Cleopatra was white and I can prove it

[Roma_Victrix]

[Epic Shakespearean announcer's voice:] by the powers of Wikipedia and black magic sorcery, arise! Arise, Cleopatra, seventh of her name! Arise and show us thy face! The face that wooed Julius Caesar and Mark Antony! The face descended from Ptolemy I, that Macedonian Greek general of Alexander the Great! The face that stared into the eyes of death itself with the vicious asp that bit your chest and introduced its deadly toxin! The face that shall inspire Afrocentrism for centuries to come and serve as a timeless icon for Black Power! The face that...



Oh. Never mind. She's kinda average for a white chick, I guess. I wouldn't swipe her away on Tinder, though. On condition that she ditch the kid here, Caesarion. I ain't paying no child support, k babe? If she speaks Latin in the streets and Greek in the sheets then we all good, yo.

The image above comes from the House of Marcus Fabius Rufus at Pompeii, Italy, and it's one that I just uploaded to Wikimedia Commons today and placed in several articles at Wikipedia (i.e. the ones for Cleopatra, Caesarion, Julius Caesar, Mark Antony, and Augustus). I also created the entire "Depictions in ancient art" sub-section of Cleopatra's present article. Without my doing, this particular painting from Pompeii would be a rather obscure one and very hard to find online, used almost exclusively in academic circles (where we all know they have a kinky fapping fetish for keeping these things to themselves and away from the unworthy, unwashed plebs of the general public, especially the uncouth dregs and knaves at TWC). As explained by Duane W. Roller (Cleopatra: a biography, Oxford University Press, 2010) and Susan Walker ("Cleopatra in Pompeii?", Papers from the British School at Rome, 2008), it's a contemporary Roman depiction of Cleopatra VII of Ptolemaic Egypt as Venus Genetrix, holding her rugrat son Caesarion, seen here as an annoying little blonde-haired cupid hugging her face.

Caesarion, as you may recall, was allegedly the son of Cleopatra and Julius Caesar.

Uh oh, Spaghettios! That was simply too problematic for Octavian/Augustus, who murdered the little bastard and would-be heir to Caesar in 30 BC. Plus, Caesarion was the legitimate Hellenistic king of Egypt, another obstacle for the expansionism of Augustus. Gotta get that sweet, sweet Egyptian grain without worrying about another stupid Ptolemaic civil war disrupting vital imports for the hungry, unruly mob in Rome. The cool thing about this painting is that the owner of it decided to wall it off completely and hide it within the House of Marcus Fabius Rufus. Both Roller and Walker affirm that this was done shortly after Caesarion was executed and there's evidence that there was a program in place for destroying images of Caesarion, who would continue to be a thorn in the side of Augustus if his legacy lived on (plus damnatio memoriae and all that nasty grease-ball Guido Italian mafia stuff). For instance, several academic sources compare the painting in Pompeii to a sculpted marble bust in the Vatican museum, the so-called Vatican Cleopatra, which appears to have a mark on its left cheek where a cupid's hand once rested. The Vatican Cleopatra, along with the Berlin Cleopatra (Altes Museum, Berlin) that has a full, undamaged nose, both seem to be derived from a single, standard work, which Roller and Walker assume was the now lost gilded statue of Cleopatra erected in the Temple of Venus Genetrix in the Forum of Caesar, Rome, by her patron Julius Caesar (it was still standing there as late as the 3rd century).

The Berlin Cleopatra:


The Vatican Cleopatra:


The British Museum Cleopatra (lacking a royal diadem, so perhaps one of her courtiers mimicking her 'melon' hairstyle instead of the actual queen herself):


The Tomba di Nerone Cleopatra, now in the Museo Pio-Clementino of the Vatican Museums:


The Esquiline Venus, thought by some academics to depict Cleopatra (with good reason):


And of course, who could forget the famous Queen Latifa Malik Abdul Jabar Afro Farrakhan Ebony Cleopatra:


If only that statue of Cleopatra commissioned by Julius Caesar was still standing in the Roman Forum! Or at least fragments of it. It must have been re-purposed during the Christian era, no doubt. Hey! Let's melt down the gilded bits to make jewelry and use the other parts as building materials!

