The Beauty of Cleopatra...

[sechan19]

...has apparently been called into question by the discovery of an ancient Roman denarion that features her image on its face. This coin languished in obscurity in a bank for years before being displayed by the University of York in Britain.

The coin shows a supposedly ugly Cleopatra and has caused many in the field to re-evaluate the traditional image of Cleopatra as one of the world's great beauties. Some are championing the notion that the great queen was loved for her mind rather than her face, a nice concept. Of course, I'm not certain that a two-thousand-year-old coin is a solid enough piece of evidence to base such a judgment on, but it's intriguing nonetheless.

Egyptian Queen Cleopatra Was No Stunner, Coin Shows (Yahoo! News)

Comments

Re: beauty shmooty

[reteva.livejournal.com]

Well, I seem to recall that often coin-makers never saw the people they were making portraits of. Still, you would expect an artisan to err on the side of beauty - that's very true. I merely meant that the item's age and possible damage could prevent it from being a reliable example of what she looked like.

Re: beauty shmooty

[lordameth.livejournal.com]

It definitely does look quite weathered. Of course, who says an ancient Egyptian princess has to match modern Western notions of beauty?

(Maybe Marc Antony just liked his women butch.)