The girl's hair is arranged in a way similar to the so-called melonenfrisur (melon coiffure ), an elaborate hairstyle often associated with the Ptolemaic dynasty, and Cleopatra particularly," said Capriotti. "Unfortunately the faces are not well preserved, but we can see that the boy has curly hair and a braid on the right side of the head, typical of Egyptian children. Both discs are decorated with the udjat-eye, also called the eye of Horus, a common symbol in Egyptian art. The serpents, perhaps two cobras, would also be different forms of sun and moon, she said. The researcher identified the children as Alexander Helios and Cleopatra Selene, Antony and Cleopatra's twins, following a detailed stylistic and iconographic analysis published by the Polish Centre of Mediterranean Archaeology at the University of Warsaw.Ĭapriotti noticed that the boy has a sun-disc on his head, while the girl boasts a crescent and a lunar disc.
Each figure has an arm over the other's shoulder, while the other hand grasps a serpent," Giuseppina Capriotti, an Egyptologist at Italy's National Research Council, told Discovery News. "It shows two naked children, one male and one female, of identical size standing within the coils of two snakes. Overall, the rest of the statue appears to be quite unusual. The back of the 33-foot sculpture, catalogued as JE 46278 at the museum, features some engraved stars - likely indicating that the stone was originally part of a ceiling. An Italian Egyptologist has rediscovered a sculpture of Alexander Helios and Cleopatra Selene, the offspring of Mark Antony and Cleopatra VII, at the Egyptian Museum in Cairo.ĭiscovered in 1918 near the temple of Dendera on the west bank of the Nile, the sandstone statue was acquired by the Egyptian Museum but has remained largely overlooked. My aim is to treat the matter solely from the historical standpoint and the name of the boy Alexander Helios, son of Cleopatra and Antony, in whom East and West met, will serve to unite the two aspects of what I have to say.Cleopatra's twin babies now have a face. I can only do a little, for most of the material vanished when Augustus later burnt 2,000 prophecies but the secondary historians from whom we derive our current ideas of the East in the crucial years before Actium are so extraordinarily tendencious that every scrap of contemporary material, outside the circle of the victors' version, must be of value. But the ideas of the East in this matter have been deduced from western and Jewish material and I hope in this paper to do a little toward ascertaining the view of the Greek East from a contemporary Greek document which has never been seriously examined, and considering its relation to the ideas of Vergil. Vergil's fourth Eclogue, foretelling a child whose coming would usher in the golden age, has often been supposed to be based upon eastern material and it has even been suggested that, in the period of Roman history which ended with Octavian's final success at Actium, both East and West alike were expecting the Roman world to pass under the rule of one man, whether a Roman or a king from the east, to be followed by the birth of a child with whom should come the final kingdom of peace.
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