Cleopatra VII, arguably the most renowned woman of the ancient world, reigned as the last of a dynasty that governed ancient Egypt for approximately 300 years. This era spanned from the death of Alexander the Great to the rise of the Roman Empire. Her image has been preserved on various ancient artifacts, including coins and reliefs. One of the most well-known depictions is a relief at Dendera Temple in Egypt, portraying her alongside her son Caesarion.
Despite these ancient representations, much about the appearance of this powerful woman remains a mystery. In recent years, a significant debate has emerged: What was Cleopatra's skin color?
Archaeological evidence offers few definitive answers, according to experts. The artifacts available today are limited. These include coins minted during her reign, discovered at Taposiris Magna in Egypt, and several statues potentially depicting Cleopatra VII, now housed in museums worldwide. However, the authenticity of these statues and whether they truly represent Cleopatra VII is still under discussion.
These artifacts, along with the Dendera relief, offer limited insight into her physical appearance. Andrew Kenrick, a visiting research fellow at the University of East Anglia in the U.K., noted that ancient writers rarely described the appearances of historical figures. Kenrick also pointed out that ancient statues can be misleading, often portraying rulers as more muscular than they were in reality.
Relief of Cleopatra VII and her son Caesarion at Dendera Temple, Egypt.
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The Question of Cleopatra's Ethnicity
Adding to the complexity, the identities of Cleopatra's mother and paternal grandmother are unknown, raising the possibility of some African ancestry. "What we do know is that Cleopatra's father was Greek, and she would have considered herself to be Greek - although she did portray herself to be Egyptian, when it suited her politically," Kenrick said.
At times the Ptolemies married within their own family and Cleopatra VII was married to her brother Ptolemy XIV before he was killed in 44 B.C. However, Zahi Hawass, the former Egyptian antiquities minister, believes her Greek parentage points clearly to one answer. "Cleopatra was not Black," Hawass said in response to Adele James, a biracial actress, being cast to play the queen in the Netflix show "Queen Cleopatra."
"As well documented history attests, she was the descendant of a Macedonian Greek general who was a contemporary of Alexander the Great. Her first language was Greek and in contemporary busts and portraits she is depicted clearly as being white," Hawass wrote in a column for Arab News at the time.
Bust of Cleopatra VII in the Altes Museum, Berlin.
Skeletal Remains and Ancestry
In 2009, a BBC documentary titled "Cleopatra: Portrait of a Killer" featured researchers examining skeletal remains found in 1926 in a tomb at Ephesus in modern-day Turkey. The researchers believed that the bones belong to Arsinoë IV, a sister of Cleopatra who was killed on the orders of Mark Antony in 41 B.C. Ancient records indicate that Cleopatra encouraged the killing, fearing that Arsinoë would try to take her throne.
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Though the skull was lost during World War Two, the team reconstructed and analyzed the skull using old photographs and drawings and claimed they identified cranial features that suggest Arsinoë IV's mother was of African descent. “The distance from the forehead to the back of the skull is long in relation to the overall height of the cranium and that is something which you see quite frequently in certain populations, one of which is ancient Egyptians and another would be Black African groups," which could suggest that Arsinoë IV had mixed ancestry, Caroline Wilkinson, an anthropology professor at the University of Liverpool, said in the documentary.
If one assumes that Arsinoë IV was Cleopatra's full sister, this would suggest the queen may have been of partly African descent, the researchers noted. The scholars that Live Science talked to were either unaware of the claims or cautious about these findings. Duane Roller, a professor emeritus of classics at Ohio State University, said that Cleopatra and Arsinoë may not have had the same mother.
The Death of Cleopatra (1874) by Jean-André Rixens.
Ancient Perspectives on Identity
Whatever Cleopatra's skin tone was, the notion of "whiteness" or "Blackness" as conceived today would have been alien to ancient people. "The ancients simply didn't care about it the way that modern and contemporary people do. It wasn't relevant to them and their worldview, it made no difference to their feelings about Cleopatra. This can be inferred from the fact that the Romans didn't describe themselves as white but rather described people from northern Europe this way, noted Draycott.
