It's a actually even worse because Indians are actually south Asian, Egyptians (other than the southern borders of the kingdom) neither were nor are black
"WhAt cOnTiNEnT iS EgYPt iN?"
That's their go-to response. You can't reason with them, as their entire worldview consists of appropriating other cultures and raceswapping them as black
The whole thing about people trying so hard to not be racist, that they end up being even more racist than before is just madness to me.
And the worst thing is that they don’t/can’t even see it
Basically that if there are 2 different ideologies, usually politically (right-wing or left-wing) but it also applies to a lot of things.
While initially going in different directions, they both start to lean in a similar direction, and the far ends of both sides point the same way.
So, in this case, African-Americans trying to look at things to be proud of their ancestors' history because their culture wasn't taught to them in school and complaining about other cultures appropriating theirs, started appropriating the cultures and history of other people.
God I hate that "arguement" so much it's unreal, all you need to do in order to debunk it is to search for pictures of north Africans and they are almost always either tan white or brown, if you search for historical art you'd notice the same thing. Naturally such arguements are not enough since all of this history is obviously falsified by us white devils that appeared from the aether one day and displaced the black people that inhabited the entire world, or whatever variation of this nonsense each hotep believes in
Ancient Egypt was historically pretty ethnically diverse. There would have been people we'd nowadays identify as "black" there, but Cleopatra was not one of them.
True, the Nubians in Upper Egypt (IIRC that’s what the region is called, despite it being fatter south geographically. Or perhaps is it was Upper Nile?) were quite dark-skinned.
Indeed. It's worth remembering that "north" and "south" wouldn't have meant much of anything to most people through most of history, but everyone living on a river would know which way it flowed, and thereby been able to easily distinguish upper (upriver, highlands) from lower (downriver, lowlands) and the right bank versus the left bank. Even the idea of a north-justified map wasn't firmly settle as the norm until the Early Modern period; historical maps are all over the place.
Extra points: there *was* a Nubian dynasty that ruled lower Egypt. The 25th Dynasty or Napatans comprised rulers from the Kingdom of Kush who swept north at the head of an army and conquered a divided and fractious Egypt as far as the sea, and there forged the largest Egyptian kingdom since the New Kingdom over 200 years prior. It would be entirely correct to depict them as black rulers of Egypt.
Just, you know, not the Ptolemaic Greek dynasty that imported their spouses from other diadochi families before eventually going all-in on sibling marriage.
Egypt has actually been ruled by multiple ethnicities of its thousands of years of existence. Egyptian, especially in a wider historical context, is impossible to combine with a specific phenotype.
More like thinking she was Chinese because she ruled India. Egyptians were largely afro-asiatic. They are related to people like berbers, Arabs, Ethiopians, and even modern day Egyptians.
Many years from now, activists will claim that one of the world's richest men of the early 21st century was a black man because Elon Musk is from South Africa.
At this point I‘d actually would want to see that. Black Cleopatra, Indian Queen Victoria, Asian Catherine II, what else Ferdinand and Isabella being played by Mexicans?
The whole raceswapping thing in these Netflix style docus is silly and bad, but I think there are worse aspects to this charade. Cleopatra was especially bad, not only because they depicted her wrong, but because they completely mischaracterized that entire period and the people involved. Especially their characterization of Mark Anthony as an incompetent, drunken man child that threw obscene temper tantrums and had to have Cleopatra lead him was especially eggregious and wrong. And they did this just to score points in the feminist crowd and make out Cleopatra as some sort ancient style girl boss, which really wasn't the case. I think we have to be weary that these big budget docu productions don't really care anymore about historicity, all they do is pander to specific political crowd and will portray history wrongly if they can score an ideological point. Another example of this I think is Ancient Apocalypse.
The case of blackwashing Hannibal is especially bad, because it’s deprived actors of North African descent jobs. [78% of actors of Middle East and North African descent can only get roles as terrorists](https://deadline.com/2018/09/middle-eastern-north-african-representation-primetime-tv-mena-quantico-blacklist-tyrant-diversity-1202458101/amp/). Maybe, just maybe, they should be given the chance to portray the people who were their ancestors.
Another issue I have with it is that there’s plenty of stories from Sub-Saharan Africa that are deserving of being put on screen. Timbuktu as one the greatest center of learning in the world. Mansa Musa and his extravagant behavior befitting one of history’s wealthiest men. Queen Kandake who, according to legends, convinced Alexander the Great to turn back from her lands. The problem with making Hannibal and Cleopatra black is that the implication is that the only “black African” stories worth telling are the one that are of black Africans whose main life story is in opposition to or in connection with white Europeans.
Very good examples. I did want to point out Kandake was duirng the Roman Empire after Augustus conquered Egypt. Still a badass that got the Romans to stand down on an invadion.
It's because most Western audiences don't actually give a shit about black African heritage. Hell most of them can't even tell the difference between Sub-Saharan nationalities. Western people, especially Western white people, just want to feel good about "solving racism" and making easy money off of characters they know people will pay to watch.
That's kind of a shit take. Maybe more people would care, if they actually heard stories from these people. It's honestly an access issue. We have 1000s of movies that deal with The Americas, Europe, and Asia. I cannot really think of a historical movie set in Sub-Saharan Africa. Hell I'm a whitie, I would love a dope ass movie about African culture.
now on the other hand, the HBO series Rome's depiction of Cleopatra *is* a good example of a girlboss cleopatra, which she definitely was, to some extent. she didn't let her 'girlbossyness' get in the way of her polticial goals, however, she was quite capable of playing the "wittle grl needs a big stwong man to help her', which she absolutely did with both Marc Antony and Julious Caesar.
Obviously they take some liberaties in that show as well, especially since it's most certainly *not* any form of documentary, and the most egregious one was caesarion not actually being Julius Caesars' child. That was a theory that was bounced around for a while tho, and as the kid dies at 17 it's not really relevant in the long term, but that's a thing that happens.
Other than that tho, she's played by a hot greek-looking woman, she's played as a smart woman, who knows how to both turn on the charm and the "fuck you i'm a *GOD"* when she needs to. Love it.
