---
title: "Ancient Egyptian race controversy"
chunk: 11/18
source: "https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ancient_Egyptian_race_controversy"
category: "reference"
tags: "science, encyclopedia"
date_saved: "2026-05-05T04:17:30.372855+00:00"
instance: "kb-cron"
---

The race and skin color of Cleopatra VII, the last active Hellenistic ruler of the Macedonian Greek Ptolemaic dynasty of Egypt, established in 323 BC, has also caused some debate, although generally not in scholarly sources. For example, the article "Was Cleopatra Black?" was published in Ebony magazine in 2012, and an article about Afrocentrism from the St. Louis Post-Dispatch mentions the question, too. Mary Lefkowitz, Professor Emerita of Classical Studies at Wellesley College, traces the main origins of the black Cleopatra claim to the 1946 book by J. A. Rogers called World's Great Men of Color, although noting that the idea of Cleopatra as black goes back to at least the 19th century. The black Cleopatra claim was further revived in an essay by afrocentrist John Henrik Clarke, chair of African history at Hunter College, entitled "African Warrior Queens." Lefkowitz refutes Rogers' and Clarke's hypotheses, on various scholarly grounds.

Scholars identify Cleopatra as essentially of Greek ancestry with some Persian and Sogdian Iranian ancestry, based on the fact that her Macedonian Greek family (the Ptolemaic dynasty) had intermingled with the Seleucid aristocracy of the time.
Michael Grant states that Cleopatra probably had not a drop of Egyptian blood and that she "would have described herself as Greek." To contrary, Joyce Tyldesley highlights that while "Ptolemies were culturally Hellenistic Macedonians", they also "believed themselves to be a valid Egyptian dynasty" and that "Cleopatra defined herself as an Egyptian queen" accepted as such by her subjects and contemporaries. She also admits possibility of Cleopatra having Egyptian mother that could potentially explain Queen's proficiency in Egyptian language. However, Tyldesley notes that even if this theory is true, it might not be helpful in determination of Cleopatra's racial heritage and her phenotype, as population of Egypt during Ptolemaic times had "diverse range of racial characteristics, with red-haded, light-skinned Egyptians living alongside curly haired, darker-skinned neighbours".
Duane W. Roller notes that "there is absolutely no evidence" that Cleopatra was racially black African as claimed by what he dismisses as generally not "credible scholarly sources," although he speculates Cleopatra may have been one-fourth Egyptian.
Part of Roller's argument rests on a speculated earlier marriage between Psenptais II and a certain "Berenice", once argued to possibly be a daughter of Ptolemy VIII. However, this speculation was refuted by Egyptologist Wendy Cheshire.
Cleopatra's official coinage (which she would have approved) and the three portrait busts of her which are considered authentic by scholars, all match each other, and they portray Cleopatra as a Greek woman. Polo writes that Cleopatra's coinage presents her image with certainty, and asserts that the sculpted portrait of the "Berlin Cleopatra" head is confirmed as having a similar profile. Similar to the Berlin Cleopatra, other Roman sculpted portraits of Cleopatra include diadem-wearing marble heads now located in the Vatican Museums and Archaeological Museum of Cherchell, although the latter may instead be a depiction of her daughter Cleopatra Selene II. Aside from Hellenistic art, native Egyptian artworks of Cleopatra include the Bust of Cleopatra in the Royal Ontario Museum, as well as stone-carved reliefs of the Temple of Hathor in the Dendera Temple complex in Egypt depicting Cleopatra and Caesarion as ruling pharaohs providing offerings to Egyptian deities. In his Kleopatra und die Caesaren (2006), Bernard Andreae contends that this Egyptian basalt statue is like other idealized Egyptian portraits of the queen, and does not contain realistic facial features and hence adds little to the knowledge of Cleopatra's appearance.
In 2009, a BBC documentary speculated that Cleopatra might have been part North African. This was based largely on the claims of Hilke Thür of the Austrian Academy of Sciences, who in the 1990s had examined a headless skeleton of a female child in a 20 BC tomb in Ephesus (modern Turkey), together with the old notes and photographs of the now-missing skull. Thür hypothesized the body as that of Arsinoe, half-sister to Cleopatra. Arsinoe and Cleopatra shared the same father (Ptolemy XII Auletes) but may have had different mothers, with Thür claiming the alleged African ancestry came from the skeleton's mother.
Furthermore, craniometry as used by Thür to determine race is based in scientific racism that is now generally considered a pseudoscience that supported "exploitation of groups of people" to "perpetuate racial oppression" and "distorted future views of the biological basis of race." When a DNA test attempted to determine the identity of the child, it was impossible to get an accurate reading since the bones had been handled too many times, and the skull had been lost in Germany during World War II. Numerous studies have shown that cranial variation has a low correlation with race, and rather that cranial variation was strongly correlated with climate variables. Mary Beard states that the age of the skeleton is too young to be that of Arsinoe (the bones said to be that of a 15–18-year-old child, with Arsinoe being around her mid twenties at her death).
In 2025, it was definitively proven that the skeleton does not belong to Arsinoe IV, when genetic research was able to assess that the skeleton belongs to a teenage male.
The 2023 Netflix documentary series Queen Cleopatra, which appears to depict Cleopatra as black, spurred a lawsuit in Egypt claiming that the documentary was distorting the reality in order to promote Afrocentrism, and that Netflix's programs were not in line with Egyptian or Islamic values. Similarly, an article published by The Telegraph criticized the Netflix documentary, stating that "Cleopatra was Greek, not a tool in Netflix's war on real history". Classics scholar Rebecca Futo Kennedy contends that discussing whether someone was “black” or “white” is anachronistic, and that asking this question says "more about modern political investments than attempting to understand antiquity on its own terms."

=== Great Sphinx of Giza ===