March 17, 2009

Cleopatra's mother was black? The article asks whether Cleopatra's mother was "African". Of course she was. What it means is, was she black? This is not a new claim in itself. The excellent Isidore of Seville has a gallery of ancient images of Cleopatra and a collection of articles. The orthodox view is that as a Ptolemaic queen she was probably blonde and definitely Macedonian. Looking at those sculptures and coins - does she look a bit, well, Jewish? Could there have been a charming Hebrew slave in her father's palace?
posted by Plegmund 15 years ago
  • I dunno, maybe she just looks Mediterranean? I could even make a case for English with a couple of the thumbgnails. Or, was her attraction in her personality, or in the legends that built up around her? There was a book that came out several years ago that wss supposed address all those issues, but it was so boring that I never finished it. Sadly, though, most of the portrait links lead nowhere for me, or to "this site is for sale."
  • Revisionist nonsense, by the looks. Concepts of race in this sense are an anachronism when talking about ancient classical cultures, IMHO,
  • Probably right,Hank. In some cases (eg the Spartans and the helots) the ancients seem to have had their own ethnic issues, but I can't think of an example where skin colour was considered salient?
  • I wish they'd explained more about an "African skeleton." The Egyptians did have a lot of "contact" as in "battles" with the Nubians, a rich and powerful nation just the other side of the first cataract of the Nile, so I suppose a royal alliance would't have been out of the question in the Cleo's father's time.
  • yeah, that's another thing. I didn't comment on it, because for all I know, maybe there are significant differences in the skeletal structures of pure African peoples compared to Mediterranean or European, but they would be minor differences, surely? They would presumably also depend upon the era in which the individual lived due to changes in environment and diet that impact on morphology. But identifying a skeleton by calling it "African" sounds bad, and has got to be academically shaky, too. Cranial metrology, the method of divining race by using skull measurements, is a completely discredited approach, these days, so I should hope this smacks of nothing like that. It appears highly likely that Cleopatra had a quite mixed genetic background, but to claim her or her forbears to be African or not appears meaningful only in terms of modern racial concerns.
  • She was pure Cleopatra though...