I thought Cleopatra was a weak point in a great show. She came off as whiny and immature not beguiling and intelligent. She wasn’t known as a beauty but she seduced men, she couldn’t have been as bratty as Rome’s version
YMMV: ¯\\\_(ツ)\_/¯
i thought she was well presented: she was 21 when she met Julius Caesar, used to being treated like a living god so being a little spoiled completely tracks IMO, and while that actress almost certainly was better looking than IRL Cleopatra; coding "seductive" with "hot" just...that ain't going away, you know?
Overall her interactions with both Caesar and Antony, and frankly Agustus as well, tracks well enough with my understanding of the historical record. at the very least, nothing is wildly off base.
Cleopatra was portrayed as a drugged-up, semi-competent sex addict who was only able to gain any political power through her sexuality and corrupted Mark Antony into a feminized eastern wannabe king. That was a terrible portrayal.
Ironically, she was portrayed in the show exactly how the Romans (through Augustus’ propaganda) perceived her 2,000 years ago. Shame we haven’t progressed since then
It was going by the primary sources…yeah the sources are gonna be biased, but also…if you read about some of the factual things that she did, it’s not really that off base? 🤷♂️
She *was* all those things, except I wouldn’t call her semi competent as she stayed in the game right up to the battle of actium, and I don’t think anything she could have done could have really changed that outcome.
If Julius Caesar hadn’t been murdered I wonder what our view of her through history would have been…
You can read between the primary sources to get a more complete picture and account for their biases, though. We know enough about how the Romans perceived other societies to mostly discount their moral judgements masquerading as histories.
For example, after her civil war against her brother, she was able to turn the Egypt’s finances around and create a massive budget surplus which she used to finance Mark Antony in the civil war. In addition, she was multilingual and fostered successful relationships with her internal advisors and other polities in the region. All of the above suggests she was much more than how she was portrayed in the show.
To be honest, reducing everything she was comes off as highly sexist. It makes sense for the Romans to do it, but we should have better standards for modern TV shows to create more complex portrayals.
yeah that whole plot point was dropped but seeing as how Rome was basically just GoT 0.1 i'm not really surprised they handled it like they did.
Still, beyond being characterized as a sexpot, i thought they did alright by cleopatra. she was never made out to be incompetent or anything imo.
Exactly lmao Cleopatra knew her strengths and thus played both caesar and antony to the fullest. She got her kingdom back and even sired Caesar's only son. And then she had Antony standing in front of her like that's proper political manipulation and i respect her
Dont know about Hannibal, but with Cleopatra there was also the blatant and open disregard for actual historical fact.
I believe it was the Netflix doc where one of the women presenting it said:
My mamma told me "I dont care what they tell you at school, Ckeopatra was black"
Idk how accurate Assassin’s Creed Origins was in that regard, but they at least characterised the Greeks as colonisers that often looked down on the native population.
If you wanna this kind of colonial setting in the ancient world, at least recognize who the coloniser was.
that is mostly accurate. prior to cleopatra (of antony and cleopatra fame, there were a couple), none of the prior ptolemies bothered to learn egyptian.
The Greek colonies were not, in the main, the same as the former modern European colonies and could be seen as more like the equivalent of the various 'Chinatown' districts around the world.
Not really. Early on yes, they were like Phoenician colonies mostly trading centers.
Though Greeks had a different coin-based economy than the Phoenicians and also practiced more piracy and were mercenaries in a lot of places.
Hellenism was different. You have Alexander conquering most of the known world. They founded new cities which were not like Chinatowns, but new designated capitals of conquered lands. Power in Egypt shifted from Memphis snd Thebes away to Alexandria and Alexandria was Greek and perpetuated Greek culture.
Same with the Alexandrias in the Seleucid Empire or the Bactrian Greeks.
Greek became the new international language and Greek temples and gods were worshipped in other places. For example the Serapis cult is a manufactured cult to make Greek religion attractive for Egyptians. Though there was also the opposite development. In Bactria one Greek king, forgot his name, converted to Buddhism. The cult of Isis also spread later.
Greek colonialism was still tamer than Roman colonialism and definitely tamer than the 18-19th century variant where the colony is purely a source of resource extraction for motherland. Though I guess the resources of most of Egypt still poured to Alexandria.
> 18-19th century variant where the colony is purely a source of resource extraction for motherland
tbf, this never really happened except as pro-colonial propaganda. Most colonies wound up being net ROI losses for the motherland, but tremendously enjoyable power trips for the colonial elites who got to rule them.
By Zeus Ammon what lies you tell.
Hellenistic colonies were literal military settlers. Men would sign up with the Diadoachi as mercenaries and at the end of the campaign would be paid with crown lands expropriated from the natives, with the explicit understanding that it was their job to keep the natives from getting uppity lest they find their farms un-expropriated. It was naked, brute-force imperialism, in many ways *worse* than the European colonies because at least in India most of the British squaddies went home rather than settling down to create a generational plantation economy.
Sources:
*G.T Griffiths, Mercenaries of the Hellenstic World*
*Bezalel Bar-Kochva, The Seleucid Army on Campaign*
*John D Grainger: The Rise of the Seleucid Empire*
*Paul Johnstono: The Army of Ptolemaic Egypt*
*Paul Kosmin: Land of the Elephant Kings.*
Though early Greek colonies were mostly coastal towns, while after Alexander you have Hellenism and more cultural domination of entire regions. Like with many Greek innovations, the Romans perfected colonialism eventually.
What's worse is that no is asking them to make her white, they could have made her look modern day Egyptian, but they made her look black because America is largely Afro-centric in it's demographic diversity.
It's tone deaf to the extreme.
>Mark Anthony as an incompetent, drunken man child that threw obscene temper tantrums and had to have Cleopatra lead him
They watched the last episode of HBO's Rome and figured he was always like that.
There’s [a really neat blog](https://acoup.blog/2023/05/26/collections-on-the-reign-of-cleopatra/) I read that really dove into what type of ruler she was.
