At the Arab World Institute, truths and legends about Queen Cleopatra

Of course, everyone knows Cleopatra, the queen of Egypt, reputed to have an unforgettable beauty, who is said to have killed herself by being bitten by a snake. Thanks to cinema and advertising, she is now a universally popular figure. Name an exhibition " "The Mystery of Cleopatra" therefore seems at first rather excessive coming from the Arab World Institute in Paris. But no, one understands as soon as one enters. What one thinks one knows about her is either uncertain or too simple.

So, from our first sentence, to be taken point by point. Cleopatra VII was born around 69 BC, probably in Alexandria, the daughter of King Ptolemy XII and a mother whose mother is not really known whether she was Egyptian or Greco-Macedonian. The Ptolemaic dynasty, also called the "Lagid dynasty," was in fact originally from northern Greece. It was founded by the first of the line after the death of Alexander the Great in 323 BC, from whom he had received Egypt as a kingdom, and the Lagids ruled it until Cleopatra's death.

She was queen alongside her two brothers or half-brothers Ptolemy XIII and XIV, and then alongside the Roman general Mark Antony, with whom she had two sons and a daughter, after the son, Caesarion, whom she had previously had with Julius Caesar. She was therefore of culture as Greek and Roman as Egyptian, as is recalled in the first rooms, devoted to archaeology and history and dotted with remarkable works, most of which came from the Louvre and the Bibliothèque nationale de France. Are these marble busts portraits of Caesar or Mark Antony? Their majesty makes us forget the question. They embody the power of the warrior.

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