In the trailer for the disastrous Netflix documentary Queen Cleopatra, classics professor Shelley Haley states, “I remember my grandmother saying to me, ‘I don’t care what they teach you in school.  Cleopatra was black.’”  The documentary goes on to depict the queen as black, or at least biracial, with Adele James starring in the title role.

Some of the Cleopatra-was-black business may be the result of ignorance of ancient history, of believing Cleopatra to be a native Egyptian, and of believing native Egyptians to be black.  But Cleopatra was not a native Egyptian; rather, she was a member of a foreign dynasty that ruled over Egypt.

When Alexander the Great and his army of Macedonians and Greeks set out to conquer the known world at the time, they liberated Egypt from Persian rule along the way.  Alexander commissioned the founding of the fabulous city of Alexandria, and after his death, one of his generals, Ptolemy, became ruler over Egypt, founding a dynasty that ruled from Alexandria.  The royal house “kept it in the family” by resorting to intermarriage if need be.  Our Cleopatra was the last of a number of Cleopatras in this Ptolemaic lineage.

Educated though they may be, some woke historians pander to the Cleopatra-was-black agenda by reading way too much into the fact that nothing is really known about Cleopatra’s mother.  Their non-sequitur reasoning seems to be that since we don’t know exactly who Cleopatra’s mother was, she must have been black!  Had Cleopatra’s mother been a Nubian or even a native Egyptian, however, such a fact probably would have been seized upon and used as a cudgel against the legitimacy of her rule by the polemicists and detractors of the day.  It would have been the kind of thing that chroniclers of the time surely would have noted.  More than likely, Cleopatra’s mother was probably just another Greco-Macedonian Alexandrian.

I’ve often wondered if anything in particular might have contributed to the present-day belief in a black Cleopatra, and I believe I’ve found it.  In 1896, an erotic novel by Pierre Louÿs, Aphrodite: Mœurs Antiques, created quite a stir in French literary circles.  The subject matter was the life of courtesans in ancient Alexandria when Cleopatra was a young girl.  The work is divided into five books, and each book into several chapters.  Chapter seven of book three gives a description of the young Cleopatra.

At this point, a caveat is in order for those who may wish to do primary research from the French text: a number of successive editions of the work were published by the Société du Mercure de France, and of those I have seen, the Cleopatra chapter has inexplicably been omitted, so look for a French edition from some other publisher.  (Tracking down the reason for the omissions might make a good research project for the scholar of French literature who happens to read this.)

Although there had been a few English translations of the work, the one that really hit its stride was the translation by Lewis Galantière, put out by Random House in its Modern Library series in 1933.  The three editors of the Modern Library series were listed on the back of the title page, one of them being a Bennett A. Cerf.  Years later, Bennett Cerf went on to become a regular on the long-running What’s My Line? television game show as a panelist.  I’m old enough to remember as a youngster watching him along with Dorothy Kilgallen and Arlene Francis trying to figure out the occupations of the show’s guests.  Back on point, here’s Galantière’s translation of the description of Cleopatra:

Queen Berenice had a younger sister called Cleopatra.  Many Egyptian princesses had borne this  name, but this girl became in later years the renowned Cleopatra who destroyed her kingdom and killed herself on the corpse of her dead realm, so to say.  She was at this time about twelve years old, and no one could yet tell what her beauty would be.  Tall and slender, she seemed not to belong to a family in which all the females were plump.  She was ripening like some defectively grafted bastard fruit of obscure and outlandish origin.  Some of her lineaments were hard and bold, like those seen in Macedonia; other traits seemed a heritage from the depths of Nubia, where womankind is tender and swarthy.  Her mother had been a woman of inferior race and dubious pedigree.  It was surprising to see Cleopatra’s almost negroid lips under a delicately formed aquiline nose.  Her young breasts were round, small, set wide apart, and the swelling aureolae which crowned them marked her a daughter of the Nile (p. 177).

The Modern Library version of Aphrodite would have been displayed in bookstores, put on order by libraries across the country, and read by educated people.  Because of Louÿs’s reputation as an author of great erudition, many readers may have assumed the above description to be based on some kind of actual historical research, when in fact it was nothing more than exotic fiction.  Such a widespread dissemination of this sensational work of fiction could not help but contribute to the notion of a black Cleopatra.

Image: Bust of Cleopatra.  Credit: José Luis Bernades Ribeiro via Wikimedia Commons, CC BY-SA 4.0 (cropped).