Cleopatra was white and I can prove it

[Roma_Victrix]

That is a good coincidence. I was actually about to say if you couldn't just go find a bust of Cleopatra Selene. Don't we actually know the location of her tomb as well?

We sure do! It's the Royal Mausoleum of Mauretania, a circular-based stone memorial in Tipaza Province, Algeria. Unfortunately no human remains have been found within it, though, perhaps due to grave robberies at one point in time, although nobody seems sure when that would have happened. Back in the 18th century Baba Mahommed tried to destroy it with gunpowder artillery, but he failed to do so and although it is largely damaged as a result, you can still see the columns etched out in the edifice. It's still rather impressive looking despite the deliberate damage.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Royal_..._of_Mauretania

The thousand native egyptians
playing any role at all in the Ptolemaic empire
must force their descendence upon you.

"Endless discussions about their genetic presence will blot out the thread."

"Then we shall argue about artwork instead."

About those Algerian busts, I have to say I don't trust them very much. The first bust depicts a very male-like face. Remove that hair-dress thing and it seems completely masculine.

Spoiler Alert, click show to read: 

So, without any disrespect to the Algerian sculptor... I don't think Cleopatra was an Albanian dude.

You're focused on her mid-face, her nose is kind of masculine, but in fact that is a hyper feminine jawline, far outside the normal range for adult men and even on the feminine side of the normal range for women. She lacks prominent male brow ridges, and the arch of her eyebrows are on the feminine side.

I would respectfully disagree.
Those are "unisex" eyes, or slightly masculine:



The jawline is feminine but not too much.

Did Cleopatra just get roasted and burned by Alhoon?

I've seen similar comments about this sculpted head of Cleopatra over at Reddit, where people have left comments about how they've dated prettier women and such.

Personally I think the sculpture looks feminine, although with a slight masculine touch, but that falls into the category of other artworks depicting Cleopatra as such. Much of her coinage deliberately makes her look masculine, like her father, and like previous Ptolemies and Macedonian rulers. Her sculpted Berlin and Vatican portraits made by the Romans show much softer feminine features. I will say this, though, Alhoon, that when I saw this sculpture of Cleopatra from Cherchel, Algeria, some busts of Constantine I the Great came to mind.

Also, I don't know if the ancient sculptor of these works was a native of the ancient Maghreb, i.e. Mauretania under Roman dominion, but he could have been an ethnic Greek sculptor imported from some place in the Roman Empire, perhaps even from Roman Egypt. Or perhaps the sculpture of Cleopatra was done during her lifetime, when the Ptolemaic Empire still existed and was just a client state of the Roman Republic. We do know that Juba II and Cleopatra Selene II imported artists and intellectuals from Alexandria, inviting them to come to their capital at Caesarea Mauretaniae, modern Cherchell, Algeria (previously the Carthaginian city of Iol).

Then you would have gotten that answer wrong on an Intro to Biological Anthropology final.

Her gonial angle is even greater than in typical demonstrative examples:



Same is true of the relative width of her mandible:



Her rami don't even appear to protrude, this is hyper feminine.

I get why you said what you said though, but the masculinity of her mid face is still within the normal range for a female, while her jawline is extremely feminine. Hold your thumb so that it obscures her nose and you should be able to see what I mean.

I'm convinced! You definitely know the human form. There are tons of Playboy magazines lying around, no doubt, that you should consider as part of your continued anthropological research.

[Whitey McKnightey]

I would respectfully disagree.
Those are "unisex" eyes, or slightly masculine:




The jawline is feminine but not too much.

I agree with you that this statue looks more like a very feminine dude than a slightly masculine female. However, compare it to the very first bust in the OP ("The Berlin Cleopatra") or - to a lesser degree the the second one ("The Vatican Cleopatra"), and the likeness is obvious. The look on her face is a bit more stern in this one, but if you look at the eyes or the jawline it's quite uncanny. I don't know if these busts are supposed to be contemporary, but they most certainly depict the same model. It's a shame the lips are a bit broken on this one, I suspect if they were intact it would be even more obvious. It looks to me - as a complete lay person - like these three busts are either of the same living model, or copies of an original. I don't know enough about sculpting to say if the latter is plausible given the slight (and quite lifelike) differences in the expression.

[Roma_Victrix]

I agree with you that this statue looks more like a very feminine dude than a slightly masculine female. However, compare it to the very first bust in the OP ("The Berlin Cleopatra") or - to a lesser degree the the second one ("The Vatican Cleopatra"), and the likeness is obvious. The look on her face is a bit more stern in this one, but if you look at the eyes or the jawline it's quite uncanny. I don't know if these busts are supposed to be contemporary, but they most certainly depict the same model. It's a shame the lips are a bit broken on this one, I suspect if they were intact it would be even more obvious. It looks to me - as a complete lay person - like these three busts are either of the same living model, or copies of an original. I don't know enough about sculpting to say if the latter is plausible given the slight (and quite lifelike) differences in the expression.

As argued by Duane W. Roller (2010: p. 175) and others (see this 2008 Susan Walker article), some or all of these sculptures are modeled after the statue of Cleopatra erected by her lover Julius Caesar in the Temple of Venus Genetrix in the Forum of Caesar, Rome. As explained in my OP, this statue unfortunately no longer exists. Also, the comparison of the Cherchel head with the Berlin and Vatican portraits is a point that is explicitly made by Diana Kleiner (2005: pp. 155-156) and Diana Preston (2009: p. 305), although they point out that the woman in the Cherchel portrait has a slightly different hairdo and looks slightly older, perhaps around the age of 30 (Cleopatra was in her early 20s when she visited Rome in 46-44 BC with Caesar).

* Kleiner, Diana E. E. (2005), Cleopatra and Rome, Cambridge, MA: Belknap Press of Harvard University Press, ISBN 9780674019058.
* Preston, Diana (2009), Cleopatra and Antony: Power, Love, and Politics in the Ancient World, New York: Walker and Company, ISBN 9780802717382.

[Whitey McKnightey]

As argued by Duane W. Roller (2010: p. 175) and others (see this 2008 Susan Walker article), some or all of these sculptures are modeled after the statue of Cleopatra erected by her lover Julius Caesar in the Temple of Venus Genetrix in the Forum of Caesar, Rome. As explained in my OP, this statue unfortunately no longer exists. Also, the comparison of the Cherchel head with the Berlin and Vatican portraits is a point that is explicitly made by Diana Kleiner (2005: pp. 155-156) and Diana Preston (2009: p. 305), although they point out that the woman in the Cherchel portrait has a slightly different hairdo and looks slightly older, perhaps around the age of 30 (Cleopatra was in her early 20s when she visited Rome in 46-44 BC with Caesar).

* Kleiner, Diana E. E. (2005), Cleopatra and Rome, Cambridge, MA: Belknap Press of Harvard University Press, ISBN 9780674019058.
* Preston, Diana (2009), Cleopatra and Antony: Power, Love, and Politics in the Ancient World, New York: Walker and Company, ISBN 9780802717382.

Yes, the Cherchel one seems different from the other too also in posture (though this might be the effect of some missing pieces) and facial expression, so these do very much look like busts of the same model in different points at her life, which could mean one of these is authentic (in that they portray the actual likeness of ole Cleo). Perhaps a skilled sculptor could "wing it", but again I don't know enough about ancient sculptors and their craft to know if this is likely or plausible.