Kenrick said that the Greeks would also not have considered themselves to be white. The ancients simply didn't care about it the way that modern and contemporary people do. It wasn't relevant to them and their worldview, it made no difference to their feelings about Cleopatra.
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The Search for Cleopatra's Tomb
For two decades, National Geographic Explorer Kathleen Martínez has been searching for Queen Cleopatra’s tomb in hidden, underground sites that others discounted. Many archaeologists think Cleopatra, Egypt’s last pharaoh and Ptolemaic ruler, died and was buried near the royal palace in Alexandria, where she was born and ruled.
Martínez, a criminal lawyer-turned-archaeologist from the Dominican Republic, has been piecing together Cleopatra’s past like a crime scene to be deciphered. Her quest has led her instead to Taposiris Magna, an overlooked temple about 30 miles west of Alexandria in the Egyptian coastal town of Borg El Arab.
Now, miles offshore of Taposiris Magna, her team has discovered what Martínez believes may be a crucial clue in the 2,000-year-old mystery: a sunken port in the depths of the Mediterranean Sea. The finding suggests that Taposiris Magna was not only an important religious center, but also a maritime trading hub, far more expansive than anyone previously realized.
“That makes the temple really important,” Martínez says, adding that it “had all the conditions to be chosen for Cleopatra to be buried with Mark Antony,” the Roman politician she loved and fought beside. Located about 40 feet underground, the tunnel was partly submerged and flooded by seawater. Inside they found ceramic jars and pottery from the time of the Ptolemies. Taken together with the most recent offshore discovery, Martínez says it suggests “the port was active during the time of Cleopatra and before at the beginning of the dynasty.”
To explore this unexpected intersection of land and sea, Martínez recruited the help of marine archaeologist and National Geographic Explorer at Large Bob Ballard, who famously discovered the Titanic. In their deep-sea operation they came across large and unmistakably man-made underwater structures, including a highly polished floor.
“After 2,000 years nobody has ever been there,” Martínez told her team back on land. “We are the first ones.”
Kathleen Martinez inside the tunnel at Taposiris Magna.
Cleopatra: The Queen and Her Legacy
Born in 69 B.C., Queen Cleopatra VII ascended the throne at 18. She was the final leader of the Ptolemaic period, the longest ruling dynasty in ancient Egyptian history, which came to power in 305 B.C. after Alexander the Great conquered Egypt. She was an “extraordinary woman” who also made powerful men afraid, says Martínez.
The Romans vilified Cleopatra, especially for her relationship with Julius Caesar. They characterized her as “a dangerous, exotic seductress who lured reputable Roman statesmen away from their responsibilities to the Republic,” says Sara E. Cole, associate curator of antiquities at the J. Paul Getty Museum, who is not part of the Taposiris Magna research team. “And Western historians and artists very much picked up that baton and ran with it.”
To Martínez, Cleopatra’s life is a lesson in fierce defiance of gender roles of her era. “She was a philosopher. She was a doctor in medicine. She was a chemist. She was a specialist in cosmetology.” Following Caesar’s assassination, the queen had an 11-year passion-filled and politically charged romance with one of his generals and potential successors, Mark Antony.
Cleopatra greeted him under a golden canopy, dressed as the goddess Venus. “Cleopatra’s appearances at sea were carefully orchestrated,” says Cole. “She created spectacles intended to awe audiences and to convey ideological messages. Appearing before Antony in a golden barge at Tarsus and overwhelming him with her riches was part of a strategy.”
Cleopatra’s political and personal relationship with Antony ended at sea as well. In 31 B.C., their naval forces faced off against the Roman ruler Octavian, Antony’s rival, at the Battle of Actium off the western coast of Greece, where Cleopatra commanded her own fleet.
Following their defeat, Antony fled to Egypt and is said to have stabbed himself with his own sword in Alexandria, later dying in Cleopatra’s mausoleum, in her arms. Threatened with captivity by the Romans, Cleopatra took her own life at age 39, some speculate by using snake venom, though that has never been proven.
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Martínez thinks that rather than submit to Rome, the queen instead devised a plan to vanish, hiding her body along with Antony’s in a place the Romans would not even think to look. “She had to choose a location where she could feel safe for her afterlife with Mark Antony,” says Martínez.
