Posted on 03/26/2005 1:14:24 PM PST by CHARLITE
No, this is not a blonde joke. If you want one of those, go to this week’s Humor File. Cleopatra was in fact a blonde. That’s because she was not Egyptian. She was a Macedonian Greek, with hair as blonde as Alexander’s.
Alexander conquered Egypt in 332 BC, then went on to subdue all of the Middle East. When he died nine years later, his just-conquered empire was fought over and carved up by his generals. The one who ended up running Egypt was Ptolemy (367-283 BC). Declaring himself Pharaoh, he founded the Ptolemaic Dynasty, with twelve Ptolemies in succession, many of whom had wives named Cleopatra. The Cleopatra we know, lover of Julius Caesar and Marc Antony, was the daughter of Ptolemy XII, and entitled Cleopatra VII (69-30 BC).
There was not a drop of Egyptian blood in the Ptolemies. They remained 100% Greek, including the Queen of the Nile herself Cleopatra. Can you imagine Elizabeth Taylor as a blonde? It kind of shakes up your image of history.
I am writing this overlooking the Nile in Cairo. The Pyramids of Giza are in the distance. If there is one thing omnipresent in Egypt it’s history – and most all of that history is old, in more ways than one.
Egyptian history ended over 3,000 years ago. The Pyramids, the Pharoahs like Ramses II and King Tut, all of that was pretty much over by 1,000 BC. When the Persians seized the place in 525 BC, it had been torn apart by Libyans, Kushite Nubians, Assyrians and other invaders for centuries. Thus the very name “Egypt” isn’t Egyptian. The Persians called it E Ko Ptah, the Land of Ptah, the Egyptian creator god. Herodotus Greekified this to Egoptus, which we changed to Egypt.
The Sphinx isn’t the Sphinx – that’s a Greek word the Ptolemies gave it, meaning “bound together” as the statue of a Pharoah’s head with the body of a lion. The real name is shesep-ankh-Atum, the Living Image of the God Atum.
The Ptolemies’ Greek rule of Egypt ended in 31 BC, with Octavian’s (who became Augustus) defeat of Antony and Cleopatra at Actium. For almost 700 years, Egypt was a Roman colony (first of Rome, then Constantinople). Then came the Arabs, followed by the Turkish Mamluks, followed by the Ottoman Turks. When Napoleon grabbed it in 1798, Egypt was an unknown backwater (I must dispense one myth here: The Sphinx’s nose was not blown off by Napoleon’s artillery, as there are pre-1798 drawings of it so disfigured. It was defaced by Arab Moslems in the 8th century). Three years later, the Brits kicked out the French, and Egypt remained a British colony until independence came in 1952.
Well, sort of. Under the dictatorship of Gamel Abdel Nasser, Egypt became a virtual colony of the Soviet Union’s. After Nasser died in 1970, it had a brief respite under Anwar Sadat, who kicked out the Soviets. Sadat was assassinated in 1981, and a fellow named Hosni Mubarak has been Egypt’s Pharaoh ever since.
It’s hard to go anywhere in Egypt today without seeing Mubarak’s picture staring down at you from huge billboards and street posters everywhere. For twenty-five years, there have been no elections, only “referendums,” where people get to vote either “yes” or “no” on his rule with no other options or candidates. He routinely gets over 98% yes. Any public criticism of him gets you in prison.
Mubarak will be 77 this May. Bush White House people who have talked with him recently comment on how he is always repeating himself and is showing signs of senility. Yet he still is shrewd enough to understand he cannot appoint his son Gemayel as his successor, and to announce (last month) with fanfare that there will be something like an actual election this fall, instead of another referendum.
If this takes place, with opposition parties allowed to organize, opposition candidates allowed to campaign, people allowed to freely vote with international monitors watching, it will be the first time in 5,000 years of recorded Egyptian history that Egyptians have had a voice in choosing their government. Far more importantly, it will have a thunderous effect throughout the entire Arab world.
Egypt is the Arab giant. There are 72 million people here, almost three times the population of Iraq. For 3,000 years it has been a sleeping giant. In the half-century since independence, its political freedom has been stifled and its economy shackled by socialism. With the most cursory glimpse of the country, one can see the enormous potential here. Egyptians are smart, friendly, hospitable to the world, and ready to go.
The famous monuments tourists have flocked here to see for centuries have a very interesting psychological impact on Egyptians. Civilization began in Mesopotamia, but there wasn’t any stone. Everything was made of mud brick and it all crumbled away. So the memory and reality of a pre-Islamic history faded away. So it is throughout the Arab world. All that came before Islam can be ignored. Except in Egypt, where there was stone, where gigantic monuments made of stone still exist and their pre-Islamic history cannot be ignored. For many Arabs, all they are, besides a tribal or clan membership, is Moslem. Egyptians know they are far and deeply more.
