Cleopatra wasn't black.
-
Mithrandir-Olorin33 — 10 years ago(January 09, 2016 06:18 PM)
Are any modern Greeks natural Red Heads? Modern Maceodnians are mostly descended from later Slavic migrations. The Ancient Macedonians were more akin to the Irish and Scottish then anyone in the Aegen.
"I knew it, I'm surrounded by @$$Holes" -
ContinentalOp — 9 years ago(July 10, 2016 04:59 PM)
Descendants of Macedonians live in the Greek state of Macedonia. The Macedonians were as Greek as modern day Spartans and were actually Dorians, like the Spartans. Modetn day Greeks are the same people as ancient Greeks so why wouldn't they have red hair today? And Macedonians are no more related to Scots (who are a mix of various ethnic groups such as Gaels and Inglis, as it is more a national denonym) than any Greeks.
This damned jury's getting me. If I don't get away soon I'll be going blood-simply like the natives. -
ContinentalOp — 9 years ago(August 15, 2016 05:17 AM)
The history of tribal migrations is very complicated.
It is but it hasn't quite changed the population of Greece in the modern era. No more than anywhere really IMO. Even places like Ireland have had about as much migrations.
This damned burg's getting me. If I don't get away soon I'll be going blood-simply like the natives. -
barbara-268 — 16 years ago(December 04, 2009 06:10 PM)
The beep kings of Egypt were Nubian, and very dark skinned. However, they only ruled Egypt for a few generations. Other short-term rulers of Egypt were the Hittites, Hyksos, and Persians. The rest of the history of Egypt up to the Ptolemies, the native rulers were all olive skinned Mediterranean people like the common Egyptian, Libyan, etc. Then with Ptolemy, the rulers were very light skinned Greeks for about 300 years all the way down to Cleopatra.
The dark skinned Nubian people of Upper Egypt were subjects of the Egyptians for long periods of time, so they would have been imported into the main part of Egypt as slave labor and mercenaries. It is reasonable to assume that they interbred with some of the Egyptians and created mixed offspring, but this would have been largely confined to the slave class and to a lesser extent the commonest class of Egyptian, such as the camp followers.
Quite a bit of tomb art shows the dark skinned Nubians alongside the light skinned Egyptians, so it was clear that the typical Egyptian was not dark skinned.
Interestingly, one of the Egyptian gods, I forget which one, is usually portrayed as being black in tomb paintings.
Regardless of all this, if a black actress (or Asian, or Eskimo, or whatever) can do a good job at portraying Cleopatra, I'm all for it. It isn't important. -
ProudTraitor — 17 years ago(July 12, 2008 02:29 AM)
What is "black" and what is "white"? These are just terms relating to skin color defined by society. Black people are not actually black, they are different shades of brown, and white people are from pale-pink to yellow.
Society could call Italians black or Ehiopians white if somehow the standards were different. Races blend into each other, and it is obvious that ancient Egyptians were somwhere between white and black.
Now today especially in the US, definiton of "black" is wide and basically includes all people with any kind of Subsaharan feature. What needs to be pointed out is the fact almost all African Americas have some European or Native American ancestry, The average being about 17-25%. This means the so called "lighter skinned" African Americans are almost mulattoes. That is why their skin tone is comparable to ancient Egyptians. If this wasn't the case all American blacks would look like Seal or Djimon Hounsou.
Go to Kenya or Nigeria and compare ordinary people there (not celebrities who are usually lighter) with Will Smith or Terrence Howard, and you will see what i mean.
On the other hand the definiton of white in US is quite narrow (White americans are overwhelmingly of North European dencent so the definiton is White = North and Central European; in many cases excluding even Greeks and Italians), compared to the more objective European definition, which usually includes Turks, Lebanese, Persians and lighter Arabs.
As for the Arab conquest People missunderstand the historic fact that Arabs came to Noth Africa from the East. As it is the case of majority of such conquests, they think this means they completely replaced the indigenous population. In reality the indigenous population only accepted their culure and religion with only minor genetic admixture from the conquerers. The Nile river had very high population density troughout history. Since today's Egyptians are of course overwhelmingly non-black, if ancient Egyptians were, this would mean they had to be completely eradicated and replaced by Arabs, which is very unlikely. Also modern genetic studies show Egptians are descendants of their ancestory who lived around the Nile, and their gene pool has not changed very much in 5 thousand years.