How about the bust of the daughter? What time is that from?

[alhoon]

Well, I give you that her jaw even from the front looks feminine. But her "midface" as you call it has the usual Greek nose. Those nice things you showed us are not easy to discern from the front; she would probably appear more feminine to me from the sides.
Also, I was not aware that men and women have different skulls, but indeed full skull thing you show above from the sides seems ... feminine. What I mean is that it "registers" as feminine in my brain, that is untainted by weird words like "Ramus" and "Mandible"

[Ludicus]

A beautiful statue.
Michael Grant -Cleopatra

Racial investigation of eminent personages does not generally serve much purpose. But in the case of Cleopatra VII at least suggest that she had a fairly dark complexion-or at least not blonde hair

(1)
-----

It's the reverse: Mark Antony is made to look like Cleopatra, not the other way around

Not exactly...according to the cultural historian Mary Hamer, Signs of Cleopatra: Reading an Icon Historically,
"there are fifteen or so separate coins issues bearing Cleopatra's head.Between them they repeat only four different images, and these belong to distinct phases of her reign.:one bears only her own head, one is said to represent her with the infant Cesarion, and the others (the third and fourth) are issued by Cleopatra in conjunction with Mark Anthony.
The coins of Cleopatra change according to which empire issues them (Rome or Egypt). On the coins issued in Egypt, Cleopatra's profile is without the aquiline nose. The coins issues after 37 BCE in conjunction with Mark Antony are strikingly different.

"It is a revision that relates specifically to the Roman rather the Ptolemaic tradition.The graceful profile of Alexandrian coins is replaced by un unflattering waist-deep portrait of an older women wearing a big necklace. The nose is big, the lower jaw sticks out.The image appeals not to past images of Hellenistic queens but to the Roman present.
In fact, to the portrait tradition displayed in the image of Mark Antony on the reverse of the coin:Cleopatra looks like Mark Antony in a wig.
The Romans portrayed Cleopatra consistently in an unflattering manner, sometimes as an old woman, usually very masculine in appearance with an assertive jaw, and typically with a large nose".

(see this 2008 Susan Walker article),

On a side note, now that you mention it, according to Walker, Auletes' portraits were influenced by images of Pompey the Great.

--

in either case, at this point I've had to repeat myself so many times that I think we'll just have to agree to disagree, then, because this conversation is going around in circles.

There is nothing more perfect than circles. Our circles,

Roller (2010: p. 15) he clearly says that she valued her Greek heritage the most

I know, that's not my point. And if Adrian Goldsworthy is your cup of tea, smile:

She was no more Egyptian culturally or ethnically than most residents of modern-Arizona are Apaches

Btw, Brother-Sister marriages originated from the Egyptian tradition of "Royal incest" (an old Egyptian strategy) to avoid splitting up of property or to maintain ethnic political status of the Greeks in Egypt.Let us say, its a case of cultural Egyptian adaptation, so the Greek traditions of endogamy were conveniently pushed to a limit. There is nothing like cultural adaptation...
----
But there are always many different other opinions,as I said before.
Margaret Miles - Cleopatra: A Sphinx Revisited

Within Egypt Cleopatra VII was presented as the Egyptian queen, mother and protectress and goddess, who promotes her son as her consort and rightful heir.
There is no preserved evidence for the presentation of Cleopatra's Macedonian Greek inheritance in Egypt, perhaps as a result of Rome conquest.
Yet possible the absence of the Macedonian connection reflects the queen's desire to be seen as an Egyptian.

In Egypt, it was not only as Isis that Cleopatra continued to be worshipped, for a demotic inscription at the temple of Isis at Philae suggests that the veneration of Cleopatra as a deity herself and her cult continued until at least the fourth century AD.

---
Joyce Tyldesley - Cleopatra the Last Queen of Egypt

Paradoxically, the woman whom millions regard as the defining Egyptian queen is more or less ignored by traditional Egyptologists, who confine their studies to the thirty-one dynasties preceding the arrival of Alexander.
The Ptolemies are considered peripheral beings and, as such, they have become the preserve of classical and specialized Graeco-Roman scholars, who, naturally enough, set them against a classical rather than an Egyptian background.

The Graeco-Roman scholars have, in turn, shied away from Cleopatra VII; maybe because histories emphasising individual rather than national achievement are currently considered somewhat old-fashioned, or perhaps because they feel a reluctance to tackle a subject as obviously popular as Cleopatra.
...For a long time this seemed entirely reasonable to me.
After all, the Ptolemies were foreigners in Egypt, and relatively modern foreigners at that.
They were separated from the true dynastic age by an embarrassing period of Persian rule and, lacking a numbered dynasty of their own, were omitted from many well-respected Egyptian histories that came to a neat end with the reign of the last native pharaoh, Nectanebo II (Nakhthorheb).

If that was not enough, they reigned over an Egypt whose pure native culture had been diluted and distorted by Greek and Roman influences: they worshipped curious hybrid gods; they issued coins; they spoke Greek, not Egyptian.
But, after many years spent studying Egypt’s "true" queens, I began to realize that placing the Ptolemies in a cultural ghetto was an irrational and unsustainable distinction.

The Ptolemies believed themselves to be a valid Egyptian dynasty, and devoted a great deal of time and money to demonstrating that they were the theological continuation of all the dynasties that had gone before.

Cleopatra defined herself as an Egyptian queen, and drew on the iconography and cultural references of earlier queens to reinforce her position.

Her people and her contemporaries accepted her as such.

Could an Egyptian-born woman whose family had controlled Egypt for three centuries really be classed as foreign (and if so, where does this leave the British royal family)? Or as irrelevant to the study and understanding of Egyptian queenship?

--

I might add, that is only tangentially related to the subject of the OP (i.e. artwork, Ludicus, artwork),

In fact, very tangentially.

I am genuinely struck by how much the woman on the left, hailing from the region of Macedonia in northern Greece, looks like Cleopatra

(1) Well,everybody speculates. Nothing wrong with that. The girl is a beautiful work of art, I must admit.

[saxdude]

She's much too nosy.

[Morifea]

I like big noses. And i cannot lie.

[Roma_Victrix]

Yes, the Cherchel one seems different from the other too also in posture (though this might be the effect of some missing pieces) and facial expression, so these do very much look like busts of the same model in different points at her life, which could mean one of these is authentic (in that they portray the actual likeness of ole Cleo). Perhaps a skilled sculptor could "wing it", but again I don't know enough about ancient sculptors and their craft to know if this is likely or plausible.

A major difference here is the fact that she's wearing a typical Ptolemaic shroud/veil over or around her diadem on her head. I'm not aware of any coins that depict her with the veil, but previous Ptolemaic queens like Arsinoe II and Berenice II have coinage depictions of them wearing both the veil and the royal diadem. For that matter, the contemporary Pompeian painting of Cleopatra in the House of Marcus Fabius Rufus, as illustrated in my OP, shows her with both the translucent veil and a golden diadem with a red jewel (over a braided and partitioned melon-style hairdo, the same hairstyle in her other Hellenistic and Roman portraits, but obviously not the Egyptian ones). Although this painting has the veil, the Berlin and Vatican portraits do not feature it, so it is uncertain if the now lost statue of Cleopatra in the Temple of Venus Genetrix in Rome had a veil or not. It almost certainly had a royal diadem, which Cleopatra wore in all of her artistic depictions except the native Egyptian ones (and the one Egyptian-style marble bust with a royal vulture headdress made by the Romans, now in the Capitoline Museum).

