mo mo s

Cleopatra's Children

It’s good to be the Queen. It’s not so great to be her children.

For the last 300 years of the “Pharaohs” NONE of them were Egyptian. They were all Greek. The Ptolemaic Dynasty ruled Egypt from 323 B.C. to 30 B.C.. The first “Greek” Pharaoh was Ptolemy I, a commander serving under Alexander the Great. After Alexander’s death in 323 B.C., Ptolemy became the Pharaoh of Egypt. For the next 300 years in Egypt, every ruling male was named Ptolemy and every ruling female was named Cleopatra. To distinguish them from one another, each was given a number after their name. Virtually all of the Ptolemaic Pharaohs were produced by inbreeding. This was the way power was kept consolidated in the family.

Mothers

Jacqueline Rose

• BuyThe Conflict: How Modern Motherhood Undermines the Status of Women by Elisabeth Badinter, translated by Adriana Hunter
  Picador, 224 pp, £10.99, June 2013, ISBN 978 1 250 03209 6
• BuyAre You My Mother? by Alison Bechdel
  Jonathan Cape, 304 pp, £16.99, May 2012, ISBN 978 0 224 09352 1
• BuyA Child of One’s Own: Parental Stories by Rachel Bowlby
  Oxford, 256 pp, £20.00, June 2013, ISBN 978 0 19 960794 5
• BuyMothering and Motherhood in Ancient Greece and Rome by Lauren Hackworth Petersen and Patricia Salzman-Mitchell
  Texas, 274 pp, £16.99, April 2013, ISBN 978 0 292 75434 8
• BuySinners? Scroungers? Saints? Unmarried Motherhood in 20th-Century England by Pat Thane and Tanya Evans
  Oxford, 240 pp, £24.99, August 2013, ISBN 978 0 19 968198 3
• BuyI Don’t Know Why She Bothers: Guilt-Free Motherhood for Thoroughly Modern Womanhood by Daisy Waugh
  Weidenfeld, 240 pp, £12.99, July 2013, ISBN 978 0 297 86876 7

my mother was a computer, tho maybe?