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Julius caesar and cleopatra clip art1/15/2024 And as curly hair is a dominant gene, an Egyptian ancestor may have changed the Ptolemaic line in that way, too.Īs I detail in my book, DNA samples recovered in Egypt from the New Kingdom to the Roman Period reveal that Egyptians had predominantly southern European and Near Eastern ancestry sub-Saharan African ancestry didn’t exceed 15 percent in the ancient times and doesn’t exceed 21 percent in Egypt today. It is this enigmatic nature of Cleopatra’s grandmothers and her mother that suggests that Cleopatra may have had mixed heritage, which would have tanned her skin complexion. There is a chance, therefore, that several of Cleopatra’s ancestors could have been Egyptian. All of this is important because the Ptolemies, including Cleopatra’s grandfather and father, were well known to have Egyptian partners and mistresses. In fact, Alexandrians at the time referred to her father as “Nothos”, or “the Bastard”. We do not know for certain the identity of Cleopatra’s mother and the queen’s grandmothers on both sides. There are also some things about which we cannot be sure. To claim that Egypt had no dark-skinned people in it, or that the origins of Egyptian civilisations were fundamentally sub-Saharan African, are essentially both forms of erasure. In Alexandria especially, there was no normative race: genetic makeup was varied as people from across the region, from Europeans to Nubians, lived and married on its lands. With the exception of Jews, ethnicities weren’t really recorded in early Egyptian history. That almost all of her ancestors would have been fair-skinned is also true.īut the largely binary racial terms being used today are anachronistic and can hardly be applied to Cleopatra’s context. That the Ptolemies intermarried and largely kept their bloodline Hellenic cannot be denied. That she was of Macedonian-Greek background is beyond doubt. Some things about Cleopatra are simply fact. As an historian, I have spent endless days studying and contemplating the queen, not least when completing my book, Alexandria: The City that Changed the World. My multigenerational Alexandrian background, on both sides, is key to my passion for Cleopatra. Mine is the only Egyptian voice on the programme. Keep reading list of 4 items list 1 of 4 Batang Kali: A British massacre in colonial Malaya and a fight for justice list 2 of 4 US sales of Palestinian keffiyehs soar, even as wearers targeted list 3 of 4 A way of saying ‘we shall overcome’: Playing football on Robben Island list 4 of 4 Henry Kissinger dead at 100: World reacts to passing of divisive diplomat end of list
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