A specter is haunting the Internet -- the specter of manufactured controversy. Every day, there's something new guaranteed to rustle a few jimmies in at least some segments of the online hoi polloi. I like to pretend that I am immune to this sort of thing because I've understood for a long time that, in the words of the great Eric Bischoff, controversy creates cash. Generally speaking, I practice what we might call meta-outrage, where I reserve my opprobrium and vitriol not so much for the topics of ragebait articles but rather their very existence or at least the manner in which they are compiled. Today, however, I found the perfect intersection of content and form that had me scrambling for my don't-kill-people meds.
Evidently, Israeli actress Gal Gadot has been cast in the role of Cleopatra in an upcoming film about the ancient queen's life. I question the wisdom of the decision to make this movie in the first place since there seems to be no real demand for it and the last English-language epic film based on the story of Cleopatra was plagued by multiple production issues, but that's beside the point. The issue, as the BBC informs us, is that:
Cleopatra, born in the ancient Egyptian capital Alexandria, was the last ruler in the dynasty founded by Alexander the Great's Macedonian general Ptolemy, whose descendants ruled Egypt for 300 years.
They have long been thought to have been white with a high degree of inbreeding. But there is mystery over the identity of her mother, leading to speculation that Cleopatra may have been of mixed heritage.
Now, I have a couple of issues with the latter two sentences, but let's just put a pin in that. The complaint is that Gal Gadot has been cast in the role of a person who "may have been of mixed heritage." For anyone who actually knows anything about the Ptolemaic dynasty, this would just be kind of an eye-roller, but frankly nothing to get hot and bothered over. The real problem is this excerpt from a similar article from IndieWire:
The casting generated backlash as Gadot is an Israeli actress set to play a mixed race historical figure.
Whoa. Notice how we've gone from a possibility to a definitive, word-of-God statement about Cleopatra's ethnicity. Now I don't mean to suggest that IndieWire is somehow less editorially stringent than the Beeb, but...well, ok, they're less editorially stringent than the Beeb. And that's saying a lot, since the BBC in 2009 uncritically repeated an astonishingly irresponsible case for the supposedly black origins of Cleopatra based on the rediscovery of a headless "African" skeleton in Turkey alleged to belong to Arsinoe IV, Cleopatra's sister. The article doesn't mention this, but the reason the skeleton was headless was because it had actually been discovered decades earlier and the skull was transported to Germany for study, where it was subsequently lost or destroyed in World War II. The identification of this body as being "African" was based on a later author's phrenological interpretations of notes on the skull taken in the 1920s or 1930s (can anyone think of anything going on in Germany at this time that might possibly bias a study of this type?). Note also that we're not even talking about Cleopatra, we're talking about an incomplete set of bones buried in a tomb with no inscription that's got a similar shape to one part of the now lost Lighthouse of Alexandria. Why exactly it would be necessary, expedient, or desirable to bury a princess from Egypt hundreds of miles away in Anatolia in the middle of a civil war in the first century BC is not explained. In case it's not clear, I doubt very much that this was the body of Arsinoe or anyone connected to Cleopatra in any way.
But whatever. The point is that this is how maybes become facts and it should be terrifying. If the article was simply reporting on the fact that some people on Twitter are bitching about Gal Gadot, it would be all right, because most online journalism nowadays is just Ctrl + C, Ctrl + Ving tweets anyway. But the author of the IndieWire article crosses a line in the way that he casually makes a declaration about a subject that he presumably knows nothing about. I say "presumably" because that is the most charitable reading of the situation. The main alternative would be that the author does know a thing or two about Cleopatra and that he's knowingly repeating completely unsubstantiated falsehoods, so I'd prefer to chalk this up to the fact that not everyone knows as much about this kind of thing as I do.
That of course raises the question as to what I do know about this kind of thing. I know, for example, that the BBC is correct when it states that the members of the Ptolemaic dynasty practiced "a high degree of inbreeding." Because their ancestors came from Macedonia, a region in Europe, they were presumably white, but I'd like to briefly digress and point out that the ancient world's conception of race was much different from our own. There was no concept of being "white," but rather being Macedonian, Greek, Gallic, Etruscan, Latin, Syracusan, Germanic, etc., so the fact that all of these groups shared a similar complexion was irrelevant to them. In the ancient world, you would be considered "mixed race" if your mother was Etruscan and your father was Greek, as was the case for the 5th king of Rome, Lucius Tarquinius Priscus, despite the fact that there was probably no appreciable physical difference between the two groups. Generically, people in the Greek world called most black Africans "Ethiopians" but that's mainly because the only black Africans they regularly encountered were, in fact, from the region that we'd call Ethiopia. The pre-Ptolemaic Egyptians tended to categorize most black Africans as "Nehesu," i.e. Nubian, but they were also aware of other groups.
