[RuggedPineapple]

I know which one you mean, as I'm sure we all do, but it always amuses me that we refer to her as just 'Cleopatra' because... basically every queen of Egypt in that dynasty was named Cleopatra. They named the vast majority of the boys Ptolemy and the girls Cleopatra. Her mother's name is Cleopatra V Tryphaena. Her daughters name is Cleopatra Selene II. Her Fathers name is Ptolemy XII, she has brothers named Ptolemy XIII and Ptolemy XIV, one of her sons is named Ptolemy.

It should be the least useful mononym possible, but its totally not. Its perfectly understood.

[volemo]

Sure, there were many a Cleopatra, but only one was the Cleopatra. :D

[hnarn]

Much like there wasn't one "Caesar", since it's a title (still kicking in Proto-West Germanic derivatives branching off "kaisar"), but many "normal" people (not history nerds) would still use only the title to refer to Gaius Julius Caesar.

Also fun fact -- if you're a history nerd -- "Julius Caesar" is almost equally nonsensical to just "Caesar" since "Julius" is not his name, but refers to his family ("gens"). The first Caesar from that family, that we know of at least, was Sextus Julius Caesar in around 200 BC, 300 years before Gaius Julius Caesar was born.

[yreg]

Cleopatra Nguyen

[krapp]

The entire Western pop cultural canon of ancient Egypt was created by a culture that ground mummies up for soup. It's not surprising that a lot of complexity and subtlety got lost in translation.

[defrost]

True enough;

The gory history of Europe’s mummy-eating fad https://www.nationalgeographic.com/history/article/mummy-eat...

The Gruesome History of Eating Corpses as Medicine https://www.smithsonianmag.com/history/the-gruesome-history-...

but people generally don't like to be reminded.

[ookdatnog]

Come on, let's not be reductive. We didn't just eat them, we also ground them up to make paint!

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mummy_brown