She certainly wasn't Negro but according to some sources her mother who is not known may have been a darker skinned Egyptian.
Was Cleopatra Black? A New Netflix Series Is Reviving an Old Controversy
BY
ARMANI SYED
APRIL 20, 2023 2:37 PM EDT
Excerpt:
What do we know about her ancestry?
The Ptolemy dynasty descended from Greek Macedonian roots and ruled ancient Egypt during its Hellenistic era, with marriages typically occurring within the family. The dynasty was established when Alexander the Great conquered Egypt in 323 B.C.
The part of
Cleopatra’s bloodline that remains a mystery is that of her mother and paternal grandmother. However, many experts say there is no evidence to suggest either woman was Black.
As Duane W. Roller, a professor emeritus of Classics at Ohio State University, wrote for the Oxford University Press
blog in 2010, “Assuming, however, that Cleopatra’s grandmother was not from the traditional Macedonian Greek stem, the question arises as to just what she was. Sources suggest that if she was not Macedonian, she was probably Egyptian. So by the time of Cleopatra’s grandparents, there may have been an Egyptian element.”
“She could have been Greek, Macedonian, Egyptian, and Roman all at the same time,” Kennedy says. She notes that the gaps on Cleopatra’s family tree leave room for people to misinterpret indigenous Egyptian identity as Black.
“The reality is that one can say that there were ancient Egyptians we would today consider ‘Black’ in so far as they were non-Arab, non-Phoenician, Africans,” Kennedy says. She notes that references to Black-skinned Egyptians are present in ancient texts, but there is a gendered element to this: “Ideologically, women were associated with pale or ‘white’ skin and men with dark or ‘black’ skin. This is a gender division, not ethnic or modern bio-racial.”
Kennedy adds that visual representations of Cleopatra that more closely resembled Egyptian rulers have been historically overlooked in favor of her likeness on coinage, which is more closely aligned with standard Greek iconography.
“These objects are for different audiences and reflect different aspects of Cleopatra’s identity. We should not separate them, but in our modern search for singular identities, we restrict Cleopatra in ways that she was not restricted to in her own life,” Kennedy says.
The messy debate over Cleopatra’s ‘race’
Racial classifications as we recognize them today are largely a product of 17th and 18th century Western anthropological thought, particularly during the European Enlightenment.
The publication of the book
Systema Naturæ in 1735 saw Swedish naturalist Carl Linnaeus classify humankind into four distinct “varieties.” Race began as a human-coined shorthand to categorize groups based on continent and skin color.
As such, these classifications were created far too late to accurately apply to ancient civilizations. “There is a tendency in the modern world to fixate on famous figures of the past who represent civilizations,” Kennedy says. She adds there will always be groups who want to flatten and claim Cleopatra, one way or the other, to suit their narrative.
But, Kennedy says, asking if Cleopatra was Black, white, or another race is the wrong question because “it suggests that these are universal and not historically contingent categories.”
She adds: “It means that we continue to have the same conversations decade after decade instead of actually learning more about how the ancient world considered its own identities.”
https://time.com/6273435/cleopatra-race-debate-netflix/
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