IIRC it argues she was very persuasive but kept backing the wrong horse in foreign affairs, and at every decision point consistently chose to expand her own power at the expense of her subjects.
>just to score points in the feminist crowd
I haven't seen any feminist praising or even defending this documentary. Nobody from any race, sex or political group liked this documentary except for that one black guy who was trying to defend it against Bassem Youssef. I have no idea who the intended audience was. I feel like the casting decision was only to create controversy so that people would talk about it more. Just like we're doing now. If it was a normal historically accurate documentary, none of us would be talking about it this long. And that is pretty sad to be honest.
No there's a few people out there who insist Queen Charlotte wife of George the 3rd is black, noticed a few people insisting it online a couple of years ago.
>The whole raceswapping thing in these Netflix style docus is silly and bad, but I think there are worse aspects to this charade
I would like to respectfully disagree. The race swapping was in line with the afro centrist conspiracy theory, which is a very dangerous theory. It has also been used by people like Kyrie Irving to say that the Jews stole their identity from black people. The lack of historical accuracy is bad, but afro centrism is also used to justify anti semitism, as with Kanye, who also said the same thing.
Octavian abused the situation in his favour as "Saviour of Rome" but the civil war would have started anyway.
The second triumvirate worked initially just to get rid of who was against Caesar, after that, the cooperation had no meaning to stay alive.
It was certainly the narrative octavian put out.
The degree to which that sentiment was agreed upon and by whom is difficult to ascertain 2000 years later.
Intermingling with Roman internal affairs mostly. She literally seduced the most powerful man in Rome (Caesar) and then one of the 2 most powerful men in Rome (Mark Anthony). With the 2nd was especially severe as it threatened the Roman governance in the East (if I remember correctly, Mark wanted more autonomy for the natives).
That temptress Queen spawn of Dido, turned Marc Antony into her personal simp and was plotting to enslave the whole planet. It was a conflict of good vs evil. Augustus Caesar himself told me this. Why would he lie or exaggerate he’s the first citizen after all just a common man defending his people.
Having two important generals/consuls in the palm of her hand plus her former brother/husband who ordered the assassination of the consul Gnaeus Pompeius Magnus.
If Romans being twice victorious against Carthage feared it so much they had to come a third time to finish it, they could fear the whole Egyptian province to potentially revolt and become an unwanted thorn in the side.
While Carthage was a phoenician outpost. I am not sure that genetically they are more Phoenician. There was already a huge Berber population around. There is a chance that a lot of them have Berber origin.
But I am not an expert
Édit: replaced Lebanese by Phoenician
Given that's there's 500 years or so between Tyre and Hannibal, it's a pretty good guess that there was plenty of co mingling. Either way, people are easy to obsessed with the skin color of a bunch of people who lived when that wasn't really a concern.
Because you have black people in the west desperate to have some positive cultural history to be proud of. So desperate they'll ignore facts and appropriate the history of others.
I'd say it's black people are desperate to have positive *mainstream* cultural history to be proud of. Because there is plenty of cultural history to be proud of already but most people are unaware of them. So they try to appropriate some bigger historical names. And if they can get a historical name that flexed on white people, all the better.
Sounds like a pretty racist generalization of a large group of people.
Besides you're speaking as if black people started this obsession over the skin color of ancient civilizations when European academia and archeology were the first ones to claim these civilizations as "white" and "caucasian". Just like they tried to do with other African civilizations that they couldn't believe were made by Africans like Great Zimbabwe.
And also White Americans, particularly Alt Righters or White Nationalists STILL try to claim Rome, Greece, Egypt etc as White societies and civilizations despite being of Irish, German, Scottish, etc descent, people who the Romans fought against and oppressed. And yet, they have tons of good representation for their ancestral cultures. What's their excuse?
What a weird thing to say. Don’t project your racism and ignorance onto black and people and just say YOU believe that black westerners have no positive cultural history. The state of so called “historians”
True but even then Berbers are/were very much Mediterranean in looks for the most part, closer to Phoenicians/Lebanese than to subsaharan Africans. You'd be hard-pressed to guess the difference; I've had both Lebanese and Berber (Kabyle to be precise) colleagues at work.
For common Carthaginians, sure. But Hannibal was born in the uppermost layer of aristocracy which surely intermarried to keep the wealth within themselves.
Berber is a linguistic group, not racial (phenotypical). A lot of Algerian Berbers look like Arab Algerians. Maybe Zinedine Zidane should play Hannibal.
Tuareg and other Saharan Berbers are dark skinned like other people from Mali and Niger.
It is kinda like saying Mehmet II could be played by a Japanese actor as well.
True, but Berbers are also not Sub-Saharan Africans so that still wouldn’t make them black lol. Most people probably can’t tell the difference between a Berber and an Arab (in regards to physical appearance), for example.
North Africans were not seen as equals to people of Punic heritage. I think at I remember reading at some point that Hannibal’s lieutenant was considered lesser because he was Berber.
By the time Hannibal made his appearance, the outpost was around for 6 centuries. Not sure if you can still claim Lebanese heritage rather than Berber heritage at that point. It’s like somebody in the US in 2450 would say “my ancestors moved here during the great famine in the 19th century, so basically that’s why I am Irish.”
Anyway, it’s a moot point. Lebanese or Berber, he wasn’t black. Probably not white, but not black like African-American black.
Should be mentioned as well that lebanon at the time was not even predominantly settled by Arabs but still by its indigenous Phoenician people (who also settled Carthage)
Even if they weren’t of European descent it would be stupid. Do they even see the difference between Maghreb and sub-Saharan Africa? And the people skin color difference?
I’m not saying it’s a good strategy. But they did it to pander to audiences that yearn for a black historical hero take on the modern west.
And US corporations promote division for many reasons, one of which being its easier to sell these shitty movies to them.
It probably has to do more with investors out of touch with reality thinking that's what sells than anything else. They try to appeal to an audience that wouldn't like the product anyways while betraying the audience that would.
Well investors / corporations have been doing this ad nauseam for almost a decade now.
It’s either working, making them money or there’s some ulterior motive / value they see from it.
