The thread about the Netflix Cleopatra pseudo-documentary is caught in a feedback loop and it aborts every time I post, and so I am starting a new thread.
Here's my question: I was taught a lot about Egypt in school, including of course the pyramids and sphinxes, the pantheon, the upper and lower kingdoms, the flooding of the Nile, hieroglyphs, Akenahten, Nefertiti, Tutankhamen, Ramses and Cleopatra—yet somehow never really learned that Egypt was taken over by Greece before Cleo came along.
It was just '5,000 years of Egyptian rule, and then Egypt was snatched away from Cleo and she was bitten by an asp and it was all over.'
Now, I've looked it up and had an 'oh, yeah, right' recognition when reading that Alexander the Great took over, but I really don't remember detail about that involving Egypt.
I'm sure I never was taught about any Egyptian wars for their own land, or about when indigenous Egyptian rulers lost their power and it was taken by Macedonian rulers. Who was the first Egyptian pharaoh in Cleopatra's Macedonian heritage? How long did they rule?
Growing up, I just assumed Cleo was the end of the indigenous Egyptian ruling line that lasted 5,000+ years. And as such, I wouldn't have imagined her as sub-Saharan African but certainly as locally Egyptian and not European.
And finally, to the point of 'wokeness' supposedly rewriting the complexions of ancient Egyptians, I spent a lot of time looking at the Egyptian artifacts in the Louvre and I was surprised that a lot of small statues of rulers featured people with drastically different skin values, from almost coal black to very pale (and also coppery blue-green, which descriptions said were meant to signify divinity). So I assume based on those depictions that there really was a great diversity of phenotypes in ancient Egypt regardless of Cleopatra's own ancestry.