How about the bust of the daughter? What time is that from?

I'm not 100% certain about the dating of Cleopatra Selene II's sculpted head/bust (not sure if it was broken off from a full statue or just a bust with shoulders and neck). It shows her as a fully grown adult. She died around 6 or 5 BC (some scholarly disagreement there), so the portrait was ostensibly made before then. I don't think it's a posthumous depiction. I would need to find some academic literature on the topic to be a bit more certain about this. If anyone can figure it out or locate reliable sources on the matter, I'm all ears! At the very least we can judge by style and circumstance alone that it is a late 1st century BC or early 1st century AD depiction of Cleopatra Selene II.

A beautiful statue.

I think so as well, but there are some on Reddit who also savaged her as being "uggo" and such. Regardless of whether or not one would think Cleopatra Selene II was attractive or not, the statue itself is a fine piece of art, of course. She also looks a lot like her mother and Mark Antony, unsurprisingly.

Not exactly...according to the cultural historian Mary Hamer, Signs of Cleopatra: Reading an Icon Historically,
"there are fifteen or so separate coins issues bearing Cleopatra's head.Between them they repeat only four different images, and these belong to distinct phases of her reign.:one bears only her own head, one is said to represent her with the infant Cesarion, and the others (the third and fourth) are issued by Cleopatra in conjunction with Mark Anthony.
The coins of Cleopatra change according to which empire issues them (Rome or Egypt). On the coins issued in Egypt, Cleopatra's profile is without the aquiline nose. The coins issues after 37 BCE in conjunction with Mark Antony are strikingly different.

"It is a revision that relates specifically to the Roman rather the Ptolemaic tradition.The graceful profile of Alexandrian coins is replaced by un unflattering waist-deep portrait of an older women wearing a big necklace. The nose is big, the lower jaw sticks out.The image appeals not to past images of Hellenistic queens but to the Roman present.
In fact, to the portrait tradition displayed in the image of Mark Antony on the reverse of the coin:Cleopatra looks like Mark Antony in a wig.
The Romans portrayed Cleopatra consistently in an unflattering manner, sometimes as an old woman, usually very masculine in appearance with an assertive jaw, and typically with a large nose".

That's interesting; thanks for sharing.

I'm glad to see there is some scholarly disagreement on the matter, because the opposite is suggested by the Art Institute of Chicago (as I shared in a previous post). From what I've seen, scholars almost universally suggest that many coinage depictions make Cleopatra look deliberately more masculine than she would have appeared in reality. This was a form of propaganda to make her seem more like an acceptable Ptolemaic ruler to subjects who were unruly, especially the rowdy bunch in Alexandria who killed her relative Ptolemy XI Alexander II and the mob who ousted and (temporarily) exiled her father Ptolemy XII Auletes. For info on that, see Duane Roller (2010: pp. 18, 182, 185), Joann Fletcher (2008: pp. 96, 104), and Diana Kleiner (2005: p. 144).

There is nothing more perfect than circles. Our circles,

Well, there is a band called "A Perfect Circle", but they're just a bunch of Tool(s). Just ask Maynard James Keenan.

I know, that's not my point. And if Adrian Goldsworthy is your cup of tea, smile:

Thanks for sharing.

Btw, Brother-Sister marriages originated from the Egyptian tradition of "Royal incest" (an old Egyptian strategy) to avoid splitting up of property or to maintain ethnic political status of the Greeks in Egypt.Let us say, its a case of cultural Egyptian adaptation, so the Greek traditions of endogamy were conveniently pushed to a limit. There is nothing like cultural adaptation...
----

The Alexandrian Greeks just hated it at first, the whole sibling marriage and incest thing promoted by Ptolemy II Philadelphus, his sister Arsinoe II, and their successors. However, they became more pliable as time went on and expected this arrangement as a routine for the Ptolemies. How the times change! It also admittedly does show the influence of Egyptian practices, since it ultimately stems from the Osiris myth of that god banging his sister Isis while being dead (lol), and producing the bouncing baby boy Horus. I mean, who doesn't want a kid with a bird face?

A relevant sub-reddit for that idea: https://www.reddit.com/r/birdswitharms/
https://www.reddit.com/r/birdswithar...0_bicep_curls/

But there are always many different other opinions,as I said before.
Margaret Miles - Cleopatra: A Sphinx Revisited

Miles is the editor of that book; which chapter did it come from? Because I have a digital scan of the book itself. In either case, this is a rather flimsy argument. Is Cleopatra recorded as screaming from the rooftops that she was a direct descendant of Ptolemy I Soter? Probably not. Aside from native Egyptian writings and artwork like the Dendera Temple reliefs and carvings, almost every other surviving piece of evidence about her indicates this, though. I mean, her coinage, Ludicus. Her coinage. Look at her coins, any one of them. They are all in Greek. They tend to show Greek imagery and directly link Cleopatra to Greek deities like Aphrodite (or Roman Venus). For an example of that see Joann Fletcher (Cleopatra the Great, 2008: p. 205). The native Egyptians viewed Cleopatra as Isis for obvious reasons (again, the Osiris Myth) and while it is neat that a cult dedicated to Cleopatra existed as late as the 4th century AD, it doesn't really indicate anything about Cleopatra's actual inherited ethnicity.

To emphasize that, the only known signature of the queen herself is unsurprisingly written in Greek. It concerns tax exemptions for Mark Antony's confidant and military officer Publius Canidius Crassus (as suggested by Roller, 2010: pp. 133-134, although Burstein, 2004: p. 33 argues that it was intended for another Roman named Quintus Caecillius). The signature at the bottom of the papyrus scroll, in a different handwriting than the rest of the document, states the following: "make it happen" (Greek: γινέσθωι, translit. ginesthō).

https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/F...I_of_Egypt.jpg


The document illustrated above containing Cleopatra's signature is not only in Greek, but it deals directly with allied Romans, namely her husband Antony and his associate Publius Canidius Crassus (or Quintus Caecillius). For that matter I'm not buying the argument that the Romans swept away or ignored Cleopatra's Macedonian Greek heritage, at least not before Octavian's propaganda depicting her as a supernatural foreign/Oriental queen practicing witchcraft to brainwash Mark Antony. As clearly demonstrated by the Roman sculptures and paintings of Cleopatra, she is consistently depicted as a Greek Hellenistic ruler wearing a diadem. For that matter, even the two posthumous painted portraits from Pompeii and Herculaneum dated to the early 1st century AD show her as a Hellenistic Greek queen. That's long after the partisan Augustan poet Virgil suggested she planned to conquer Roman Italy and replace Roman gods with barbaric animal-headed Egyptian ones. The Romans were well aware of her Greekness, since they spoke with her in Koine Greek instead of Latin (see Roller, 2010: pp. 46-48).

Hell, even the event at the Lupercalia festival where Mark Antony attempted to crown Julius Caesar with the Greek royal diadem is thought to have been inspired by Cleopatra's presence in the city of Rome at that exact time! Cicero already disliked Cleopatra, considering her arrogant and noting that she failed to acquire (Greek) books for him from the Library of Alexandria that he requested. He sarcastically asked Caesar and Antony where they acquired the diadem in their theatrical little feigned coronation, obviously referring to Cleopatra who was then residing in Caesar's freaking villa in Rome. Please read Roller (2010: pp. 72–74) and Fletcher (2008: pp. 205–206) for more on that.

