Ack!

People who have backgrounds in classical and ancient history (well, any kind of historical studies) should probably not watch television. (Of course, then they'd miss things like 'Heroes'.) The History Channel itself is egregious in 1) promoting shows that have nothing to do with history [like 'Monster Quest] or 2) presenting bad or dumbed-down history. Which is why I thought I'd give Discovery a whirl tonight.

Tonight I was watching Discovery's 'Cleopatra: Portrait of a Killer', which was overall very entertaining and interesting, but then at the end they wrapped it all up neatly by indicating that Cleopatra had eliminated her siblings and then herself, in essence ending the Ptolemaic line.

They totally ignored her children. One, which she purportedly had with Caesar, was co-ruler for awhile and after her death was proclaimed pharaoh. He was captured and executed on orders of Octavian (later known as Augustus Caesar). That is the true end of the Ptolemaic dynasty in Aegypt, and Pharaonic Aegypt in general. But there may be descendants of Cleopatra out there, for she had three other children with Mark Antony, who were given into the care of Antony's former wife (and Octavian's sister) after the deaths of their parents. It is unknown whether the boys survived to adulthood; it is thought they died of illness prior to their sister's marriage. But the sister settled with her husband in Mauretania and ruled there. She in turn had two children, a boy and a girl, although I think after that the descendants become difficult to trace. Her son ruled Mauretania after his father's death and was murdered on orders of Caligula, after producing a daughter.

I guess that's the appeal of true history--it's never something you can really wrap up in an hour and there's lots of loose ends that can be fascinating.

Still, the show was very interesting, talking about the life and death of Cleopatra's younger sister, Arsinoë, who had been held hostage by Caesar, escaped, and then led a rebellion that routed the Romans from the Pharos of Alexandria and nearly cost Caesar his life. She was later captured, paraded in shame in Rome, and exiled to the Temple of Artemis in Ephesos, an ancient place of sacrosanct sanctuary which was violated when she was dragged from the Artemisium and murdered. At the time Mark Antony was in charge of the province that included Ephesos. The show follows an investigation into a tomb that was situated inside the city limits (rare in ancient times) of a woman (rare still), found in the 1920s and studied further with forensic techniques. The belief is that this woman was Arsinoë, whose tomb was shaped in a way reminiscent of the Pharos. The bones matched the gender and age. A skull model was reconstructed from photos taken at the time of the first excavation (the original was lost during World War II) and using computers a face was put onto it to give a sense of what Arsinoë, and perhaps to some degree, Cleopatra, looked like.

They also included a small shot of a horned viper, one of several snakes sometimes called an asp, which is supposed to be the manner of Cleopatra's suicide. (Personally I vote for the Aegpytian cobra as the manner of her demise; it is fitting given its link to the royal family and is also sometimes called an asp, which simply means poisonous snake anyway.) This was timely as in the game yesterday (we're set in the Sudan, which was Upper Aegypt in ancient times, at the moment), we were attacked by magical asps that managed to bite my character as she fought the evil cultists, leaving her pretty close to death until she put herself into a stasis-like trance. I came across a video of a Field's Horned Viper which pretty much reminded me of what I was visualising at the time, although this particular snake is not native to Africa (but then do magical venomous snakes HAVE to be???) It is a Pseudocerastes; the African ones are the Cerastes themselves. The embedding is disabled, but the video's interesting, if for no other reason than the man doing closeups on a venomous snake with the cage open. Don't watch if you're ophidiophobic.