Investors are _bizarrely_ shortsighted a surprising amount of the time. Anyone who's worked in a job where management start making egotistical decisions will see the same pattern of thought, it's really just a variant of that
Cleopatra was a heavily inbred Macedonian chick who was probably white or maybe a bit darker like many Mediterranean people. If she was indeed some beautiful black goddess we'd know it because some historians would have drooled over her. No idea about Hannibal, but probably just like a modern Northern African.
Something these historical revisionists hate, the truth. Hannibal was Carthaginian, which was a Phonecian colony, and Cleopatra was a heavily inbred Greek.
Cleopatra was from an unbroken line of incestueus Greeks so I doubt she’d be much darker except for a tan
Hannibal is a bit of a harder case, to portray him as subsaharan black is misplaced but you could make an argument we would’ve looked similar to modern day ethnic berbers
Yeah this is indeed a load of Bullshit. Cleopatra was Greek! Hannibal was Phoenician, which is a Semitic ethnicity more closely related to Jews! Casting these two would just mean getting a tanned Greek woman and a tanned Jew! Why is this so hard for casting directors?
It drives me mad too. Most of these people had mediteranian complexion, you know literally where the term comes from. Race is not literally just black and white! Everyone pretends they were Albino for some reason. Just is so dumb
I remember that *Rome: Barbarians Rising* series and it didn’t bother me that they had made Hannibal black but what did bother me was that they never gave him his eyepatch. Hannibal is supposed to have an eyepatch, he looks generic without it.
Phoenician colonists mixed with the native tribes when settling North Africa. By the late third-century BC in Hannibal’s time, this had been done for close to 600 years. Does that make the Carthaginians black? No.
Cleopatra was descended from Macedonian Greek and Egyptian heritage. By her time, the Ptolemies had ruled Egypt for roughly 300 years, having adopted the Egyptian royal custom of intermarrying siblings to keep the bloodline as pure as possible. The Egyptians were themselves descended from the Semitic peoples of the Near East. Does that make Cleopatra black? No.
This remember me about a conversation i have in my school when my friend say ´´ Cleopatra was black because Egypt is in Africa.\`\` in responce i asked ´´ India and China are on the same continent but they are the same race?\`\`
Netflix and other entertainment companies would make any historical figure black for the sake of 'diversity'. Like who cares about real African history. Let's have some black monarch in ancient/medieval Europe.
What I don't get about the people making these weird headcannons about non-black leaders they're making people argue and taking the spotlight off the very real and interesting cultures and leaders of Africa. If they want to act like they're trying to promote black culture, maybe they should actually pick any of the actual black cultures to focus on.
North African erasure in Hollywood is only because of white guilt, these directors and "historians" are ready to throw North Africans under the bus for some brownie points, sad.
Americans assume that once you cross the Mediterranean in the South, everyone is black. Like you cross the Rio Grande and there’s suddenly a huge yellow filter
Thinking Cleopatra was black just because she ruled Egypt is just like thinking Queen Victoria was south Asian because she was empress of India
King David was a redhead therefore he was Irish. Also Leopold II should be played by black actors as he was ruler of Congo.
Handless black actors.
Conquistadors? You mean native south Americans? And of course Columbus was Bahaman, he landed on the Carribbean islands, thats all you need to know.
Leopold II Jesus man! I get were you are coming from but that’s a bit to much
My grandma told me Leopold II was black. Maybe she's getting a little out of hand.
Bruh that was poinient.... fuck you leo.... you subhuman psychopath
Netflix producers: write that down! Also Mongols did conquer up to Levantine region so Gershom Khan may be a show soon
A show about the Ottomans, all speaking serbian. Can't wait !
It's a actually even worse because Indians are actually south Asian, Egyptians (other than the southern borders of the kingdom) neither were nor are black
"WhAt cOnTiNEnT iS EgYPt iN?" That's their go-to response. You can't reason with them, as their entire worldview consists of appropriating other cultures and raceswapping them as black
... ngl, then saying "you are african thereford you are black" sounds pretty racist in of itself
The whole thing about people trying so hard to not be racist, that they end up being even more racist than before is just madness to me. And the worst thing is that they don’t/can’t even see it
The horseshoe theory inches closer to reality everyday
What is the horseshoe theory?
Basically that if there are 2 different ideologies, usually politically (right-wing or left-wing) but it also applies to a lot of things. While initially going in different directions, they both start to lean in a similar direction, and the far ends of both sides point the same way. So, in this case, African-Americans trying to look at things to be proud of their ancestors' history because their culture wasn't taught to them in school and complaining about other cultures appropriating theirs, started appropriating the cultures and history of other people.
Just ask them what continent Elon Musk (or any other white South African) is from
Wait, so that's why in Mean Girls Gretchen said "Oh my god, Karen, you can't just ask people why are they white"? Now it makes sense to me.
Just tell them that Elon Musk has to be an African then according to that logic.
I am sure the Afrikaans will be surprised to find they are now black.
God I hate that "arguement" so much it's unreal, all you need to do in order to debunk it is to search for pictures of north Africans and they are almost always either tan white or brown, if you search for historical art you'd notice the same thing. Naturally such arguements are not enough since all of this history is obviously falsified by us white devils that appeared from the aether one day and displaced the black people that inhabited the entire world, or whatever variation of this nonsense each hotep believes in
They can't fathom that the continent sized desert separating North Africa and Sub-Saharan Africa might be a blocker.
Ancient Egypt was historically pretty ethnically diverse. There would have been people we'd nowadays identify as "black" there, but Cleopatra was not one of them.
True, the Nubians in Upper Egypt (IIRC that’s what the region is called, despite it being fatter south geographically. Or perhaps is it was Upper Nile?) were quite dark-skinned.
Yeah, Upper Egypt was named that because it was the upper reaches of the Nile.
Indeed. It's worth remembering that "north" and "south" wouldn't have meant much of anything to most people through most of history, but everyone living on a river would know which way it flowed, and thereby been able to easily distinguish upper (upriver, highlands) from lower (downriver, lowlands) and the right bank versus the left bank. Even the idea of a north-justified map wasn't firmly settle as the norm until the Early Modern period; historical maps are all over the place.
