Mark Gagnon

He puts his pal Ptolemy.

So Ptolemy has some kids and down the line, we get Cleopatra.

So when Alexander dies in 323, the entire empire gets split up.

But here's where it gets weird.

For three centuries, the Ptolemies ruled Egypt, but stayed completely separate from Egyptian culture, right?

They spoke Greek, they worshipped Greek gods, and they married within their own bloodline to keep their families pure.

Yes, they were linking with the stepsises, if you will.

And when they get married within their family, and I mean, literally, like they're just marrying, like some people speculate, historians will speculate that Cleopatra's parents were likely siblings, which was a pretty common practice in the Ptolemaic tradition.

Because again, bloodlines are the most important thing that you can have specifically in the ancient world.

oftentimes because they were descendants from gods, so to speak.

And so you got to keep the godly blood internal.

So that means Cleopatra's mom got stuck in an Egyptian washing machine, and now we have Cleopatra.

Her father is said to be Ptolemy XII, and her mother, historians are not exactly sure who she was, but it is suspected that she is Cleopatra V Tryphena, or Tryphena, as my dear pal Christos would correct me.

Now, the Ptolemies married their siblings because, again, they believed that they were divine, like Egyptian gods, right?

Plus, they kept, you know, keeps power concentrated and prevents foreign royal families from having influence.

And if you know anything about, you know, ancient history, even to today, to an extent, you got to keep the people with power, you know, internal.

But by Cleopatra's time, this inbreeding had created some issues.

Most of her recent ancestors had been weak and ineffective and barely spoke to their Egyptian subjects at all.

And as a result, it creates this class system where the people that are being ruled kind of don't really respect or like the ruling family.

But Cleopatra was different.