Egyptians the Copts, became dhimmis. In time the power of the Arabs waned throughout the Islamic Empire so that in the 10th century, the Turkish Ikhshids were able to take control of Egypt and made it an independent political unit from the rest of the empire. Egyptians continued to live socially and politically separate from their foreign conquerors, but their rulers like the Ptolemies before them were able to stabilize the country and bring renewed economic prosperity. It was under the Shiite Fatimids from the 10th to the 12th centuries that Muslim Egyptian institutions began to take form along with the
Ancient Egyptian race controversy was presented in some statuary in the idealized Egyptian style, she was unlikely to have dressed like this outside of performing certain rites; instead Cleopatra "wore the headband and robes of a Greek monarch." Stacy Schiff concurs, Cleopatra was not dark-skinned, that "the Ptolemies were in fact Macedonian Greek, which makes Cleopatra approximately as Egyptian as Elizabeth Taylor", that her Ptolemaic relatives were described as "honey skinned", that she was part Persian, and that "an Egyptian mistress is a rarity among the Ptolemies." (Additionally, it interesting to note that Cleopatra's son with Mark Antony, Alexander Helios, was engaged to a