So what do you guys make of all of this? Bear in mind this thread is about the academic discourse focused on surviving coins, sculptures and paintings. We don't need to talk about the silly race debate in popular media. Let's focus instead on comparing and contrasting these images in the surviving corpus of ancient works depicting Cleopatra, and those which are mostly disputed in academia. Let's all huddle together in our Ivory Tower and have a smart discussion about this, cuz we're smart guys and we do smart things like comparing the aquiline nose of the Berlin portrait to that of Cleo's coinage. That's pretty smart! You can do smart stuff too, right? Like a smart kid?

In essence, the title of my thread is largely in jest, even though it's true. We're not here to talk about Cleopatra's skin unless it has something to do with an academic debate, such as Walker's comparison of her ivory-white skin and other features in the Pompeii mural to that of common Roman and Ptolemaic-Egyptian depictions of various goddesses.

Oh, and if you deviate from this, the wrath of the gods and the thousand moderators of the Persian Empire shall descend upon you. Their arrows and TWC moderation shall blot out the sun, one should hope. And we shall argue in the shade.

EDIT: I made this little video recently about the aforementioned artworks. Please visit the link, give it a thumbs up, and subscribe!



Cleopatra and Caesarion, wearing royal diadems and attended to by servants as Cleo commits suicide by poisoning, in a fresco from the House of Giuseppe II at Pompeii dated to the early 1st century AD:
https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikiped...ing_poison.jpg


Posthumous painted portrait of Cleopatra from Herculaneum dated to the early 1st century AD (before Herculaneum was destroyed in 79 AD by Mt Vesuvius), depicting Cleopatra with red hair, her Greek royal diadem, melon-style hairdo, and studded pearl earrings:
https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikiped...1127162%29.jpg

[Christianus]

hahahaha

[nvm]

Honestly, I hadn't heard of anyone stating otherwise. The recent find of the dark skinned "Cheddar man" in Britain is rather intriguing though, if it can be trusted.

[Rad]

Spoiler Alert, click show to read: 

[Baharr]

It's my understanding that it's not really possible to map modern ethnicities onto the ancient world, though. In a sense Cleopatra was no more "black" or "white" than the Sarmatians were "Ukrainian" or "Uzbek" - black/white distinctions are afaik a much later, modern distinction - the first time a distinction was explicitly formulated between the two groups was in the Virginia slave code of 1705, which is often credited with inventing the concept of "whiteness" as opposed to the plurality of white identities that existed before - English, Italian, Irish, etc.

Anyway, attempting to shoehorn North African peoples in particular into the modern black/white dichotomy is imo particularly awkward since they very much sit at the "boundary zone" where the hard border between these identities really begins to break down, even today.

Haha, just read all that back and it sounds so serious - sorry, just adding my 0.2$

Also, wasn't Cleopatra of Ptolemaic (and therefore Macedonian) descent? So we would expect her to look similar to contemporary Greeks, no?

[Roma_Victrix]

Honestly, I hadn't heard of anyone stating otherwise. The recent find of the dark skinned "Cheddar man" in Britain is rather intriguing though, if it can be trusted.

I'm glad to see you've never read a Youtube comments section, then.

Cheddar man is irrelevant to the thread, but yeah, it's interesting to note the alleged appearance of Britons long before the Celtic peoples even arrived, let alone the Romans.

It's my understanding that it's not really possible to map modern ethnicities onto the ancient world, though. In a sense Cleopatra was no more "black" or "white" than the Sarmatians were "Ukrainian" or "Uzbek" - black/white distinctions are afaik a much later, modern distinction - the first time a distinction was explicitly formulated between the two groups was in the Virginia slave code of 1705, which is often credited with inventing the concept of "whiteness" as opposed to the plurality of white identities that existed before - English, Italian, Irish, etc.