In any case, unlocking the "mystery" of Cleopatra's ethnic makeup requires a little bit of background about the Ptolemaic dynasty and its place in the milieu of the ancient Mediterranean. Alexander the Great of course was a Macedonian king who conquered the extensive territory of the Persian Empire and even pushed into what is now India, creating a polity that stretched from the Balkans to the Indus River. He then inconsiderately died at the age of 32 in 323 BC without bothering to actually run the thing. His empire was then partitioned among his leading generals and advisors, originally with the intent of maintaining it as a single realm until his heir, the then-unborn Alexander IV, could take over. This was a polite fiction that these men -- called Diadochi, from the Greek for "successors" -- told each other because they knew that while war was most likely inevitable, none of them at that time had the power, resources, or credibility to take the whole empire. The general Ptolemy, however, knew that he would have to act quickly to secure the best position for himself in the future conflicts. He claimed the province of Egypt. Strategically, Egypt was surrounded on all sides by desert or water, making it easy to defend from overland attacks. He also took the, uh, interesting step of abducting Alexander's dead body and bringing it for burial to the city that Alexander had founded in 331 BC right at the edge of the Nile Delta on the Mediterranean Sea. That city was called Alexandria (one of many of the same name across the vast expanse that Alexander conquered), which would become the capital of Ptolemaic Egypt.
The eventual wars of the Diadochi that broke out are too numerous and convoluted to go into here, but the end result was that no one man was able to claim the entirety of the Alexandrian Empire, so several successor states popped up and the various Diadochi each proclaimed themselves independent kings of the lands they occupied. Even though these successor kingdoms were dispersed throughout the eastern Mediterranean basin (and further inland) well beyond the geographical confines of Greece, the Diadochi never stopped considering themselves Greek. In the generation that followed the death of Alexander and the establishment of these polities, Greek culture spread over a massive area and this era of history is therefore known as the Hellenistic period (from the word the Greeks used for themselves, Hellene).
While all of this is very informative, I'm sure you're wondering what any of it has to do with Cleopatra. Well, let's get back to Egypt. Egypt, naturally, was already ancient by the time Alexandria was built. It had many capitals and administrative centers such as Thebes, Memphis, and Luxor, so why did Alexander bother building an entirely new city? In particular, why did he build a city that was so far removed from the geographical center of the country? Why did Ptolemy and his own successors use a barely established city for their capital when there were already several other more venerable and respectable choices?
The answer is simple: Alexandria was a brand new Greek city designed along Greek lines intended for a primarily Greek population. Thebes, Memphis, and Luxor were unsuitable locations because they were Egyptian capitals and the Ptolemies never developed a conception of themselves as being Egyptian. In Latin, the Romans called the city Alexandria ad Aegyptum, that is, Alexandria by Egypt; it is significant that they did not consider it "in" Egypt or "of" Egypt. All of the Diadochi considered it imperative to maintain strong presences close to the Mediterranean Sea because they were Greek and they did not want to be far removed from the Urheimat.
When Alexander finally overthrew the Persian monarchy and took it for himself, he felt the only way to ensure the acceptance of Macedonian hegemony over the satrapies of the Achaemenid Empire was to create a blended, hybrid Helleno-Persian civilization. To this end, he arranged marriages between his most trusted officers -- including Ptolemy -- and noble Persian women. Alexander himself had multiple wives, the most famous of which was Roxana, the daughter of a Bactrian vassal of the Achaemenid dynasty. The attitude that his men had toward these forced marriages is evident by the fact that after Alexander's death, Seleucus was the only Diadoch to not discard his Persian wife (a woman named Apama). Considering the fact that all of the other Diadochi -- again, including Ptolemy -- would later go on to marry Greek/Macedonian women, I think it is safe to assume that they were not interested in creating a new culture or in mixing with non-Greeks.
In Ptolemaic Egypt -- and indeed in virtually all of the successor kingdoms -- there were very clear lines of delineation between the indigenous populations and their new Hellenistic rulers. The Ptolemaic rulers called themselves "Pharaohs" as a way to maintain political continuity but they never embraced any aspect of Egyptian culture beside incest in anything other than a superficial or ritual way. It is telling that Cleopatra is said to have been the first Ptolemaic ruler capable of speaking the Egyptian language; this means that for nearly 300 years, over a dozen monarchs did not consider it important to learn the language spoken by most of their subjects.