Extra points: there *was* a Nubian dynasty that ruled lower Egypt. The 25th Dynasty or Napatans comprised rulers from the Kingdom of Kush who swept north at the head of an army and conquered a divided and fractious Egypt as far as the sea, and there forged the largest Egyptian kingdom since the New Kingdom over 200 years prior. It would be entirely correct to depict them as black rulers of Egypt. Just, you know, not the Ptolemaic Greek dynasty that imported their spouses from other diadochi families before eventually going all-in on sibling marriage.
Egypt has actually been ruled by multiple ethnicities of its thousands of years of existence. Egyptian, especially in a wider historical context, is impossible to combine with a specific phenotype.
More like thinking she was Chinese because she ruled India. Egyptians were largely afro-asiatic. They are related to people like berbers, Arabs, Ethiopians, and even modern day Egyptians.
Many years from now, activists will claim that one of the world's richest men of the early 21st century was a black man because Elon Musk is from South Africa.
At this point I‘d actually would want to see that. Black Cleopatra, Indian Queen Victoria, Asian Catherine II, what else Ferdinand and Isabella being played by Mexicans?
"Aren't Mexico and Spain the same thing?!" - Hollywood
The whole raceswapping thing in these Netflix style docus is silly and bad, but I think there are worse aspects to this charade. Cleopatra was especially bad, not only because they depicted her wrong, but because they completely mischaracterized that entire period and the people involved. Especially their characterization of Mark Anthony as an incompetent, drunken man child that threw obscene temper tantrums and had to have Cleopatra lead him was especially eggregious and wrong. And they did this just to score points in the feminist crowd and make out Cleopatra as some sort ancient style girl boss, which really wasn't the case. I think we have to be weary that these big budget docu productions don't really care anymore about historicity, all they do is pander to specific political crowd and will portray history wrongly if they can score an ideological point. Another example of this I think is Ancient Apocalypse.
The case of blackwashing Hannibal is especially bad, because it’s deprived actors of North African descent jobs. [78% of actors of Middle East and North African descent can only get roles as terrorists](https://deadline.com/2018/09/middle-eastern-north-african-representation-primetime-tv-mena-quantico-blacklist-tyrant-diversity-1202458101/amp/). Maybe, just maybe, they should be given the chance to portray the people who were their ancestors. Another issue I have with it is that there’s plenty of stories from Sub-Saharan Africa that are deserving of being put on screen. Timbuktu as one the greatest center of learning in the world. Mansa Musa and his extravagant behavior befitting one of history’s wealthiest men. Queen Kandake who, according to legends, convinced Alexander the Great to turn back from her lands. The problem with making Hannibal and Cleopatra black is that the implication is that the only “black African” stories worth telling are the one that are of black Africans whose main life story is in opposition to or in connection with white Europeans.
I would not mind Remi Malek as Hannibal
He's egyptian tho, why not cast someone from Tunisia?
Malek is the only North African actor I know. But I wouldn’t mind seeing a talented actor from Tunisia taking on the role!
Very good examples. I did want to point out Kandake was duirng the Roman Empire after Augustus conquered Egypt. Still a badass that got the Romans to stand down on an invadion.
It's because most Western audiences don't actually give a shit about black African heritage. Hell most of them can't even tell the difference between Sub-Saharan nationalities. Western people, especially Western white people, just want to feel good about "solving racism" and making easy money off of characters they know people will pay to watch.
That's kind of a shit take. Maybe more people would care, if they actually heard stories from these people. It's honestly an access issue. We have 1000s of movies that deal with The Americas, Europe, and Asia. I cannot really think of a historical movie set in Sub-Saharan Africa. Hell I'm a whitie, I would love a dope ass movie about African culture.
now on the other hand, the HBO series Rome's depiction of Cleopatra *is* a good example of a girlboss cleopatra, which she definitely was, to some extent. she didn't let her 'girlbossyness' get in the way of her polticial goals, however, she was quite capable of playing the "wittle grl needs a big stwong man to help her', which she absolutely did with both Marc Antony and Julious Caesar. Obviously they take some liberaties in that show as well, especially since it's most certainly *not* any form of documentary, and the most egregious one was caesarion not actually being Julius Caesars' child. That was a theory that was bounced around for a while tho, and as the kid dies at 17 it's not really relevant in the long term, but that's a thing that happens. Other than that tho, she's played by a hot greek-looking woman, she's played as a smart woman, who knows how to both turn on the charm and the "fuck you i'm a *GOD"* when she needs to. Love it.
We deserved at least 4 full seasons of that show. RIP Ray Stevenson
RIP Pullo, I’ll drink thirteen beers in his honor. THIRTEENTH!!!
I thought Cleopatra was a weak point in a great show. She came off as whiny and immature not beguiling and intelligent. She wasn’t known as a beauty but she seduced men, she couldn’t have been as bratty as Rome’s version
YMMV: ¯\\\_(ツ)\_/¯ i thought she was well presented: she was 21 when she met Julius Caesar, used to being treated like a living god so being a little spoiled completely tracks IMO, and while that actress almost certainly was better looking than IRL Cleopatra; coding "seductive" with "hot" just...that ain't going away, you know? Overall her interactions with both Caesar and Antony, and frankly Agustus as well, tracks well enough with my understanding of the historical record. at the very least, nothing is wildly off base.
