Anyone who knows me is likely aware that I’m fascinated by Cleopatra’s younger sister, Arsinoe (Ahr-sin-oh-WAY). So could there be a better way to start off a history blog than by writing about the obscurity surrounding this young woman and her possible tomb—the Octagon?
In modern writings about her legendary sister, Arsinoe receives little attention. Scarcely more than a few sentences depending on the interpretation, and I can’t help but feel that she is hard done by. My fascination with this lesser Egyptian royal goes way back to my childhood. So you can imagine my excitement when she began to receive some attention in 2013 when Dr. Hilke Thur of the Austrian Academy of Science made splashy headlines declaring she’d identified the skeleton of Cleopatra’s sister in a burial chamber beneath an octagonal structure in Ephesus. It even received media treatment when the BBC documentary Portrait of a Killer aired. This was the first, and to the best of my knowledge, only documentary ever made about her.
I was quick to believe it. The idea that Arsinoe was buried in the Octagon enthralled me. I even went to Turkey with my grandmother when I was 17 years old to see the tomb for myself. But over the years I’ve become more skeptical. I just can’t believe that the skeleton found in Ephesus belongs to her, and this is why.
The Skeleton’s Age
For one thing, the skeleton’s age immediately presents problems. The team that examined the skeleton, led by Dr. Fabian Kanz of the Medical University of Vienna, concluded that the body belonged to a young girl between the ages of 15 and 17, perhaps 18 years old. In the BBC documentary, he based his finding on the fact that her epiphyses and diaphysis had not fused yet. The long bones in our legs come in three separate pieces to accommodate our growing bodies, separated by a thin cartilage plate that ossifies when we reach adulthood. The fact that this girl’s long bones hadn’t fused meant that she hadn’t finished growing, and was just an adolescent when she died.
Historians don’t know the exact date of Arsinoe’s birth. What we do know is that she was younger than her sister Cleopatra and older than her brother Ptolemy. This means she was born sometime between 68 and 62 BCE. She died in 41 BCE (killed by Mark Antony on Cleopatra’s orders), which would’ve made her between the ages of 21 and 27 at the time of her death, far too old to be the girl in the Octagon.
Even assuming Arsinoe was much younger than we traditionally believe is unlikely because of the role she played in the Egyptian Civil War years before her death. If she really was just a teenager at the time of her death, she would have been leading a rebel uprising when she was only eight years old, which is highly unlikely. The other possibility is that she was just a figurehead in the war rather than an active participant. But Julius Caesar’s own writings about her and the Egyptian rebels he fought in 48 BCE dispels that theory.
Inconclusive Results
Carbon dating matched the bones to the era Arsinoe lived and died in and the team working on the case dated the tomb to the latter half of the first century BCE. So it’s plausible that the tomb could belong to Arsinoe because the dates match. However, hard evidence like DNA tests proved inconclusive. The bones in question were handled too many times to yield uncontaminated results. If the team was right and this woman is the first forensic evidence of the Ptolemaic dynasty, that also means they don’t had any DNA samples from Arsinoe’s bloodline to compare with the results.
To further complicate matters, the woman’s skull has been missing for decades. A shame really, because her dental records could’ve provided further insight into her age at the time of death.
The team reconstructed the skull using photos and measurements of the original before it was lost in Germany during the Second World War. From there, they concluded that the owner had mixed Greek and African ancestry. Craniometry—the assertion of race based on the measurements of the skull—has been dismissed as pseudoscience. Even if it were a reliable indicator, no one has conclusive proof of Arsinoe’s ancestry. She shared a father with Cleopatra, and Alexander the Great was quite possibly their ancestor. This would have made her Greek, although we don’t know if she also shared a mother with Cleopatra, a woman who would’ve been a Greek princess, or if she did have some Egyptian ancestry.
As much as I would like to believe the woman in the Octagon is Arsinoe, I can’t. The tomb obviously belongs to someone of high rank, but any Greco-Egyptian girl could’ve been buried in it. Without an inscription or a DNA test, we’ll never know.