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Akhenaten wasn’t the most manly pharaoh, even though he fathered at least a half-dozen children. In fact, his form was quite feminine. And he was a bit of an egghead.

So concludes a Yale University physician who analyzed images of Akhenaten for an annual conference Friday at the University of Maryland School of Medicine on the deaths of historic figures. The female form was due to a genetic mutation that caused the pharaoh’s body to convert more male hormones to female hormones than needed, Dr. Irwin Braverman believes. And Akhenaten’s head was misshapen because of a separate condition in which skull bones fuse at an early age.

The pharaoh had “an androgynous appearance. He had a female physique with wide hips and breasts, but he was male and he was fertile and he had six daughters,” Braverman said. “But nevertheless, he looked like he had a female physique.” Braverman, who sizes up the health of individuals based on portraits, teaches a class at Yale’s medical school that uses paintings from the university’s Center for British Art to teach observation skills to first-year students. For his study of Akhenaten, he used statues and carvings.

Akhenaten (ah-keh-NAH-ten), best known for introducing a revolutionary form of monotheism to ancient Egypt, reigned in the mid-1300s B.C. He was married to Nefertiti, and Tutankhamun, also known as King Tut, may have been his son or half brother. Egyptologist and archaeologist Donald B. Redford said he supports Braverman’s belief that Akhenaten had Marfan syndrome, a genetic disorder marked by lengthened features, including fingers and the face. Marfan syndrome would not have been responsible for his feminine appearance, however.

Visiting clinics that treat those with the condition has strengthened that conviction, “but this is very subjective, I must admit,” said Redford, a professor of classic and ancient Mediterranean studies at Penn State University. Others have theorized Akhenaten and his lineage had Froehlich’s Syndrome, which causes feminine fat distribution but also sterility. That doesn’t fit Akhenaten, who had at least six daughters, Braverman said. Klinefelter Syndrome, a genetic condition that can also cause gynecomastia, or male breast enlargement, has also been suggested, but Braverman said he suspects familial gynecomastia, a hereditary condition separate from Marfan syndrome that leads to the overproduction of estrogen and the development of breasts.

The Yale doctor said determining whether he is right can easily be done if Egyptologists can confirm which mummy is Akhenaten’s and if Egyptian government officials agree to DNA analysis. Braverman hopes his theory will lead them to do just that. “I’m hoping that after we have this conference and I bring this up, maybe the Egyptologists who work on these things all the time, maybe they will be stimulated to look,” he said.

Previous conferences have examined the deaths of Edgar Allan Poe, Alexander the Great, Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart, Florence Nightingale and others.

Erotic carvings and excavated Roman artefacts connected to sex will go on display on Saturday in Germany’s best-preserved ancient Roman city, Trier. The temporary exhibition, 100000 Years of Sex, comprises of 250 items, mainly archaeological.

They date back to the Stone Age and show how our ancestors experienced lust and procreation, said Mechthild Neyses-Eiden, deputy director of the museum.

Devised in the Netherlands and first mounted in 2003 in another museum, the exhibition is being supplemented at the Rhenish Museum in Trier with about 50 local Roman-period artefacts recovered by archaeologists.

Trier - called Treveris by the Romans - has several well-preserved buildings, such as a town gate, an arena and a church, from the time when it was a principal northern city of the late Roman empire.

The original exhibition includes primitive objects representing feminine charms, explicit pictures on Greek vases, a medieval chastity belt and an 1813 item described as the world’s oldest condom. The show, inaugurated with a party on Thursday evening, runs from Saturday till June 22. It will be repeated for the last time in the German city of Heilbronn in July 2009.

Neyses-Eiden said it was important to study past attitudes to sex in a neutral way. She said the show illustrated how different historical periods had differing attitudes. “Things we regard as normal now were regarded as revolting in medieval times,” she said. Referring to child sex, she noted that some things allowed among the Greeks were taboo or illegal nowadays.

In ancient Greece, the Scythians were at first known as mysterious “milkers of mares”. To Jeremiah, the Old Testament prophet, the Scythian mounted archers crossing Palestine to raid Egypt were “midnight people”.

Detailed reports about the rider-nomads came only some 2,500 years ago from the widely travelled Greek historian Herodotus. Now a major archaeological exhibition offers an exhaustive overview of the life and history of the enigmatic tribes that ruled the steppes in Eastern Europe and Asia for more than 500 years BC and had a little-known but highly developed culture.

Museums and institutes in eight European and Asian countries worked together in preparing the impressive show at Berlin’s Martin Gropius building. Many objects on display have never been shown in the West, among them magnificent samples excavated only in recent years.

The show’s title, Under the Sign of the Golden Griffin: the Royal Graves of the Scythians, refers to Herodotus’ claim that they originated in a “Land of the Gold-Guarding Griffins”. The griffin, a mythological animal with the body of a lion and the head of an eagle, can be seen on many artefacts recovered by archaeologists.

However, Herodotus made scarce mention of the enormous amounts of gold, silver, bronze and electrum (a gold and silver alloy) that the Scythians wore and used, and which are now fascinating exhibition visitors.

The show was triggered by a sensational find made by a German-Russian team between 2001 and 2003 on a southern Siberian plain popularly known as the Valley of the Kings. In one of untold burial mounds in the region, the team excavated the grave of a royal couple in a chamber 10 feet deep containing a vast amount of gold objects.

It was a unique discovery because grave robbers, known to have been active since antiquity, obviously abandoned search of this mound after uncovering other chambers that were empty.

Many of the artefacts from this find are on view at the exhibition. They range from a neck ring weighing 1.5 kilograms (a little over 3 pounds) to more than 5,000 tiny golden figurines of panthers decorating the capelike mantles of the prince and his wife.

