Summer's winding down as we enter September—or, as they would have called it in ancient Egypt, Akhet, the height of the rainy season that flooded the Nile once a year and made their entire civilization possible. Ken Jennings has a new book out this month on the land of the pharaohs, so all month he'll be sharing his sphinx-like wisdom with us by debunking millennia of misinformation about the ancient Egyptians. Maybe you've been in "de Nile" for a long time, but finally, here are the Ra facts.
The Debunker: Was Cleopatra Egyptian?
Cleopatra is the quintessential Egyptian queen, of course, with all the trappings: the barge, the snakes, the kohl-eyed beauty, the lovestruck suitors. She was the last pharaoh of Egypt, and two of the most powerful men in the world, Julius Caesar and Mark Antony, fell for her hard.
But pretty much everything we know about Cleopatra owes more to legend than history. Yes, she was born in Alexandria at the end of a dynasty of pharaohs—the Ptolemies—who ruled Egypt for almost three hundred years. But the Egyptians were, like some modern presidential hopefuls, not big fans of birthright citizenship. Cleopatra was just the last in a long line of foreign invaders who had ruled Egypt for a thousand years: the Libyans, the Nubians, the Assyrians, the Babylonians, the Persians. Her family was Macedonian Greek, and that ethnic difference would have been crystal-clear to the Egyptians she ruled. In fact, she was the only member of her dynasty of pharaohs who even spoke Egyptian. The rest of the Ptolemies knew only Greek!
The only surviving images of Cleopatra from her lifetime appear on coins, and many of these make the legendary looker appear rather masculine, with a big hook nose. The Greek historian Plutarch wrote that "her beauty…was in itself not altogether incomparable, nor such as to strike those who saw her," so we have to assume that Caesar and Antony found she had inner charms that made up for her not being a conventional "10." Plutarch does claim that Cleopatra killed herself with the bite of an asp, but Strabo, writing a century earlier, mentions other possibilities: that she used a poison ointment, or was murdered by an unknown killer. So even the snake story might not be true! At least the thing about her having a really nice barge is real. I think.
Quick Quiz: Elizabeth Taylor entered the Guinness Book of World Records for doing what 65 times in the movie Cleopatra?
Ken Jennings is the author of six books, most recently his Junior Genius Guides, Because I Said So!, and Maphead. He's also the proud owner of an underwhelming Bag o' Crap. Follow him at ken-jennings.com or on Twitter as @KenJennings.