There is thus an entrenched capacity in Egypt for a moderate Islam that participates in the world and doesn’t reject it. Egyptian Islamofascists like Ayman al-Zawahiri, Osama Bin Laden’s Number Two in Al Qaeda, aren’t welcome and have to go elsewhere. Radical anti-West movements like Iqwan Muslimi, the Moslem Brotherhood that started here, have to ally elsewhere, like with the Wahabbis of Saudi Arabia.
The Iqwan is here in Egypt, no doubt. It was formed here in 1928. It conducted the assassination of Anwar Sadat. Right now it is quiescent. And so we come to Egypt’s great fork in today’s road. The fear of the Iqwan is now suddenly serving a useful purpose. The January 30 elections in Iraq stunned Egypt. Millions of Egyptians watched their fellow Arabs freely, peacefully, and enthusiastically vote for their government. Now they want the same for their country.
And Mubarak realizes that if he doesn’t give it to them and dashes their hopes, then lots of folks will see the Iqwan as their only alternative. American, European, and world pressure will be on Mubarak to not hold pretend sham elections. He’s got to launch Egypt on the road to actual democracy.
That, plus an unshackling of the Egyptian economy with solid free market reforms – which has already started – will be a blow from which Arab Moslem terrorism and radicalism may not be able to recover. A free democratic Egypt is the doom of radical Islam.
It’s a memorable time to be here, watching Egypt awaken from a slumber of three millennia. This ancient land may be about to play a critical role in our future.
That, plus an unshackling of the Egyptian economy with solid free market reforms – which has already started – will be a blow from which Arab Moslem terrorism and radicalism may not be able to recover. A free democratic Egypt is the doom of radical Islam.
Dr. Wheeler is right. If 75 million Egyptians reject Muslim-Islamic extremism and join an emerging prosperous, democratic Middle East, then terrorism will follow Soviet communism on Ronald Reagan's dust heap of history.
If Ronaldus Magnus were alive today, he would be championing the spread of freedom and liberty around the world, just as President George W. Bush is doing.......and the liberals would be opposing Reagan as loudly as they are opposing Bush.
Interesting post BUMP!
Well, it's true that we do have more fun......
Wonderful read! BUMP!
(thank you!)
Has this man ever met a Greek woman? They're not exactly known for being overwhelmingly blonde. Nobody knows for sure what Cleopatra looked like, although some coins suggest she was large and dumpy.
My father (studied Greek and Latin) has been telling me this for years...
We have no idea what this woman's hair color was.
Okay. Getting back to the original statement that Cleo was blond, nothing more was said about it. I’ve been to Greece and the folks there have dark hair. Outside of Greece, I have never met a blond Greek.
It was an interesting post though.
Well I knew that Alexander was a blonde because it was in that movie which I saw previews for.
Good post, Charlite!
Walk Like An Egyptian...
I thought she was black. That's what the multiculturalists told me.
Great article!
2) Egypt is the #1 producer of Castor Oil in the world
3) The Immediate byproduct of castor-oil production is ricin
Macedonian does not mean Greek - they were a different ethnic group. In the time of Alexander's father, they were considered half-civilized savages who lived on the edge of the Greek world.
The present-day Greeks have also had considerable racial intermixing since Ptolemy's (or Cleopatra's) day, with Turks, Normans, etc.
Well, no, it wasn't a Roman colony, because the Romans never sent anyone to settle there and populate the place. Considering that at the time of the Battle of Actium, Alexandria was a larger and much more economically important place than Rome, the idea that it needed to be colonized would have been considered absurd.
Egypt was, instead, initially an imperial province - essentially a miniature nation-state administered by the Emperor's agent for his personal benefit, instead of being under the control of the Senate.
It's little gems like this that get my ire up. If it is true, then Egypt does not exist and we can just delete the rest of the article. At the best, it's sloppy writing which should be beneath any PhD.
On the subject of the Greeks being blond, The classical Greeks are generally said to have been light haired and the current coloring is likely due to having been over run repeatedly by Turks and other dark haired people. Dark hair is, I think, a dominant trait.
N.B. The woman we think of as "Cleopatra" was the 13th of that name.
It's little gems like this that get my ire up. If it is true, then Egypt does not exist and we can just delete the rest of the article. At the best, it's sloppy writing which should be beneath any PhD.
On the subject of the Greeks being blond, The classical Greeks are generally said to have been light haired and the current coloring is likely due to having been over run repeatedly by Turks and other dark haired people. Dark hair is, I think, a dominant trait.
N.B. The woman we think of as "Cleopatra" was the 13th of that name.
The simple fact is that thriving cultures attact multitudes of immigrants willing to perform low-level service functions. Over time, the base reaches a tipping point and the wealth producers move on to a new region, keeping one step ahead of the masses until the cycle repeats itself again.