The taxation scheme in Ptolemaic Egypt was arranged along occupational, geographic, and ethnic lines. Greeks were taxed at different rates than native Egyptians and other ethnicities. It was considered a high honor for a native Egyptian to receive "Greek" taxation status, as was the case for certain priests, nobles, and functionaries. Foreign currency was banned in Ptolemaic Egypt; upon arrival, foreign merchants had to exchange all of their currency for Ptolemaic coinage, which was frequently debased and certain categories had little or no value outside of Egypt. Native Egyptians and other non-Greeks in the kingdom were mainly restricted to using the latter types of currency or simply trading in goods while Greeks were permitted to trade in silver coinage (which obviously had a more universal value internationally). Native resentment toward the Alexandrian regime hit a boiling point during the reign of Ptolemy IV and the first 20 years of his son Ptolemy V's reign were consumed by a ruinous rebellion in southern Egypt that saw native Egyptian pharaohs proclaimed for the first time since the Persian era.
If all of this makes it sound like the Ptolemies viewed the native Egyptians as inferior...that's because they did. They were willing, for the sake of convenience, to come to certain accommodations with the native upper crust in areas of religion and taxation. But let's not confuse that with a widespread adoption of Egyptian culture or an affection for the Egyptian people. Ptolemy IV was the first of his line to marry and have children with his sister, which was considered acceptable in native Egyptian culture, but was viewed as aberrant and frankly disgusting by his Hellenistic contemporaries both inside and outside of his kingdom (Ptolemy II had also married his sister after divorcing his first wife, but this was most likely done as a purely protective measure for her benefit and the two never had children). But this raises the question of why he did that. The dynasty had been at war with other successor kingdoms -- principally the Seleucid Empire that controlled territory from Syria to Afghanistan -- since its inception. There was a marked lack of trust between the various powers at that time (or at least between Egypt and the other powers). Pressure would have been high on Ptolemy IV to find a suitable bride and he might very well have turned to the native Egyptian nobility for support...and yet instead of doing that, he went with his own sister, scandalizing the Greek world and damaging his own prestige. If he had had a native Egyptian bride and a half Egyptian son, perhaps the revolt against his rule that occurred at the end of his own reign would never have happened. And yet there's no indication that this thought process ever even entered his mind or his advisors' minds.
There was an historical precedent for why the half-Greek, half-foreign offspring of a Hellenistic ruler would struggle to find acceptance: Alexander the Great's own son, Alexander IV. His mother was Roxana, who, as mentioned earlier, was a decidedly non-Greek Bactrian from what is now Afghanistan. Roxana had not even given birth by the time Alexander the Great died, and his position as an infant monarch was precarious enough on its own. Shortly before turning 14, he and his mother were murdered on the orders of Cassander, the regent of the Macedonian kingdom who assumed the crown for himself afterward. There was no great outrage in the Greek world and nobody leapt into action to avenge their deaths. Keep in mind that this was the adolescent son of a man that thousands of Greeks followed halfway across the world and who many believed to be either a god or the son of a god. Even before Alexander IV's birth, the common soldiers of Alexander the Great's army were ready to proclaim his physically and mentally disabled half-brother Arrhidaeus as his successor rather than wait around for a posthumous half-Bactrian to be born. (In the event, Arrhidaeus and Alexander IV shared the empire simultaneously before being disposed of.)
The only one of the major successor dynasties to actually intermarry with non-Greeks was the Seleucid dynasty, starting with Seleucus I and the Persian wife Alexander the Great forced him to marry, Apama. However, after this initial union, subsequent Seleucid monarchs primarily married women from other successor kingdoms. They also married women from the Kingdom of Pontus on the southeast coast of the Black Sea; while Pontus originated as mainly Persian in cultural and linguistic orientation, it became rapidly Hellenized at both the common and elite levels to the extent that while its rulers typically bore Persian names (e.g. Mithridates or Ariobarzanes), frequent marriages with Diadochi princesses meant that the rulers and their offspring were almost entirely Greek in ethnicity within two or three generations of the kingdom's foundation circa 280 BC; Greek also became the majority language of both the common people and the ruling class.
