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Comment by krapp | Hacker News Reader

>I guess Cleopatra feels somewhat 'close' to us due to the surviving literary and archeological artifacts from the Roman empire.

Shakespeare wrote a play about her and Elizabeth Taylor played her in a movie. The effect of modern media is 99% of the reason why Cleopatra feels more "contemporary" than, say, Hatshepsut (for whom plenty of artifacts exist) or even Nefertiti.

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Cleopatra was a contemporary of Julius Caesar, and played a major role in his biography. (Which is why Plutarch wrote about her, which is why Shakespeare wrote about her, which is why 20th Century Fox made the film about her.) Julius Caesar is... a big name... in the West. Call that "the effect of media" if you like, but it's a thing.

Hatshepsut and Nefertiti lived respectively 1400 and 1300 years before Cleopatra, and about 700 years before even the founding of Rome. I'm no expert, but seems to me that those two names completely disappeared from the historical record between say 1000 BC and AD 1800, and were rescued from obscurity only by 19th-century archaeologists.

+1, I think the real reason that Cleopatra is still living in our common culture is mostly because of her association with Julius and Marcus Antonius, as well as of course proximity to Augustus.

I don't think Sharespeare would have mentioned her had she not figured prominently in the lives of main figures during the fall of the Republic.

That's why Cleopatra is a (relatively) household name while Sophonisba is an obscure historical trivia question.

Nefertiti was subject to a "damnatio memorae"-campaign as I recall, along with the rest of her monotheist (Aten-worshipping) family.

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