Sorry for the double post, I simply double clicked when a single was correct..
Bull! I saw the movie.....and Cleopatra was no Harlow.
The blonde waitresses take their trays
They spin around and they cross the floor
They've got the moves (oh way oh)
You drop your drink then they bring you more. . .
Power is an aphrodesiac!
One of my favorites. Have it on my hard drive
OOOOh!
I get it!
Cleopatra was reincarnated as a waitress!
The large barbarians from the north (Germania) invaded the Shore People who hailed from Asia Minor--twice (once as "Dorians"). Things got mixed up.
LOL! I guess that was a drop in salary for her :-)
Gosh! And there she was flying around amongst the pyramids, blond hair trailing behind?
No, wait........
*chuckle* Well, other than the minority American Indian community, most people in the United States are not Americans but are European colonizers or a mixture of African/European.
cant be true. Time magazine, a few years ago, claimed she was an African princess, and you know Time Magazine has no agendas
I wrote my post poorly! It was the Invaders from Europe who invaded twice--not the Shore People.
F-
:(
Economic immigration is a phenomenon very rare in premodern times. What really happens is that thriving cultures attract migrating peoples, who invade, kill most of the "wealth producers", and settle in the area.
What about Antinoopolis founded by Hadrian? There may have been other Roman colonies in Egypt.
no , since there was no America until Europeans colonized it, and named it for Amerigo Vespucci. there was no england until angles displaced celtic Britons.
The city was founded by Hadrian, but it wasn't populated by Romans who were sent to live there. That is essentially the definition of a "colony" in classical times. It was probably settled by Greek traders from elsewhere in Egypt.
Celts, Jutes and Picts!
"Editorial Reviews
From Kirkus Reviews
In an exhaustively researched and creatively argued reassessment of mankind's origins, British physician Oppenheimer, an expert in tropical pediatrics, contends that the now-submerged area of Southeast Asia was the cradle of ancient civilization.
From time to time, scholars from various disciplines have argued for the existence of a vastly old ``founder civilization.'' Among the most famous was Charles Hapgood, who based his theory of a lost seafaring civilization on his analysis of the famous 16th-century ``Piri Re'is'' maps of the Antarctic land mass.
In this tradition, Oppenheimer blends evidence from geology, genetics, linguistics, archaeology, and anthropology to argue persuasively that such a civilization existed on a submerged land mass in Southeast Asia, which geologists call the Sunda shelf. Pointing to geological evidence for the submersion of the shelf by abrupt rises in the sea level about 8,000 years ago, Oppenheimer contends that the coastal cultures of Southeast Asia were drowned by a great flood, reflected in flood mythologies scattered from the ancient Middle East (such as the biblical story of Noah) to Australia and the Americas.
According to the author, tantalizing archaeological evidence exists of settlements under a ``silt curtain'' left by the sea floods in drowned coastal regions from Southeast Asia to the Middle East, while linguistic markers indicate that languages spread from Southeast Asia to Australia and the Pacific.
The shared flood story is one striking example of similar Eurasian myths according to the author; the ancient Middle East and Asia share other myth typologies, conspicuously including creation and Cain and Abel myths, which point to common origins in a progenitor culture.
Absorbing, meticulously researched, limpidly written, and authoritative: should be regarded as a groundbreaking study of the remote past of Southeast Asia, and of civilization itself. -- Copyright ©1999, Kirkus Associates, LP. All rights reserved.--This text refers to an out of print or unavailable edition of this title."
Product Description:
A book that completetly changes the established and conventional view of prehistory by relocating the Lost Eden - the world's 1st civilisation - to SouthEast Asia.
At the end of the Ice Age, SouthEast Asia formed a continent twice the size of India, which included Indochina, Malaysia, Indonesia and Borneo.
The South China Sea, the Gulf of Thailand and the Java sea, which were all dry, formed the connecting parts of the continent. Geologically, this half sunken continent is the Shunda shelf or Sundaland.
In the Eden in the East Stephen Oppenheimer puts forward the astonishing argument that here in southeast Asia - rather than in Mesopotamia where it is usually placed - was the lost civilisation that fertilised the Great cultures of the Middle East 6 thousand years ago.
He produces evidence from ethnography, archaeology, oceanography, from creation stories, myths and sagas and from linguistics and DNA analysis, to argue that this founder civilisation was destroyed by a catastrophic flood, caused by a rapid rise in the sea level at the end of the last ice age."
When I was last there they were pot shotting the cruise ships on the Nile. Hurt a few but killed their tourist business. Smart people!
So...are their genetics wiped out?
(Love learnin' stuff!!!)
What loving people.
They were so kind to each other back then.
I spent a few years in Egypt and its a basket case. Heavy socialist( Ba'athist lite). If I had to guess, Id say look for a lot of violence there in the near future.
