Zenobia
Ancient sources

In the Historia Augusta, Zenobia is said to have been a descendant of Cleopatra and claimed descent from the Ptolemies. According to the Souda, a 10th-century Byzantine encyclopedia, after the Palmyrene conquest of Egypt, the sophist Callinicus of Petra wrote a ten-volume history of Alexandria dedicated to Cleopatra. According to modern scholars, by Cleopatra Callinicus meant Zenobia. Apart from legends, there is no direct evidence in Egyptian coinage or papyri of a contemporary conflation of Zenobia with Cleopatra. The connection may have been invented by Zenobia's enemies to discredit her, but circumstantial evidence indicates that Zenobia herself made the claim; an imperial declaration once ascribed to Emperor Severus Alexander (died 235) was probably made by Zenobia in the name of her son Vaballathus, where the king named Alexandria "my ancestral city", which indicates a claim to Ptolemaic ancestry. Zenobia's alleged claim of a connection to Cleopatra seems to have been politically motivated, since it would have given her a connection with Egypt and made her a legitimate successor to the Ptolemies' throne. A relationship between Zenobia and the Ptolemies is unlikely, and attempts by classical sources to trace the queen's ancestry to the Ptolemies through the Seleucids are apocryphal.
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