Cleopatra: Scientist, Not Seductress?

[Dover]

Cleopatra: Scientist, Not Seductress?

By Jennifer Viegas, Discovery News

Dec. 14, 2004 —Medieval Arabic texts suggest that Egyptian queen Cleopatra VII was a brilliant early mathematician, chemist and philosopher who wrote science books and met weekly with a team of scientific experts, according to a forthcoming book.

If historians can verify the medieval accounts, then the real Cleopatra likely bore little resemblance to the sexy seductress described by Greek and Roman scholars.

The book, "Egyptology: The Missing Millennium, Ancient Egypt in Medieval Arabic Writings," will be published in January by the University College London Press. For the book, author Okasha El Daly, an Egyptologist at the Petrie Museum of Egyptian Archaeology at University College London, found previously undiscovered medieval Arabic texts, translated them, and analyzed the texts based on his knowledge of early Egyptian history.

El Daly believes the Arab writers had access to first-hand accounts of Cleopatra, and perhaps even books authored by the famous queen herself. He thinks many of these texts no longer exist.

A library at Alexandria was said to have been burned in ancient times, possibly by a Muslim general who wished to destroy texts written before the Koran, according to Lisa Schwappach, curator of the Rosicrucian Egyptian Museum in California...cont'd

http://dsc.discovery.com/news/briefs/20041213/cleopatra.html

[Cicero]

1. Why not both?

Dec. 14, 2004 —Medieval Arabic texts suggest that Egyptian queen Cleopatra VII was a brilliant early mathematician, chemist and philosopher who wrote science books and met weekly with a team of scientific experts, according to a forthcoming book.

If historians can verify the medieval accounts, then the real Cleopatra likely bore little resemblance to the sexy seductress described by Greek and Roman scholars.

Why not both? Why must there always be this stereotype that sexy women cannot be smart, and vice versa???

Later,

[struggle4progress]

2. I hear she and Marc Anthony did a lot of research together. eom