A crowd which is quite representative picture of today's Egpytians
http://shrani.si/f/42/1I/3fJz9Gpq/28670190675cdbb1c5eb.jpg
Also dental and cranial analysis from Mummies shows they are more similar to people of North African, Europe and Middle East, not so much Subsaran Africa, tough some similarities to them is present.
This picture very much debunks the black nationalist claims.
http://shrani.si/f/1/21/1EpjGMCA/1/races2.jpg
The Egyptian is the last one. Look at the facial features which are not similar to the Black guy's jaw, nose and mouth.
What partially contributed to darkness of pigmentation of ancient Egyptians is also exposure to hot sun. Majority of the population were farmers and spent most of the time outside. If you look at the wall paintings the are topless most of the time. The result is the reddish-brownish skin tone observed in the wall paintings and exactly what today's middle easternes look like who are much exposed to the sun.
http://shrani.si/f/1d/c3/2ISU6Tm2/145276066f9ecf80787o.jpg
http://shrani.si/f/2j/bx/2oC3RrT2/414113255bcf86b30c3o.jpg
Also woth noting is the fact Egypt conqered Nubia, and later for a while when Egypt weakened Nubians even ruled Egpyt. Immagine if India came to rule Briain after it's donwfall and much later some people concluded British people were brown, becouse the description of some of their leaders who were actually Indians.
I am white and do not think Ancient Egyptians were. But what bothers me when people want to "steal" an ancient culture from others, such as here some blacks and white nationalists want to steal the civilization from the rightful descendats, in this case today's Egyptians who are Middle Eastern. -
iesa_t — 11 years ago(October 22, 2014 02:15 AM)
No, wherever you got this from, it's not only wrong, but it's nonsense. First, Africa does not equal black people. Africa contained and still contains a range of feature types and skin colors, and it always did, even before persians or greeks, The idea that you seem to have clutched onto where everybody is magically black if you go 50 miles southwest is astonishing just for that. That entire area is extremely packed with people of various kinds and colors.
The true black, not just mocha brown, people originated from the middle three-fifths of the continent, and this makes a lot of sense when you consider how that sits under the equator. People tend to be dark skinned around the equator, and lighter towards the poles, but migration does mix things up a bit.
Egypt, however, has one of the longest, documented visual histories in the history of the world, painted on walls, carved in temples, brushed on papyrus, inlaid in goldthousands of years worth. Those are Egyptians on those walls, and they're tan, olive, or reddish tan, much like Native Americans in the southern states. They generally have sharp, delicate features, resembling europeans or asians with larger eyes, but in these images there are black people, with classic black features, and there would be: because they were visiting or captured from the areas they were native to, outside of Egypt. Many of those depicted are servants. Don't take that the wrong way though, because the other colors of Egyptians in those scenes are also servants. They were divided more by family ties than race. Everybody is a slave.
I have been reading an uptick of people claiming things like Horus and Osirus were truly balck, take back the black gods, etcbut this is so repugnantly misleading just on the face of it: Horus is a hawk headed God, whose face is made of features. becauseHawk Head! He does not have a Black hawk head, whatever good that would do your movement, and his body is never represented as dark skinned like a nubian, and there are dark skinned people represented, but they are not the majority of the figures.
Saying that Egyptians were black until they got rolled by outsiders is the kind of fantasy you have to be completely ignorant to believe. All of the records of ancient egypt left by the egyptians in paintings and sculptures over thousands of years strongely indicate the opposite. Sometimes they had Nubians over for a birthday party, and you can see the difference in the features side by side on the same wall. It's so clear, if you can be bothered to even look. -
LadyofAzul — 11 years ago(January 08, 2015 06:39 AM)
King Tut's grandmother,
Queen Tiye, does look like a black African to me
, so does her son, Akhenaten; and so does King Tut and her other grandchildren, plus her husband Amenhotep III looked black African too (
who is known for marrying several foreign wives
I honestly don't know how people could look at statues of Amenhotep III and Queen Tiye and say these people were Caucasian or White. Their various statues make them look like Sub-Saharan Africans; and King Tut is their grandson and his own statues have black African features
(
https://s3-us-west-2.amazonaws.com:443/data.filmboards/images/upload/fnb7VR3.jpg
), yet there's still a huge debate on what race King Tut was. Even this king from the Third Dynasty looks black:
https://s3-us-west-2.amazonaws.com:443/data.filmboards/images/upload/fqwJlzs.jpg
But either way, the whole Egyptian race thing debate could go on forever. I like to think of them as a multiracial society
(
Egypt today is pretty mixed, one Egyptian could look more Sub-Saharan or Middle Eastern than another; and they don't have demographics separating white from black, they are all Egyptian
).