There's that. And then there's also the obvious fact that ancient Macedonian Greeks, like the Ptolemaic dynasty of rulers in Egypt (including Cleopatra), had nothing to do with population groups of black Africans south of the Sahara Desert. Aside from the fact that Cleopatra, in her attempt to learn multiple languages, also picked up Ethiopian and could apparently speak it alongside her native Greek as well as Late Egyptian, Hebrew, Median, and Parthian-Iranian.

Also, archaeogenetics aren't as murky or hazy as you seem to think. We actually know a great deal about the genetic history of population groups around the world, contrary to your beliefs.

Anyway, attempting to shoehorn North African peoples in particular into the modern black/white dichotomy is imo particularly awkward since they very much sit at the "boundary zone" where the hard border between these identities really begins to break down, even today.

Some North African populations include varying levels black sub-Saharan elements, especially in places like Algeria and Libya, but these are distinct minorities within those populations. Most North Africans share a lot more genetic code with Mediterranean islanders and southern Europeans than anything else, and that's basically been the case since the Neolithic period. It's the reason why North Africans are classified as white/Caucasian by today's United States Census Bureau.

East Africans like Sudanese, Ethiopians, Eritreans, Somalis, etc. are basically "black" for lack of a better word, but even various population groups of the Horn of Africa share significant amount of genetic history with Semitic peoples of the neighboring Arabian peninsula. That becomes rather obvious when you consider that even various cultures of East Africa are Semitic, like the predominant ethnic group of Ethiopia, the Amharic people.

Haha, just read all that back and it sounds so serious - sorry, just adding my 0.2$

Also, wasn't Cleopatra of Ptolemaic (and therefore Macedonian) descent? So we would expect her to look similar to contemporary Greeks, no?

I mean, I mentioned in the fourth sentence of this thread that her ancestor (and founder of the dynasty) was Ptolemy I, a Macedonian Greek general who originally served under Alexander the Great. This part here is a silly conversation, though, one that's not grounded in reality or basic knowledge of the people we are discussing. How about establishing the basics? Like, you know, the name Cleopatra (Κλεοπάτρα) itself being Greek (meaning "from the glorious father"). Philip II of Macedon, father of Alexander the Great, had a wife named Cleopatra Eurydice. He even had a daughter named Cleopatra, for god's sake. Anyone with any sort of basic literacy in Greek history knows this.

[athanaric]

Baharr - yes, Cleopatra was ethnically Macedonian. Anyone arguing she was "black" or somehow "African" in origin is a retard. Same goes for Hannibal, who was Phoenician.

[HernanU]

Baharr - yes, Cleopatra was ethnically Macedonian. Anyone arguing she was "black" or somehow "African" in origin is a retard. Same goes for Hannibal, who was Phoenician.

People tend to mix, you know, no man or woman reject love and sex naturally because the color of their skin. Egypt was conquered by Makedonia three centuries before the arrival of the romans, and Hannibal being Phoenician... well, 500 years and a small group of Phoenician probably mixed with the local nobility and warchief to secure the peace. The ancient world was more culturally biased and not racially, the greek and romans probably look with the same contempt the blonde barbarians of the Rhine and the black barbarians of Nubia. Probably in the centuries of presence in Egypt the hellenized elites mixed with the original macedons, same with the phoenician in Carthage.
I think the modern prejudices about race clouded this discusion. It's like "Hey, Jesus was a white man. Don't you see the paintings, you liberal scum!" Yes, painted a thousand years later.
The people live, have babies with the locals and change, that's why probably the jews in the I century ressemble more like the modern palestinians than the modern jews who change in the 1.500 years of diaspora in Europe. And black jews exist too! So, maybe she was light skinned, maybe not, but call "retard" to other people because they have different opinons in this matter is, well, retard.
Don't be that guy man.
I still struggle with the english language, so sorry for the gramathics. But I speak spanish almost perfectly.
Saludos.

