Contrary to what is taught in many history courses, it couldn’t have been a bite from a venomous snake that did in the legendary Egyptian queen Cleopatra, experts from the University of Manchester have argued as part of a new, free online course on Egyptian history.
According to BBC News, the queen, who died in 30 BC at the age of 39 while in the midst of a power struggle within the Roman empire, is often reported to have ended her own life by having a poisonous snake or “asp” bite her. Egyptologist Dr. Joyce Tyldesley and Andrew Gray, curator of herpetology at Manchester Museum, however, dispute this claim in the new course.
Using six items from the museum’s collection, the duo demonstrate that ancient accounts which claim that a snake hid in a basked of figs carried in from the country could not have be accurate, as the venomous snakes in Egypt (cobras and vipers) would have been too large for this to work.
Cobras, Gray said, are typically five to six feet long but can grow up to eight feet, making them too difficult to hide. The accounts also indicate that one or two of Cleopatra’s maids were killed in this manner, but the slow nature of snake bite deaths suggests there was too little time for multiple people to die in this way, and the venom carries just a 10 percent chance of death.
If not snake bites, what was the cause of death?
“Snakes use venom to protect themselves and for hunting – so they conserve their venom and use it in times of need,” Gray said in a statement. Most snake bites are “dry bites,” meaning that they do not inject venom, he added in the course, A History of Ancient Egypt, which will be launched online next week and cover the pre-pharaoh period through Cleopatra’s life.
So if a snake bite wasn’t the cause of death, how exactly did Cleopatra die? Some experts are not even convinced that she committed suicide at all, and that she could actually have been murdered by Roman Emperor Octavian. Dr. Tyldesley does believe that she killed herself, however.
“We know very little about suicide in ancient Egypt – it is almost as if it was unheard of – but suicide in the Hellenistic or Roman world was seen as a totally acceptable means of dealing with an otherwise insoluble problem. And Cleopatra belongs to that world,” she told the Daily Mail.
“Mark Antony [Cleopatra’s lover] stabbed himself, and there are reports that Cleopatra had already attempted to stab herself, so maybe a knife or dagger wound of some kind – opening the veins in a bath, perhaps – was the easy solution,” Dr. Tyldesley added. “Alternatively, maybe she used snake venom that she had already prepared for the occasion: but not a live snake.”
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