Was Cleopatra Black? The Truth About Cleopatra's Ancestry

hello everyone it is chincia and this video is sponsored by skillshare welcome to my library if you're new here hello my name is chincia and if you're not new here and you're one of my lovely regulars hi how are you i hope you're doing splendidly now i can only apologize for the state of my voice at the moment i'm currently recovering from laryngitis i didn't have any voice for a couple of days last week so i wasn't able to film anything at the moment i have to speak very lonely or else it really really hurts so i can only apologize if i sound a little bit more nasally than usual a bit lower than usual for once it is actually me having to construct my voice because it hurts to speak at a higher pitch but today we are actually going to be talking about the controversial uh cleopatra discussion you see if you spent any time on twitter especially in the ancient history realms of twitter you will have come across a hot debate that happens every few years a back and forth between self-proclaimed historians uh actual historians and just the general public was cleopatra egyptian or in the more controversial terms was she a white woman or was she a woman of color see the last big debate around this actually occurred in 2020 when it was announced that gal gadot would play cleopatra in an upcoming sony biopic twitter began an uprising about a white woman being cast as the queen of egypt and even the guardian newspaper called the casting a backward step for hollywood representation for not casting a north african actress as the queen of egypt however other critics have noted that cleopatra though she was born in egypt was of greek macedonian descent though no one came to a solid consensus over on twitter i think the whole debacle actually mainly serve as proof that people will still fight over a woman's body for thousands of years no matter how ancient or dead she is so should cleopatra in any film not be you know presented by liz taylor and someone of an african descent of some kind north african descent more specifically a person of color or should she be played by a white person where does she lie well yes cleopatra was of greek macedonian descent but her race isn't as clear-cut as well she must be played by a white woman because she was greek macedonian and it's actually a really interesting discussion to go through her family history because her genetic makeup is not straightforward in the slightest and when things are tricky i love to step in so to break down cleopatra genetically uh we need to analyze the genetics of her parents the first is that we know of her father was teleme the twelfth or letters the macedonian king of egypt his father was talemy the ninth sota two uh whose by name is latharus which is actually greek for chickpea which is what i'm going to call him from now on so talemy's father and cleopatra's grandfather chickpea was the son of pharaoh talemese and cleopatra iii now again if you're not familiar with greek idiotology you're probably thinking huh cleopatra the third most people just think cleopatra is cleopatra because there's only one of her but she wasn't the first cleopatra and you're probably also going whoa whoa we've gone back several generations why are we going back so far well there are several reasons why we have to go back this far and we're going to go back further trust me so let's discuss the obvious here first you know we call cleopatra cleopatra today but she's not the first cleopatra she's actually cleopatra the seventh for ease of this video i will call her cleopatra but it's important to remember because there's going to be lots of cleopatras in the story cleopatra was from a long line of cleopatras and cleopatra the first the cleopatra who started this whole chain was syrian but was she ethnically syrian or just born there well again we have to analyze something just because someone was born somewhere doesn't determine their ethnicity so for example had i been born in china i would be no less irish in english just because i was born in china and this is a lot to take into consideration when it comes to cleopatra and her heritage they're primarily colonizers and they're from a descendants of colonizers so again it's too easy an angle for people to say a north african woman should play cleopatra because cleopatra was not ethnically north african but her ethnicity wasn't entirely greek so let's get into it so let's start with the first cleopatra cleopatra the first was the daughter of antiochus iii who was born circa 241 and he reigned until 187 bce now he was the syrian king of the seleucid dynasty but her mother leo dica was actually both greek and persian descent so cleopatra the first was already mixed race because her mother was mix-raised but as you can see that's really far back if we go down the timeline cleopatra the first is very far away from cleopatra the seventh but we have to go all the way about to prove that the macedonian line wasn't pure in terms of greek macedonian there was persian and there was also syrian that's going to come into the family line as you will see however although there was this diversification don't get it twisted the tilami's definitely kept it in the family but before i explain how that is the case i'd like to take a quick moment to thank today's sponsor skillshare are you someone with a lot of ambition but you don't know how to prioritize your work organize your thoughts or basically actually just kick yourself into gear whether