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Comment by RuggedPineapple | Hacker News Reader

I know which one you mean, as I'm sure we all do, but it always amuses me that we refer to her as just 'Cleopatra' because... basically every queen of Egypt in that dynasty was named Cleopatra. They named the vast majority of the boys Ptolemy and the girls Cleopatra. Her mother's name is Cleopatra V Tryphaena. Her daughters name is Cleopatra Selene II. Her Fathers name is Ptolemy XII, she has brothers named Ptolemy XIII and Ptolemy XIV, one of her sons is named Ptolemy.

It should be the least useful mononym possible, but its totally not. Its perfectly understood.

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Sure, there were many a Cleopatra, but only one was the Cleopatra. :D

Much like there wasn't one "Caesar", since it's a title (still kicking in Proto-West Germanic derivatives branching off "kaisar"), but many "normal" people (not history nerds) would still use only the title to refer to Gaius Julius Caesar.

Also fun fact -- if you're a history nerd -- "Julius Caesar" is almost equally nonsensical to just "Caesar" since "Julius" is not his name, but refers to his family ("gens"). The first Caesar from that family, that we know of at least, was Sextus Julius Caesar in around 200 BC, 300 years before Gaius Julius Caesar was born.

> Much like there wasn't one "Caesar", since it's a title

It wasn't (yet) a title during the lifetime of Gaius Julius Caesar, though...

> still kicking in Proto-West Germanic derivatives branching off "kaisar"

Like the non-Germanic Slavic "Tsar".

> Sextus Julius Caesar in around 200 BC, 300 years before Gaius Julius Caesar was born.

Did you accidentally swap the 200 and 300, or are you saying Julius was born ~100 AD?

Cleopatra Nguyen

The entire Western pop cultural canon of ancient Egypt was created by a culture that ground mummies up for soup. It's not surprising that a lot of complexity and subtlety got lost in translation.

True enough;

The gory history of Europe’s mummy-eating fad https://www.nationalgeographic.com/history/article/mummy-eat...

The Gruesome History of Eating Corpses as Medicine https://www.smithsonianmag.com/history/the-gruesome-history-...

but people generally don't like to be reminded.

Well, the part about grinding up mummies is true enough. Natural resources get processed.

"The Western pop cultural canon of ancient Egypt" seems to be a red herring, though; Cleopatra is not part of or associated with ancient Egypt. She would be at the tail end of the Hellenistic period or the beginning of the Roman Empire. The New Kingdom ended a thousand years before she came to power.

(Hey, why do we call it "the New Kingdom"?)

Being fair to krapp and their comment above, I don't think the popular western notion of Egypt that started with the mystic of mummies and proceeded through tomb raiding as "archeology" and included stories of Anthony & Cleopatra, milk baths and asps really didn't clarify much between truly ancient Eygpt and the later era under Rome.

Some people care, of course, and many are better informed today, but there's a body of "common knowledge" out there that just runs it all together in a melange of pyramids and funny walks.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Bv_I-6dJ9p8

Come on, let's not be reductive. We didn't just eat them, we also ground them up to make paint!

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mummy_brown

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