Netflix causes international uproar over Cleopatra

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I already knew what "the Berlin bust" referred to so I searched on that to check for references to Cleopatra - bringing up the page of the museum in Berlin displaying the bust of Nefertiti, and the Wikipedia page, with neither mentioning Cleopatra.

AFAIK there's only one "Berlin bust", and I posted links and a picture of it.

Searching on "Cleopatra" finds this: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cleopatra which references "The Berlin Cleopatra, a Roman sculpture of Cleopatra wearing a royal diadem" -



and lots of other images here: https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/Cate ... eum_Berlin


In its simplest usage - to post a link, copy the URL of the page as shown in your browser, then paste that into a post.
There are other ways, but this is enough to publish a link.

Same.

Exactly.

Jesus couldnt have been the blue eyed auburn haired guy you see in most American pics of him, nor that sun-bleached bonde surfer dude above.

He probably looked much like the Arabs and Oriental and Sephardic Jews, of his part of the world today. Not "Black", but not WASP either.

I cannot find them presently, but I'm looking. I have seen a few depictions of Cleopatra that were quite unflattering, one specifically where she was a fair-ish complected hirsute. The images I've seen that consistently show Cleopatra as half-way attractive have been Middle-Eastern, or Egyptian. I had always heard, read that the men whom she attracted had been struck by her character and intelligence, rather than her appearance.

My point is that Ancient Egyptians as depicted in Western pop culture have almost never been depicted in anything like historically accurate rates of representation. I would also point out that even with genetic markers, there is no biologically valid definition of race, it doesn't matter how many SNPs populations have in common or not.

Don’t know but all this race stuff is getting out of hand if they don’t like it then don’t watch imo

Spot on...a composite of her pics indicates she wasn't actually a "ravishing beauty" and may have been quite (aesthetically speaking) quite ugly.

It's highly likely the actress playing Cleopatra is order of magnitude hotter than the actual Cleopatra (even if the latter was white skinned).

Last edited by cyberdad on 24 Apr 2023, 3:21 am, edited 1 time in total.

There is quite a lot of distortion out there for what Cleopatra looked like. It should be pointed out that archaeologists who are smugly claiming the busts of her likeness are accurate are also victims of bias. Busts/sculptures are more than likely stylised. What is likely is she was short, had a huge hooked nose and was overweight which by modern standards hardly makes her anything to crow about as some type of cultural flag bearer.

A little bit of comic relief (this is hilarious)

I have never heard ANY expert claim that she was anything other than homely. In fact our History of Western Civ. instructor described her in a way that was not flattering, and then said "but she was the only game in town". Lol!

She might have been homely but she was also undisputed sovereign of Prolemaic Egypt, but she seemed to think dealing with her male counterparts included having sex with them. So on the one hand, she was one of the most powerful women in history and a great leader, but we can't teach girls about her as a role model because we don't want to suggest one should have sex with men for the reasons she did.

It would seem that powerful men were genuinely attracted to her though. Which is why I wish they could have cast somebody unattractive or at least not conventionally attractive as it would show there's more to sexual attraction than just physical beauty.

She was a politician. People in her position did not marry, or do anything else for love, it was a partnership to consolidate wealth and power. Julius wasn't in Egypt to see the pyramids or find a soulmate and by the same token he is certainly no model for a society's boys. I just tried to find contemporary descriptions of Alexander's appearance and they are vague at best, non-contemporary descriptions from the Roman Era are different and just as vague.

I'm triangulating different puported images and I suspect she commissioned most of them. Her predecessors among the Pharoahs were notorious for stylising their image to look muscular (they look like body builders). This is quite a long time before social media filters were invented

For a long time some of there was a myth the Scottish nobility descended from Egyptians (I can't make that up). There is no reason to criticize Pinkett-Smith's project sans criticism of any previous a historical Hollywood project dealing with Egypt; I thought Yul Brynner did a superb job as Pharaoh, despite the fact we will never really know any Pharaohs' phenotype and Brynner was was of mixed ancestry (W. Russian, Swiss-German, Buryat and possibly Romani) ancestry; to say nothing of the great job he he did in The King and I (he was not Thai). Race is pretty much an early modern concept that only arose with the Capitalism twinned with Chattel Slaverym and Human populations had been mixing well before then. All of humanity originated in The Cradle of Humanity, Africa. Our species did not evolve in separate continents, skin color is determined by one nucleotide that can vary between full siblings; I can be mistaken for British, my full sibling is much darker, but when people who do not know us meet us for the first time they ask if we are twins.

This fundamentally informs a major drawback with the criticism for any casting of actors/actresses in historical dramas. The white critics of Pinkett-Smith act like a two faced Janus. On the one hand they say race should not matter in 2023 and that black people should stop asking for reparations and stop blaming the current generation for the sins of their fathers. But then they get infuriated about casting roles for Cleopatra where the role is played by somebody "not white". If you remember the Hunger Games franchise the reaction from literally hundreds of thousands of white teenage fans to the casting of black actors in roles that were ambiguous to start of with (in terms of race) but like any good Rorshach's test bought out the closet racists in droves. I expect the same reaction when Hermoine Grainger will be played by a black actress in the new HBO Harry Potter series of the "Cursed Child".

But the key point remains. Pinkett-Smith chose to call this a docuseries. This will continue to remain the ammunition for the Egyptian and American critics. But here's the thing. How fragile is western and Egyptian culture that a single Netflix series would bring about the collapse of civilisation

Parents worried about their kids seeing black people in cinematic roles should simply not subscribe to Netflix in the first place. There is volumes of books on Cleopatra in libraries around the world. Anyone willing to use their brain can find the truth for themselves.