A Beautiful, Blank Face: Cleopatra

As one of history's most famous faces, Cleopatra has often been depicted as dark-haired, fair-skinned woman with a perfect face. However, new research shows that according to a rediscovered and well-preserved coin, Cleopatra had a rather plainer profile than Hollywood and Audrey Hepburn will have us believe: she had a larger than average nose and a sharp, hooked nose. 

Yet one of the most intriguing mysteries about Cleopatra is not how nobody noticed her wrapped up in a rug, but her hair and skin colour: coins can't tell us that, because they weren't struck in colour. Her lineage, as a descendant of Ptolemy, general of Alexander the Great, tells us that she is a Macedonian Greek, and should be fairly light-skinned. Even though the Ptolemaic dynasty were rather xenophobic and mainly intermarried, Cleopatra may not have been a full-blooded Macedonian Greek, lending her the possibility of being part African, and thus having a darker skin colour. Her father, Ptolemy Auletes, had a Greek father but an unknown concubine for a mother. If this mistress was not Greco-Macedonian, Cleopatra might have looked much different that the stereotype dark-haired white beauty. Some supporters of that theory point to Shakespeare's "Anthony and Cleopatra", where Cleopatra is referred to as "tawny". Certain Roman chroniclers, on the other hand, suggest that she was a redhead, with a big nose; rather like Boudicca, except more of a maneater.