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The May 15 Style article “Was Cleopatra Black? We’re asking the wrong question.” quoted a definitive statement on this subject by Zahi Hawass but in the rest of the article ignored what he said.
Hawass, whom I had the honor of meeting at his archaeological dig in the West Valley of Luxor, Egypt, is perhaps the foremost world expert on ancient Egypt and a formidable archaeologist who has spent much of his life excavating various sites in Egypt. Hawass was the longtime head of the Supreme Council of Antiquities. If you’re going to trust anyone on the subject of Cleopatra VII, trust Hawass.
I’m a member of the American Research Center in Egypt (an organization that includes many of the greatest living scholars on ancient Egypt) and an amateur Egyptologist who has traveled all over Egypt. Among other places, I’ve visited the Temple of Hathor at the Dendera Temple Complex. This temple contains the most well-known bas-relief images of Cleopatra VII. In precisely none of these images — or any other reliefs or statues of Cleopatra VII anywhere — is she depicted as Black. Nor are there images of other Ptolemaic pharaohs who preceded her showing them as Black. The ancient Egyptians knew how to depict Black people, including Nubian pharaohs and Nubian captives.
Where is the evidence that pharaohs were prejudiced against Black people purely because they were Black? Cleopatra VII could have depicted herself as Black if she chose to. There is simply no historical basis for asserting that she was Black but chose to represent herself as “European” because she was prejudiced against Black people.
Also, Cleopatra was not representing herself in temple reliefs and statuary as “Egyptian,” in the sense of being genetically related to the people of ancient Egypt. She was representing herself as pharaoh, just as did her Ptolemaic forebears.
Current and former Egyptian government officials are quite correct that “Queen Cleopatra” cannot legitimately claim to be a documentary, because Cleopatra VII was not Black. As for “historians” who insist that “sources” on Cleopatra VII are “subject to bias,” that is a statement without a foundation.
Finally, Shelley Haley, whose credentials on ancient Egypt aren’t in the same universe as Hawass’s, would be well-advised to make her assertions about Cleopatra VII at the American Research Center in Egypt’s next national convention and see what the real experts have to say on the subject.
The good kind of rent-seeking
Thanks for the May 14 Business article “A TikToker exposes how much people pay for rent. Viewers can’t get enough.” I kept looking for something about Washington rents in the article, to no avail. Please provide us with more information on average local rents. After all, the second word in the name of the newspaper is “Washington.”
Susan Hoechstetter, Washington
Shutting out a champion team
As a longtime Post reader, I often complain about the lack of coverage given to George Mason University basketball. I agree there are a lot of good basketball teams in the area, but GMU gets one line in a basketball digest covering games across the country.
On May 13, the GMU women’s softball team won the Atlantic 10 championship for the first time in their 45-year history and there was not even a word in The Post. And they won it with the help of a local player of the year, Aly Rayle, pitching.
There are sports fans who care about something other than the Commanders or the University of Maryland or private school sports.
GMU is the largest public university in Virginia and deserves some coverage.
Sandy Baney, Fairfax Station
Don’t become comfortably numb
I was saddened to learn of another mass shooting, this one at a suburban mall outside Dallas. But I was even more saddened to find The Post’s eight-paragraph article on Page A23 [“At least 8 killed and 7 wounded after gunman opens fire at mall in Texas,” May 7]. Does The Post think readers have become so inured to these shootings, they no longer merit prominent coverage? I hope that’s wrong. If it’s right, America is really in trouble.
A fate no one could deserve
I appreciated Thankful Vanderstar’s May 6 letter, “No dignity in the Confederacy,” recognizing Confederate Gen. Robert E. Lee for who he was: a leader who fought to preserve the despicable practice of slavery.
However, to make her point about rewriting history, Vanderstar referred to Adolf Hitler as “an evil tyrant who … murdered millions of innocent Jews and others in the service of his warped notions of racial purity.” This phrase stunned me. Why refer to the “innocent” Jews whom Hitler murdered? Were there guilty Jews who deserved to die?
Miriam Bloom, Silver Spring
We’ve failed to solve insolvency before
The May 8 editorial “Move the debt limit deadline” asserted that a default in payments on the national debt would be “the first … in U.S. history.”
Late in the War of 1812, the treasury could not raise sufficient funds to pay interest that had come due. As Henry Adams recounted in his “History of the United States During the Administrations of James Madison,” a “formal stoppage of payment in interest on the debt was announced, November 9, [1814,] by an official letter from the secretary, notifying holders of government securities in Boston that the Treasury could not meet its obligations. … After that date the Treasury made no further pretence of solvency.”