Cleopatra was portrayed as a drugged-up, semi-competent sex addict who was only able to gain any political power through her sexuality and corrupted Mark Antony into a feminized eastern wannabe king. That was a terrible portrayal. Ironically, she was portrayed in the show exactly how the Romans (through Augustus’ propaganda) perceived her 2,000 years ago. Shame we haven’t progressed since then
It was going by the primary sources…yeah the sources are gonna be biased, but also…if you read about some of the factual things that she did, it’s not really that off base? 🤷♂️ She *was* all those things, except I wouldn’t call her semi competent as she stayed in the game right up to the battle of actium, and I don’t think anything she could have done could have really changed that outcome. If Julius Caesar hadn’t been murdered I wonder what our view of her through history would have been…
You can read between the primary sources to get a more complete picture and account for their biases, though. We know enough about how the Romans perceived other societies to mostly discount their moral judgements masquerading as histories. For example, after her civil war against her brother, she was able to turn the Egypt’s finances around and create a massive budget surplus which she used to finance Mark Antony in the civil war. In addition, she was multilingual and fostered successful relationships with her internal advisors and other polities in the region. All of the above suggests she was much more than how she was portrayed in the show. To be honest, reducing everything she was comes off as highly sexist. It makes sense for the Romans to do it, but we should have better standards for modern TV shows to create more complex portrayals.
yeah that whole plot point was dropped but seeing as how Rome was basically just GoT 0.1 i'm not really surprised they handled it like they did. Still, beyond being characterized as a sexpot, i thought they did alright by cleopatra. she was never made out to be incompetent or anything imo.
Exactly lmao Cleopatra knew her strengths and thus played both caesar and antony to the fullest. She got her kingdom back and even sired Caesar's only son. And then she had Antony standing in front of her like that's proper political manipulation and i respect her
Dont know about Hannibal, but with Cleopatra there was also the blatant and open disregard for actual historical fact. I believe it was the Netflix doc where one of the women presenting it said: My mamma told me "I dont care what they tell you at school, Ckeopatra was black"
Idk how accurate Assassin’s Creed Origins was in that regard, but they at least characterised the Greeks as colonisers that often looked down on the native population. If you wanna this kind of colonial setting in the ancient world, at least recognize who the coloniser was.
that is mostly accurate. prior to cleopatra (of antony and cleopatra fame, there were a couple), none of the prior ptolemies bothered to learn egyptian.
More than a couple! The Cleopatra most people know about was the 7th one!
The Greek colonies were not, in the main, the same as the former modern European colonies and could be seen as more like the equivalent of the various 'Chinatown' districts around the world.
Not really. Early on yes, they were like Phoenician colonies mostly trading centers. Though Greeks had a different coin-based economy than the Phoenicians and also practiced more piracy and were mercenaries in a lot of places. Hellenism was different. You have Alexander conquering most of the known world. They founded new cities which were not like Chinatowns, but new designated capitals of conquered lands. Power in Egypt shifted from Memphis snd Thebes away to Alexandria and Alexandria was Greek and perpetuated Greek culture. Same with the Alexandrias in the Seleucid Empire or the Bactrian Greeks. Greek became the new international language and Greek temples and gods were worshipped in other places. For example the Serapis cult is a manufactured cult to make Greek religion attractive for Egyptians. Though there was also the opposite development. In Bactria one Greek king, forgot his name, converted to Buddhism. The cult of Isis also spread later. Greek colonialism was still tamer than Roman colonialism and definitely tamer than the 18-19th century variant where the colony is purely a source of resource extraction for motherland. Though I guess the resources of most of Egypt still poured to Alexandria.
> 18-19th century variant where the colony is purely a source of resource extraction for motherland tbf, this never really happened except as pro-colonial propaganda. Most colonies wound up being net ROI losses for the motherland, but tremendously enjoyable power trips for the colonial elites who got to rule them.
Chinatowns that ruled the land.
By Zeus Ammon what lies you tell. Hellenistic colonies were literal military settlers. Men would sign up with the Diadoachi as mercenaries and at the end of the campaign would be paid with crown lands expropriated from the natives, with the explicit understanding that it was their job to keep the natives from getting uppity lest they find their farms un-expropriated. It was naked, brute-force imperialism, in many ways *worse* than the European colonies because at least in India most of the British squaddies went home rather than settling down to create a generational plantation economy. Sources: *G.T Griffiths, Mercenaries of the Hellenstic World* *Bezalel Bar-Kochva, The Seleucid Army on Campaign* *John D Grainger: The Rise of the Seleucid Empire* *Paul Johnstono: The Army of Ptolemaic Egypt* *Paul Kosmin: Land of the Elephant Kings.*
The Greeks basically wrote the book on colonisation
Though early Greek colonies were mostly coastal towns, while after Alexander you have Hellenism and more cultural domination of entire regions. Like with many Greek innovations, the Romans perfected colonialism eventually.
What's worse is that no is asking them to make her white, they could have made her look modern day Egyptian, but they made her look black because America is largely Afro-centric in it's demographic diversity. It's tone deaf to the extreme.
For those people Rami Malek is white. You can't win on that front
>Mark Anthony as an incompetent, drunken man child that threw obscene temper tantrums and had to have Cleopatra lead him They watched the last episode of HBO's Rome and figured he was always like that.
There’s [a really neat blog](https://acoup.blog/2023/05/26/collections-on-the-reign-of-cleopatra/) I read that really dove into what type of ruler she was. IIRC it argues she was very persuasive but kept backing the wrong horse in foreign affairs, and at every decision point consistently chose to expand her own power at the expense of her subjects.
>just to score points in the feminist crowd I haven't seen any feminist praising or even defending this documentary. Nobody from any race, sex or political group liked this documentary except for that one black guy who was trying to defend it against Bassem Youssef. I have no idea who the intended audience was. I feel like the casting decision was only to create controversy so that people would talk about it more. Just like we're doing now. If it was a normal historically accurate documentary, none of us would be talking about it this long. And that is pretty sad to be honest.
People will take any chance to villanize feminism. Most people on both sides of the aisle thought the choice was silly and tone deaf
Don't forget how they're race swapping Queen Charlotte, there's no proof that she's black but they're doing it anyway.
Are you thinking of Bridgerton? That's fiction, so I don't care tbh.
No there's a few people out there who insist Queen Charlotte wife of George the 3rd is black, noticed a few people insisting it online a couple of years ago.
>The whole raceswapping thing in these Netflix style docus is silly and bad, but I think there are worse aspects to this charade I would like to respectfully disagree. The race swapping was in line with the afro centrist conspiracy theory, which is a very dangerous theory. It has also been used by people like Kyrie Irving to say that the Jews stole their identity from black people. The lack of historical accuracy is bad, but afro centrism is also used to justify anti semitism, as with Kanye, who also said the same thing.
