Leonard H Bones mcCoy

Before discussing the Ptolemies, Cleopatra, Egypt, or modern concepts of race, I first want to address the concept of historical identity in the global black diaspora. One of the things that interests people the most in history is their own ancestry. The majority of people in the world can claim a piece of history as their own because they identify as descendants of a specific culture, civilization, or country. (I, for instance, can claim knowledge of my Irish, Finnish, English, and German ancestry by pointing at names in the family tree). However, for the majority of the black diaspora, especially in the Americas, that is something entirely unavailable. When the ancestors of black Americans were stolen or captured and then transported and sold across the Atlantic, it was not just people that were taken, but historical and cultural connections. And the taking did not end at the first auction block. Families were routinely separated for centuries before abolition finally toppled North and South American and Caribbean slave economies one by one. Cultural and historical knowledge is nearly impossible to preserve in that industrialized dehumanization. Black Americans, from the North to the South Atlantic, lack access to their own history - and that is incredibly isolating.

So, understandably, members of the black diaspora have - with their recent increased access to education (as a historian the term "recent" goes back much farther than most people think qualifies) - gone in search of their stolen history. They have every right to do this, but it can be difficult considering the lack of scholarship on African history outside of the continent and the expense and limitations of Eurocentric genetic tests like 23&me. There is also the issue that most people look to their personal history as a source of pride (I, personally, am very happy to inform people that my family left Germany before either of the World Wars... leaving out the fact that that side of the family is now mostly made up of right-wing religious extremists). And the problem with African history is that most of it has traditionally been considered by the Western world to not be particularly significant - with the singular exception of Egypt. If you ask any Westerner, regardless of race, to name the most important or definitive civilization in African history, a good 98% would hands-down say Egypt. No contest.

But that is the type of question that you could only ask about Africa. If you went up to someone in the United States, for instance, and asked them what the most important civilization in Europe was, or Asia, you would either entirely stump them, start a fist-fight, or get an answer like: "there isn't one." There is a myth perpetuated in the Western world (outside of current post-secondary historical academia) that Egypt is the only remarkable African civilization - or that they are the only historical nation on the continent that could be described as a "civilization." This is false and a hold-over from the white, Western dominance of academic history. It is a blatant, racist dismissal of great African kingdoms like Nubia, Carthage, Mali, Benin, Great Zimbabwe, and many others. But because of the strength of the myth, many in the black diaspora seeking their own history look to Egypt. And because they want pride in their history - something they have every right to - they want to claim Egypt as theirs - which is something they do not.

During the Atlantic slave trade Egypt was under the control of the Ottoman empire, not Europe. So while a certain form of slavery was practiced in Egypt at the time (though not the chattel slavery familiar to the Americas), they were not a part of the diaspora. European slave merchants were not shipping slaves out of Egypt, they were shipping them out from the coast of north and central West Africa. So claiming to be Egyptian as a descendant of West Africa would be comparable to claiming to be French or Spanish if your family descended from Scandinavians. You can imagine that the French would be pissed if a bunch of Swedes tried to claim Joan of Arc or Marie Antoinette as one of their own. Modern Egyptians are similar, especially because Egypt can just as accurately be described as a Mediterranean or even Middle Eastern civilization. Members of the black diaspora, for quite some time, have only been able to describe themselves specifically and solely as "black." Egyptians do not do this because of their incredibly long and nuanced history.

Okay, with all that in the air let's move on to the Ptolemies:

In the 330s BCE Alexander the Great conquered Egypt from the Achaemenid Persians and the native Egyptians welcomed him as a liberator. Egyptian religious leaders proclaimed him to be the son of Amun and he was crowned as Pharaoh, founded the royal city of Alexandria in the Nile Delta, and then immediately left to keep fighting the Persians. When he died he essentially nuked his new empire because he was a childish bitch (don't get me started on Alex, I think you can tell he's not my fav) and his generals scrambled to each claim a piece of the pie. One of the most desirable regions was Egypt, which was taken by Alexander's general Ptolemy who kidnapped Alexander's dead body (lol) while it was on its way to Greece and instead buried it in Egypt to legitimize himself as Alexander's heir - and it worked. The Ptolemies ruled Egypt for almost three centuries.

