Post on 25-Oct-2014
(Left to right): wall relief of Cleopatra III and II, Ptolemy VIII, and Horus
-23 April 2012- Egyptologist Giuseppina Capriotti of the Italian
National Research Council said that an approximately one-meter-high sculpture of a boy and girl embracing depicts the offspring of Mark
Antony and Cleopatra: Alexander Helios and Cleopatra Selene II.
The statue dates to between 50 and 30 BCE; Mark Antony and Cleopatra’s twins were born in 40 BCE. After their parents’ suicides, all three of Antony’s children by Cleopatra were taken to Rome in gold
chains by Octavian in 30 B.C. to march in his triumph as royal captives.
The statue is of two nude children, one male, one female,
who bear the attributes of sun and moon respectively.
They have an arm over each other’s
shoulders while they hold a serpent in their other hands. The coils
of two snakes wind around their legs and
the base of the statue.
The boy has a sun-disc on his head, while the girl boasts a
crescent and a lunar disc. The serpents, perhaps two cobras, would also be different forms
of sun and moon.
The boy has curly hair and a braid on the right side of the
head, typical of Egyptian children. If these are Antony
and Cleopatra’s twins, it’s the first representation of the two
together ever discovered.
Cleopatra by Augustin Hirschvogel (1547)
Cleopatra at a London arts ball (1925)