The Cranium from the Octagon: Do We Have the Skull of Cleopatra’s Sister?
In 1929, archaeologists excavating an octagonal monument at the heart of the ancient Greek city of Ephesus in modern day Turkey found a well preserved skeleton in a sarcophagus inside. In the hundred years since there has been much speculation about who this person was.
The prime candidate is also perhaps the most exciting: since the 1990s it has been theorized that this is the body of Arsinoë IV, daughter of Egyptian pharaoh Ptolemy XII, and younger (half-)sister of Cleopatra VII. That’s right, that Cleopatra.
Now, a new study from a team led by anthropologist Gerhard Weber from the University of Vienna and published in Nature.com hopes to answer the question once and for all. The study, of the skull from the body (which was originally removed separately from the remainder of the skeleton in the flooded sarcophagus), uses state-of-the-art morphological, genetic and dating analyses to confirm who this was.
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Why might we think this skeleton is Arsinoë IV? Well, we know that the Egyptian princess was exiled here and spent her final years in Ephesus, where she was executed on the orders of Cleopatra’s lover Mark Antony in 41 BC. Furthermore, the octagonal monument, known simply as the “Octagon” is strikingly similar to Egyptian architecture elsewhere, most notably with rhe famous Pharos Lighthouse, one of the seven wonders of the ancient world.
So, what has the study discovered? Well, the skull and the skeleton definitely belong to the same individual, and both date from the right period, the date of death having been narrowed down to between 205–36BC.
However this cannot be Arsinoë IV and for a very good reason: the skull is that of a male. More specifically, it belongs to an 11–14 year old boy, of Italian or Sardinian ancestry, not an Egyptian princess at all.
The possibility that the skull might be that of Arsinoë IV dates back to one of the original excavators of the Octagon, Josef Keil. It was Keil that speculated about the identity of the skeleton, and it was his assessment that this skull belonged to a woman about twenty years of age that led to the first suggestion that this could be Cleopatra’s sister.
Further experts confirmed Keil’s assessment in the decades that followed his discovery, but this new study suggests that they were all wrong. The traits which led to the cranium being identified as female, which include a fragile and thin bone structure and weak muscle markers, are also applicable to the skull of an adolescent male.
The original misidentification may have been further confused by the fact that the skull displays significant deformations. The upper jaw is abnormally inclined and underdeveloped, and the entire face is strongly asymmetric.
But this, of course, means that we do not know where lies the body of Arsinoë IV. We know she was taken to Rome in chains in 46 BC, a victim of the Egyptian dynastic struggles in which Rome became increasingly involved during this period. We know she was sent into exile in Ephesus, and we know she was executed on the steps of the Temple of Artemis there in 41 BC.
But where her body was taken after her murder, remains a mystery.
Header Image: The skeleton in the Octagon at Ephesus has long been believed to be that of Cleopatra’s half sister. Now a new analysis of the skull should answer the question once and for all. Source: Arienne King / CC BY-NC-SA 4.0.
