most folks just talked about the problems
with historical revisionism.
Trying to control the past has in history had negative permutations.
The Egyptian lawyer accused Netflix of promoting “Afrocentric thinking … which includes
slogans and writings aimed at distorting and erasing the Egyptian identity.”
Modern Egyptians might not want to be alienated from their history and heritage, just as black
Africans would feel the same about their history and heritage.
To make that point, one commenter asked if it would be ok for Ryan Gosling to play the
heroic Martin Luther King in a movie.
It would sure seem weird and could rouse some outrage, especially if it was a documentary.
Still, King didn’t live thousands of years ago, so the same argument can not be made.
No one can be absolutely sure, but then you could say that about many figures in ancient
history.
It sounds petty debating this, but for some, it was a serious issue.
Other people said it’s understandable that after such an awful legacy of slavery in Africa,
both the North African slave trade and the Euro-American slave trade, not to mention
the legacy of racism, that it could be seen as empowering to promote a female black African
heroine to the masses.
Nevertheless, the general feeling was that re-writing history is probably not the best
way to go about making the world a better place.
In fact, some commentators said they believe such revisionism causes even more social disharmony
than there already is.
It looks like it has.
As for Netflix and the serie's creators, some said that might well have been a very wily
bit of marketing!
Controversy, trolling even, often gains traction, but there are always long-term risks in this
way of acquiring attention, so we doubt that was the reason Cleopatra was given her new
look for a few hours.
Now you need to watch “History of the Entire Universe (In 25 Minutes).”
Or, have a look at “Earth Millions of Years Ago.”