Was Queen Cleopatra Black or white?

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Was Egyptian Queen Cleopatra Black or white?

While my first response is, "does it matter," I admit that the anecdotal social media evidence shows that clearly it matters a great many things to a great many people around the world, particularly modern Egyptians, modern Blacks across the Diaspora, Hollywood execs and, yes, a great many white historians and history buffs. 

The new Netflix documentary on Cleopatra has been a lightning rod of controversy for several weeks now due to Adele James (left), a Black actress, taking on the role once depicted by the late Liz Taylor (right)

Now, if you are my age or older, then you surely grew up with the Hollywood images of Egyptian kings and queens during the Pharaonic dynasties portrayed by white movie stars like Yul Brynner, Charlton Heston, and the original silver screen Cleopatra, Elizabeth Taylor. 

But were those depictions accurate? 

With regards to Rameses, played by Brynner in The Ten Commandments, and his adopted cousin/brother Moses, played by Heston, those depictions were woefully inaccurate because during the early dynastic ages, people in the lower Nile Valley (nearest the Mediterranean Sea) shared stronger racial phenotypes with their darker neighbors from upper Egypt, which is to the south nearer to Ancient Ethiopia and other lands inhabited by darker African people. 

But by the age of Cleopatra many centuries later, the glory of Ancient Egypt had long since waned due to the colonial exploits of Alexander the Great and his Macedonian hordes who ruled vast stretches of North Africa until the Roman Empire's incursions wrested total control by the First Century B.C. 

To be clear, I have no historical bases to question that Cleopatra was the descendant of a Macedonian Greek General on her father's side; where it gets tricky is that historians have absolutely no clue as to who Cleopatra's real mother was and because that information is incomplete, she could have been a white Macedonian descendant, or a local whose blood was mixed with Afro-Semitic-Phoenician like many of the citizens living at the time. 

What we do know is that Cleopatra spoke Greek and in a number of busts of her visage (above), had a thin nose and lips that differ from the thicker noses and lips of prior Egyptian leaders like earlier King Tutankhamen (below).

The above two photos depict a relief of King Tutankhamen, and a bust of his grandmother, Queen Tiye.

Still, most of us know from our own families and friends that biracial children often can take on some or most of the physical features of one parent or another, can reach back several generations, or can be a blend of the distinctly separate races, so it is tough for any historian to say, definitively, whether the real Cleopatra looked Black or white. 

What we do know is that in the pantheon of great Egyptian rulers, Cleopatra is rarely included because Egypt during her age was merely a colony that provided agricultural bounties for a Roman Empire which initially was under the control of the First Triumvirate (Julius Caesar, Pompey Magnus, and Crassus), then Julius Caesar as sole dictator. Cleopatra subsequently became Julius Caesar's paramour, and the Roman leader backed her as the titular queen of her realm before fathering a son with her named Caesarion.

Following Caesar's assassination in 44 BC, Cleopatra took on a new Roman paramour, Caesar's loyal former general and tribune Mark Antony, and after nearly 14 years of strife and a Roman civil war between the Second Triumvirate of Antony, Octavian Caesar (Julius' nephew) and Lepidus, when the younger Caesar proved the ultimate victor and declared himself Augustus, the first Emperor of Rome, Cleopatra—and Antony—committed suicide in Egypt to avoid being captured and paraded as condemned prisoners through the streets of Rome. 

In light of this historical synopsis, I circle back to my second question above: "Does it matter whether Cleopatra was Black or white?"

When I was a freshman at Morehouse College, I was exploring Woodruff Library one afternoon when I stumbled across a 19th Century map that called all of what we know to be North Africa "Southern Europe.”

One need not be a historian to understand that for centuries and even unto this day, the wonders of the Ancient Egyptian world, from the pyramids, to the architecture, to the mystery system that formed the bases of modern education in Europe—and the concept of monotheistic religions like Judaism, Christianity, and Islam, all formed in Ancient Egypt. 

The Egyptian Trinity of Isis, Horus, and Osiris, remind many of the much later Christian Father, Son, and Holy Spirit Trinity…

One need not be a sociologist to understand that in the modern era, as European powers raped and pillaged all of Africa while enslaving many of its inhabitants in the Americas, that it runs contrary to the racist lie that Black people were uneducated savages if the evidence is plentiful that our ancestors were not just the first humanoids, but also the progenitors of all manner of academic, religious, and practical thinking. Thus, the original "Big Lie" by Europeans that the people in North Africa, including Egypt, were devoid of any African blood or descent!

While the racist biases are clearly obvious in the macro of Ancient Egyptian studies, in the micro—whether Cleopatra was Black—will remain subject to debate although I, for one, believe that she was a miscegenated woman who was clearly more attuned to her Macedonian European (white) heritage, even if some blood from Black Africa may have flowed through her veins. 

Separately, and most importantly for today's blog, is that I find the entire debate about whether the current Netflix documentary by Jada Pinkett Smith and director Tina Gharavi featuring Adele James, a Black British actress, quite disturbing. 

What disturbs me is that the main push back on a Black actress playing Cleopatra is coming from modern Egyptians, many of whom consider themselves to be white. Chief among the critics is Dr. Zahi Hawass, a famous professor and archaeologist who dismisses Jada Pinkett Smith, comedian Kevin Hart, and famed Afrocentric historian Dr. Cheikh Anta Diop for concluding that Cleopatra and the ancient kings and queens were Black, and not white.

Dr. Zahi Hawass

When I saw the above picture of Dr. Hawass, I chuckled because had he grown up here in America, he SURELY would not have been considered a white man, especially in the deep South. In fact, he actually shares a similar complexion, hair texture, and nose to my maternal Grandpa George Catchings and a whole host of other Black men who suffered under the yoke of Jim Crow in the Deep South!

But for reasons that I may never understand, there are so many darker skinned people across the globe who desire to be white and LOVE their white adjacency. Such is why you don't see a host of Egyptians calling for MGM or Paramount to remove all movies featuring northern white Europeans as ancient kings and queens because deep down inside, some really think that they look more like the Brynners, the Hestons, and the Taylors of the world, than they do like their neighbors to the South in Africa. 

But this is no surprise, mind you, as I told one Egyptian poster several years ago on my Facebook page that he should go read Toni Morrison's "The Bluest Eye" and watch "Imitation of Life," and then circle back to me after he looked in the mirror and realized that no matter how hard he tried, he wasn't white! I took a 3-day Facebook suspension for that barb, but still submit that it was true then—and true now. 

While Hollywood has it's problems, one aspect that I appreciate in the modern world is how dramatic documentaries can bring ancient people, places, and events to life. Cleopatra's story is a classic and deserves to be told for who she was and what she did, because the themes of colonial exploitation and manipulation remain with us to this very day.

2016’s “Gods of Egypt”

But in the end, I submit that anyone whose troubled by a Black woman depicting the queen in this piece, but held no qualms with a blue or green eyed white woman portraying the same in the 1960’s, or made no fuss when the movie “Gods of Egypt” featured a predominantly white cast of gods in 2016, is trapped into the same racist cauldron that makes white adjacency the gold standard both in cinema and history classes across the globe.