Egyptian nationalism 1924, the Prime Minister Saad Zaghloul formally opened to Tutakhuam's tomb to the Egyptian public in an elaborate ceremony held at night with the sky lit up by floodlights, which reportedly attracted the largest crowd seen in Luxor. The reopening turned into an anti-British demonstration when the British High Commissioner, Field Marshal Allenby, arrived when the crowd demanding immediate British withdrawal from Egypt. The dispute over who owned King Tutankhamun's treasures took place against the backdrop of a movement in the Egyptian intelligentsia known as Pharaonism which extolled ancient Egypt as a national symbol and portrayed Egypt as a Mediterranean
Ancient Egyptian race controversy may have been part Syrian, in line with the precedent of Persian and Syrian blood in the Ptolemaic line, continuing that Cleopatra "almost certainly had olive skin and dark eyes." Michael Grant also argues that Cleopatra's paternal grandmother may have been mixed Syrian and Greek, continuing that "certainly she was not an Egyptian," noting there is only one known Egyptian mistress of a Ptolemy and no known Egyptian wife of a Ptolemaic king. He goes on to say Cleopatra probably had not a drop of Egyptian blood and that she "would have described herself as Greek," adding that if Cleopatra