Since her stated goal, which is shared by her editors, is to redress past oppression and to help establish a new social justice, she presents a portrait of Cleopatra as a woman (rather than as a Hellenistic despotic ruler), as a black (rather than a Macedonian Greek), and as a victim (rather than a loser in a closely matched struggle for power). It is not that there is no factual data to support some of these hypotheses; it is unquestionably true that we do not know the precise identity of Cleopatra’s paternal grandmother, the mistress of Ptolemy IX. The problem lies in how the evidence is used. Surely it is misleading to suggest that the unique non-Greek mistress Didyme provides evidence of a common practice, or that Cleopatra was almost completely Egyptian. Possibility is not the same thing as probability. But people who want Cleopatra to be black tend to downplay the importance of warranted evidence in constructing their arguments. That is, in place of known historical fact, these writers prefer to substitute acceptable claims, simply because they are approved by their particular audiences.
Not Out of Africa - Mary Lefkowitz
“Well she descends from one of the generals of Alexander the Great who are Greek Macedonians. So there is no question there that she comes from a line of Greeks. It gets a little bit more certain because they tend to…they intermarried. The 13 or 14 marriages in her dynasty, ten of them were brother-sister marriages. So there’s really no foreign blood whatsoever in this dynasty, they are truly Greek Macedonian to the hilt. There may have been a Persian princess who slipped in there somewhere, but otherwise you’re really talking about a woman who was as Greek in terms of ethnicity, in terms of culture, in terms of education, as you could be in that world.”
“Cleopatra VII was born to Ptolemy XII Auletes (80–57 BC, ruled 55–51 BC) and Cleopatra, both parents being Macedonian Greeks.”
The Oxford Encyclopedia of Ancient Egypt
“For ten generations her family had styled themselves pharaohs. The Ptolemies were in fact Macedonian Greek, which makes Cleopatra approximately as Egyptian as Elizabeth Taylor. The word “honey skinned” recurs in descriptions of her relatives and would presumably applied to hers as well, despite the inexactitudes surrounding her mother and paternal grandmother. There was certainly Persian blood in the family, but even an Egyptian mistress is a rarity among the Ptolemies. She was not dark skinned.”
Cleopatra, A Life - Stacy Schiff
“Cleopatra (69- 30 BC), the Greek queen of Egypt, belonged to the Ptolemaic family, the Macedonian Greeks who ruled Egypt during the Hellenistic Age.”
Western civilization: ideas, Politics, and society by Marvin Perry, Margaret C Jacob, Myrna Chase, James R Jacob
“The colour of her hair and her complexion are unknown. There is a tradition popular in some circles that she was black, but there is not a shred of evidence to support this. The Ptolemies were Macedonians, though there was some Greek and, through marriages to Seleucids, also a little Persian blood in their recorded family line.”
Caesar: Life of a Colossus - Adrian Goldsworthy
“In Egypt the Greek dynasty of the Ptolemies was the successor to the native Pharaohs, exploiting through a highly organized bureaucracy the great natural resources of the Nile Valley”.
The Civilization of Rome by Donald R. Dudley
