Advance ticket sales have ended but plenty of additional tickets remain available at the door.
Profs and Pints Northern Virginia presents: “The Hidden Cleopatra,” an excavation through myth and slander to uncover the real Egyptian queen, with Jacquelyn Williamson, an Egyptologist and associate professor of archaeology and ancient art at George Mason University.
Depictions of Cleopatra are abundant in popular culture. A long list of painters have depicted her, Marilyn Monroe and Kim Kardashian have posed as her, and Vivien Leigh and Elizabeth Taylor famously portrayed her in Hollywood films.
At the end of the day, however, what most of us think we know about Cleopatra is wrong, the product of the ancient Rome’s “fake news” and anti-Egypt propaganda.
Learn about the real Cleopatra—and how our understanding of her came to be so distorted—with Professor Jacquelyn Williamson, scholar of women and power in ancient Egypt, teacher of courses on ancient Egyptian art and archaeology, and author of Nefertiti’s Sun Temple: A New Cult Complex at Tell el-Amarna.
Dr. Williamson will walk us through how the first Roman emperor, Octavian, created the distorted image of Cleopatra as seductress that we know today as part of his political scheming to defeat his rival Antony and end the Roman Republic once and for all.
Cleopatra has been the subject of debate and controversy ever since. William Shakespeare later relied on ancient Roman sources such as Horace and Plutarch in writing Antony and Cleopatra, and his play helped give rise to countless other works offering a distorted picture of her.
Professor Williamson argues that “Cleopatra was a human being, like you and I,” and “deserves the dignity of being represented as accurately as possible.” Her efforts to set the record straight have met frustration, however—after being extensively interviewed for the recent Netflix historical docuseries Queen Cleopatra, she concluded that it, too, had missed the mark.
You’ll gain a much deeper appreciation of the challenges of researching and accurately depicting the ancient past from Dr. Williamson, who also has taught at Harvard, Brandeis, and the University of California at Berkeley and is involved with an ongoing archaeological investigation of Queen Nefertiti’s sun temple. (Advance tickets: $13.50 plus sales tax and processing fees. Doors: $17, or $15 with a student ID. Listed time is for doors. Talk starts 30 minutes later.)
Image: Layla Taj portrays Cleopatra VII as part of an Egyptian Cultural Performing Arts Society production. Photo by Amos Gvili / Wikimedia Commons.