Race & Ethnicity

They lived in their own city. They married among the other Greek-speaking elite. And intermarried. Sometimes closely, hence Ptolemy Philadelphus. We know their family tree, because that also was important to them.

What goes wrong with most portrayals of Cleopatra isn't how she looked, but who the Ptolemies were. They were foreigners who ruled Egypt by right of conquest, quite conscious of their own separate origin and language and heritage. Identifying Cleopatra with the people she ruled would be like identifying Robert Bulwer-Lytton as Keralan, because he was made Viceroy of India. The late 19th c. rulers of India weren't from India. The Ptolemies weren't from Egypt.