Egypt’s Antiquities Ministry insisted on Thursday that Cleopatra had “white skin and Hellenistic features” in an ongoing row over a Netflix drama documentary that portrayed the famous ancient beauty as black.
“As Egypt’s last pharaoh, Cleopatra fights to protect her throne, family and legacy in this docudrama featuring re-enactments and expert interviews,” says the Netflix site promoting her upcoming production.
But even before its release, “Queen Cleopatra” has caused a storm of controversy in the North African nation.
An online petition protesting the rewriting of history has already garnered more than 40,000 signatures.
And in a country calling for a ban on Netflix for content deemed offensive to Egypt or “its family values,” MP Saboura al-Sayyed has again called on parliament to ban the platform.
On Thursday, the Ministry of Antiquities weighed in on the controversy, publishing a lengthy statement containing expert testimony, which it said all agreed: Cleopatra had “white skin and Hellenistic features.”
“The bas-reliefs and statues of Queen Cleopatra are the best evidence,” the statement read, its text embellished with illustrations showing Cleopatra’s European features.
For Mostafa Waziri, the head of the Supreme Council of Antiquities, depicting the famous queen in black is nothing more than a “falsification of Egyptian history”.
He insists there is nothing racist about this view, motivated by his defense of “the history of Queen Cleopatra, an important part of ancient Egyptian history.”
Egyptian commentators tend to decry campaigns that claim the origins of Egyptian civilization among mostly African-American groups.
Cleopatra belonged to the Macedonian Lagides dynasty, a descendant of Ptolemy, one of Alexander the Great’s generals, who founded the Ptolemaic dynasty on the banks of the Nile.
Although legend regards the queen, born around 69 AD, as a great beauty, her appearance and skin color are open to interpretation.
A BBC documentary in 2009 claimed Cleopatra had African blood, a claim that went down without incident.
AFP
