Was Cleopatra Egyptian or Greek?

A Macedonian family on the throne of Egypt

When Alexander the Great died in 323 BC, his generals carved up his empire. One of them, a Macedonian named Ptolemy, took Egypt and in 305 BC made himself king. Every king after him was also called Ptolemy, and the queens were mostly Cleopatras, Berenices and Arsinoes. The famous Cleopatra was the seventh queen of that name, born around 69 BC. Even her name is Greek: Kleopatra, “glory of her father.”

The family ruled from Alexandria, the Greek city Alexander had founded on the coast. The court spoke Greek, the officials wrote Greek, and the coins carried Greek letters. To keep the blood royal, the Ptolemies married inside the family. Ptolemy II married his full sister, Arsinoe II. Cleopatra herself shared the throne with two younger brothers in turn, each one her husband in name.

The first of her line to speak Egyptian

Plutarch, writing more than a century after her death, gives the most striking detail. She could turn her tongue to whatever language she pleased, he says, and rarely needed an interpreter. He lists peoples she answered in their own speech: Ethiopians, Troglodytes of the Red Sea coast, Hebrews, Arabs, Syrians, Medes and Parthians. Then the surprise. The kings of Egypt before her, he writes, had never even tried to learn the native language, and some had given up their Macedonian dialect (Life of Antony 27).

Think about that. After almost three hundred years on the Nile, the dynasty still lived in a Greek world inside Alexandria, while most people along the river spoke Egyptian. Cleopatra could talk to her farmers and her priests without a translator.

Greek queen, Egyptian pharaoh

She played both roles on purpose. Her coins show a Greek queen with a royal headband and her hair drawn back in a bun. On the outer walls of the temple of Hathor at Dendera, in Upper Egypt, she and her son Caesarion are carved as pharaohs in the old Egyptian style, making offerings to the gods. In Alexandria, Plutarch says, she appeared in public in the robe of Isis and was hailed as the New Isis. At the same ceremony her little son Ptolemy wore boots, a short cloak and a broad-brimmed hat with a diadem, the dress of the Macedonian kings (Antony 54).

Her paperwork was Greek too. A papyrus of February 33 BC, later reused to wrap a mummy, grants tax privileges to a Roman and ends with one added Greek word, ginesthoi, “let it be done.” Some scholars think the queen wrote it in her own hand.

What about her mother?

Here the record goes quiet. Her father was Ptolemy XII, nicknamed Auletes, “the flute player.” No ancient writer clearly names her mother; most historians think she was Cleopatra V, of the same family. Her father’s mother is unknown too. Most scholars describe Cleopatra as essentially Macedonian Greek. One biographer, Duane Roller, suggests her mother may have come from a priestly family of Memphis, which would make her one quarter Egyptian. It is a hypothesis, not a record. What is certain is how she saw herself: a Greek queen of Egypt, the last of the Ptolemies. Her looks are a different question.