Joyce Tyldesley - Cleopatra the Last Queen of Egypt

Well that's nice and everything, and while I would agree that she was a Queen of Egypt and presented herself as such to her native Egyptian subjects, it was simply a different story for her Greek subjects and others. Why would literally all her coinage be in the Hellenistic Greek fashion, Ludicus? Ponder that, please, along with the fact that the Romans even depicted her as a Greek queen in their own artwork. Cleopatra's coins represent the largest body of surviving material from her perspective and point of view, since papyri documents to that effect (like the one shown above) are incredibly rare. Tyldesley doesn't mention it here, but surely she speaks about coinage elsewhere. No? For that matter, look at the vast body of Roman historiography. Tyldesley surely uses Plutarch like any other historian covering the reign of Cleopatra. Plutarch's account, as well as others, are filled with references to Cleopatra's Greekness, including her appearance as the Greek goddess Aphrodite when meeting Antony at Tarsus. The Romans even emphasized this by making a giant freaking statue of Cleopatra as the goddess Venus (the Roman equivalent of Aphrodite) and erecting it in the Temple of Venus Genetrix in Rome.

Does Tyldesley talk about that? Because Duane W. Roller (2010: p. 72, 175), Stanley M. Burstein (2004: p. 21), Joann Fletcher (2008: pp. 195-196), and Eric R. Varner (2004: p. 20) sure as hell talk about it. Note the Esquiline Venus statue in my OP, which is also thought to depict Cleopatra for various reasons, as indicated by Roller (2010: p. 175) and Francisco Polo (2013: pp. 186, 194 footnote10). If the Romans depicted Cleopatra as Venus-Aphrodite over and over again, and Roman historians like Plutarch and Suetonius directly make this suggestion, how is this not enough evidence to demonstrate not only the Greek but even the Greco-Roman identity of Cleopatra? Whose sons and daughters were technically Roman citizens by birthright, in addition to being descendants of the greatest companions of Alexander the Great.

Well,everybody speculates. Nothing wrong with that. The girl is a beautiful work of art, I must admit.

I like big noses. And i cannot lie.

She's much too nosy.

What's the matter, Saxdude? Are you not...titillated?

http://farm1.static.flickr.com/86/24...d7de4bee7f.jpg


Lol. Nice rebuttal, although I'm with Ludicus on this one, that modern Macedonian girl is pretty despite the big protruding schnoz. She's also perhaps prettier than Cleopatra would have been, given all the Game of Thrones Lannister/Targaryen incest in her family tree.

[Ludicus]

About those Algerian busts, I have to say I don't trust them very much. .

In fact, a word of caution,



Cleopatra by Stacy Schiff,

That Egyptian Woman
"Man's most valuable trait is a judicious sense of what not to believe" Euripides

..If the name is indelible, the image is blurry. Cleopatra may be one of the most recognizable figures in history but we have little idea of what she actually looked like.

Only her coins portraits-issued in her lifetime, and which she likely approved -can be accepted as authentic.

Plutarch was born seventy-six years after she died. Appian wrote at a remove of more than a century. Dio of well over two.
Augustus...magnified Cleopatra to hyperbolic proportions so as to do the same with his victory...the end result is a nineteenth century British life of Napoleon or a twentieth century history of America, were it to have been written by Chairman Mao.

To the team of extraordinary tendentious historians, add an extraordinary spotty record. No papyri from Alexandria survive. Almost nothing of the ancient city survives aboveground. We have, perhaps at most, one written word of Cleopatra...Appian is careless in details, Josephus hopeless with chronology. Dio preferred rhetoric to exactitude. The lacunae are so regular as to seem deliberate; there is very nearly a conspiracy of silences.

How is it possible that we do not have an authoritative bust of Cleopatra from an age of accomplished, realistic portraiture?

Cicero's letters of the first months of 44 BC -when Caesar and Cleopatra were together in Rome- were never published.. Livy's accounts breaks off a century before Cleopatra. Delius's chronicle has also vanished...even Lucan come to an abrupt, infuriating halt partway through his epic poem...
And in absence of facts, myth rushes in, in the kudzu of history.

The holes in the record present one hazard, what we have constructed around them another...A commanding woman versed in politics, diplomacy, and governance; fluent in nine languages, silver tongue and charismatic, Cleopatra nonetheless seems to joint creation of Roman propagandists and Hollywood directors. For all its erudition, Cleopatra's Egypt produced no fine historian.

[Roma_Victrix]

In fact, a word of caution,

Cleopatra by Stacy Schiff,

Stacy Schiff is NOT an art historian and nor is she an archaeologist or a professional of any kind in this field. She's just a popular non-fiction author. Unsurprisingly, she only presents us with a half-truth here, because it's easier just to dumb things down for her target audience, i.e. the general public. She's not worried about academics peer-reviewing her works (say what you want about Sally-Ann Ashton, her peer-reviewed works outside of her blog posts are usually solid academic stuff). I'm not very surprised Schiff did a piss-poor job explaining this subject compared to a serious scholar like Duane W. Roller, who explains why scholars have identified certain works of art (that is, with a very high degree of probability) as legitimate representations of Cleopatra VII, despite the lack of immediate verification with a convenient inscription or coin legend telling us as such. Schiff's ridiculously obtuse statement is like someone arguing that we literally don't know anything (not a single fact) about the Minoan civilization of Crete because we can't infer anything about their artwork (since we can't decipher their Linear A writing system/language). Schiff clearly has no appreciation for circumstantial evidence and apparently doesn't know anything about Greco-Roman art.

On the other hand, British Museum Senior Curator Susan Walker just so happens to be a specialist in that field, so we'll get to her in a moment. However, I'll cite two different works by Roller first, before I get to Susan Walker and Peter Higgs' Cleopatra of Egypt: from History to Myth (2001), by the Princeton University Press. Then I'll cite Michael Pfrommer and Elana T. Markus' brilliant work Greek Gold from Hellenistic Egypt (2001) by the J. Paul Getty Trust, to make a point about royal diadems in art, the implications of which Schiff doesn't seem to appreciate either (whether deliberately or out of honest ignorance). I'll also pepper the post with little snippets by Joann Fletcher (2008). The first Roller quote will deal with art in general, while the second will address Alhoon's skepticism about the Cherchel sculpture, followed by Walker and Higgs' supportive assessment. Here's Roller, Cleopatra: a Biography, Oxford University Press, 2010: pp. 173-174:

------------
"The iconography of Cleopatra VII is elusive, although the subject of much scholarship. Two excellent catalogues have appeared in the last decade, one produced by the British Museum in 2001 and the other from an exhibit in Hamburg in 2006-7. The outstanding visual representations in both of these books, especially the former, provide easy access to essentially the totality of the know and suggested iconography of the queen, although obviously interpretations will continue to change. Determining her extant representations remains a difficult problem, because only her coins and Egyptian reliefs and steles have inscriptions that identify her, and both these genres have their own issues of interpretation. None of the suggested portraits of the queen within the Greco-Roman tradition can be attributed on anything other than art-historical grounds, a methodology with obvious pitfalls, and although many of the conclusions are probably valid, one still lacks definitive evidence. As with the biographical details of the queen's life, the information is frustratingly limited."