Now the Ptolemies were fucking fascinating. They are called the Ptolemies or the Ptolemaic dynasty because every. single. male. in the family was named Ptolemy. No matter how many there were. This led to some confusing situations like the joint rule of Ptolemy the 6th and the 8th. The women of the family rotated through three names: Arsinoë, Bereníkē, and Cleopatra, meaning that the famous Cleopatra every knows and argues about was actually Cleopatra the 7th. The Ptolemies were also unique specifically because they ruled as a joint pair: king and queen. The queens didn't have the same level of power as their male counterparts, but male pharaohs based a certain level of their legitimacy on having their queen by their sides.

What is important to know about the Ptolemies is that they were soooo Greek. Specifically Macedonian Greek. The founder, Ptolemy Soter, was full on Greek and so were his wife and his kids. But it doesn't stop there because the Ptolemies wanted to keep all their power in the family... which means they all married each other. Brother to sister, occasionally uncle to niece. Gross? Absolutely. Politically savvy? Probably not. It worked for a good while, though, except for the fact that it encouraged "family rivalry" to the ultimate extreme. The Ptolemies were famous for their incest and their love of murder. Specifically the murder of each other. So, while they stayed Very Greek throughout the centuries, they did their own family-tree-pruning. This inevitably led to all the legitimate heirs just straight up eliminating each other entirely in the early first century BCE, leading to a bit of a succession crisis that ended with the ascent of Ptolemy the 12th to the throne. Ptolemy the 12th was the father of our Cleopatra (the 7th) and was also - significantly - illegitimate. We have no clue who his mother was. We are also not entirely sure who Cleopatra the 7th's mother was, though the most likely candidate is another Ptolemy (specifically Cleopatra the 5th). Cleopatra the 7th (whom I will now just call Cleopatra) succeeded her father to rule jointly with her brother-husband Ptolemy the 13th and later Ptolemy the 14th. She also actively competed with her sister Arsinoë the 4th. Eventually all but Cleopatra ended up dead, with our remaining queen likely having some level of involvement in all of their deaths.

So what does this all mean? Especially for Cleopatra? Well, it means that the only thing we can say is that she was anywhere from 25%-100% Greek. We don't have a definitive number and, unless we find her mummy in a decent enough state for DNA testing (which is highly unlikely at this point), we'll never have one. But, if we're considering modern concepts of race and allow for the potential of native Egyptian ancestry, the most Cleopatra could be considered is mixed race. Specifically: mixed Greek and native Egyptian. Now, Egypt is in Africa and Egyptians are Africans, but they are Mediterranean North Africans, meaning they are generally light-skinned and consider themselves to be particularly cosmopolitan. They do not see themselves as representatives of an entire continent - they are an independent country with their own history.

But before we get into modern discussions of race I want to talk about contemporary ethnic and national identities. Because our modern concept of race and ethnicity is relatively young (in comparison to Cleopatra) and is a direct result of the past 4-5 centuries of colonialism, imperialism, and a certain level of corruption of science. Cleopatra's family was Macedonian Greek. They also ruled Egypt as Pharaohs. This existed simultaneously. Cleopatra was Greek, proudly, but she was also Egyptian - not because of the color of her skin, but because she was the Queen of Egypt. The Ptolemies were Greek, but they were recognized as legitimate Egyptian rulers because they did everything Pharaohs were supposed to do. Cleopatra was perhaps the best of them. She participated in religious ceremonies, build temples, protected her kingdom from the Roman Empire for over two decades, and headed the cult of the goddess Isis. When she died, Egyptian religious leaders pleaded with the Romans to allow them to bury her in Egypt. Why? Because if a Pharaoh is buried outside of Egypt then they cannot protect Egypt in the afterlife. Regardless of the color of her skin, regardless of the fact that she was Greek, her people, her allies, her enemies (see Plutarch's Life of Antony), and her peers considered her to be Egyptian because she was the queen of Egypt. Egyptian historians today also recognize her this way. And as an Egyptian Cleopatra was also undeniably African, but she was not the queen of all of Africa. She was the queen of Egypt. (If you are interested in how she was represented in her own time and how that evolved to today I would recommend this book, this book, or this one, all of which you can probably request through your public library).