you're a want to be researcher a creative or an entrepreneur skillshare can help you get your life on track and take you to the next level creatively personally and professionally skillshare is an online learning community with thousands of inspiring classes for anyone who loves learning and wants to explore their creativity and learn new skills have a specific skill you'll try to learn well skillshare is the perfect place to start this month's highlight goes to 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signing up then the first 1000 people who use my link below and use the code lady of the library will get one month free trial of skillshare so just use the code lady of the library and check my link out down below to set yourself up on skillshare and best of luck so thank you skillshare for sponsoring today's video and now let's get into the juiciness that is the cleopatra teleme family line so to cleopatra the first was married off to talemy v and their daughter cleopatra ii was married off to both of her brothers she was first married after her eldest brother who was talemy the sixth filometer until he died and then she was married after her younger brother talemy the eighth eugettis ii cleopatra ii had children with both of her brothers and one of those children was cleopatra iii cleopatra iii was also married after her uncle and stepfather to lemmy the eighth cycon and they gave birth to cleopatra iv who was married after her brother talemy the ninth but this is where it gets really fun because there's more than one cleopatra in the story see cleopatra iv had another sister who was also called cleopatra but she's known as cleopatra celine of syria because yes further down the family line there's actually another clear patch of celine cleopatra the saline the second but cleopatra iv had a sister cleopatra celine and due to a lot of family issues cleopatra iii forced her daughter cleopatra iv and her son tilemi ix to divorce and then she ordered her son to marry her other daughter cleopatra celine so both cleopatra celine and cleopatra iv were forced to marry their brother by their mother cleopatra iii isn't this exciting the cleopatra celine of syria actually had an extensive line of husbands she had five husbands throughout her life including both of her brothers until she was married off to the antiochus brothers who yes all the way back in the family history we've already met these guys before that they're we're all related in some way so her next three husbands were actually antiochus the eighth the ninth and the tenth and the antiochus eighth ninth and tenth were actually the sons of a woman called cleopatra thea where did cleopatra thea come from well actually cleopatra thea is another daughter of cleopatra the second yes lots of daughters have the same name it all comes from roundabouts however there must have been some jealousy rising in the family amongst the cleopatra girls because more specifically uh there was one daughter who wasn't called cleopatra at all she was called trifena trifana was actually the sister of cleopatra celine and cleopatra iv and she must have felt pretty left out being the only one that wasn't called cleopatra which probably explains why she was totally okay with ordering the death of her sister cleopatra iv yes cleopatra iv was killed by her sister trifana however what's interesting is she didn't kill her other sister cleopatra celine and that's because um they shared a husband yeah the husband was quite upset actually he didn't want his wife tryfina to kill cleopatra iv uh and she he begged her not to but she did it anyway so obviously not with her bare hands she ordered someone else to kill them off however when it came to his other wife cleopatra celine she couldn't really touch that she had to draw the line somewhere she could only kill one sister okay or left her at it now as confusing as all as that was this is actually where it gets even more muddy and more uncertain you see then we have the cleopatra the fifth and she is an anomaly no one actually knows who the mother of cleopatra the fifth was and no one is sure if her father was tilled me the ninth or if it was actually tolemy the tenth and these are the two sons of cleopatra the third which means cleopatra the fifth may or may not have been legitimate uh it's just more interesting that it wasn't recorded who her mother was or who her father was accurately and because we don't know who her mother was the ethnicity of cleopatra the fifth is uncertain all we know for sure about cleopatra the fifth is that she had a daughter berenice iv and then we jump from cleopatra the fifth to the famous cleopatra the clay patch we know today cleopatra the seventh but you're probably thinking where the [ __ ] was cleopatra the sixth and i hear you but again it's really complicated so cleopatra the fifth's daughter berenice iv ruled egypt alongside her parents and a woman known as cleopatra vi but no one knows the relationship between berenice iv and cleopatra the sixth so some people believe that cleopatra vi was berenice's sister but there are others who think that she may have been one of berenice's daughters that's my dog making that weird noise in the background by the way so we don't know anything about the relationship between berenice the fourth and cleopatra the sixth the doc is making me laugh so we don't actually know anything for certain about the relationship between cleopatra the sixth and berenice all we do know is that berenice was actually killed by her