I mean, it's a civilization that's thousands of years old and was surrounded by other countries in the Mediterranean, the Middle East, and the Sahara, and, through the Kingdom of Kush, was connected to Sub-Saharan Africa. Egypt was conquered by a variety of different kingdoms/countries, ruled various other regions, and traded with many different groups of people. How could they not be multiracial?
Now King Tut and his family could of been biracial
but,
I would not look at any one of their statues
(
and those of some other Ancient Egyptians
), and say,
"
Hey, that looks like a White person!
"
How other people do is beyond me. Anyways, I think one DNA testing company from Sweden tried to do some kind of
DNA test on him and his father and grandfather and determined that they shared a Y-Haplogroup (
R1b1 or R-M343
) with most Western Europeans
, but that excludes their maternal lineage and
doesn't really mean they were Caucasian themselves
. It just that
they could have had paternal Caucasian ancestry
.
The belief that this automatically makes him White, like some people say, is wrong.
It's a 20,000-34,000 year old haplogroup and
people of the Central Sahel Region of Africa (
reaching all the way to Equatorial Guinea
) share this haplogroup as well that supposedly originated in the Middle East or South Asia.
I think you could probably
test nearly half of all Black American men and find their Y-Haplogroup or paternal line and match it to the ones shared by Western Europeans
(
I know you can for my dad because I had his paternal line tested. My father is black and hasn't had a white ancestor since my great-great-great grandfather who fathered my great-great grandfather with a woman from Guinea, West Africa, yet he is of the R1b1 haplogroup, specifically R-U106 which is descendant from R-M343
); most of the popular DNA testing companies say they find
the average African American to be 20% European.
West Africans have only been in America for a few hundred years, think of what that says about the black people in Africa and the admixture there. I think
they tested Rameses III's DNA too
(
https://s3-us-west-2.amazonaws.com:443/data.filmboards/images/upload/H5HqADU.jpg
) and
found it to be closest to the Haplogroup E-V38 from E1b1 (
a common Sub-Saharan African haplogroup said to originate in West Africa with a frequency rate of 90-100% from various West and South African tribes tested
)
, which can be found in many A
frican males throughout all parts of Africa
(
West, Central, South, North, and East
) and
the E-V38 haplogroup seems to be strongest in West and South Africans
(
like Yoruba, Mandinka, Bamileke, and several other Bantu tribes
found in West and South Africa) and
lowers the further east you go
(
though it's strongest at a 47% frequency rate in the nomadic
Tuareg people from Niger
in Northern and Eastern parts of Africa:
http://i57.tinypic.com/alq7ev.png
). However, I believe they say
DNA testing on mummies isn't 100% accurate
. So, it appears the
race of Ancient Egyptians is more complicated than just black or white
.
Africa is the most genetically diverse continent on Earth, so Egypt could have had pharaohs from many different haplogroups throughout the centuries
(
it is one of the oldest kingdoms on Earth
). -
ContinentalOp — 10 years ago(July 19, 2015 10:02 AM)
The Ancient Egyptians were Black Africans, and not 'Middle Easterns', also know as Arabs.
Actually the Egyptians were an Afro-Asiatic group related to Arabs. And most modern Egyptians are Arabized Egyptians, not actual Arabs. It is for this reason that many spoke of the same families that speak Arabic used to speak Coptic, and a minority still speak it.
They were Black
Only if we use ''black'' to mean darker Afro-Asiatic people. The Afro-Asiatic people of Egyptian are related to Arabs and Berbers. They are not closely related to Sub-Saharan Africans.
Formerly KingAngantyr -
shmn — 19 years ago(October 18, 2006 04:15 AM)
funny becuz the exact opposite (could) be true, namely that she was of arian race, considering that Cleopatra was from the Ptolemaus family, one of the 4 generals who took a forth of the greek empire, made by Alexander The Great (a blonde boy)
nuff said? -
isabellabruno000 — 14 years ago(November 04, 2011 07:21 PM)
Nobody really knows what she looked like.