"Her iconography falls into four categories. There are a few pieces of Hellenistic sculpture and other artistic media, all identified by style ad details. There are coins from more than a dozen cities on which the queen is identified by legend, mostly from the Levant but as far west as Cyrene and Patrai and including a few struck by Antonius. There are a number of Egyptian portraits, sculptures, and reliefs; the latter often cite the queen by name. And finally, there is a genre of works produced immediately after her death as a parallel to the Augustan literary output, serving the same purpose of establishing the politically correct view of the queen within the new regime and the self-conception of the Augustan era. These works—whether wall paintings or three-dimensional media—have diagnostic elements that make their interpretations reasonable. Since most were produced within a generation of Cleopatra's death, they can be assumed to be accurate visual representations of her physical features, even if turned to a narrow purpose."

"Hellenistic-Roman portrait sculpture provides the best chance of showing the queen drawn from life and within the most familiar artistic tradition. Unfortunately the examples are few in number, and none is undisputed. Provenance is often equally uncertain. Probably the best known is a Parian marble portrait in Berlin (fig. 2), by all accounts found somewhere south of Rome, although its history before being obtained by the museum in 1976—the piece seems to have been known since the early nineteenth century—is torturous. It is a fine work, well preserved, showing Cleopatra with a melon hairstyle and a royal diadem. Details, such as the hair and the prominent nose, are similar to the consistent portrait of Cleopatra on her coins. If the suggestion of an Italian provenance is correct, the Berlin head may have been produced while the queen was in Rome in the 40s B.C. Despite the vagueness, the head remains the most probable extant representation of the queen in Hellenistic-Roman art. It was carved when she was in her mid-twenties and demonstrates the dignity and resoluteness that characterized her life."
-----------

Although I've produced the same quote for you multiple times now, Ludicus, I suppose it would also do good to repeat Roller's assessment about the very first painting in my OP, from the House of Marcus Fabius Rufus at Pompeii (Roller, 2010: p. 175):

-----------
"This shows a royal woman who strongly resembles the queen as depicted in the Vatican portrait, wearing a royal diadem and holding a Cupid on her shoulder, appearing at the massive double doors of a templelike structure. Although a rendering of Venus with Cupid comes immediately to mind, the diadem means that the subject is a royal person and that any divinity is only allegorical. There seems little doubt that this is a depiction of Cleopatra and Caesarion before the doors of the Temple of Venus in the Forum Julium and, as such, it becomes the only extant contemporary painting of the queen."
-----------

Pretty strong words there and he backs Walker on this assessment, and we'll return to the idea of the importance of diadems in identifying royal figures in Greco-Roman art. Now let's turn our attention to the Cherchel sculpted head of Cleopatra VII and her daughter Cleopatra Selene II. Here's a juicy and revealing quotation explaining the ambiguities but also interesting circumstances about these two sculpted portraits from the court of Juba II of Mauretania, the Roman client ruler under Augustus. Interestingly, Roller has different views about the sculptures than the Archaeological Museum of Cherchel, noting that both pieces could either be Cleopatra VII or her daughter (although Roller updated his ideas by 2010 about the Berlin and Vatican portraits since he now accepts Italian provenance for those pieces, as do Walker and Higgs, who argued against Alexandrian provenance back in 2001). The following is taken from Duane W. Roller, The World of Juba II and Kleopatra Selene: Royal Scholarship on Rome's African Frontier, New York: Routledge, 2003, pp. 139-142:

-----------
"The remains of the Mauretanian sculptural program are fragmentary, but all of the proper elements are extant. The commemoration of Juba's ancestry - which the king stressed as far back as Massinissa - is known through one extant portrait of his father, a heavily bearded head from Caesarea now in the Louvre (Figure 15). The head is indeed bene capillatus as Cicero described Juba I, and the only surviving piece of a collection of sculpture that displayed the ancestors of Juba II."

"Kleopatra Selene's heritage was also commemorated. A portrait from Caesarea, now in the Cherchel Museum, seems to conform best to existing types of Kleopatra VII, although the evidence is not strong. Another portrait from Caesarea, of a veiled head, may be of either Kleopatra VII or her daughter. But as Kleopatra VII's only surviving child, only Kleopatra Selene could keep alive the memory of her famous mother - especially in such a way as to avoid the demonization of her in contemporary Roman literature - and thus it is probable that she would have commissioned many portraits. Other surviving images of Kleopatra VII, such as the ones in Berlin and the Vatican, may have emanated from the Mauretanian court."

"No certain portraits of Kleopatra Selene have been found at Caesarea, although the two pieces noted above may be the queen. A bone counter in the British Museum...shows the left-facing bust of a woman...with curls remindful of portraits of Kleopatra VII, but the piece has been suggested to be her daughter...More significant is a gilded silver dish in the Louvre, part of the collection found at Boscoreale in 1895...[It] has the figure of a woman depicted in high relief. Her features are remindful of those of Kleopatra VII, but are not the same. On her head is the scalp of an elephant; on one breast is an asp and on the other a panther. To her left is a cornucopia with Helios engraved as a young man. On her right shoulder is a lion. The piece has a complex visual symbolism that points consistently to a North African context, with the cornucopia and lion especially remindful of the coinage of the Mauretanian monarchs. The suggestion that it is a portrait of Kleopatra Selene has much merit."
-----------

Here's the silver dish from the Louvre, an excellent piece that, as Roller (2003: 141-142) just explained, could represent either Cleopatra VII or her more probably her daughter Cleopatra Selene:




Roller seems almost too tepid in his assessment here; he could have explained more. Walker and Higgs (2001: pp. 312-313) brilliantly outline why this dish is so strongly linked to Cleopatra Selene II. It's almost beating us over the head and screaming in our ear that it is her, based on the loaded imagery and symbolism of the many objects surrounding the woman:

"Conspicuously mounted on the cornucopia is a gilded crescent moon set on a pine cone. Around it are piled pomegranates and bunches of grapes. Engraved on the horn are images of Helios (the sun), in the form of a youth dressed in a short cloak, with the hairstyle of Alexander the Great, the head surrounded by rays... The symbols on the cornucopia can indeed be read as references to the Ptolemaic royal house and specifically to Cleopatra Selene, represented in the crescent moon, and to her twin brother, Alexander Helios, whose eventual fate after the conquest of Egypt is unknown. The viper seems to be linked with the pantheress and the intervening symbols of fecunditity rather than the suicide of Cleopatra VII. The elephant scalp could refer to Cleopatra Selene's status as ruler, with Juba II, of Mauretania. The visual correspondence with the veiled head from Cherchel encourages this identification, and many of the symbols used on the dish also appear on the coinage of Juba II."

It should be noted, in case anyone here has forgotten it, that "Selene" refers to the moon in Greek, while "Helios" refers to the sun.