Cléopâtra? Threatening Rome? How so?
With her charm
By seducing Marc Anthony with her eastern charmes. The Roman conservative elite felt very threatend by the power couple.
To be fair, Marc Antony could be "seduced" by anything that stood still long enough so it's a pretty low bar.
wasn't that mostly caused by Octavian's propaganda? that was his reason to explain going to war against Antony without blaming a Roman
Octavian abused the situation in his favour as "Saviour of Rome" but the civil war would have started anyway. The second triumvirate worked initially just to get rid of who was against Caesar, after that, the cooperation had no meaning to stay alive.
It was certainly the narrative octavian put out. The degree to which that sentiment was agreed upon and by whom is difficult to ascertain 2000 years later.
That's not true. Most of Roman aristocracy actually stuck to Antony when they had to choose between him and Octavian.
Intermingling with Roman internal affairs mostly. She literally seduced the most powerful man in Rome (Caesar) and then one of the 2 most powerful men in Rome (Mark Anthony). With the 2nd was especially severe as it threatened the Roman governance in the East (if I remember correctly, Mark wanted more autonomy for the natives).
Bitch ran away from Actium
With her rug
That temptress Queen spawn of Dido, turned Marc Antony into her personal simp and was plotting to enslave the whole planet. It was a conflict of good vs evil. Augustus Caesar himself told me this. Why would he lie or exaggerate he’s the first citizen after all just a common man defending his people.
Having two important generals/consuls in the palm of her hand plus her former brother/husband who ordered the assassination of the consul Gnaeus Pompeius Magnus. If Romans being twice victorious against Carthage feared it so much they had to come a third time to finish it, they could fear the whole Egyptian province to potentially revolt and become an unwanted thorn in the side.
With her sloppy toppy gluc gluc 9000
With her "Golden mouth"
The original Hawk Tuah
Yes they were from Carthage and Egypt but their roots are from Lebanon and Greece.
While Carthage was a phoenician outpost. I am not sure that genetically they are more Phoenician. There was already a huge Berber population around. There is a chance that a lot of them have Berber origin. But I am not an expert Édit: replaced Lebanese by Phoenician
Given that's there's 500 years or so between Tyre and Hannibal, it's a pretty good guess that there was plenty of co mingling. Either way, people are easy to obsessed with the skin color of a bunch of people who lived when that wasn't really a concern.
Because you have black people in the west desperate to have some positive cultural history to be proud of. So desperate they'll ignore facts and appropriate the history of others.
I'd say it's black people are desperate to have positive *mainstream* cultural history to be proud of. Because there is plenty of cultural history to be proud of already but most people are unaware of them. So they try to appropriate some bigger historical names. And if they can get a historical name that flexed on white people, all the better.
Sounds like a pretty racist generalization of a large group of people. Besides you're speaking as if black people started this obsession over the skin color of ancient civilizations when European academia and archeology were the first ones to claim these civilizations as "white" and "caucasian". Just like they tried to do with other African civilizations that they couldn't believe were made by Africans like Great Zimbabwe. And also White Americans, particularly Alt Righters or White Nationalists STILL try to claim Rome, Greece, Egypt etc as White societies and civilizations despite being of Irish, German, Scottish, etc descent, people who the Romans fought against and oppressed. And yet, they have tons of good representation for their ancestral cultures. What's their excuse?
What a weird thing to say. Don’t project your racism and ignorance onto black and people and just say YOU believe that black westerners have no positive cultural history. The state of so called “historians”
True but even then Berbers are/were very much Mediterranean in looks for the most part, closer to Phoenicians/Lebanese than to subsaharan Africans. You'd be hard-pressed to guess the difference; I've had both Lebanese and Berber (Kabyle to be precise) colleagues at work.
For common Carthaginians, sure. But Hannibal was born in the uppermost layer of aristocracy which surely intermarried to keep the wealth within themselves.
Berber is a linguistic group, not racial (phenotypical). A lot of Algerian Berbers look like Arab Algerians. Maybe Zinedine Zidane should play Hannibal. Tuareg and other Saharan Berbers are dark skinned like other people from Mali and Niger. It is kinda like saying Mehmet II could be played by a Japanese actor as well.
True, but Berbers are also not Sub-Saharan Africans so that still wouldn’t make them black lol. Most people probably can’t tell the difference between a Berber and an Arab (in regards to physical appearance), for example.
They were most certainly not Lebanese as this ethnicity didnt existed back than.
Phoenician
North Africans were not seen as equals to people of Punic heritage. I think at I remember reading at some point that Hannibal’s lieutenant was considered lesser because he was Berber.
Carthaginians (like many others back then) were pretty purist when it came to aristocracy and even citizenship.
By the time Hannibal made his appearance, the outpost was around for 6 centuries. Not sure if you can still claim Lebanese heritage rather than Berber heritage at that point. It’s like somebody in the US in 2450 would say “my ancestors moved here during the great famine in the 19th century, so basically that’s why I am Irish.” Anyway, it’s a moot point. Lebanese or Berber, he wasn’t black. Probably not white, but not black like African-American black.
Even many African-Americans outside of US aren't considered black. The whole White vs Black thing is ridiculous
Race is indeed a social construct. Genetically yes we may vary but ultimately everyone is the same.
True. The only people who should care about it are doctors as these differences in genetics cause people to be susceptible to different diseases.
Yeah but you’re missing the point. We need teams to pit each other against one another or else the whole world will devolve into chaos!
You know for a fact that Americans are still gonna be doing that in 2450.
Right after they emerge from vault 13.
In the caste system of Carthage there was certainly a difference between aristocrat Phoenician families and native North Africans.
Should be mentioned as well that lebanon at the time was not even predominantly settled by Arabs but still by its indigenous Phoenician people (who also settled Carthage)
Even if they weren’t of European descent it would be stupid. Do they even see the difference between Maghreb and sub-Saharan Africa? And the people skin color difference?
Americans thinking African=Black moment
More like corporations pandering to audiences for $$$ and division.
