Cleopatra
VII Thea Philopator
69 BC-30 BC
Sooner or later, everyone who tries to recreate faces from the past
will turn their attention to Cleopatra, the last pharoah
of Egypt. She is endlessly fascinating: a young queen who managed to
seduce a series of ambitious warlords from Rome, and play them against
each other. And she came so close to
beating them all.
Her
appearance is not as unknowable as many would have you believe.
As
the queen of a rich and powerful nation, her portrait was spread far
and wide during her lifetime, so we have coins and statues to guide us.
This might not be as helpful as it appears at first. Portraiture in the
days before photography was always a compromise between how the subject
actually looked and how society felt they should
look. Traditional Egyptian art was stylistic and idealized which leaned
towards making everyone fit a template that suited their status;
however,
this is where Cleopatra's Greek ancestry complicates matters. Greek art
of her era prefered to be realistic, so some of her statues were
probably
rather accurate, such as
the one in Berlin's Altes Museum.
She
belonged to a royal family with a well documented geneology that began
in Greece, so we know for a fact she wasn't black. The family was just
one Greek after another, and the Ptolemaic Dynasty was pretty strict
about who else got to join in. One data point to remember is that
Cleopatra's hometown of Alexandria is closer to Vienna (2200 km)
than it is the Addis Ababa (2600 km). Calling Cleopatra black because
she was technically from
Africa is like calling Idris Elba white because he's technically from
Europe.
The
popular perception of Cleopatra as black and beautiful is so
deeply rooted in our culture that I found it difficult to get the AI
app to let go of it. This picture probably makes her darker and
lovelier than she was IRL. I tried to talk the AI out of it, but
it seems to
have a mind of its own.
SITE INDEX
Queens against Rome:
Actresses who played Cleopatra: