Via The Huffington Post, I found this fascinating article in The Daily Mail about recent efforts to reconstruct an image of the legendary Egyptian queen, Cleopatra. Cleopatra (69 BC – 30 BC) was the last Pharaoh of a (nearly) independent ancient Egypt, and her seduction of Julius Caesar and Mark Anthony is a story of legend. There has been some debate as to her appearance, however, with some authors claiming she was a woman of immense beauty, while others suggesting she was short, frumpy and plain. A variety of images of Cleopatra exist in sculpture, but there is no definitive picture of the doomed queen.
For over a year, Egyptologist Sally Ann Ashton (who wrote a book on Cleopatra which came out in May) has been developing a computer-regenerated image of Cleopatra based on the collection of contemporary artwork. The result is an image of a lovely woman of apparent mixed ethnicity:
How accurate are such images? I often wonder at the authenticity of such reconstruction techniques; after all, we have no real way of comparing ancient Egyptian artwork to the real-life person. It is still a fascinating bit of work, and the resulting image looks oddly similar to my friend cairochemist, who occasionally posts on this blog!
Skulls in the Stars 
Hey, wasn’t Cleopatra Greek and not Egyptian anyway?
cairochemist: Apparently, her family is originally of Greek descent, but they had been living in Egypt for around 300 years and probably ‘mingled’ with the locals!
They definitely did not “mingle” with the locals lol And if you said this during the reign of the Ptomely dynasty, youd probably be killed lol They didnt leave their palace grounds. Cleopatra was the only 1 who even learned Egyptian, and only to ingratiate herself to the locals in the power struggle with her brother.
Cleopatra was an Egyptian, but that says almost as little about her physical appearance as identifying Barack Obama only as an “American” tells us anything about how he looks.
Cleopatra was a member of the Ptolemaic dynasty, a family of Macedonian origin. This family often followed the Egyptian custom of royal incest (thus not intermarrying with other Macedonians much less with Egyptians), which means that the specific way they most assimilated Egyptian culture was precisely the means which prevented them from looking “Egyptian.”
pareanom: I believe cairochemist was roughly referring to ethnic origin, not country of origin; being an Egyptian working in the U.S. married to a European, she’s well aware of the difference!
I was certainly aware of the tradition of incest in the royal Egyptian families; what is surprising about the ‘reconstruction’ of Cleopatra is that it suggests that she was not of pure Macedonian origin. With some reflection, this isn’t necessarily surprising: it is almost inconceivable that rulers weren’t ‘playing the field’, and presumably some of those couplings resulted in kids.
People just don’t want to except the fact that she was of black orgin,,,,,if they were living in a predominantly black nation,they were mixing and a fucking…
Where has this concept of “black” Cleopatra arise? Even Egyptologists strongly deny this. Just because she was born on the continent of Africa does not negate history. She descended from Macedonians(Greek) and therfore most likely was Mediterranean in appearance; olive-skinned. As for interviewing with locals was a taboo since most did not mix with real Egyptians. Hence two of her lovers Julius Caesar and Mark Antony, both Mediterranean.