[Roma_Victrix]

People tend to mix, you know, no man or woman reject love and sex naturally because the color of their skin. Egypt was conquered by Makedonia three centuries before the arrival of the romans, and Hannibal being Phoenician... well, 500 years and a small group of Phoenician probably mixed with the local nobility and warchief to secure the peace. The ancient world was more culturally biased and not racially, the greek and romans probably look with the same contempt the blonde barbarians of the Rhine and the black barbarians of Nubia. Probably in the centuries of presence in Egypt the hellenized elites mixed with the original macedons, same with the phoenician in Carthage.
I think the modern prejudices about race clouded this discusion. It's like "Hey, Jesus was a white man. Don't you see the paintings, you liberal scum!" Yes, painted a thousand years later.

Your argument is based on nothing, though. As outlined by Egyptologist Dr. Joann Fletcher (Cleopatra the Great: The Woman Behind the Legend, New York, 2008), the ONLY person in the entire Ptolemaic dynasty to introduce any known non-Macedonian-Greek blood was Cleopatra I Syra, and even she was mostly Macedonian-Greek. She was part Sogdian-Persian by virtue of being a descendant of Apama, wife of Seleucus I Nicator. Yet Sogdians weren't some incredibly different people from that of the Greeks, being an Eastern Iranian people who had fair hair and fair eyes. Just look at their descendants today in what is now modern Tajikistan. They're basically white people native to Asia. Just because some Europeans (mostly Anglos, let's be honest) have the arrogance to presume that only Europeans can be white doesn't mean that it's actually true.

Any claims that Cleopatra was anything other than Macedonian Greek (with like 5% Sogdian-Persian blood) is either pure speculation or Afrocentric propaganda. She had an Egyptian (but also part Macedonian) half-cousin, the High Priest of Ptah, but that branch of her family is not known for having produced Ptolemaic royal family members or heirs. And it was also ILLEGAL in the Greek city-states of Alexandria, Naukratis, and Ptolemais Hermiou (considered legally separate from the rest of Egypt) for Greeks and Egyptians to intermarry. This was a partially segregated society. The Egyptians (and Jews) even lived in separate residential quarters than the Greeks and Macedonians in the city of Alexandria.

Cleopatra was loved by her Egyptian subjects for being the first Ptolemaic pharaoh to bother learning their language and she respected their religious rites and privileges in every way she could, but she didn't promote intermarriage at any point in her reign between Greeks and Egyptians. Your anachronistic ideas about Ptolemaic society should be reevaluated, at least when it comes to the multicultural Greek city-states in Egypt. Outside of those cities Greeks and Egyptians were allowed to marry one another, it is true, but even then these partial Egyptians, especially upper class ones, usually preferred to take on a Greek identity and leave behind their Egyptian one because it was undesirable in the social hierarchy.

For info on that see Stanley M. Burstein's Reign of Cleopatra (2004).

As for Romans having contempt for Celtic and Germanic tribes in Europe, some ancient authors definitely expressed this, but the Romans had a funny way of showing such contempt by not only allowing these men to become citizens after military service but also had some of them become literal Roman senators and magistrates. Funnily enough, some Celtic and Germanic soldiers left by Aulus Gabinius in Ptolemaic Egypt, while restoring Ptolemy XII in 55 BC, became almost totally assimilated into Greek culture, just like the Celtic Galatians before them who became kleruchoi soldiers and landowners in Egypt. They were even used against Cleopatra by Ptolemy XIII and then later used by Cleopatra to aid the Second Triumvirate against the assassins of Caesar in the Liberators' War of 43-42 BC. Nubians also had a small presence in Ptolemaic Egypt and they along with Ethiopians later served in the Roman military and became Roman citizens. So yes, they cared more about culture than race or skin color, so long as they adopted the mainstream Greco-Roman culture.