father tolerate the twelfth and the throne was taken from berenice and given over to his other daughter cleopatra the seventh the cleopatra so berenice iv is actually related to cleopatra and i say related because we know we should they shared a father but we don't know if they shared a mother that's right we don't know who cleopatra's mother was and it's not certain we know for certain that cleopatra v had a daughter called berenice but it's unknown whether or not she was also the mother of cleopatra the sixth and cleopatra vii all we know is that cleopatra the seventh was the daughter of talemi the twelfth so she may may have been illegitimate but that said uh it's unlikely and here's why you see there's no roman author out there at the time who ever described her as being illegitimate and trust me they liked pointing out a legitimate children it was the target goal it was a bit like calling someone ugly it was the the the achilles heel of slights in the ancient world to point out someone's illegitimacy so it doesn't make sense that that wasn't a slight used against her by people who didn't like her were she illegitimate not even octavian a cleopatra's arch enemy called her illegitimate which would have been so easy for him to do as a dick were it true so what can we actually to conclude about some form of race and ethnicity well okay let's look at cleopatra's grandfather king talemy the ninth uh for example kingsley ix was full greek and iranian descent so we have a mixture there but what's interesting is when it comes to one of his sons you see okay cleopatra's grandfather was a good boy he kept it in the family you know he married both of his sisters very loyally as he should however his son talemy the 12th or letters the man who went on to marry cleopatra v who may or may not have been cleopatra's mother um he may not have been a product of incest cleopatra's father's mother is unknown so whilst cleopatra's grandfather married his sisters the man who came out as cleopatra's father telling me the 12th or letters uh his mother isn't listed as one of those sisters so talemy the 12th actually may be a byproduct of fooling around concubinary as it were we don't know who his mother was and what's interesting is talemy cleopatra's father was actually uh called by the egyptians and romans as nothos which is which is the word for bastard in ancient greek so we don't know who cleopatra's grandmother was on her father's side uh which makes him mix blood in terms of a royal bloodline because again someone's snuck out of the bloodline here everything's been kept in the family until now everything's being ancestral or you know cousins or uncles or step fathers whatever he's the product of something completely different however does that mean that he was actually mixed race in terms of ethnicity see again let's break this down in terms of looking at what ancient egypt looked like at the time egypt at this point was filled with greek colonizer which means technically it was more likely that he's the product of a greek concupine rather than a northern african concubine but there's no way to prove it the telemach family were in contact with people all across europe the middle east libya new media his mother could have been anyone the chances are he would have gone with a greek concupine but again that's just based on projection of our social understanding of their relationships within that social context but we don't know for sure second major gap is actually cleopatra's mother herself the woman who makes up fifty percent of her genetic makeup is totally unknown and the likelihood is cleopatra v his sister is the mother of cleopatra the seventh but where it gets tricky and why people don't really know is that after cleopatra the cleopatra was born cleopatra v almost completely disappeared from official documents how interesting now some people originally thought that she completely disappeared from documents because she died in childbirth whilst giving birth to cleopatra but this is refuted by two other mentions of her later in two different sources so there's one mention of the clear patch of the fifth eleven years later in a temple and the other mention is of a trifena with ruling alongside the cleopatra cleopatra the fifth is also known cleopatra the fifth trifana and that wouldn't be the same trifana that killed off her sister cleopatra iv and who also shared her husband with her sister cleopatra of celine it's more likely by this point in the stage if cleopatra the seventh is ruling that the trifaina that they're referring to is actually cleopatra v who is also known as cleopatra the fifth trifana which means what happened to cleopatra the fifth uh well likelihood is actually she was exiled after cleopatra the seventh was born the famous cleopatra would which would explain why there's no documentation of her and why the records are missing because they liked doing that they wanted to erase people in egypt and they didn't like you they just erased you entirely so if cleopatra is the legitimate daughter of cleopatra v uh then she would have inherited macedonian iranian and persian genes from her parents making her not 100 greek but also not ethnically egyptian or north african unless her father's mother was a non-greek concupine if you were to break this down from the genetics you know and look at how people are portrayed in egyptian artwork again we can decipher some things of how people look like but again we have to take in consideration that this artistic flair being