In 1814, the treasury secretary said that “nobody was disposed to lend” money to the United States. Today, the United States can readily find lenders. To find wisdom might be harder.
Alone again (unnaturally)
I’m not sure whether Caryn Marjorie’s manager, Ishan Goel, intended it, but his photograph of Marjorie sitting in a sterile, unpeopled setting perfectly reflected her quote “They think that [my AI clone is] the end of humanity” [“For $1 a minute, this AI clone will be your girlfriend,” news, May 15].
For just $1 per minute, you, too, can sit in your room all alone and communicate with or even pursue a romantic relationship with a machine-created nonhuman. To take the irony of the photograph even further, how many eyes might be peering into your room through the glass screen of your computer? The photo (along with the article) is a chilling reminder that not all that is new is necessarily good.
Barbara Coughlan, Annapolis
The May 15 Style article about the autism portrayal in “The Good Doctor” was about high-functioning people with autism, discussing how they and only they are portrayed [“‘The Good Doctor’ memes go viral, reigniting debate about autism portrayal”]. There was not one word about the reality for those many people with profound or serious autism. One study found that almost 30 percent of recently diagnosed children had profound autism. They are simply being erased, even though they have much more serious needs than how they are portrayed in a TV series.
There’s a saying in the autism community that when you meet one person with autism, you’ve met one person with autism. The autism spectrum is so huge that it covers both a medical school graduate with minor social problems and someone the same age who is not toilet-trained, cannot speak and is incapable of social interactions. We keep hearing from those who can speak, something that has been labeled “partial representation” because one subset of a population claims to speak for the entire group. It could also be labeled “ableism,” because only those who can speak or fill out surveys are heard from. The others cannot speak, and their caregivers are no longer even being consulted. Their needs are serious, but the push by the highest-functioning to regard autism as always merely a “difference” erases them and their many challenges.
As a result, autism is being publicly defined only in terms of the needs of those least impacted. Those more seriously impacted, those with far more serious needs, have no voice and rarely if ever appear on TV. But they are just as human and just as deserving of concern. They should not be rendered invisible because acknowledging that they exist makes some people uncomfortable.
Substantial blame for all of this lies with the medical community, which continues to use “autism” as an umbrella term for a huge range of behaviors and afflictions that might have dozens of causes. Medicine should do its job and come up with separate, meaningful terms for different conditions. Then the high-functioning wouldn’t have to worry about being thought of in the same light as those profoundly impacted, and those in greatest need could be seen.
Weed out these references
Regarding the May 11 special section article “Does weed help with anxiety?”:
If The Post were writing a piece about the effects of alcohol, would it include whether teens get hangovers? Of course not. It’s not legal for anyone under the age of 21 to drink.
Alas, this is the second article The Post has published recently that talks about teenagers who consume cannabis illegally. They don’t belong in the conversation.
Sarah O’Leary, Ann Arbor, Mich.
Putting the ‘men’ in ‘menopause’
“A useful handbook for navigating menopause,” Meredith Maran’s May 9 Style review of Jancee Dunn’s book “Hot and Bothered: What No One Tells You About Menopause and How to Feel Like Yourself Again,” struck a nerve in an unlikely person: me — a male who knows more than I wanted to know of this universal condition of women.
I was diagnosed with breast cancer (yes, it’s rare in men, but it does happen) in 2011. Five years after surgery, it returned, then was treated with radiation followed by potent hormone suppressors that block the production of testosterone and estrogen. So now I endure severe hot flashes (and get no sympathy at all from my wife and most of my women friends) and profound fatigue.
So, yes, this man is both sympathetic and empathetic with women of a certain age who endure the condition universal to their gender.
Jim Kellett, Harrisonburg, Va.
The May 13 front-page article “Ariz. official targeted by election deniers struggling with PTSD” struck me as odd. I know that deniers are struggling with something, perhaps reality, but I did not know that they were struggling with post-traumatic stress disorder.
Perhaps the reader might have been better served by the headline “Arizona official struggling with PTSD targeted by election deniers.”
I had to think about Ellis Rosen’s May 15 editorial cartoon for a minute, then I understood. We’re all thinking about when we can relax a bit. We’re all due for a collective deep breath.
Randy Bograd, Gaithersburg
We got it to fit — but it wasn’t fit to print
“Reply All Lite” is usually condensed from the “Reply All” comic strip to a single panel. “Reply All Lite” generally isn’t drawn but assembled from stock bits on a computer. And its punchlines are usually vapid.
But the May 15 version was something else — although exactly what I’m not sure.