So what does all of this say about Cleopatra? Most obviously, I think the general Hellenistic attitude toward non-Greeks precludes the idea that a Ptolemy would sexually involve himself with a native Egyptian woman or that the offspring of such a dalliance would be accepted as a first-rate member of the ruling dynasty. So let's address the supposed "mystery" of the identity of her mother. Spoiler alert: there isn't one. Well, maybe that's not fair; there is a mystery, but it's banal and it doesn't change Cleopatra's ethnic background. The thing about the Ptolemaic dynasty is that they weren't very creative when it came to names. All the male rulers of the dynasty are called "Ptolemy." In the ancient world, they weren't even assigned numbers like Ptolemy I, Ptolemy II, etc., they were simply known by epithets like "Soter" (Savior), "Euergetes" (Benefactor), or "Epiphanes" (God made Manifest). The women of the dynasty fared a little better in terms of nomenclature, but in general, the names Berenice, Arsinoe, and especially Cleopatra kept showing up. Our Cleopatra in fact is called Cleopatra VII. Her name means "glory to her father" and is the feminine version of Patroclus. Like the Ptolemaic men, Ptolemaic women were generally given epithets; Cleopatra VII was known as Cleopatra Philopator, the latter being a titled reserved for the children of ruling monarchs meaning "lover of her father," as in she loved her dad, not that she was her dad's lover.
In any case, Cleopatra VII Philopator's mother was a woman named Cleopatra Tryphaena (Delicate), and there is confusion in the records as to whether there were one or two women known by this epithet. Hypothetically, they would be called Cleopatra V Tryphaena and Cleopatra VI Tryphaena; the former would be the wife of Ptolemy XII Auletes (the Flautist) and the latter would be his daughter. Auletes was the father of Cleopatra VII Philopator, and it is extremely unlikely that he would marry and have a kid with his own daughter Cleopatra VI Tryphaena, so Cleopatra V Tryphaena is almost certainly the mother of Cleopatra VII Philopator. It is entirely possible that Cleopatra VI Tryphaena did not exist and references to her are mistaken references to Cleopatra V Tryphaena. Cleopatra V was the daughter of either Ptolemy IX or Ptolemy X; because of the repeated uses of these names, it is difficult to ascertain for sure which one was her father, but in either case, she was a Macedonian Greek, meaning that Cleopatra VII was one as well.
Ironically, to the extent that Cleopatra VII was of "mixed ethnicity" in any regard, it was due to Persian rather than Egyptian ancestry. The Seleucid bloodline entered the Ptolemaic dynasty through Ptolemy IV, who was the great-great-grandson of Seleucus I and Apama through his mother Berenice II; the bride of Ptolemy V, Cleopatra I Syra (the Syrian, referring to her family's kingdom) was also a Seleucid princess, the daughter of Antiochus III and his wife Laodice, who was a princess of the aforementioned Pontic kingdom. However, the Persian ancestry present in the Ptolemaic dynasty would have been so remote by Cleopatra VII's time that the amount of non-Greek (or at least non-Macedonian) DNA in her blood would have been utterly negligible. All of this is to say that it is extremely unlikely that Cleopatra had any native Egyptian (let alone black African) admixture and that claims of her being "mixed race" are wildly inappropriate and factually incorrect.
Ultimately, though, does it even matter? Probably not for most people. Whether or not Cleopatra was white, black, mixed, purple, or Neptunian has no impact on my life. What I guess does matter to me is the way misinformation is being used either knowingly or unknowingly by people to stoke anger and profit from the internet grievance industry. That said, I get where there are problems in popular culture when it comes to dealing with non-white cultures. I personally hate white savior fiction. I understand how it would be offensive, for example, to cast Channing Tatum as the lead in a Haile Sellasie biopic or Ethan Hawke as Tokugawa Ieyasu. But on the other hand, casting an Israeli woman with some European ancestry as a Macedonian Greek woman with a small amount of Persian ancestry isn't too much of a stretch. If we have to demand extreme specificity, we're getting into really bizarre territory with these complaints about casting choices. There is no suggestion, for example, that every actor in contention for the role of George Washington in some future hypothetical movie or television show must be an American planter from Virginia with predominantly English ancestry. I don't think anyone believes that Forest Whitaker was an inappropriate choice to play Idi Amin simply because he does not have any known Ugandan ancestry.
Of course, nothing I say about this will have any impact whatsoever on people who will never read it and who wouldn't believe it even if they did. Honestly the biggest problem with casting Gal Gadot as Cleopatra is the fact that there is some dispute as to whether the queen was considered beautiful and there's not really any debate about that when it comes to Gal Gadot. Cleopatra's appeal to powerful Roman men like Julius Caesar and Mark Antony was evidently in her sophistication and intelligence as well as the obvious fact that she would be a strong ally to have in terms of ensuring food security for Rome. What I think everyone should really worry about with this movie is my premonition that it will prominently feature Gal Gadot rampaging through hordes of hoplites in the style of 300, which would frankly be worse than botching the ethnicity of the character.