LogFAQs > #973113517

I think the biggest issue is here thinking identitie like "Egyptian", "Black", "Greek" or what have you, are some unbroken concepts that stretch all the way into the past. From Professor Rebecca Futo Kennedy:

To ask whether someone was black or white or Black or White is anachronistic and says more about modern political investments than attempting to understand antiquity on its own terms. As I wrote on the Society of Classical Studies facebook page: I am getting at the issue of lineage and descent as the thing that makes one Egyptian or Greek or Roman. We know that one could be any of these things in antiquity by adoption, citizenship, descent, or cultural practice. We know that some people who called themselves Greeks did not think people of Macedonian descent (Ptolemies!) were Greek. We know the Ptolemies intermarried at least twice with Syrian-Macedonian-Greek families. We know Romans defined themselves through citizenship and Cleopatra may have gained it. We know Egyptians accepted her as pharaoh and considered her Egyptian. Our modern ethno-national or bioracial ideas did not define identity in antiquity, so how is it anything but modern ideology or anachronism to limit ancient identities to our specific model of parental birth? That is my point. My point is that if we want to be more historically accurate, we need to understand how ancient peoples considered their ethnicities instead of universalizing and de-historicizing our own views and putting them on them. It isnt rewriting history to try to understand the past better in its own terms. Its revising modern attempts at understanding history with better knowledge and nuance. But I have not seen the show (just the trailer), so I dont know what they are doing fully. What I am saying only is that this she was Greek not Egyptian fundamentally misunderstands ancient ways of thinking.

She could have been Greek, Macedonian, Egyptian, and Roman all at the same time because these are not a matter (only) of ancestry.

As I've stressed in other posts here identities in the ancient world were a lot more fluid than they are today. Take for example the Macedonians, Alexander I of Macedon had to prove his "Greekness" in order to participate in the olympics, which he apparently did, Herodotos never actually presents the evidence, by proving a mythic lineage to the Greek hero Herakles. Likewise the mainland Greeks didn't appear to see the Macedonian people as being Hellenes, this line was a lot more blurred in the Hellenistic kingdoms in the eastern mediterranean, but sometimes there was an acceptance of the nobility depending on the person. We see contrast of this between Isokrates and Demosthenes during the rise of Philip II of Macedon. I've mentioned how Polybios tied "Greekness" to morals and political systems in an effort to present the Romans as showing "Greekness" and the Macedonian king Philip V of Macedon from a "darling of the Greeks" to a barbarian king eschewing all things Greek. Even things like the way you drank your wine or even the act of carrying weapons in public could barr people from certain groups to some, it wasn't a consistent thing based off one thing. What it means to be "black", or "egyptian", "greek", etc carries a completely different meaning in context and trying to impose our modern conceptualization of identities unto the past won't ever yield any fruitful discussion except for petty nationalists bickering.

And as mentioned by the article I've linked earlier no one seems to care about the other Kleopatras. How many people are rushing to "claim" Kleopatra III Philometor Soteira Dikaiosyne Nikephoros as their own? It's a matter of trying to "claim" the biggest and most well known historical figures. On top of all that people are hyper focused on skin color more than anything else. How many people here care that they portray the wrong sets of clothes or the culture is inaccurately portrayed? It's only when they cast an actor with dark skin that people start to come out of the woodworks to complain. A similar thing happened when the BBC depicted a dark skin Roman legionnaire which prompted accusations of distorting the past. The depiction of a black Kleopatra is also not a new phenomenon but one that is centuries old that has it's roots with the renaissance conceptualization of whiteness and blackness which was tied to moral character. There is a poem where a pitch black "Saracen" has his skin turn white by converting to Christianity for the best example of what I mean. Kleopatra wasn't Roman, she was a sexual immoral barbarian other so in the minds of Renaissance writers she became black and in the 19th century black Americans adopted Kleopatra as a positive role model of blackness, reversing the racist imagery imposed to her by European writers. In reality we don't really know how she would look like, she is depicted based off standards of femininity and royalty of her time and how she's depicted in coins differs to how she's depicted in Egyiptian iconography.