Cleoptra (or to be exact cleopatra X philopater) was in no way 'Black'. Nor does Greek science 'come from Egypt. Why do people think it neccesary to allow this (*)(*)(*)(*)?
Cleopatra was a North African rather than a sub-Saharan African and she may have resembled Hayat Boumeddiene (26), who is believed to be the wife of Amady Coulibaly, the man killed after taking hostages in a kosher grocery in eastern Paris. Boumeddiene is a French woman of Algerian descent who is linked to the two gunmen of the recent attack on the French satirical newspaper and one of the gunmen looked similar to the reconstructed image of King Tut, who belonged to Haplogroup R1b1a2, to which more than 50 per cent of all men in Western Europe belong.
The Ancient Egyptians including King Tut were Black. Cleopatra VII was of Macedonian Greek descent so probably looked White but there is evidence that her family the Ptolemies including her half-sister Arsinoe had Egyptian/African ancestry. [video=youtube;iCTzfb5tWDg]https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=iCTzfb5tWDg[/video] As for Greek science coming from Egypt there is evidence that the Ancient Egyptians colonized parts of Greece during the archaic period and brought their culture with them which is detailed in the book Black Spark, White Fire: Did African Explorers Civilize Ancient Europe?
Well, we really don't have an accurate portrait of her, just stylized ones. So I really can't say for certain if she was black or white.
There is (*)(*)(*)(*) all evidence here. Just PC nonsense with no academic rigour. Just absurd posturing and not taken seriously by any proper historian. Just by 'b;ack studies; lunatics - - - Updated - - - Why would she be black? SHe was of Greek background. The black thing is an invention by idiots
Did you even watch the video? The video comes from a documentary about Cleopatra and Arsinoe. A reconstruction of Arsinoe's skull was analyzed by a team of respected British Anthropologists who determined that the skull had the anthropometric characteristics of a mixed race person, indicating that while the Ptolmaic dynasty was Greek they may have mixed to some extent with the native Egyptians. Your angry declarations do not discredit the scientific rigor on display. As for the book I own it and recommend it. It's very well written and researched. Cleopatra's mother is unknown and some historians believe she may have been an Egyptian concubine or a member of the Egyptian religious elite who intermarried with the Ptolemaic royals. If that is true she may have had some Egyptian and therefore African ancestry but that is speculation. We can be certain that she had Macedonian Greek ancestry and probably pure Greek ancestry given that the Ptolemies were an incestuous dynasty who had brothers marry their sisters. So again I think Cleopatra probably looked White but there is evidence that her family had mixed ancestry.
With the data we have right now, I would say Cleopatra VII's ancestry is equivocal. The whole discovery of Arsinoe's skull having a mixture of African and European characteristics, combined with certain blank spots in Cleo's family tree, should have done a lot of damage to orthodox scholarship's confidence in proclaiming her pure Greek. Personally I prefer to imagine her as mixed-race, maybe looking something like Zoe Saldana or Kerry Washington: But even if she was pure Greek, odds are she would have looked more Mediterranean, like most ancient Greek women. In other words, closer to Eva Mendes or Penelope Cruz than the Nordic stereotype: That said, while Cleopatra VII's story may seem more dramatic or romantic to us today, I would say Hatshepsut from the New Kingdom is a much better example of a strong Egyptian queen regnant. We have no reason to doubt her native Egyptian pedigree, and so far it appears that she was a pretty successful ruler who didn't cause the empire's downfall upon her death (more than can be said for Cleo). I think an African actress like Lupita Nyong'o would pull her off pretty well if they ever get around to making a Hatshepsut biopic: (made that myself in Photoshop BTW)
E-V68 is the Egyptian branch of Haplogroup E1b1b and its descendant group E-V13 is closely associated with the ancient Greek expansion and colonisation in the Aegean Bronze Age. The haplogroup tree chart above shows that the ancient Egyptians and Greeks had Ethiopian ancestry and the frequencies of Haplogroup E1b1b in Greece are from 11% in Crete to 29.5% in Central Greece. As a result, modern Greeks have mixed Afro-European ancestry and it's highly likely that Cleopatra also belonged to Haplogroup E1b1b. Ancient Greek woman re-enactor. Taken at Salute for heroes, Glemham Hall, Suffolk, UK 24 July 2010.
Hey, maybe Cleopatra was the world's first professional female impersonator and nobody knew! Hey, it could be true you know.
I dont catre whether you own it or not. It is ridiculed by professionals and it is supported by the most absurd of people. Its nonsense.
