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Cleopatra

The race and skin color of Cleopatra VII, the last active Hellenistic ruler of the Macedonian Greek Ptolemaic dynasty of Egypt, established in 323 BCE, has also caused some debate,[1] although generally not in scholarly sources.[2] For example, the article "Was Cleopatra Black?" was published in Ebony magazine in 2012,[3] and an article about Afrocentrism from the St. Louis Post-Dispatch mentions the question, too.[4] Mary Lefkowitz, Professor Emerita of Classical Studies at Wellesley College, traces the origins of the black Cleopatra claim to the 1972 book by J.A. Rogers called "World's Great Men of Color."[5][6] Lefkowitz refutes Rogers' hypothesis, on various scholarly grounds. The black Cleopatra claim was further revived in an essay by afrocentrist John Henrik Clarke, chair of African history at Hunter College, entitled "African Warrior Queens."[7] Lefkowitz notes the essay includes the claim that Cleopatra described herself as black in the New Testament's Book of Acts – when in fact Cleopatra had died more than sixty years before the death of Jesus Christ.[7]

The Berlin Cleopatra, a Roman sculpture and marble portrait of the queen in the Altes Museum, 1st century BC [8]

Scholars identify Cleopatra as essentially of Greek ancestry with some Persian and Syrian ancestry, based on the fact that her Macedonian Greek family (the Ptolemaic dynasty) had intermingled with the Seleucid aristocracy of the time.[9][10][11][12][13][14][15][16][17][18][19] Grant states that Cleopatra probably had not a drop of Egyptian blood and that she "would have described herself as Greek."[20] Roller notes that "there is absolutely no evidence" that Cleopatra was racially black African as claimed by what he dismisses as generally not "credible scholarly sources."[21] Cleopatra's official coinage (which she would have approved) and the three portrait busts of her which are considered authentic by scholars, all match each other, and they portray Cleopatra as a Greek woman.[22][23][24][25] Polo writes that Cleopatra's coinage presents her image with certainty, and asserts that the sculpted portrait of the "Berlin Cleopatra" head is confirmed as having a similar profile.[23]

In 2009, a BBC documentary speculated that Cleopatra might have been part North African. This was based largely on the claims of Hilke Thür of the Austrian Academy of Sciences, who in the 1990s had examined a headless skeleton of a female child in a 20 BCE tomb in Ephesus (modern Turkey), together with the old notes and photographs of the now-missing skull. Thür hypothesized the body as that of Arsinoe, half-sister to Cleopatra.[26][27] Arsinoe and Cleopatra shared the same father (Ptolemy XII Auletes) but had different mothers,[28] with Thür claiming the alleged African ancestry came from the skeleton's mother. To date it has never been definitively proved that the skeleton is that of Arsinoe IV. Furthermore, craniometry as used by Thür to determine race is based in scientific racism that is now generally considered a pseudoscience that supported "exploitation of groups of people" to "perpetuate racial oppression" and "distorted future views of the biological basis of race."[29] When a DNA test attempted to determine the identity of the child, it was impossible to get an accurate reading since the bones had been handled too many times,[30] and the skull had been lost in Germany during World War II. Mary Beard states that the age of the skeleton is too young to be that of Arsinoe (the bones said to be that of a 15–18-year-old child, with Arsinoe being around her mid twenties at her death).[31]

Notes

[edit]
  1. ^ Hugh B. Price, "Was Cleopatra Black?". The Baltimore Sun. September 26, 1991. Retrieved May 28, 2012.
  2. ^ Roller (2010).
  3. ^ Charles Whitaker, "Was Cleopatra Black?". Ebony. February 2002. Retrieved May 28, 2012. The author cites a few examples of the claim, one of which is a chapter titled "Black Warrior Queens", published in 1984 in Black Women in Antiquity, part of The Journal of African Civilization series. It draws heavily on the work of J.A. Rogers.
  4. ^ Mona Charen, "Afrocentric View Distorts History and Achievement by Blacks". St. Louis Post-Dispatch. February 14, 1994. Retrieved May 29, 2012.
  5. ^ Lefkowitz (1992), pp. 36–40.
  6. ^ World's Great Men of Color, Volume I, By J.A. Rogers; Simon and Schuster, 2011; ISBN 9781451650549
  7. ^ a b Lefkowitz (1992), pp. 40–41.
  8. ^ Roller, Duane W. (2010), Cleopatra: a biography, Oxford: Oxford University Press, pp. 54, 174–175, ISBN 978-0-19-536553-5.
  9. ^ Samson (1990), p. 104.
  10. ^ Schiff (2011), p. 35-36.
  11. ^ Preston (2009), p. 77.
  12. ^ Goldsworthy (2010), pp. 8, 127–128.
  13. ^ Schiff (2011), pp. 2, 42.
  14. ^ Grant (2009), p. 4.
  15. ^ Preston (2009), p. 22.
  16. ^ Jones (2006), pp. xiii.
  17. ^ Schiff (2011), p. 28.
  18. ^ Kleiner (2005), p. 22.
  19. ^ Tyldesley, pp. 30, 235–236.
  20. ^ Grant (1972), p. 5.
  21. ^ Roller (2010), pp. 15, 18, 166.
  22. ^ Schiff (2011), pp. 2, 41–42.
  23. ^ a b Pina Polo (2013), pp. 185–186.
  24. ^ Kleiner (2005), pp. 151–153, 155.
  25. ^ Bradford (2003), pp. 14, 17.
  26. ^ Foggo, Daniel (2009-03-15). "Found the sister Cleopatra killed". The Times. London. Retrieved 2010-04-15.
  27. ^ "Also in the news | Cleopatra's mother 'was African'". BBC News. 2009-03-16. Retrieved 2016-06-02.
  28. ^ The Lives of Cleopatra and Octavia, By Sarah Fielding, Christopher D. Johnson, p. 154, Bucknell University Press, ISBN 978-0-8387-5257-9
  29. ^ "Phrenology and "Scientific Racism" in the 19th Century". Vassar College Word Press. Retrieved January 16, 2019.
  30. ^ "Have Bones of Cleopatra's Murdered Sister Been Found?". Live Science. Retrieved 2017-04-07.
  31. ^ "The skeleton of Cleopatra's sister? Steady on". The Times Literary Supplement. March 15, 2009. Retrieved 2018-06-12.
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