Cleopatra was so concerned that Arsinoe would try to challenge her rule again that she orchestrated her own sister’s murder in 41 B.C.E. Egypt’s Ptolemaic rulers had a complicated family tree.

The historical origins of this interpretation of Cleopatra come from the blank spots in the Ptolemaic family tree and the possibility that Cleopatra might have been the daughter of one of Ptolemy ...

Queen Cleopatra was survived by her daughter, Cleopatra Selene, who would go on to rule a kingdom of her own in North Africa.

Cleopatra’s Family Lineage Scholars often point to uncertainties in Cleopatra’s family tree. The lineage of her father, Ptolemy XII, a pharaoh himself, is well-documented; her mother’s, not so much.

It did no harm that, like Cleopatra, the royal family at the time hailed from Macedonia, though it does not seem that the writers and artists depicting Cleopatra were hung up on questions of ancestry.

the producers of the show say question marks in her family tree leave room for the possibility that her mother was of another background: The identities of Cleopatra’s mother and grandmother are ...

So what exactly do we know? Cleopatra’s father, Ptolemy XII, was a member of the family that conquered Egypt over 200 years earlier. He was routinely referred to as an illegitimate child.