As for the veiled bust from Cherchel that we've been discussing, Egyptologist Joann Fletcher (Cleopatra the Great, New York: Harper, 2008: image plates between pp. 246-247) is much firmer than Roller in her conviction that it represents Cleopatra VII, as explained in this image caption:

-----------
"Marble head of Cleopatra VII set up by her daughter Cleopatra Selene in her capital Iol Caesarea (modern Algeria). The curly hair appearing beneath her mantle is very similar to the way Alexander was represented at this time and was perhaps a means of maintaining connections with their great ancestor."
-----------

Walker and Higgs (2001: p. 242) seem to side with Roller about the ambiguities of the veiled head from Cherchel. They at least observe that it is a possible depiction of Cleopatra VII and highlight the masculine nature of it that we've been talking about:

"Initially, the face was thought to be that of Agrippina, Nero's wife, then that of Cleopatra VII, Selene's mother; this last identification is, however, uncertain. The scholars who identify this portrait as Cleopatra VII draw into their arguments her masculine character, but they also note the lack of resemblance to Cleopatra VII's profile as it is preserved on coins, and to the marble portrait preserved in the Vatican (cat. no. 196). The other head from Cherchel with a melon coiffure (cat. no. 197) is even further removed from the veiled portrait, with its masculine and idealized appearance."

For the head without the veil that I labeled as Cleopatra Selene on the previous page, Walker and Higgs (2001: p. 219) title it as "Marble portrait, perhaps of Cleopatra VII's daughter, Cleopatra Selene, Queen of Mauretania," but also note the ambiguities outlined by Roller above, in that this piece can be a representation of either Cleopatra VII or her daughter Cleopatra Selene:

-----------
"The portrait, which was found close to Juba II's palace at Cherchel, is of an estimable quality. The refined melon coiffure, quite similar to that adopted by the early Ptolemaic queens and revived by Cleopatra VII, is held in place by a rigid diadem, large and thick, and apparently imitating metal. In front of the diadem the hair is elaborately arranged in several waves of locks drawn out of a central parting to cover the upper brow. The centre of the brow was dominated by a nodus. On the forehead a series of small, carefully arranged tight curls, pierced by symmetrical holes, completes the elegant coiffure..."

"As with cat. no. 262, the identification of the subject is disputed. For more than a century the portrait was, for valid reasons, attributed to the queen Cleopatra Selene, the wife of Juba II (21/20 - 5/4 BC) and twin daughter of Mark Antony and Cleopatra VII. Recently, it has been proposed that we should recognize instead the face of her mother, notwithstanding the considerable differences between this portrait and the head in the Vatican (cat. no. 196), unanimously acknowledged as representing Cleopatra VII. However, the differences are significant, not only in the hairstyle but also in the facial features, both critical to recognition and identification. The Vatican portrait's long face, with narrow chin, long nose, high brow and wide-set eyes is not matched by the royal image in Cherchel, which is full-faced and expresses none of the energy and harsh authoritarianism of the Vatican portrait. However, certain images of Cleopatra Selene on coins show a similarly full profile. Thus, though a likeness to Cleopatra VII exists, there is no hesitation in restoring to this portrait the first identification as Cleopatra Selene, Queen of Mauretania."
-----------

To really drive home the point that Schiff is being stupid for excluding all of this academic input, let us compare the description of Cleopatra Selene's hair in this bust to this description offered by Joann Fletcher (2008: image captions between pp. 246-247) about Cleopatra VII's hair in her official coinage. Schiff at least accepts Cleo's coins as being authentic, but fails to make the connections between it and other mediums such as sculpture and paintings. Here's Fletcher's description of one particular coin:

-----------
"Bronze eighty drachma coin of Cleopatra VII from her Alexandrian mint, portraying her distinctive profile, royal diadem, and 'melon'coiffure with wavy curls around her forehead."
-----------

Notice how all of this matches the iconography of her sculpted busts, including this one from Cherchel as described above.

Finally we come to Pfrommer, Michael; Markus, Elana Towne (2001). Greek Gold from Hellenistic Egypt. Los Angeles: Getty Publications (you can read the whole thing in the PDF). In regards to the incredible importance of diadems in artwork, they discuss a Roman painting from Pompeii that most likely depicts Ptolemaic Queen Berenice II, ancestor of Cleopatra VII (Pfrommer and Markus, 2001: pp 22-23):

-----------
"Figure 19: Berenike II wearing a Stéphane with a medallion (detail). From Roman villa at Boscoreale. First century B.C. Wall-painting. New York, The Metropolitan Museum of Art, Rogers Fund, 1903 (03.14.5)."
-----------

https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/F...T_DP105943.jpg


-----------
"Although these and similar knots were highly valued for their magical power, it was not until the time of Philip II and Alexander the Great that Greek jewelers first developed an artistic concept for the sacred knot. Despite appearing quite late in the history of Greek jewelry, the Herakles knot nevertheless dominated the world of Hellenistic jewelry. The explanation for its sudden popularity is not difficult to discern. The era of Alexander and the two following centuries, which were dominated by Macedonian dynasties, are replete with Herakles iconography. Although pieces of jewelry with the Herakles knot were very fashionable in this period, the use of the motif should not be seen exclusively as an allusion to the owner's Macedonian descent. Even though this connotation is likely, the use of these knots also shows a trend toward magical symbolism in jewelry. The knot of the Getty Stéphane illustrates that its ancient owner was completely aware of the dominating trends of her time. It is the centerpiece of an elaborate headdress, and it was meant to rest directly above the forehead of its wearer. A number of small terra-cotta statuettes show a Stéphane with a Herakles knot [FIGURE 18]. In another view of how a Stéphane would have looked when it was worn, FIGURE 19 illustrates the Ptolemaic queen Berenike n (r. 245—222 B.C.) from a wall-painting in a Roman villa in Boscoreale that was buried by the eruption of Mount Vesuvius inA.D. 79. (Berenike's Stéphane, however, has a medallion and not a Herakles knot in the center.)"

"Today these headdresses are most often referred to as diadems (a crownlike ornament), but "stephane" (headdress) is the more appropriate term for the present discussion, for it does not imply royal rank. In antiquity a diadem was a very special item that was linked almost exclusively to Alexander the Great, his successors, and the sphere of kings. It was simply a purple textile band that was rarely decorated. Originally, diadems were part of the royal accoutrements of the Achaemenid kings; when Alexander captured the Persian Empire, he incorporated some of their regal elements into his royal costume. Accordingly, the bandlike diadem, tied in the hair with its tasseled ends dangling on the neck or flowing around the shoulders, came to symbolize kingship. No man except the king himself could wear or even touch the diadem, as illustrated in a famous story about Alexander and his diadem. During a boat excursion in Mesopotamia the wind swept the diadem off the king's head and carried it away. An ordinary sailor volunteered to rescue this symbol of the king and dove into the water. He was successful in retrieving the diadem, but in order to protect it, he put it on his own head, and by so doing gambled with his life. The action could have sentenced him to death for having profaned the symbol of kingship. Luckily he was given a monetary reward instead. Because the diadem is a symbol of royalty, applying the term to the Getty piece might suggest a royal status for the anonymous owner—a conclusion that cannot be corroborated in this case."
-----------

So there you have it, diadems were sacred objects and were treated as such in real life as much as contemporary artwork. Long story short, Schiff is unreliable, she is not a real scholar, she doesn't give us the full picture of what's going on here, either deliberately or out of ignorance, and she's a big silly, no-good, smelly poo-poo head too. So take everything she says with a grain of salt. Big, big grains of salt, Ludicus. Big ones.