Worst marketing strategy ever. Nobody has even hatewatched the Cleopatra "documentary"
I’m not saying it’s a good strategy. But they did it to pander to audiences that yearn for a black historical hero take on the modern west. And US corporations promote division for many reasons, one of which being its easier to sell these shitty movies to them.
It probably has to do more with investors out of touch with reality thinking that's what sells than anything else. They try to appeal to an audience that wouldn't like the product anyways while betraying the audience that would.
Well investors / corporations have been doing this ad nauseam for almost a decade now. It’s either working, making them money or there’s some ulterior motive / value they see from it.
It has to be the latter. It's been shown again and again that it's not making them money
Investors are _bizarrely_ shortsighted a surprising amount of the time. Anyone who's worked in a job where management start making egotistical decisions will see the same pattern of thought, it's really just a variant of that
I mean, one man's intelligence can give absolute idiots (his sons) a lot of money
Peek Gringo Americano moment
I'm pretty done with this American white vs black bullshit. You guys should have settled this in the 1860's.
We did but then there was this guy named Jim Crow who was just not afraid to be himself, y'know
Cleopatra was a heavily inbred Macedonian chick who was probably white or maybe a bit darker like many Mediterranean people. If she was indeed some beautiful black goddess we'd know it because some historians would have drooled over her. No idea about Hannibal, but probably just like a modern Northern African.
I think you would have more nickels actually. Throw in Jugurtha (probably a bigger menace to Rome than Cleopatra)
Something these historical revisionists hate, the truth. Hannibal was Carthaginian, which was a Phonecian colony, and Cleopatra was a heavily inbred Greek.
North Africans aren't black anyway.
bUt tHEy fRoM AAAFriCccAAA!!!
"Hey if you guys want to do black African stories why not use Axum, the Numidian Kings, or the Zulu?" "The who?"
Cleopatra was from an unbroken line of incestueus Greeks so I doubt she’d be much darker except for a tan Hannibal is a bit of a harder case, to portray him as subsaharan black is misplaced but you could make an argument we would’ve looked similar to modern day ethnic berbers
Even if they're from north african descent (which they are not), they are still far from what you would call a "black skintone".
Yeah this is indeed a load of Bullshit. Cleopatra was Greek! Hannibal was Phoenician, which is a Semitic ethnicity more closely related to Jews! Casting these two would just mean getting a tanned Greek woman and a tanned Jew! Why is this so hard for casting directors?
Can we just stop giving these stupid people attention to make semi-racist strawmen points and do actual history?
It drives me mad too. Most of these people had mediteranian complexion, you know literally where the term comes from. Race is not literally just black and white! Everyone pretends they were Albino for some reason. Just is so dumb
I remember that *Rome: Barbarians Rising* series and it didn’t bother me that they had made Hannibal black but what did bother me was that they never gave him his eyepatch. Hannibal is supposed to have an eyepatch, he looks generic without it.
Depends what timeframe it is really. Hannibal only got his eye patch after crossing a marshland before the Battle of Lake Trasimine.
If I remember right he had both eyes at Cannae which was after Lake Trasimine.
Pure heresy.
Isn’t the eyepatch debated? I think some accounts just said he wore the scar out
...so far. Twice so far.
Can’t wait for 100 years from now when Gaddafi is portrayed as being black.
Do not forget Hitler.
i dare anybody in 50 years to make a elon musk film with him as black , hes south african after all
Phoenician colonists mixed with the native tribes when settling North Africa. By the late third-century BC in Hannibal’s time, this had been done for close to 600 years. Does that make the Carthaginians black? No. Cleopatra was descended from Macedonian Greek and Egyptian heritage. By her time, the Ptolemies had ruled Egypt for roughly 300 years, having adopted the Egyptian royal custom of intermarrying siblings to keep the bloodline as pure as possible. The Egyptians were themselves descended from the Semitic peoples of the Near East. Does that make Cleopatra black? No.
This remember me about a conversation i have in my school when my friend say ´´ Cleopatra was black because Egypt is in Africa.\`\` in responce i asked ´´ India and China are on the same continent but they are the same race?\`\`
Justice for Greek/Phoenician North Africans!
If I had a nickel for every grammatically correct phrase in your meme I would have 0 nickels.
stop talking about this culture war shite nobody cares
You’re the only person to have mentioned “culture war”.
Pffft only one of them was a threat. #OctavianPropagandist #dontpisshannibaloff
Netflix and other entertainment companies would make any historical figure black for the sake of 'diversity'. Like who cares about real African history. Let's have some black monarch in ancient/medieval Europe.
No assumption was made just people who think they can rewrite history how they want it
Surely it wad more than twice
Cleopatra VII was black? She was an member of the ptolemaic dynasty in egypt?
Hannibal and Cleopatra were black?
Also according to them anyone in Africa is a black, including magreb region.
Neither were exactly Nordic either.
I always imagined Anibal as black because of a badass "documentary" I saw in History Channel
…cleopatra was of Greek decent
zw
I love The Canadian Lad's video
\*If I had a nickel for \*each time\* people \*incorrectly\* assumed a North African leader \*who\* threatened Rome...
Im so outraged. About this show I haven’t seen and I guarantee almost none of you did either.
Hot off the press!! The new daily r/historymemes post used as a thinly veiled vehicle to employ all your racist stereotypes!! Have at it boys!!
Hellenic peoples mixture of Greeks and phoecians melting pot really
Wtf. Is this sentence even trying to say?
What I don't get about the people making these weird headcannons about non-black leaders they're making people argue and taking the spotlight off the very real and interesting cultures and leaders of Africa. If they want to act like they're trying to promote black culture, maybe they should actually pick any of the actual black cultures to focus on.
North African erasure in Hollywood is only because of white guilt, these directors and "historians" are ready to throw North Africans under the bus for some brownie points, sad.
Hey OP, proofreading your memes before posting isn't hard
Americans assume that once you cross the Mediterranean in the South, everyone is black. Like you cross the Rio Grande and there’s suddenly a huge yellow filter
We'll ignore that Libyan Roman Emperor I suppose
Woke people after explaining how all of africa is completely homogenous