Israeli-born actress Gal Gadot has been cast to play Cleopatra, ancient queen of Egypt, in an upcoming film that will reunite her with "Wonder Woman" director Patty Jenkins.
Alot of people are up in arms that Gal Gadot, a Jewish Israeli woman, will be playing Cleopatra, a woman of color. People are asking why a "person of color" wasn't instead tapped to play the role and they consider this to be Hollywood once again whitewashing history.
Now for my personal opinion. I dont see why this should make anyone mad. If the issue is "was a person of color represented," one could make the case that Gadot, whose lineage traces back to the middle east, could count as a POC. Many however seem to have wanted a black actress to play the role instead and this is where things get messy. The truth is the ancient Egyptians genetically and phenotypically were actually close to the Jews of today. According to Haaretz:
Even if Cleopatra herself was a local woman and not an inbred Macedonian aristocrat, Gadot would still be appropriate to play the role – perhaps even more so. Genetic analysis of 90 mummified remains of ancient Egyptians who lived between 1388 B.C.E. (just before the time of Ramses II) to 426 C.E. (the late Roman period) concluded that these people (not just the Egyptian elites but ordinary folk whose remains were preserved) had “higher affinities with modern populations from the Near East and the Levant compared to modern Egyptians,” according to the 2017 study published in Nature Communications.
The fact that the ancient Egyptians’ closest living relatives are people who live in Israel, Jordan and the surrounding region today, and not modern Egyptians, is not entirely surprising. We know that in antiquity there was often massive immigration from the Levant, especially from Canaan, into pharaonic Egypt.
Meanwhile, the same study found that today’s Egyptians have a much stronger African genetic component than their pharaonic ancestors, which stems from an influx from sub-Saharan Africa well after the Roman period, in other words long, long after Cleopatra lived.
The mummy DNA study highlights the irony of the anti-Gadot campaign. Inadvertently it makes a very good argument for casting the Israeli actress in the role of the Egyptian queen. If indeed Cleopatra had mixed Greek and ancient Egyptian heritage and if we accept that ancestry should be a factor when choosing an actor to play a historical character (a big if) then someone of European and Levantine descent such as Gadot seems like a good match. In fact, this would seem like the closest match we could get without actually bringing back to life an ancient Egyptian pharaoh, and anyone who has seen “The Mummy” knows that that would be an extraordinarily bad idea.
The Mummy, official trailer YouTube
The Khazar myth
Of course there will always be those who will argue that Ashkenazim, Jews of Eastern European descent like Gadot, are just white Europeans and have no link to the ancient Israelites or other inhabitants of the Levant. The idea is based on the theory, itself colored by a strong political bias, that Ashkenazim descended from the Khazars, a Caucasian people who converted to Judaism during the Middle Ages. This thesis continues to hold some currency, especially in anti-Israel and antisemitic circles, even though a plethora of historical and genetic studies have debunked it. As an example, one study, published in 2014 in Nature Communications, sequenced the genome of 128 Ashkenazi Jews and concluded that this group “is an even mix of European and Middle Eastern ancestral populations.”
This entire controversy has been digging up a much older battle over the phenotype of the ancient Egyptians. Battle lines have been drawn for some time now between a set of three camps. Historically, many Nordicists have tried to claim the existence of a Nordic Egypt, while afrocentrists claim that the Egyptians were "black." And mediterraneanists obviously put their hat in the ring too. Imo the Egyptians of today, who share a majority of their genetic heritage with the ancient Egyptians, probably share a physical resemblance with their forefathers. What is your opinion NSers? Is the black Egypt hypothesis realistic? Did the Egyptians then look as they do now? Were they nordic? Were they something else altogether? Let me know down below.
Sources cited:
https://www.haaretz.com/archaeology/.pr ... -1.9236953
https://www.cnn.com/2020/10/15/entertai ... index.html