[HernanU]

Afrocentric propaganda? C'mon man, are you serious?
Joann Fletcher is very questioned by the egiptology experts for rush conclusions and very shady practices in intepreting the source material, so citing her is not a very solid back in your theory.
I want to be clear, I don't say the Cleopatra was black or brown or any other racial label you don't want to put on her, maybe she was the Charlize Theron of the first century BC. I'm just saying that naming someone as a "retard" for have an idea backed by serious academics and profesional research is stupid, even if the conclussions are still open to debate.
Of course the romans give celts, iberians, africans, asians and many others roman citizenship. Like I say (and you to), for them was not a matter of skin color but of cultural assimilation. For the same reason Julius Cesar took one million gauls into slavery (and kill another million) without many repercusions in Rome, they were barbarians and do not have much worth in the eyes of the "civilized" romans. If you have the bad luck of being a barbarian or an enemy of Rome (like the civilized punic or greeks who were made slaves by the tens of thousands if not put under the sword) you could have the fairest hair and the bluest eyes and be a faithful member of the Alt-Right and still end in chains in a mine or a latifundia in Italy.
All this subject is just a modern ideological view of the ancient "races" and is racist himself. And by god sake, I'm a profesor of history (yeah, I know, you won't believe me) and a passionate one. I don't take lightly the history of humanity and because of that I know the today take on the racial problem is a modern issue (very different from the idea of "race" in the medieval or early modern times), born when the romanticism meet the nationalism in the XIX century and still linger like a cancer in the world.
But, you know, peace man. I love this mod like you do, and love history like you do. This is just, I hope, a productive debate.

[Darios]

All this subject is just a modern ideological view of the ancient "races" and is racist himself. And by god sake, I'm a profesor of history (yeah, I know, you won't believe me) and a passionate one. I don't take lightly the history of humanity and because of that I know the today take on the racial problem is a modern issue (very different from the idea of "race" in the medieval or early modern times), born when the romanticism meet the nationalism in the XIX century and still linger like a cancer in the world.

It is sad but there can sometimes be a uncomfortably thin line between a history lover and a racist. This is why I ultimately became sick of Europa Barbarorum I and eventually stopped playing it all together. It stated as a mod that wanted to depict barbarian factions more accurately (a noble goal in itself) but ended up trying to depict everyone in Central and South Asia as some sort of long-lost northwestern Europeans. I remember the faction description for a kind of Galatian unit arguing that the modern prevalence of light hair and eyes in the Fayum area of Egypt being the result of settled Galatian mercenaries. The final straw was when they released a type of "wolf-warrior" Sweboz unit that they described as "these are the true Indo-Europeans." Like...seriously?

I have heard that EB2 has largely moved away from that sort of stuff, but I still do not have the stomach to play it, as I get along well enough playing Rome 2.

I am not going to argue anything regarding Cleopatra's appearance or color because I have no interest in the topic. However, I have never agreed with trying to portray the ancients with our ridiculous 'modern' categories of race. A Greek from antiquity might have scoffed at the notion of being referred to as 'white' considering how their writers went out of their way to describe how different peoples such as the Germans, Celts, and Slavs looked. Saying that Cleopatra had Europoid features is one thing (and one that is backed up by data), but referring to her as 'white' can be a bit provocative and potentially drag Afrocentrists into a flame war. Who knows what sort of skin color an ethnically Greek woman living in Egypt (and its 300+ days of sunshine a year) had. Most importantly, why should we care?

[athanaric]

applying modern standards to ancient ppl is anachronistic but sadly this is the trend now. damn politically correct.

It's always been the case, though. Just the "modern standards" vary over time.

actually when you click on any roman rebel character on strat map he'll shout at you "MENTULA!" he don't mention the size tho.

Which is awesome. Although I think they say "mentulae" (plural).

People tend to mix, you know, no man or woman reject love and sex naturally because the color of their skin.

Not really; it depends on the inclinations of the individual and of course the social environment in which said individual grew up. Even without conditioning, people have preferred types and those may extend to skin colour, although they probably have more to do with features and body shape in most cases.

Egypt was conquered by Makedonia three centuries before the arrival of the romans, and Hannibal being Phoenician... well, 500 years and a small group of Phoenician probably mixed with the local nobility and warchief to secure the peace.

That's not an unreasonable assumption, but that wouldn't make them "black" or even dark-skinned by any sensible standards, it'd just mean that they were a tiny bit darker than their pale-skinned (by international standards) Phoenician ancestors. But still very much Mediterranean types.

