Scientists have discovered what Cleopatra actually looked like

Cleopatra VII was perhaps the most famous woman in the ancient world. It was the last of a dynasty that ruled ancient Egypt for nearly 300 years, from the death of Alexander the Great until the rise of the Roman Empire.

His face has been immortalized in various artifacts of the ancient world, including coins and reliefs. Perhaps his most famous image is a relief at the Temple of Dendera in Egypt, where he is depicted with his son Caesarion.

But despite these ancient depictions, we actually know very little about what the most powerful woman in the ancient world looked like. In recent years this debate has focused on a controversial issue: What color was Cleopatra’s skin?

“The archaeological record doesn’t leave us many clues,” the experts said. “His body was never found, and the images taken at the time were probably not intended to be a true representation of his physical features.”

“We don’t have evidence from the ancient world pointing to Cleopatra’s skin color,” said Prudence Jones, a professor of classical and general humanities at Montclair State University.

Moreover, our perception of skin color as “white” or “black” would have been foreign to ancient peoples of that time.

Cleopatra VII ruled from 51-30 BC and was the last ruler of the Ptolemaic dynasty, which ruled Egypt for nearly 300 years. When Julius Caesar came to Egypt, he had a son named Caesarion. She later had an affair with Mark Antony that resulted in the birth of three children. After Octavian’s troops conquered Egypt in 30 BC, he committed suicide.

What color was Cleopatra’s skin?

“The artifacts we have today are very few. These include coins with his image found at the Taposiris Magna site in Egypt. There are several statues that can represent Cleopatra VII, which are now in museums around the world. But the origin of these statues is and whether they really depicted Cleopatra VII is unknown,” the scientists say. “These artifacts and the land in Dendera tell us very little about what it looked like.”

Andrew Kenrick, a visiting professor at the University of East Anglia in the United Kingdom, said former authors often do not discuss what ancient figures looked like. Kenrick also noted that old statues can be misleading. “The statues and statues were conceived as projections of different aspects of the figure, not actual similarities,” Kenrick said. For example, a statue may depict a ruler as more muscular than he actually is.

“Besides, we don’t know who Cleopatra’s mother or paternal grandmother were,” Kenrick said. “This means that Cleopatra may have been of African descent.”

The statue of Cleopatra with the Serpent Asp is seen during a press visit to the ‘Superstars of the Pharaohs’ at the Gulbenkian Foundation in Lisbon, Portugal, on 24 November 2022. Here we see a naked woman with a sheet wrapped around her legs and an aspen on her arm.

“What we do know is that Cleopatra’s father was Greek, and although she thought of herself as Egyptian when it was politically appropriate for her, she would have thought of herself as Greek,” Kenrick said. The Ptolemies sometimes married within their families, and Cleopatra VII married her brother Ptolemy XIV before she was killed in 44 BC. But Zahi Hawass, Egypt’s minister of antiquities, believes that Greek origins clearly point to a single answer.

“Cleopatra wasn’t black,” Hawass said in response to biracial actress Adele James’s casting as queen on the Netflix show Queen Cleopatra.

“As well-documented history attests, he was a descendant of a Macedonian Greek general who was a contemporary of Alexander the Great. His native language was Greek and is clearly depicted as white in contemporary busts and portraits,” Hawass wrote in a column for Arab News.

Could skeletal remains show what Cleopatra looked like?

This is Jean-André Rixens’ painting The Death of Cleopatra (1874). Cleopatra lies dead in her bed. He has long black hair and a golden cap. Another corpse lies at the end of the bed, and a man sitting on it pulls Cleopatra’s hair from her face.

In 2009, the BBC released a documentary called Cleopatra: Portrait of an Assassin, in which documentary filmmakers spoke to researchers examining skeletal remains from a tomb found in 1926 in Ephesus, modern-day Turkey. Researchers have found that the bones date back to BC. They believed it belonged to Cleopatra’s sister, Arsina IV, who was killed on the orders of Mark Antony in 41 BC. Ancient records show that Cleopatra encouraged the assassination because she feared that Arsinoe would try to take the throne.

Although the skull was lost during World War II, the team reconstructed and analyzed the skull using old photographs and drawings and claimed to have identified skull features that suggested Arsina IV’s mother was of African descent.

“The distance from the forehead to the back of the skull is large relative to the overall height of the skull, which is something quite common in certain populations, one ancient Egyptians and the other black African groups. Caroline Wilkinson, professor of anthropology at the University of Liverpool, said in the documentary Arsinoe IV’s mixed He claims to be descended from it,” he said.

“Assuming that Arsinoe IV was Cleopatra’s sister, this leads to the fact that the queen may have been of partially African descent,” the researchers wrote. However, a literature review did not reveal any published studies in a scientific journal detailing these reconstructions.

Scientists contacted by Live Science reporters were either unaware of the claims or wary of the findings. Dwayne Roller, an honorary professor of classics at Ohio State University, said Cleopatra and Arsinoe may not have had the same mother. The ancient writer Strabo (63 BC – 24 AD), who lived in Alexandria, wrote that Cleopatra’s father, Ptolemy XII, had children from several mothers.

“We have no idea who Cleopatra and Arsina’s mother is, or even if she’s the same person,” Roler said.

“At the end of the day, Cleopatra’s skin color doesn’t really matter,” Roller said. “After all, their success is huge.”