No. We are them. The Caucasians and Mongoloids probably split from a common ancestor and that was probably the Jomon - Ainu people. The oldest (undisputed) Mongoloid skeleton ever found is only 10,000 years old.
Here's another 'take' from Dr Robert Schoch (Geologist/Geophysist):
Dr. Schoch’s Recent Book :
Voyages of the Pyramid Builders: The True Origins of the Pyramids
From Lost Egypt to Ancient America
A startling and dramatic new view of our ancient past ...
By Robert M. Schoch, Ph.D., with Robert Aquinas McNally
We associate pyramids with ancient Egypt. But pyramids are not uniquely Egyptian ‑- and therein lies a great mystery. Pyramids and pyramid‑like structures can be found all over the globe, built by cultures that span vast distances of geography and time. They appear in the ancient African kingdom of Kush, along the Nile ... in Mesopotamia and Sumeria ... in England and Ireland ... in India and throughout Southeast Asia ... in ancient China ... in Peru's coastal and Andean regions ... in the ancient Olmec and Mayan realms of southern Mexico, Guatemala, Honduras, Belize, and El Salvador ... in pre‑Columbian Illinois... and elsewhere. How can it be that a form as distinctive as the pyramid was built in such widely separated locales? Was it merely coincidence? Or was there another force at work?
In “Voyages of the Pyramid Builders: The True Origins of the Pyramids from Lost Egypt to Ancient America” (a Tarcher/Putnam hardcover, 2003, $24.95 U.S./$37.50 Canada), Boston University professor Robert M. Schoch ‑- one of the world's preeminent geologists in recasting the date of the Great Sphinx ‑- suggests that there was, indeed, another force at work. In his eye‑opening new book, Dr. Schoch argues that these far‑flung pyramids share a common ancestor long lost to history: a primordial pyramid‑building civilization that once navigated the seas and spread its way of life around the globe.
Meticulously researched and dramatically written, “Voyages of the Pyramid Builders” lays out, step by step, a fascinating new theory of how the Old World and the New World met:
Evidence that the Egyptian pyramids at Giza (or portions of them) and certain associated structures were built earlier than conventionally believed.
The significance of the striking similarities between pyramid cultures in Africa, Asia, and the Americas, despite the long distances of land and sea between. The rituals, beliefs, and stories that underlie the pyramids.
How ancient peoples emigrated from the Old World into the New World.
How pyramid builders entered the New World from the west and influenced the rising civilizations of Central and South America.
How the pyramid builders sailed.
A theory that ancient peoples may have migrated across vast distances in response to catastrophic encounters with comets.
The possible existence of a lost pyramid‑building civilization in the period before 3,500 B.C., the generally accepted date for humankind's earliest taste of civilization.
What it means to know that the high civilizations of our planet may have been interconnected for much longer than we imagined.
“Voyages of the Pyramid Builders” also includes a special appendix, "Redating the Great Sphinx of Giza," in which Dr. Schoch provides his most recent and persuasive evidence that the Sphinx is much older than we think. For anyone who is interested in ancient Egypt, past cultures, prehistory, early migrations, paradigm shifts, and the origins of civilization, “Voyages of the Pyramid Builders” is a groundbreaking reinterpretation of how we understand our ancient past.
Robert M. Schoch, a full‑time faculty member at the College of General Studies at Boston University since 1984, earned his Ph.D. in geology and geophysics at Yale University. Dr. Schoch has been quoted extensively in the media for his work on the Sphinx, and he was featured on the Emmy‑winning documentary “The Mystery of the Sphinx,” hosted by Charlton Heston.
Robert Aquinas McNally is a writer and poet whose early education in classical Latin blossomed into a lifelong fascination with ancient civilization and mythology.
I first learned the fact of who and what Cleopatra was in my freshman history class. I wonder how they know that she was blonde though? Don't the Greeks come in many different shades of hair colors?
I guess "blonde" means "light haired" and not black- or red-haired. True, undyed "blonde blondes" aren't so common in the world as a whole. In some places, anyone whose hair wasn't black might be regarded as a rarity worthy of note. Some Greeks would qualify as blond(e)s in Egypt who wouldn't pass muster in Scandinavia. It's the same way in India. Color differences get exaggerated. It is worth noting though, that the "Macedonians" in those days were rather a different people from today's Macedonians, and it's said that even the Greeks were changed by intermarrying with later Slavic arrivals. This has been a very touchy topic though.
Large, dumpy, blonde and thinking she was born to rule? That sounds like Hillarypatra.
Very interesting post, but it sure strayed a long way from that 'blonde' siren, Cleopatra. :)
Ping.
Disclaimer: Opinions posted on Free Republic are those of the individual posters and do not necessarily represent the opinion of Free Republic or its management. All materials posted herein are protected by copyright law and the exemption for fair use of copyrighted works.