"If I had to guess I would say she was probably brown like the Arabian/Mongol type people".

Um, yeah ... the Mongols are neighbors of the Chinese, who they more than slightly resemble. What is an Arab/Mongol type person?

And what is this guess based on? Let us be serious. This is appeasement masquerading as scholarship. One group has claimed that Cleopatra was black, another has said that she was white, so somebody here throws up a compromise position. Compromises may make for an easy short term peace, but they make for atrocious scholarship, because they are unrooted in objective, non-political reality.

which, in context, could just as easily mean "are you disposed toward me in a kindly or unkindly way" (assuming that Shakespeare ever even wrote that line). Context the reader is denied, because somebody didn't bother to include a passage number. Unless Cleopatra is supposed to be blind, or speaking on the telephone (!), though, and retarded as well, a racial interpretation of this alleged passage is difficult to make sense out of.

Anthony is standing in front of her, is he not? Where is the mystery on this score? Does she not know that he is a Roman, a member of a white ethnic group (and yes, there is an extensive tradition of realistic portraiture in ancient Roman art). Here's a question to research : when did the terms "white" and "black" take on racial significance? Is the proposed interpretation of this alleged passage anachronistic?

Again, though, what a strange authority to cite. Are we speaking of the same author who gives Bohemia a sea coast in the Winter's Tale (act three, scene three)? Planning on taking a cruise to Prague, anybody? Better take a lot of water, though, because the Bard tells us that you'll be visiting a desert (see Antigonus' first line of dialogue). And if Shakespeare says it, it just has to be true. Just ask Nepthys and SylphMacha!

(Oh, and once again - it is very bad form to not cite a line number. It is not reasonable to expect the skeptical reader to read through an entire play, just to confirm his suspicion that an alleged line is absent. It is reasonable to expect that people with axes to grind will fabricate lines, when they don't expect people to take the time to look).

Which era? In the archaic period, features in Greek art tend to lack individuality, or expression. As time progresses, so does the representational quality of Greek art. The (probably) Greek artists who did the extant busts of the Roman emperors did work that was noteworthy for its realism, even by modern standards. I have heard much the same said of Ptolemaic art.

Cleopatra was not living in the archaic period.

Realism? Realism comes in degrees, especially in media with the size limitations of coinage. Even on our own coinage, Susan B. Anthony's features on the ill-fated dollar piece were so stylized, that she was mistaken for George Washington, and the dollar for a quarter. However, nobody would have mistaken her for Emperor Hirohito.

2700 BC + 4000 years = AD 1300? I don't think that the pharaohs were still with us during the very late High Middle Ages. Or are we now counting the predynastic period as being part of the history of Pharaonic Egypt?

Had the ancient artists been able to get one of the gods to sit for a portrait, or even allow him to set foot in his court, I would be impressed, indeed, both with him, and this argument. However, as the gods were never seen in the flesh, it is pretty obvious that representational portraiture of them would be out of the question. The Pharoah was a bit more visible.

For those overly fond of playing devil's advocate ... (*)

May I hope that nobody will attempt to play rhetorical games, here, and say "but the pharoah was a god to the Egyptians"? The divinity of the pharoah was an article of faith, which few non-Kemetics would share; his existence was not. Gods such as Ra, Wesir and Heru were in a far different position. If we take the point of view of Kemetic Orthodoxy, we should not even attempt a serious comparison : the "kingly ka", that of Heru, is seen as dwelling within the nisut (or pharoah); this is not the same thing as saying that pharoah is Heru himself.

If we take a more simpleminded view of alleged pharonic divinity, however, and postulate that the Egyptians held to it, then we are lead to the inescapable conclusion that the Egyptians were wrong. (1) At least one of those 'gods', Amenemhet I, was assassinated. (2) Had this pharoah commanded that which we'd call the power of a god, obviously, the outcome would have been far different, in a way most disappointing for the would-be assassin.

