Cleopatra did not kill herself in 30BC by letting an asp sink its poison-laced fangs into her delicate flesh, as everyone thought. Instead she swallowed a lethal cocktail of drugs — opium, hemlock and aconitum. At least, that is what Professor Christoph Schaefer of the university of Trier says. He tells a German television programme, “Back then this was a well-known mixture that led to a painless death within just a few hours, whereas the snake death could have taken days and been agonising.”

Mind you, of those three poisons, I am not sure that either aconitum or hemlock would be bring about an easeful death. Opium just sends you to sleep — into the arms of Morpheus — and in high doses shuts down respiration; that’s how you die. The other two, though, could feel extremely nasty.

Aconitum, aka wolfsbane, stimulates the heart and can kill as a result. You’d feel terrible, with palpitations, fever probably, terrible nausea and angor animi — that’s the feeling of acute anxiety and fear of death that presages actual death. Aconitum is a flower from the ranunculales (buttercup) family, and an ancient medicine. Medea used it when she attempted to murder Theseus. She mixed it in a bowl of wine. It appealed to the Romantics, or the idea of it did anyway. Keats refers to it in his Ode on Melancholy:

No, no! go not to Lethe, neither twist
Wolf’s-bane, tight-rooted, for its poisonous wine;
Nor suffer thy pale forehead to be kiss’d
By nightshade, ruby grape of Proserpine;
Make not your rosary of yew-berries,
Nor let the beetle, nor the death-moth be
Your mournful Psyche, nor the downy owl
A partner in your sorrow’s mysteries;
For shade to shade will come too drowsily,
And drown the wakeful anguish of the soul.

It’s a common misconception, which the Romantics may have encouraged inadvertently, that all these toxins kill you by sending you into a nice sleep. They don’t, usually. Most poisons that kill you do not cause you to doze pleasantly as you expire. You are likely to be wide awake, and suffering. People make this mistake today, I’m afraid to say. They take paracetamol thinking it’ll put them to sleep and instead three days later they find themselves lying in hospital in agony, dying of liver damage.

As for hemlock, this is Conium maculatum, a leafy shrub containing the neurotoxin coniine. It works similarly to curare. When Socrates took it after being condemned to death, he slowly lost sensation in his body as he died, with numbness starting in his feet and moving upwards through his legs. So Plato describes it in the Phaedo. It doesn’t sound quite as bad as aconitum, but still hardly instantaneous: plenty of time to work oneself up into a state of high anxiety.

Any one of those drugs on its would be enough to kill, in the right doses. So perhaps the Queen of the Nile was applying a “belt and braces” principle. In the same way executioners in the USA employ a barbiturate to knock out the victim, then follow up with other drugs such as potassium to stop the heart dead, even though the barbiturate would be enough to kill the patient on its own.

It’s certainly no surprise that Cleopatra was familiar with mind-bending substances. The Egyptians were keen on altering their moods with chemicals. Many cultures used chemicals extracted from plants, which I wouldn’t recommend because they’re nearly all horribly toxic and produce little discernible benefit.

Egypt, however, was in the early wave of alcohol producers, perhaps 4,000 years or more before Christ. It may have been that grapes stored in jars started fermenting by accident, someone decided to drink the juice and found themselves feeling unaccountably more cheerful than before. The ancient Egyptians also developed techniques of brewing beer by malting barley, making a mush with it, boiling it and then fermenting it. They also had a goddess of beer called Menquet, and Hathor the bull, god of wine, had his own day of devotion, a Day of Intoxication.

The 35-year-old beauty is set to take on the role of the Egyptian queen in a new biopic, previously played by the veteran actress but in the 1963 movie, Contactmusic reported.

“I will play it differently to Elizabeth Taylor, but I could never be as lovely as she was. We are trying to uncover the truth about her as a leader and not just a sex symbol which she really wasn’t, she didn’t have many lovers, maybe only two, and they’re men she had children with,” Jolie said.

The American beauty said she saw Cleopatra in a different light after researching for the role.

“She was misunderstood and her life story was written wrongly. I always thought her life was very glamorous. Then I read her story and found a different side to her – that she was a mother, leader and an intellect who spoke five languages! Her upbringing also reflected her relationship with Rome – all that is much more interesting than what she was summed up to be,” Jolie said.

Read more at: http://movies.ndtv.com/movie_story.aspx?Section=Movies&ID=ENTEN20100147054&subcatg=MOVIESINDIA&keyword=hollywood&cp

Describing the tomb that was discovered at Taposiris Magna, Dr Martinez remains confident that she will uncover the tomb of Cleopatra and Marc Anthony.

• A Gift For Caesar
• An Audience
• The Great Fire
• The Fatal Drink
• Caesar’s Justice
• Cleopatra’s Coronation
• Fertility*
• Dictator for Life
• The Queen conquers Rome
• Visions Of Death / Caesar’s Assassination
• Cleopatra Leaves Rome

A few galleries have changed names

• The Seduction of Caesar – renamed Fertility
• A Son – renamed, Fire Burns / Son of Caesar
• Anthony’s Concern – renamed, Calpurnia

I also corrected the spelling mistake of “Ceasar” to “Caesar”.

Egyptologist Sally Ann Ashton believes the compute regenerated 3D image is the best likeness of the legendary beauty famed for her ability to beguile. Pieced together from images on ancient artefacts, including a ring dating from Cleopatra’s reign 2,000 years ago, it is the culmination of more than a year of painstaking research. The result is a beautiful young woman of mixed ethnicity  -  very different to the porcelain-skinned Westernised version portrayed by Elizabeth Taylor in the 1961 movie Cleopatra.

Dr Ashton, of Cambridge University, said the images, to be broadcast as part of a Five documentary on Cleopatra, reflect the monarch’s Greek heritage as well as her Egyptian upbringing. ‘She probably wasn’t just completely European. You’ve got to remember that her family had actually lived in Egypt for 300 years by the time she came to power.’

The picture of the queen contrasts with several other less flattering portrayals. For instance, a silver coin which went on show at Newcastle University’s Sefton Museum last year showed her as having a shallow forehead, pointed chin, thin lips and hooked nose. Her lover, the Roman general Mark Antony, fared little better.

The reverse side shows him to have bulging eyes and a thick neck. The queen’s appearance has long been the subject of debate among academics. While Shakespeare’s Antony and Cleopatra made reference to her youthful looks and ‘infinite-variety’, many believe she was short and frumpy with bad teeth. A statue of Cleopatra exhibited at the British Museum in 2001 portrayed her as plain, no more than 5ft tall and rather plump.

Born in Alexandra in 69BC, into a Macedonian Greek dynasty which had ruled Egypt for three centuries, Cleopatra acceded to the throne at 17. Three years later she seduced Julius Caesar, bearing him a son, Caesarion. After Caesar was assassinated she courted Mark Antony before committing suicide on his death. Legend has it that she put an asp, a venomous serpent, to her breast.