michael epps

Cleopatra. You picked Cleopatra. Out of three thousand years of ancient Egyptian history, three thousand years of pharaohs, pyramids, medical texts, mathematical papyri, architectural achievements that engineers still study today, you reached for the one ruler whose dynasty wasn’t even Egyptian. The Ptolemaic dynasty was founded by Ptolemy I Soter, a Macedonian Greek general of Alexander the Great. His descendants intermarried obsessively, and we mean obsessively, sibling-marriage-as-policy obsessively, within their own dynasty, while also marrying into the Seleucid royal family, founded by another Macedonian general, Seleucus I Nicator. What the Ptolemies were not, in their dynastic origins, was indigenous Egyptian. They were a Hellenistic foreign dynasty that ruled Egypt for its last 275 years before Roman annexation. At the very end. Before them came the Persian conquests. Before the Persians came over two and a half millennia of Egyptian civilization. So your argument against the Africanness of ancient Egypt is: the last dynasty, installed by a Macedonian conqueror, whose ruling family maintained its predominantly Greek bloodline, wasn't indigenous Egyptian. That's like arguing Britain was never Celtic because William the Conqueror was Norman. You have just independently confirmed that foreign conquerors took control of a civilization that had existed in Africa for millennia before they arrived. Thank you, Mike. You walked in to rebut the argument and handed it ammunition instead. The pyramids were not built by Macedonians. They were built by ancient Egyptians. Africans. More than 2,500 years before Cleopatra was even born.