The ancient world was more culturally biased and not racially, the greek and romans probably look with the same contempt the blonde barbarians of the Rhine and the black barbarians of Nubia.

Yeah, um, I already knew that.

Probably in the centuries of presence in Egypt the hellenized elites mixed with the original macedons, same with the phoenician in Carthage.

I actually think that it took a long while, and replacement/takeover by another political elite (Romans and/or Arabs) for them to blend into the local mix. These ethno-cultural biases hold on for a long time, as a rule. Just look at how many ethnic groups live side by side to this day without much mixing going on, unless they're culturally and genetically really close.

I think the modern prejudices about race clouded this discusion.

In my observation, studying with them and working for them, left-leaning "liberal" academics are way more biased than they think. In many cases, the pendulum has swung way too far in the direction of denying genetic differences as a factor, particularly among the humanities - including history and Classical archaeology - where most people don't really have a clue about how genetics work, and their default stance is panicked denial of any genetically-transferred differences or cultural traits. Because their greatest fear in life is to be seen as a racist/Nazi/colonialist. It's not healthy.
Same goes for the other extreme of course, like the alt-right, where people try to prove that 'negroes' are inferior for some reason, or afro-centric people who build their beliefs on the assumption of the inferiority of Europeans.

It's like "Hey, Jesus was a white man. Don't you see the paintings, you liberal scum!" Yes, painted a thousand years later.

We've had this debate. It's not a good analogy because nobody here claims that Jesus (if he even existed) was a blonde guy from Northern Italy.

The people live, have babies with the locals and change, that's why probably the jews in the I century ressemble more like the modern palestinians than the modern jews who change in the 1.500 years of diaspora in Europe.

Well, actually there is a very big percentage of Israeli Jews with Middle-Eastern looks. And, given the genetic evidence, the paleness of the Ashkenazim is not necessarily due to mixing, although some of that will unquestionably have taken place, but it's also quite likely that people naturally experienced a decreasing melanin level over the generation due to their geographical environment. It's happened before after all.

And black jews exist too!

Um yeah, but that's a different story.

So, maybe she was light skinned, maybe not, but call "retard" to other people because they have different opinons in this matter is, well, retard.
Don't be that guy man.

Well, given her ancestry and the pictorial evidence (whatever one might think of idealization etc.), actually there is no reason to assume she wasn't as pale as the average Greek woman. So yeah, it's retarded to assume she was "black", because "black" in modern parlance refers to Bantu types with negroid features and very dark skin. I don't necessarily agree with modern racial categories either, particularly not the absurd American ones, but I think you know what I mean.

I still struggle with the english language, so sorry for the gramathics. But I speak spanish almost perfectly.
Saludos.

Well, for me it's the other way round. And if we had this discussion in Spanish, it'd be against forum rules.

[QuintusSertorius]

Well, actually there is a very big percentage of Israeli Jews with Middle-Eastern looks. And, given the genetic evidence, the paleness of the Ashkenazim is not necessarily due to mixing, although some of that will unquestionably have taken place, but it's also quite likely that people naturally experienced a decreasing melanin level over the generation due to their geographical environment. It's happened before after all.

Just on this point, being Sephardic or Ashkenazi Jewish is distinct enough to show up in the DNA. Despite spending centuries in Europe, many Ashkenazim have very little non-Ashkenazi DNA, which is not what you'd expect from any population who were freely mixing with the natives of wherever they were living. The reason many Israeli Jews have Middle Eastern looks is because that's where their ancestors came from in the first place, and they largely kept to their own even while outside the Levant.

Well, given her ancestry and the pictorial evidence (whatever one might think of idealization etc.), actually there is no reason to assume she wasn't as pale as the average Greek woman. So yeah, it's retarded to assume she was "black", because "black" in modern parlance refers to Bantu types with negroid features and very dark skin. I don't necessarily agree with modern racial categories either, particularly not the absurd American ones, but I think you know what I mean.

Indeed, the Ptolemaic elite was Makedonian. Not even Greek, and if they ever married outside of the elite (which was rare) Greek was probably as far outside it as they went. They were hugely inbred by the amount of sibling marriage they indulged in.

