legacy of ancient china ancient egypt legacy

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 A second Nakba? What history tells us about Palestine and Israel list 2 of 4 What do the keffiyeh, watermelon and other Palestinian symbols mean? list 3 of 4 ‘A metaphor for life’: Bollywood’s stormy love affair with Indian cricket list 4 of 4 A cricket rivalry evolves: How Indian fans came to love English players end of list

Legacy of ancient china ancient egypt legacy