[Roma_Victrix]

Small correction about the post above: Susan Walker and Peter Higgs are the editors of Cleopatra of Egypt: from History to Myth (2001), which contains chapters by individual authors, but I didn't realize until now that those lengthy image captions were actually authored by various different authors with their abbreviated names (as explained on p. 374) and not the two main editors, unless otherwise noted. The information and quotations from pages 219 and 242 were actually authored by Mafoud Ferroukhi, while pages 312-313 were authored by Susan Walker, but not in conjunction with Peter Higgs. Just thought I'd let everyone be aware of that and to faithfully ascribe materials to their rightful authors. My bad, Ferroukhi! Credit where credit is due, my man.

Also, the book Greek Gold from Hellenistic Egypt (2001) is by Michael Pfrommer and Elana Towne-Markus, not Elana Towne Markus (her full surname being Towne-Markus). Hope I don't get crucified for that.

[Ludicus]

I really appreciate the time and effort you put into these articles. ... but I'm biased against the Ptolemaic dynasty.

Stacy Schiff She's just a popular non-fiction author.

You are partially right, but please don't exaggerate - you are also biased:

Isn't Prudence Jones a serious scholar? certainly, right? ( btw, one of the best books I have read about Cleopatra is Jone's Cleopatra: A Sourcebook). Well, as you know, Jone's main scholarship focuses on Augustan Rome and Cleopatra - and she partially disagrees with you, and praises Schiff's book.
She wrote, in "Jones on three Cleopatra's", review,

"...Three recent biographies of Cleopatra, Adrian Goldsworthy's Antony and Cleopatra ,Stacy Schiff's Cleopatra: a Life , and Duane Roller's Cleopatra: a Biography all well written and researched books that rely on much of the same evidence--present three distinct assessments of Cleopatra and her place in history. Goldsworthy and Roller appeal to a more scholarly audience than does Schiff about Cleopatra (but do so with different aims), while Schiff strives to flesh out Cleopatra's story by adding context.

...Roller emphasizes her political role...Goldsworthy ...a major part of what he wants to debunk is Cleopatra's importance as a politician...

For Schiff, Cleopatra is unquestionably a key player in the politics of her day and Schiff is not afraid to indulge the fascination readers feel for Egypt's last queen..
Unlike other biographers, Schiff expresses the historian's eternal frustration in colorful metaphors: "The end result is an nineteenth-century British life of Napoleon or a twentieth-century history of America,were it to have been written by Chairman Mao"
...Schiff's book is an attractive volume with many color plates and several maps... Interestingly, the notes reveal that Schiff conducted interviews with Classics scholars as part of her research (e.g. p.309 n. 15). This thoroughness makes the fact that Schiff relies on translations of the Greek and Latin sources less of an issue. All in all, her book is well researched and a good read"

[Lord Oda Nobunaga]

Never been a huge fan of Goldworthy's analysis. He basically just goes through the primary sources, combines and repackages them as a secondary source but doesn't delve deeply into what the sources mean or whether what they say is all that true.

[Roma_Victrix]

I really appreciate the time and effort you put into these articles. ... but I'm biased against the Ptolemaic dynasty.

You are partially right, but please don't exaggerate - you are also biased:

Everyone has some sort of bias and I'll happily acknowledge my own. That being said, my bias is at least grounded in Roman historiographic works, numismatics, and archaeological findings such as pieces of Greco-Roman artwork. My bias is a little bit warranted, I'd say.

Isn't Prudence Jones a serious scholar? certainly, right? ( btw, one of the best books I have read about Cleopatra is Jone's Cleopatra: A Sourcebook). Well, as you know, Jone's main scholarship focuses on Augustan Rome and Cleopatra - and she partially disagrees with you, and praises Schiff's book.
She wrote, in "Jones on three Cleopatra's", review,

I don't even see how Jones partially disagrees with me. Jones didn't address the subject of Cleopatra in ancient artworks here, or Schiff's incredibly limited knowledge (or deliberately limited presentation) of that subject. Jones' glowing report about Schiff's other qualities and writing abilities might be warranted, and Schiff is clever when it comes to offering us an entertaining spin on an age-old figure like Cleopatra, but when it comes to explaining this particular subject - artwork - Schiff is abysmally, myopically, and miserably shortsighted. When it comes to other things, Schiff is right on the money, though. For instance, when she writes:

"For ten generations her family had styled themselves pharaohs. The Ptolemies were in fact Macedonian Greek, which makes Cleopatra approximately as Egyptian as Elizabeth Taylor."

So do I hate Schiff? No, I have no strong feelings about her other than my boiling temper when she or anyone else says something dumb. In fact her work as a whole is okay as far as popular history goes. However, this one fault of hers is enough to mislead literally hundreds of thousands of people reading and consuming her book, a New York Times top ten list publication translated into 30 different freaking languages. Sorry, but I won't let her off the hook just because she happens to write other things that are reasonable or because she's popular or because Jones has a high opinion of her. You're certainly right that Jones is an excellent scholar and I cite her book frequently in this thread, but your argument rests on a vague appeal to authority rather than building a well-supported thesis here. The soundness of an argument is better than an appeal to authority.

[Ludicus]

In my (biased?) opinion, Schiff magistrally describes Lucan (Lucan was early in scene, before Plutarch) and Plutarch: "even when they are neither tendentious nor tangled, the accounts are often overblown. They were by modern standards polemicists, apologists, moralists, fabulists, recyclers, cut-and-pasters (1), hacks."
(1) *cough* (Plutarch and I)

In fact, Plutarch, the Roman moralist /propagandist, wrote about a century after Cleopatra’s death,
" For Rome, who never condescended to fear any nation or people, did in her time fear two human beings, one was Hannibal (yes!) and the other was a woman " ( ).

A complete absurdity. Let's keep in mind that Ptolemy X gave Egypt to Rome in his will, Rome decided not to take the country, because it had fallen into civil war. Also, let's keep in mind that in 80 BC, Sulla planted the first puppet prince in Egypt.
----
The Biographers. An excellent article, (it's about the ancient Roman sources, and biographers -Roller, Schiff, Goldsworthy). Read the full article, by Judith Thurman - The Cleopatriad | The New Yorker

...Whether we like it or not, biographers bring their experience as men or women to their task. Roller and Goldsworthy both seem determined to resist the temptations of a siren, as if she might corrupt their integrity.
Schiff relies on the same venerable Cleophobes, and exercises the same caution about them. She takes her epigraph from Euripides: “Man’s most valuable trait is a judicious sense of what not to believe.”
The quarrel between the ancients and the moderns in the field of Cleopatra studies is, in essence, a face-off between misogyny and feminism, though both sides have sympathies and ideals alien to their subject. (The villainess and the heroine are also two sides of her coin.)

-----

Back to the topic- The Art

According to Professor Kevin Butcher - University of Warwick : ""The myth of beauty is just that: a myth"
Egyptian Coins with Prof Kevin Butcher



Video, go to 1.45 minute - "the coins are the only contemporary documents that record her physical appearance"

Kevin Butcher, a text,

"These coin portraits, surprising though they may be to those who have grown up with a ‘Hollywood Cleopatra’, are the only certain images we have of her. That hasn’t stopped people from attempting to dismiss them as inaccurate and overly stylised – hoping against hope that there could have been another face of Cleopatra, a hidden one whose face would better match our expectations. Perhaps, they suggest, these unconvincing portraits were the work of unskilled artists.
There’s no reason to think these coin portraits are wrong, however. At the time, a warts-and-all approach to portraiture was in vogue in the Mediterranean world, and it seems that Cleopatra’s image was no exception to this trend. Features like large noses or determined chins may have been slightly exaggerated, but only because those features were the most recognisable attributes of the individual being portrayed. In this sense they were intended to be realistic".