Marrying some natives would have done wonders for the variety of their gene-pool (look at how progressively debauched they look in their coinage), but there's no evidence they ever did.

[Baharr]

That's all super interesting, actually! I admit my knowledge of ancient history is fairly limited compared to many of the people here, so it's pretty cool to see a really in-depth discussion materialise every now and again

re: archaeogenetics - what I meant to say was that I frequently see people attempting to slap modern ethnic labels onto ancient cultures, to the point where I've seen the Proto-Indo-Europeans referred to as "ancient Ukrainians", which is really just silly. I wasn't implying the science is murky at all, more that ethnic groups are not "fixed", if you catch my meaning. To get back to the point, what I was implying but failed to really articulate is that claiming either Cleopatra or Egypt (whether Ancient or Ptolemaic or Islamic...) as "black" or "white" is to anachronistically project a modern conflict into the past - it's a bit like asking "who owns Ancient Egyptian culture, white people or black people?" and the answer really is "Ancient Egyptians" because "white people" and "black people" in a sense did not exist as identities until recently.

But anyway, I applaud your find, that reconstruction you posted at the end of your initial post seems super ridiculous now

[QuintusSertorius]

Trying to put modern labels on ancients is really, really silly. Especially when you consider how much migration there has been between now and then. The Asian steppe was a constantly-moving procession of people from east to west (even millenia before Genghis Khan), and there were many smaller migrations going on all over the place too. Add to that Phoenician, Hellenistic and Roman colonisation.

[athanaric]

Trying to put modern labels on ancients is really, really silly. Especially when you consider how much migration there has been between now and then. The Asian steppe was a constantly-moving procession of people from east to west (even millenia before Genghis Khan), and there were many smaller migrations going on all over the place too. Add to that Phoenician, Hellenistic and Roman colonisation.

Sure, and that's why it's so important that we have tools like archaeogenetics, which bring facts to a discussion that has seen so much speculation from laymen, hand-waving from historians (or even certain archaeologists whose world only includes studying Greek pottery and Roman portraits ), and hilarious theories from race ideologues of all colours... hey wait a second, didn't the original EB bibliography thread recommend one of those quacks, a certain Mr. Bernal?

[QuintusSertorius]

Sure, and that's why it's so important that we have tools like archaeogenetics, which bring facts to a discussion that has seen so much speculation from laymen, hand-waving from historians (or even certain archaeologists whose world only includes studying Greek pottery and Roman portraits ), and hilarious theories from race ideologues of all colours... hey wait a second, didn't the original EB bibliography thread recommend one of those quacks, a certain Mr. Bernal?

I wouldn't call the original EB1 bibliography an especially good example of the team's work. Not least because that was largely a different team, and our standards of rigour are much higher than was the case back then.

I wasn't a member of that team, and as I'm regularly at pains to point out, I couldn't care less what EB1 did, it doesn't inform what we're doing in EBII.

As for archaeogenetics, I'd take it with a pinch of salt until they gather a lot more data on modern populations. The current data on Africa, for example (where the greatest variety of genetic expressions exist) is very thin right now.

[Roma_Victrix]

Love the conversation thus far, but just a friendly reminder that the thread is about portraits and iconography of Cleopatra, not about genetics or biological forensics. Unless of course one of you guys has a hair follicle from Cleopatra’s head or something. Lol. Let’s keep the discussion about artwork, please.

[Tactics Mayers]

Kinda related to this thread but how multicultural is the Roman Empire? Are they similar in a way America is?

Is it possible you would be able to encounter Illyrians, Gauls, Dacians, Africans and many more spread out all over the Empire?

[Beckitz]

Kinda related to this thread but how multicultural is the Roman Empire? Are they similar in a way America is?

Is it possible you would be able to encounter Illyrians, Gauls, Dacians, Africans and many more spread out all over the Empire?

Short answer: yes

Long answer: basically yes, but you should keep in mind the different world and society of Ancient Rome. The most likely people to travel across the Empire were administrators/magistrates, soldiers, slaves, or the merchant class