So why all the fuss? Many people point out that Cleopatra has been portrayed by many different actresses over the decades in Hollywood with little protest from Egyptians or their historians, why this documentary series? The answer is in the question itself: it is a documentary series. Historical fiction, even in the realm of Hollywood biopics, is allowed a certain amount of artistic license. Because in the end movies and TV shows are narratives. A documentary, however, is held to a different standard. Documentaries are supposed to explore the truth for a public, non-academic audience. We as historians hold ourselves to an incredibly high level of expectation when it comes to historical objectivity. That means that it is our job not only to explain history, but to defend it. That means teaching about the horrors of slavery in the Americas to Americans, no matter how shameful and uncomfortable it is. That means teaching the horrors of the Holocaust to Germans for similar reasons. That means that, when someone goes beyond exploring historical ideas and starts claiming historical facts as their own when they belong to someone else, telling them that they are wrong. Yes, Cleopatra was African - in potentially both the modern and historical contemporary senses - but claiming that she looks like and is similar to descendants of people from, for instance, the Congo is not factually correct. Having a white British-American like Elizabeth Taylor play Cleopatra is also not factually correct, but Mankiewicz's Cleopatra was a historical drama film, not a documentary - it has more wiggle-room.

Which brings me specifically to Netflix's documentary trailer. It describes Cleopatra as a warrior queen in an era of female power - which is just not true. It attempts to portray her as a feminist and a #girlboss, which is one of the things that made my blood boil the most. Cleopatra was a fascinating and amazing woman, but she wasn't a modern feminist because she existed over 2000 years ago. But that doesn't make her a bad woman, because there is no wrong way to be a woman. The trailer also implies that she has some sort of power to hold over Rome, which is also not true. Cleopatra was amazing because of her ability to keep Egypt independent for so long in spite of Rome. And then there is the phrase that probably got all the Egyptian historians (and the non-Egyptian ones) truly up in arms. One of the experts being interviewed (who the trailer doesn't name, but I've found out is Africana Studies Professor Shelley P. Haley at Hamilton College in New York) says that her grandmother told her that “I don’t care what they tell you in school, Cleopatra was Black.” This is not just a claiming of Cleopatra by the black diaspora as specifically one of their own, but is a direct dismissal of the entire field of academic history. Yes, it is one phrase, but actively challenging what children are told "in school" as incorrect or fake is a huge problem today, especially in the United States. The sowing of anti-intellectualism by people who are themselves intellectuals is insidious and potentially even worse than attacks against academia by the popular news media.

So what's the issue with exploring Cleopatra as an African queen? None, really. The issue is taking her out of her Egyptian context, away from the identity of an entire nation of African people, and making her into an icon of the black diaspora and the entire African continent. It takes away from modern Egyptians and also is somewhat insulting to female leaders from the rest of the continent's history by making them less "iconic" in comparison. Queen Elizabeth the First was not the queen of Hungary. Does that make her less of a powerful female leader? No. But it does make her not Hungarian. Is she European? Absolutely. Does that make her an icon of all of Europe, or the most important one? No. Cleopatra is the same. She is fascinating. She was Greek. She was Egyptian. She was African. Was she the ancestor or the queen of the ancestors of slaves taken to America? No. But does that mean that members of the black diaspora have no history, no queens? Also no. They are out there. Yes, they have traditionally been neglected, which is racist and a problem. Yes, there is less documentary evidence about them because they did not have the pencil-pushing Romans writing about them all the time and more often maintained an oral tradition to preserve their history. The solution is not to erase borders and definitions. the solution is to provide better funding for the historical field, for translations, for international research, and for diversifying historians themselves. Black history has become increasingly relevant recently because more black people have been able to access post-secondary education. But we are nowhere near done. So here I will beg that instead of rejecting history that you don't like - whether for its incompleteness or lack of relatability - don't blame historians. Become one. Because we need you.