A BBC documentary is claiming that the famous Egyptian queen Cleopatra may have been at least part-African, rather than Greek.

The claim hinges on a skeleton that maybe Cleopatra’s sister Arsinoe, who some suspect was murdered on the orders of her sister. The remains were found at a tomb called ‘The Octagon’ in Ephesus, Turkey.

“That Arsinoe had an African mother is a real sensation which leads to a new insight on Cleopatra’s family and the relationship of the sisters Cleopatra and Arsinoe,” says Hilke Thuer, of the Austrian Academy of Sciences, who re-discovered the skeleton after earlier anthropologists had uncovered it and removed the skull in the 1920s.

The Times reports that the skull was reconstructed by forensic anthropologist Caroline Wilkinson, using measurements taken in the 20s. “It has got this long head shape. That’s something you see quite frequently in ancient Egyptians and black Africans. It could suggest a mixture of ancestry,” says Wilkinson.

Mary Beard, professor in classics at Cambridge, strikes a cautionary note on her blog.

First, Arsinoe was indeed supposed to have been murdered on the steps of the temple of Diana in Ephesus, and the Octagon (which was found in the 1920s) is a rather grand tomb which can be dated stylistically to the first century BC. But there is nothing more than that to link the tomb and the princess. There is no surviving name on the tomb and the claims that the shape was meant to evoke the shape of the lighthouse of Alexandria (and so hint at an Egyptian occupant) don’t add up for me.

Second, the skeleton itself doesn’t survive intact. The crucial skull, on which the ethnic arguments are based, was lost in the second world war. The new conclusions (including a mock up of Arsinoe’s face) rely on the measurements of the skull left by the first excavators. The remaining bones are said to be those of a 15-18 year old; Arsinoe may well have been in her mid-20s when she died.

Third, we don’t actually know that Cleopatra and Arsinoe were full sisters. Their father was King Ptolemy, but they may well have had different mothers. In that case, the ethnic argument goes largely out of the window.

The rogueclassicism blog takes a similar tack:

The headlines of both the Telegraph (”Cleopatra had African ancestry, skeleton suggests”) and the AFP coverage (”Cleopatra ‘was part-African’”) show the leap the press is taking with this one, despite the fact that we are not entirely sure who Cleopatra’s mother was (she is not named in any Classical source as far as I’m aware and the suggestion that is was Cleopatra V (Arsinoe’s mother) is a long-standing conjecture) — she and Arsinoe did not necessarily have the same mother. But beyond that, we get this skull business and having Arsinoe’s ethnicity actually being determined from a reconstructed skull based on measurements taken in the 1920s? Although I fear being labelled as one having the “brainpan of a stagecoach tilter”, can there not be some actual DNA tests on the skeletal material? Was it even suggested? I think the jury’s still very much out on this one …

The BBC documentary ‘Cleopatra: Portrait of a Killer’ will be shown in the UK on March 23