"Coin portraits of Cleopatra’s father, much rarer than those of Cleopatra herself, show him with a prominent nose and sloping forehead, so these physical characteristics may well have been family traits. Her lovers don’t match modern popular conceptions either: Caesar has a wrinkled, scrawny neck and hides his bald head with a crown, and Antony’s jutting chin and broken nose bear no resemblance to Richard Burton’s features"



"Most of the coin portraits date to the mid to late 30s BC, when Cleopatra herself was in her mid to late thirties. Often she is associated with Mark Antony, whose portrait appears on the other side (and occasionally on the same side, next to hers), but she is always described as a queen in her own right, and not just Antony’s consort: “Queen Cleopatra, the New Goddess”; “For Cleopatra, Queen of Kings and of children who are kings”. On some coins depicting her by herself there is no name attached at all – those distinctive features told people who they were looking at".



"The modern negative reaction to the face of Cleopatra tells us more about our love of stories than anything about this most famous of Egyptian queens, who ruled from 51 to 30 BC. For us, the reality of her coin portraits clashes with the much greater myth of Cleopatra, a myth so grand that it has practically consumed the person behind it.
Hollywood did not invent the tradition of the beautiful seductress; that we can believe so says much about its influence in our world. Instead it simply followed a longstanding convention"

----

What about the busts? the Vatican Cleopatra may (or not) be a Roman copy of the gilded bronze statue of Cleopatra in the Temple of Venus Genetrix. Who knows.

[Lord Oda Nobunaga]

Coins are not indicative of how these people actually looked with any real accuracy. I've already compared high quality coins with low quality coins and showed how the high quality images are better than the cheap sketches on most of these coins. Further evidence is that these coins are not all that consistent, when you look at the fine details of the actual image. The coins being used as evidence were made rapidly for the sole purpose of paying off troops on campaign. I'm sure if we did a metal analysis my hypothesis would be proven correct since we would be likely to find that the gold and silver content has been debased by other metals. In other words they devalued the coins with other metals to pay the troops as quickly as possible.


Here is a good quality coin depicting the victory at Philippi. As you can see the stark contrast with the other coins is astounding. We have no such coin for Cleopatra.

Closest we have are probably these:

[Roma_Victrix]

In my (biased?) opinion, Schiff magistrally describes Lucan

Vae victis.

I'm well aware of the many problems about Cleopatra in Roman historiography. There isn't even a sole work dedicated to Cleopatra. As Roller explains, the fullest narrative about her life is offered by Plutarch, but this belongs to the biography dedicated to Mark Antony in the Parallel Lives. Roman historians were hardly partial, but at least they were less biased and far less obnoxious than the Roman poets of the Augustan age, namely Virgil, Horace, Ovid, and Propertius. Even so, poets like Virgil and Horace had some positive things to say about her, despite the general program of partisan criticism aimed at her and approved by the Augustan regime.

Back to the topic- The Art

According to Professor Kevin Butcher - University of Warwick : ""The myth of beauty is just that: a myth"
Egyptian Coins with Prof Kevin Butcher

Each ancient artistic representation of Cleopatra contain their own set of problems and that includes her coinage, as Oda indicates in his post above mine. The coins offer us limited caricatures of her visage (exclusively in profile view) compared to the arguably more realistic Berlin Cleopatra head in the Altes Museum, for instance. Perhaps her sculpted images are more idealistic, but the Berlin and Vatican heads don't exactly show the most flattering portrait of a beautiful woman either. They show us a woman of moderate or average looks, in my opinion, which lends them a high degree of credibility. Once again, as I've stated numerous times in this thread, her coins also vary greatly from one to the other as some of them seem to show a deliberately masculine woman whose features are forcibly conformed to those of her Ptolemaic and Macedonian ancestors. Don't take my word for it, refer to Roller (2010: p. 182), Fletcher (2008: pp. 96, 104), Kleiner (2005: p. 144), and the Art Institute of Chicago web page I shared earlier.

What about the busts? the Vatican Cleopatra may (or not) be a Roman copy of the gilded bronze statue of Cleopatra in the Temple of Venus Genetrix. Who knows.

As explained by Roller (2010: p. 175), this is the general belief in academia, that most surviving Roman portraits are derived from the now lost statue erected by Julius Caesar in the Temple of Venus Genetrix in the Forum of Caesar. That's certainly not the case for the perhaps idealized facial features in the statue of the Esquiline Venus (Polo, 2013: pp. 186, 194 footnote10; Roller, 2010: p. 175), though, or her alleged idealistic portrayal in the famous Portland Vase of the British Museum (Walker, 2004: pp. 41-59; Roller, 2010: p. 178; Caygill, 2009: p. 146, etc.). Also, I have evidence about certain other images of Venus-Aphrodite that may depict Cleopatra that show a more idealized view of her and that might follow a separate tradition than those spawned by the gilded statue in the Temple of Venus Genetrix. Who knows? There might be a forthcoming article published on the subject by...yours truly.

The alleged Cleopatra (as Aphrodite) with a serpent rising from between her legs, reaching her hand out to Mark Antony, supposedly, on the Portland Vase in the British Museum (although she doesn't have her royal diadem or melon-style hairdo):

Coins are not indicative of how these people actually looked with any real accuracy. I've already compared high quality coins with low quality coins and showed how the high quality images are better than the cheap sketches on most of these coins. Further evidence is that these coins are not all that consistent, when you look at the fine details of the actual image. The coins being used as evidence were made rapidly for the sole purpose of paying off troops on campaign. I'm sure if we did a metal analysis my hypothesis would be proven correct since we would be likely to find that the gold and silver content has been debased by other metals. In other words they devalued the coins with other metals to pay the troops as quickly as possible.

I'll just chime in here by strengthening your argument with this little fact: Cleopatra did indeed debase her own coinage throughout her reign and unlike many previous rulers in the early Ptolemaic period did not even issue gold coins, just bronze ones and (gradually debased) silver ones (Roller, 2010: pp. 106–107). Someone had to pay for Antony's blunders in Parthia and triumphs in Armenia!

[Lord Oda Nobunaga]

What I am really getting at is that the claim that Cleopatra was ugly is baseless. There is no mention of this, and we have no evidence to even suggest this. That Cleopatra may have been aging at 39 is one thing, but to say that she was likely an ugly woman sounds absurd to me. If we take those coins as our evidence then Antony looked like a literal Popeye the Sailorman. We know this isn't true because we have the existing Hercules/Antony bust.

[alhoon]

I saw a woman today that looked much like Cleopatra based on the 1st page imagery. It may be a coincidence (2050 years and a Mediterranean apart) but she was tall, with lighter hair color than Cretans, and the green-blue eyes etc so she probably was a student from another part of Greece, probably Northern Greece.

At this time I wonder:
- Why I notice only women looking like Ptolemies. That is perhaps because I don't notice men's faces even if they have blue eyes but could it be that women are more likely to show more strong resemblance to our ancestors?
- Whether "You look like a Ptolemy! Specifically Cleopatra." would have been a good pick-up line...