It appears to have been actually drawn, with word balloons, like a real strip. But it’s hard to tell because its three panels have been squeezed into one, and the extreme distortion makes both the “art” and the words almost impossible to make out, even with a magnifying glass.
What was the point? Incomprehensibility? That has been a keynote of “Reply All Lite” all along. But the utter pointlessness of this one trumps all previous ones. It’s an insult to readers.
I very much enjoyed the May 15 Style article on Rahm Emanuel’s service as U.S. ambassador to Japan, “From Rahmbo to Rahm-bassador.” I found it surprising, however, that there was no mention of Mike Mansfield’s 11-year tenure in that position, from 1977 to 1988.
Mansfield set the mold for subsequent ambassadors, such as Caroline Kennedy, Walter Mondale and Howard Baker, who were mentioned. If there was a “political giant” among them, it was certainly Mansfield.
John W. Outland, Henrico, Va.
Hamas’s ministry of untruth
The May 10 news article “3 Islamic Jihad leaders among 15 reported killed in Israeli strikes on Gaza” repeated casualty claims made by “Palestinian health officials” yet failed to provide readers with important context and details.
As the Committee for Accuracy in Middle East Reporting and Analysis and others have documented, the “Palestinian Health Ministry” is an arm of Hamas, the U.S.-designated terrorist group that rules the Gaza Strip. It reports to Hamas and is funded by the group, whose leaders call for the destruction of the Jewish state.
Hamas has a long history of encouraging civilian casualties by using human shields. It has even hidden weapons in schools, according to a 2015 United Nations investigation and, as recently as the 2021 conflict, employed ambulances as “transport vehicles” and hospitals as “command centers.”
Along with Islamic Jihad, another Iranian proxy based in Gaza, Hamas routinely fires missiles at Israel from behind the cover of civilians — a double war crime.
In a 2018 interview, Hamas official Mahmoud al-Zahar admitted to Al Jazeera that the group believed in “deceiving the public” for propaganda purposes.
Trusting a Hamas-run “ministry” to provide reliable casualty counts is like trusting a fox to guard a henhouse.
The writer is a senior research analyst for the Washington office of the Boston-based Committee for Accuracy in Middle East Reporting and Analysis.
To question, or not to question? There is no question.
Regarding the May 13 Free for All letter “Lord, Lord, how this world is given to lying”:
As an academic, I have always been perplexed that questioning, which is part of what academics are supposed to do, is met with unexplainable vitriol when it comes to Shakespeare. It’s like questioning Homer’s authorship back in the day — an unthinkable heresy.
Unlike with the best-known writers of today, we have no paper trail of any kind for Shakespeare except for hundreds of business records. It is assumed he went to the Stratford elementary school, but those records were lost or burned. Unlike for other prominent writers, there are no records that he attended university. His will mentions no books, not even a family Bible, no manuscripts, no theater shares. At least one of his daughters was illiterate. His physician son-in-law noted in his diary that he treated a writer but failed to mention his father-in-law was a writer. Shakespeare’s plays are predominantly about royal lineage, the court and courtiers, with everyday folk serving as comic relief. “Hamlet” has a scene with a nobleman rewriting a play and teaching the actors how to perform it.
What’s wrong with asking questions when the pieces don’t fit? Why all this apoplectic name-calling? Could it be that reputations are at stake? The saddest part of this saga is that because of the limitations of what Shakespeare of Stratford could have known, until recently “traditional” scholars could not address the complexities of the plays and the sonnets. Now they forge ahead, ignoring what Shakespeare could or could not have known. This way, nobody’s reputation is at stake.
If there were a satisfactory answer to this question about “the soul of the age,” the question would go away. It is highly ironic that traditional English academics have found themselves defending the amazing knowledge revealed in the plays, ignoring studies that cast doubt — such as those of French academics. And as far as the new stylometric studies that “prove” Shakespeare works were written by a group of writers, the ignored French Renaissance academic Abel Lefranc, a member of the Académie Française, said that it is quite possible that Shakespeare wrote the plays and that over the years they were touched up by other writers for later presentations — a premise that makes group authorship impossible to prove.
Elizabeth Winkler is a highly respected journalist. She examines the Shakespeare authorship question as any good journalist would: What is the problem? What is the history? Who are the principal players, and what do they have to say? She provides all the information, and she lets readers come to their own conclusions. “Shakespeare Was a Woman and Other Heresies: How Doubting the Bard Became the Biggest Taboo in Literature” is fun to read — like a good detective story, because journalists are detectives.
In my experience, people resort to name-calling when that is the last line of defense.
Elisabeth Waugaman, Rockville
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