Upon doing some research on her origins, I'm beginning to visualize her looking rather like your average italian female of today. Dark hair, dark eyes and olive skin.
The Ptolemy dynasty was descended from the Greek Macedonian Ptolemy Soter, established as ruler of Egypt by Alexander the Great's conquest of Egypt in 305 B.C.E. (In other words, they were imperialist outsiders.) Many of their marriages were incestuous, with brothers marrying sisters - but not all the children born are known to have had both fathers and mothers who were Ptolemies.
We are not certain of the heritage of Cleopatra's mother or her paternal grandmother. That leaves 50% to 75% of her genetic heritage unknown and ripe for speculation.
Is there any evidence that either her mother or paternal grandmother was a black African? No. "We don't know the heritage of" means just that. We don't know.
Is there any evidence that either of those women were not black Africans? No, by the same reasoning. -
psteve321 — 14 years ago(November 08, 2011 06:34 AM)
Nobody really knows what she looked like.
Upon doing some research on her origins, I'm beginning to visualize her looking rather like your average italian female of today. Dark hair, dark eyes and olive skin.
The Ptolemy dynasty was descended from the Greek Macedonian Ptolemy Soter, established as ruler of Egypt by Alexander the Great's conquest of Egypt in 305 B.C.E. (In other words, they were imperialist outsiders.) Many of their marriages were incestuous, with brothers marrying sisters - but not all the children born are known to have had both fathers and mothers who were Ptolemies.
We are not certain of the heritage of Cleopatra's mother or her paternal grandmother. That leaves 50% to 75% of her genetic heritage unknown and ripe for speculation.
Is there any evidence that either her mother or paternal grandmother was a black African? No. "We don't know the heritage of" means just that. We don't know.
Is there any evidence that either of those women were not black Africans? No, by the same reasoning.
Yes we do know the heritage of both her mother and paternal grandmother and they were NOT black Africans. They were of Greek-Macedonian ancestry more then likely Ptolemaic Princess and Queens themselves because the Ptolemies were very xenophobic and didn't inter marry or produce heirs to their Dynasties with people who were NOT like them. Plus we have plenty of descriptions and depictions of what Cleopatra looked like and she was not black African or mixed black or whatever, all her ancient depictions from her lifetime clearly show a white woman with fair complexion and auburnish hair color, which by the way fair coloring was very common among the Ptolemies. -
foton — 21 years ago(February 11, 2005 02:01 PM)
I am Egyptian woman myself ,and please let me sort somethings about my country as it hurts me so much to read all those horrible misconcepts about Egypt & Egyptian people !
First of all Cleopatra is AN Egyptian Queen ,but she ruled Egypt during plotemey era . Some would wonder why she is Egyptian then???!!
Egypt is like a crucible it absorbs every new comer to it and after mixing with its people you are Egyptian to the bones . In fact people here still have the same features and skin colour of the ancient Egyptiansm and their way of life (Which Westerns like to call Pharoes ) Pharoes were ancient Egyptians also . And they are not black by the way . We don't discrimnate people here by the colour of their skin and catgories them into black & white !!!! You can find a blonde, a brunette and black walking down the street and they are all the same thing Egyptians .
Another thing I was so frustrated and disgusted about what other thnik of Cleopatra . Egyptian women are very strong and respectable and they are no prostiutes !!! It hurts any Egyptian woman to see such a degrading portayal of women in her country as this completely is bare from truth. -
JrJordan — 19 years ago(November 05, 2006 11:59 AM)
If Cleopatra hadn't murdered Arsinoe, Arsinoe would have murdered her. Besides, thats alot of conjecture. The only thing known for sure is that Cleopatra wanted Caesar to have Arsinoe killed, because she would be dangerous if left alive. And since Arsinoe was an active supporter of Caesar's murderers, Cleopatra was right.
Besides, it was part and parcel of being a Ptolemy to murder family members -
JrJordan — 19 years ago(November 14, 2006 02:25 PM)
They crowned her Queen of Egypt when they went East..and she declared that they were hero's for killing Ceasar. Thats pretty self-explanatory as to where she stood on the whole subject.
Besides the pointArsinoe was a nobody. Who cares that Cleopatra murdered her? I'd rather read stories and history books with Cleopatra in them, then Arsinoe.