Of course, this is intuitive, postmodern "scholarship".

Nice, respectful way of referring to the previous nisuts and their consorts in a Kemetic forum, ma'am (3).

She's kidding us, right? The skeletons of royalty are not hard to come by in Egypt, and forensic techniques do allow for the reconstruction of features from skeletal remains. So, I repeat, researchers are not working in a vacuum, here, and there really is no excuse for offering unsubstantiated guesses in lieu of an examination of available evidence, as Afrocentrists and their politically correct apologists are prone to do.

Off hand, I recall that somebody's features were reconstructed (4) (and they didn't look especially "negroid"). If one is curious about this, a publication search on the use of forensic reconstruction in Egyptological publications might be a good place to start. Not that I would expect an Afrocentrist to bother, or be open to reading the results.

and made a royal wedding, of great diplomatic significance, that would have brought two realms together, with no mention being made of the fact in the royal records of either country?

The Romans were monogamous, and still executing people for adultery at the time. Somebody, perhaps, is thinking of the values of the age of Nero.

Oh, come on!

The Romans were the most joyous pack of literary gossips ever seen, and frequently documented each other's personal eccentricities and backgrounds in lovingly malicious and lurid detail. It is difficult to imagine them passing up a good piece of dirt on a defeated enemy like this.

Documentation? As usual, Nepthys produces none. But how about logic and common sense. Zenobia considered a relative of hers, however distant, as being her mentor purely because of a similarity in complexion? The same would have been true of the rest of her relatives. Why would this have made Cleopatra any more her mentor, than any of her other relatives?

The Syrians, however, weren't black, either.

In other words, "I've made up my mind, don't try to confuse me with the facts".

Greek is an ethnicity, Macedonian is an ethnicity. While the United States is a melting pot of semi-recent arrivals from around the globe, most societies down through history have not been, and the Greek city states and Macedonia weren't.

What we can learn from this is that Nepthys can't even understand the concept of an ethnic group, or that old world societies have not traditionally had anything resembling an American level of ethnic diversity.

This takes cultural illiteracy to a high level, but not a new one, and points to something that really annoys many of us about the Afrocentric movement. It takes ignorance and seeks to recast it as a cultural alternative.

Sure, 200,000 years ago or more, assuming that the neandertals were a distinct species and didn't intermarry with the incoming cro-magnons. That's over 40 times the age of Egypt, going back to the founding of the old Kingdom, and about 100 times as much time as has passed since the time of Cleopatra.

Not bothered by a factor of 100? Then I suppose Nepthys thinks that a grad student, and the city of Alexandria are about the same age? 23 = 2300? Such interesting arithmetic!

The original Italo-Celtic speaking Indo-European immigrants into the Italian peninsula?

Before I asked if somebody had ever seen a Moroccan. Now, I have to ask if somebody has ever seen a Celt. One doesn't get much more white than an Irishman or a Scot. If the common ancestors of the Irish and the Romans were black, what strange genetic mutation accounts for the pallor of the former, the moment they reached Ireland? (Bog bodies, remember? We know exactly what the ancient Celts looked like, because the relatively intact bodies of a number of them still exist).

The Moors don't make their appearance until the Middle Ages. What's next? A discussion of the Puerto Rican impact on Medieval Europe?

Advice that Neppy would do well to take.

Reality is one thing, and fantasy is quite another.

In other words, Neppy is now legislating white people out of existence? The Ibo are a black-skinned ethnic group, and the Greeks are a (somewhat) white-skinned ethnic group.

Repetition of the above line of rhetoric doesn't change that simple reality. Neither does shutting one's brain off.

The Romans had a documented empire, with documented settlements. Likewise for the Macedonians. All that we have seen to counter a wealth of contrary evidence in the case of Neppy's invisible Black Empire, however, is a wealth of handwaving. I refer the reader to Ockham's razor (5) - the burden of proof lies on those who posit the existence of an entity, not on those who deny it.

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