used here so if we look at our egyptian artwork to decipher how people looked the egyptians actually depicted skin tones in their artwork you know ancient egyptian art showed northern non-egyptians asiatics and a mediterranean with yellow skin color and then they demonstrated egyptian men as having this like reddish skin color with the exception of some ruling women such as hatchet sip and nefertiti and then also nubians from the region of sudan which they actually presented with having darker skin so if we're looking at this color yellow uh you will actually see that all the women aside from obviously never ct and hatchets of are yellow skinned so some people would imply that that means that they are white because of it but however there's a major flaw here because yellow as a color uh the ancient egyptians called this uh kenneth was the color that they used for all women's skin as well as the people who lived in the mediterraneans uh the libyans the bedouins the syrians and the hittites so yellow is actually a significant color because it is the color of the sun and it's also very much associated with the color gold which represents perfection so women were naturally painted of this yellow color in pictures because it was of purity gold perfection all that jazz but because it was also used when they were looking at like non-egyptian western asiatic etc people then believe it just signifies white skin but again knowing the significance of colors we can't judge how they use their colors exactly because they were symbolic as much as they were potentially realistic makes it even more difficult again is that we don't have any physical descriptions of cleopatra by writers at the time the main physical description we actually have of cleopatra from the ancient world is actually by a poet called lucan and the poem goes as such they're the monarchs reclining along with caesar power was greater and the queen cleopatra her dangerous beauty enhanced by cosmetics she wore riches on her hand and neck and felt the weight of her jewelry her snow white breasts shone through diaphanous sidonian cloth so people would read that and be like ah she had snow white breasts this ancient poet lucan said so can we trust lucan's account well luca never saw cleopatra himself people give him credit however because one of his besties was nero so due to many levels of incest mark anthony cleopatra's lover was both nero's great-grandfather and also his great-great-grandfather i know family lines so lucan the poet may have taken you know some pointers from nero about what cleopatra looked like but can we really trust the depiction of a woman by a man who was besties with another man who was describing hit the lover of his great great grandfather who he never met people give out a lot of credit and wait i'm like oh yes he knew nero so he must have known what cleopatra looked like at the end of the day lukan is just a dude a poet who is besties with a guy who has told him what he thinks his great-great-grandfather's lover looked like to me that's not exactly really found i don't know what my great-great-grandfather looked like let alone my great-great-grandfather's girlfriends looked like that's not something that trickles through the family talk line we don't chat about all of that you know so at the end of the day i wouldn't give that much credit uh i don't think she would be snow white uh in that sense she definitely had persian iranian heritage and bloodline but again it's only a fraction so she wasn't a pure greek macedonian as people argue but she certainly wasn't anything near north african she wasn't from that realm her family line wasn't from that realm unless unless her father's mother i.e her grandmother on her father's side was a concubine of a different ethnicity but again there's no way to prove it it wasn't documented in any shape or form so people can play with that if they want there is no accurate way to depict her race and ethnicity because there are two major gaps in cleopatra's life that are pretty close her grandmother on her father's side and also her mother they're quite major gaps we probably think that cleopatra the fifth is her mother and was exile for some reason but who her fraternal grandmother was is a big question mark and that could change the whole game but again we'll actually never know so as deep as we want to get into this and they argue back and forth back and forth uh she wasn't a pure macedonian greek but she certainly wasn't north african either and that is the conclusion of the family tree as complicated and hilarious and ancestral as it is so i hope you enjoyed this video thank you so much skillshare for sponsoring this video thank you so much for watching if you got all the way through here please leave any request down below for other topics you'd like me to cover and i will see you soon for another video and remember books save lives so keep reading

Channel: Lady of the Library

Views: 266,137

Keywords: cleopatra, was cleopatra black, cleopatra documentary, cleopatra history, cleopatra facts, truth about cleopatra, weird truth about cleopatra, cleopatra movie, queen cleopatra, strange facts about cleopatra, strange things about cleopatra, cleopatra hair, is cleopatra black?, facts about cleopatra, cleopatra story, cleopatra's tomb, cleopatra marc antony, cleopatra black, weird facts about cleopatra, black history, cleopatra sister, cleopatra costume, cleopatras tomb

Id: O3d1c4l1pgM

Length: 22min 54sec (1374 seconds)

Published: Thu Apr 14 2022