Reinaldo José Lopes: Cleopatra and the colors of Egypt – 04/29/2023 – Reinaldo José Lopes

It was predictable that the choice of a black actress (British Adele James) to play Cleopatra in a Netflix miniseries would provoke controversy. Even Egypt’s Ministry of Antiquities decided to make an official statement, pointing out that the queen had “white skin and Hellenic features”, as she descended mainly from Macedonian nobles, including a general of Alexander the Great.

From a purely factual point of view, the ministry’s observation seems to me to be correct—although we don’t know for sure who Cleopatra’s mother was. She may have been a lady of the Macedonian dynasty, also called Cleopatra, or someone unrelated to her father, Ptolemy XII. documented.) In this second case, it could even be of Egyptian origin, although Ptolemaic rulers generally looked down on their native subjects.

Having said that, however, I think it is more interesting and productive to change the focus a little, leaving aside the “physical person” Cleopatra. After all, she and her direct ancestors (at least those of the male lineage) are just the icing on the cake in ancient Egypt’s 3,000-year history—the queen, by the way, is closest to you and me, in that timeline, than the pharaohs of the pyramids.

Controversy happens to be the perfect window to address how our ideas of “race” are very recent and arbitrary, and how the real world tends to throw them to the ground.

First, I challenge anyone to demonstrate that the inhabitants of the ancient Mediterranean divided humanity into races based on skin color, assembling two large blocks of “whites” and “blacks”. There are some indications that these classification boxes began to take shape in the Middle Ages, but they only gained global projection even from the 16th century onwards.

And it never hurts to remember that, for many Europeans and North Americans, people like Italians, Greeks and Jews did not deserve the label “white” until about 150 years ago.

Other than that, human populations have always been genetically porous. There was an infinite “degradation” of miscegenation between Africa and the Mediterranean. And this was also true within Egypt itself – thanks to the Nile, which united the maritime populations in its delta, in the north, with the interior of Sudan, in the south.

In different periods of the endless Egyptian history, there were pharaohs of Semitic origin, the so-called Hyksos (“whites”, according to modern categorization), and also from Nubia or Kingdom of Kush (Sudanese and “blacks”). Both influences, plus many others, were incorporated into pharaonic domains over thousands of years.

Studies of ancient Egyptian DNA confirm this complicated scenario. Although they indicate a much closer kinship with Middle Eastern peoples, there is still a significant genetic contribution from groups south of the Sahara (“blacks”, therefore), of up to 15%. In current Egyptians, this contribution rises and may exceed 20%. These are very similar numbers, for example, to those of many Brazilians who today declare themselves “brown” in national censuses.

And, of course, it’s worth noting that all of these numbers are population averages, which don’t capture the broad spectrum of individual diversity across time and space. Whatever the image of Cleopatra that works in her head, the truth is that her world was much more complicated than a simple opposition between skin colors.

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