Yes she would have looked mediterrenean. I couldnt care less how you imagine her. She wasn;t black in any way shape or form. Hatsheput certainly would not have looked like a west african at all.We have no idea of her skin colour and her nose is certainly not typical of black people.
Actually the subject of the book has been debated seriously in academic circles most notably in the Black Athena debates.
Who says she was "black" and in what context are they using the word? Most people identified as "black" actually have a brown skin tone and are often relatively light skinned. "Black" in many contexts extend well beyond being of pure west/central African heritage (whether that's a legitimate use of the term is a different issue). It seems clear Cleopatra was of Mediterranean and North African heritage though the exact heritage is unclear and her exact appearance unknown. It's very unlikely that she looked like Elizabeth Taylor, which is probably a major part of the point of the question being raised in the first place. It's not unlike all of the Western images of Jesus as light-skinned and blond-haired. There is a cultural tendency to Westernise (often incorporating "whitening") characters of world history and there is a legitimate objection to that, not only on the basis of fundamental historic truth but also how is masks the range and variety of input people of different races and cultures had upon the world. Clearly some people push too far in the opposite direction in response to this but that doesn't make the general principle wrong. Where early sciences came from is a much more complex issue and I suspect saying they came from any single place is probably flawed, though say they didn't come from somewhere equally so. I wouldn't be at all surprised if many of the fundamental discoveries and understandings were developed by multiple people in multiple places but in many that knowledge was lost over generations, only surviving to be built upon in a few. I'd be very surprised if various scientific knowledge and understanding (and some misunderstanding) didn't pass in both directions during the periods of contact between strong societies like the Greece and Egypt of the times we're talking.
Is it not possible that the haplogroup in question entered Africa? And either way this was a Pleistocene event.
Considering Egypt's location (in Africa) and the influence of Nubian's on the society, as well as scientific research about the ancestry of the pharoah's and queens, it's likely that some looked like Halle Berry, President Obama, Mariah Carey or other biracial people who self-identify as black today and are considered to be black by many people. Makeda, Queen of Sheeba, was Eithiopian and although they have mixed heritage, Eithiopians are generally considered to be black. Without information about Cleopatra's maternal lineage, it's imposible to know definitively. Your insistence that she was pure white is absurd, because you have no way of knowing this or of proving your claim. A more reasoned approach would be to say that we don't know for sure. It is possible, given the interracial nature of Egyptian society.
In case you don't realize that there were black pharoah's, take a look at this site: http://ngm.nationalgeographic.com/2008/02/black-pharaohs/robert-draper-text.html
In my previous post, I estimated a Late Bronze Age for E-V13 in Greece and areas affected by historical Greek colonization. I now used Ken Nordtvedt's Generations2 program to obtain estimates of the age of E-V13 in three different datasets: the King set, 12-marker data from the E-M35 Phylogeny Project (Haplozone), as well as E-M78 data -most of which should be E-V13- from Bosch et al. (2006). In the latter set, I used two marker sets: all 12 markers common between Generations2 and Bosch, as well as 8 markers common between them, but excluding markers after DYS392 (in the Generations2/FTDNA order). http://dienekes.blogspot.com/2008/07/expansion-of-e-v13-explained.html
Do you smell a subtle irony in this thread like i do... i mean, we want to know cleo's race but no ancient text talks of Cleopatra as white, black, mulatta etc... she was just Cleopatra. Even Mark Anthony, his greatest lover doesn't talk about Cleopatra's race. Could it be that these ancient brutes were actually much less racist than us, and smarter in some way too? Btw i wonder what Cleopatra would say to someone labeling her as black, white or mulatto race... probably get very angry lol.
Is anyone surprised that someone from North Africa would be a mixed race? Isn't the entire middle east region actually of "mixed race"? I mean we know race doesn't really scientifically exist right? So we are talking about gene pool flow and just looking at Greece, Italy, Egypt or any other nation in that region of the Mediterranean should all have a mixed genetic gene pool because all of those regions at one point or another were the melting pot of that part of the world. People from all over Africa, Europe and near Asia migrated to and through these regions throughout history. As far as I am concerned all people of that region are a little bit northern and a little bit southern. To claim otherwise seems silly.
I looked, but what am I supposed to see there? Is there genetic evidence somewhere because all I see is some statues with odd features. But they are no more clearly "black" or sub-Saharan than they are white. Again skin color is a poor determinate. Im sure many people further back in history had darker skin, especially before the influx of Europeans, that doesn't mean much as far as modern "race" is concerned.
