Although he had two wives of traditional Macedonian background, he seems to have had at least one concubine of uncertain origin, who may have been Cleopatra’s grandmother. It is with Cleopatra’s grandfather that uncertainties develop. In fact two of her ancestors married their sisters, thus reinforcing the Macedonian ethnicity. So until the time of Cleopatra’s great-grandfather, the ethnic makeup of the dynasty was still pure Macedonian Greek. For the first six generations the wives of the ruling Ptolemies also came from the same Macedonian background as their husbands. Image Credit: ‘Sarah Bernhardt (1844 – 1923) in the role of Cleopatra’, by Georges Jules Victor Clairin (1843 – 1919), Public Domain, via Wikimedia Commons.īut what about the mothers? Women are always difficult to find, even in royal dynasties, and it is here that questions of her racial background have been raised. So Cleopatra was no more than eight generations away from being pure Macedonian Greek.
The descent passed through six successor Ptolemies until it reached Cleopatra’s father. Ptolemy was Macedonian Greek in origin (he grew up at the royal court of Alexander’s father in Macedonia, the northern part of the Greek peninsula), and established himself as king of Egypt in the convulsive years after Alexander’s death. Her ancestor Ptolemy I, a companion of Alexander the Great, founded the dynasty in the late fourth century BC. It’s a little complicated, so do follow closely! She was born in early 69 BC as the descendant of a line of Egyptian kings in a dynasty that went back 250 years. Let us consider exactly the evidence for Cleopatra’s racial background. What follows lays out the evidence for Cleopatra’s racial ancestry, but one must not forget that this is of little importance in assessing the legacy of the queen in world history. To be blunt, there is absolutely no evidence for this, yet it is one of those issues that seems to take on a life of its own despite all indication to the contrary. It has been suggested – although generally not by credible scholarly sources – that Cleopatra was racially black African. It is hard to imagine that race would be more important than acting ability, but clearly others disagree. Such concerns have recently come to the forefront with the announcement that in at least one of the several Cleopatra movies currently planned, a white (instead of black) actress would play the role of the queen. Cleopatra VII, the last queen of Egypt and a woman of great ability, is often a victim of racial profiling, as today people can be more interested in her racial background than her many accomplishments. It has become an issue in contemporary politics, and over 2500 years ago the Greek historian Herodotos wrote that ethnicity was regularly turned to political ends.
Racial profiling and manipulation have been around for a very long time.
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