Martínez considered all the possible temples the queen could have reached from Alexandria within a day. She ultimately narrowed her search down to Taposiris Magna and in October 2005, her team began their search. Notably, Martínez’s team unearthed a foundation plate at the temple site, with an inscription in Greek and hieroglyphics that indicated the temple had been dedicated to the goddess Isis-a link that holds significance, since many considered Cleopatra a living embodiment of Isis.
To Martínez, it made sense that the queen would want her final resting place to be in the temple of Isis, the goddess that Cleopatra so deeply identified with. “She didn’t want to die as a slave or a prisoner,” Martínez speculates. “She wanted to die as a daughter of Isis.”
Underwater structures discovered off the coast of Taposiris Magna.
Evidence from Taposiris Magna
At the temple, her team has discovered hundreds of human remains, including mummies that were once covered in gold leaf, as well as pottery, and more than 300 coins, some bearing the image of Cleopatra. The ceramics date to around the time of Cleopatra’s rule, 51 to 30 B.C., the Egyptian Ministry of Tourism and Antiquities announced last December.
“So far, we have discovered more than 2,600 objects in a place where everybody believed there was nothing to be found,” Martínez says. “We have changed the history of the area so far, even though we have not discovered the tomb of Cleopatra. I have proved all those professors wrong.”
Martínez believes Cleopatra’s body was brought to Taposiris Magna and possibly carried through the tunnel, before being laid to rest, hidden and out of reach of the Romans. Over the centuries, at least 23 earthquakes struck the Egyptian coast between A.D. 320 and A.D. 1303, causing parts of Taposiris Magna to sink beneath the waves. Martínez’s latest discovery beneath the sea builds on two decades of evidence, broadening the search and reaffirming the temple’s prominence in Cleopatra’s era.
In their underwater search, Ballard says his team first found stone pockets where long ago fisherman had stored gear like fishing net and weights, indicating that the area must have once been a shoreline. Using sonar, they mapped a picture of the sea floor-where divers then discovered a profusion of ancient relics.
“We started seeing structures,” says Ballard, a series of colossal constructions covered in sediment, arranged in rows and over 20 feet high-cemented blocks, columns, smooth stone, as well as multiple anchors and amphora (containers used by the Greeks and Romans to transport goods). The evidence suggests it may have been a port connected to Taposiris Magna that was once used in Cleopatra’s time.
For Martínez, the discovery of this submerged port has brought her one step closer to her goal. “We will continue searching on land and underwater,” Martínez says. “This is the beginning of this huge task.”
Cleopatra in Art and Culture
Cleopatra was depicted in various ancient works of art, in the Egyptian as well as Hellenistic-Greek and Roman styles. Surviving works include statues, busts, reliefs, and minted coins, as well as ancient carved cameos, such as one depicting Cleopatra and Antony in Hellenistic style, now in the Altes Museum, Berlin.
Contemporary images of Cleopatra were produced both in and outside of Ptolemaic Egypt. Her strong, almost masculine facial features in these particular coins are strikingly different from the smoother, softer, and perhaps idealized sculpted images of her in either the Egyptian or Hellenistic styles. Her masculine facial features on minted currency are similar to that of her father, Ptolemy XII Auletes, and perhaps also to those of her Ptolemaic ancestor Arsinoe II (316-260 BC) and even depictions of earlier queens such as Hatshepsut and Nefertiti.
Other possible sculpted depictions of Cleopatra include one in the British Museum, London, made of limestone, which perhaps only depicts a woman in her entourage during her trip to Rome. The woman in this portrait has facial features similar to others (including the pronounced aquiline nose), but lacks a royal diadem and sports a different hairstyle.
In Victorian Britain, Cleopatra was highly associated with many aspects of ancient Egyptian culture and her image was used to market various household products, including oil lamps, lithographs, postcards and cigarettes. Fictional novels such as H. Rider Haggard's Cleopatra (1889) and Théophile Gautier's One of Cleopatra's Nights (1838) depicted the queen as a sensual and mystic Easterner, while the Egyptologist Georg Ebers's Cleopatra (1894) was more grounded in historical accuracy.
Whereas myths about Cleopatra persist in popular media, important aspects of her career go largely unnoticed, such as her command of naval forces and administrative acts.
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