The German Archaeological Institute compared the importance of the find to the discovery of Tutankhamun’s tomb in 1922 near Luxor, Egypt, in what is also known as the Valley of the Kings.

Research established that the prince died of prostate cancer in the 7th century BC. The much younger and healthy wife showed no traces of violence. But given the Scythians’ horrifying funerary ritual described by Herodotus, she hardly died of natural causes. That ritual demanded that the widow, aides and servants must immediately follow the prince or king into death. The same applied to the horses.

The skeletons of 41 slain men and women and the remains of 14 horses, all strangled or killed with battle axes, were found in other chambers of the burial mound. The funeral ceremony also included the smoking of marijuana, according to research verifying an observation already made by Herodotus.

Last year, a German-Russian-Mongolian team made another spectacular find in the permafrost of the Mongolian side of the Altai Mountains, near the Russian border. In a stone-covered mound, the archaeologists discovered the frozen remains of a Scythian warrior who died some 2,500 years ago. The partly mummified, completely clothed warrior is also displayed at the exhibition, his armament and other equipment well preserved.

The man wore a sable-rimmed fur coat and woolen trousers and his legs were stuck in boots made of felt similar to the grey blanket on which he was lying. His headdress, still to be restored, was decorated with wooden animal figurines originally covered with gold foil. The excellent preservation of the clothing permits detailed scientific research.

The “Golden Man of Issyk”, discovered in the 1970s in Kazakhstan, is also a main attraction at the show. It is the life-size reconstruction of the clothing of a youth whose corpse was literally strewn with jewellery and thousands of plates and platelets of gold.

A golden pectoral of compelling beauty found in 1971 and lent by the Ukrainian National Museums is sure to be an eye-catcher, too. A photograph of it makes the cover the detailed exhibition catalogue.

The show gives proof of the fabulous wealth the Scythians amassed by controlling important east-west trade routes. But it leaves unanswered the question how such highly detailed golden masterpieces could be created with simple hand tools.

The Golden Comb from the fabled “Siberian Collection” of Peter the Great at St Petersburg’s Hermitage Museum is a dazzling example of such masterly goldsmithing. The Russian Czar was the first among European Royalty to appreciate Scythian art and begin an important collection in the early 18th century. This started a bit of archaeological research which was scientifically intensified only some 50 years ago.

The show will move to Munich next month and then to Hamburg in 2008. Several major items, including the famous golden comb, will return to the lenders at the end of the Berlin run.

Life is not bad in this North Caucasus mountain town. The air is pure, the view is magnificent, and the centuries-old tradition of silver handiwork guarantees jobs for all.

There is one downside for the 2,000 residents of Kubachi, however. Their neighbors, a short donkey ride down the road, cannot understand a word that they say.

“What we speak here, the Kubachinsky language, people in Darginsk don’t understand at all,” said Magomed Akhmedov, director of the village’s silverworks factory. “That’s literally five or six kilometers away [three to four miles].”

The extraordinary linguistic diversity preserved amid these snow-capped peaks is what led a 10th-century geographer to name the Caucasus “the mountain of tongues.” The rocky, mostly rural region of Dagestan has one of the highest concentrations of languages in the world, between 30 and 70 in an area smaller than Scotland. Its 2.3 million residents are divided into 34 ethnic groups and nearly all speak Russian, as the territory fell to Russia’s imperial advance in 1859. Besides Russia are local languages that would strike fear into the heart of any student who has ever wrestled with case endings.

Lak, the native tongue of about 5 percent of the Dagestani population, has 56 cases, compared to six in Russian and a mere four in German, language specialist Yunusov Abdul-Raman said. But even Lak is beaten by Tabasaran, which is spoken by 95,000 in southern Dagestan and has 62 cases.

“It was in the Guinness Book of World Records! These are extremely difficult languages,” Abdul-Raman said.

Like many Dagestani tongues, Kubachinsky in not a written language and is not taught in schools, but was preserved through the Soviet era by the same combination of geography and tight social bonds that has preserved Kubachi’s tradition of silver-working for centuries.

“We only marry among ourselves. There are exceptions, but you can count them on the fingers of one hand,” said Akhmedov, who has directed the village’s silverworks factory since 2001. “Everyone here is related in one way or another.”

Unlike in neighboring Chechnya, which was devastated when Joseph Stalin deported its entire population in 1944, Dagestan’s mountain towns were largely spared from Soviet social engineering. Aside from the total number of languages here, which depends on where lines are drawn between dialect and language, the diversity of their origins also amazes scholars. Aside from the native Caucasian languages, linguists have identified Turkic, Mongol, Greek, and other language families here.

The Tats, an ethnic group of about 18,000 people living near the southern coastal city of Derbent, still speak a dialect of Persian that is over 1,000 years old. But what seven decades of Soviet rule could not erode, the creep of Western culture is beginning to. Children in Kubachi learn their native language only at home, since it has no written form and is not taught in schools. The related language of Darginsky is, but has to jostle for position with Russian and, increasingly, English.

“To tell you the truth, we teach English better than our own language,” said Darzhi Kurvan, the director of a village school. “As much as we talk about patriotism, beyond our region it’s more convenient and more profitable to know English.” And though children usually speak Kubachinsky in the home, “we’ve noticed that in the schoolyard, most of the children speak Russian. They even bawl each other out in Russian,” Kurvan said, his wizened face breaking into a smile.

“There’s a battle for these languages going on now,” said journalist and opposition activist Magomed Shamilyev, a member of Dagestan’s majority Avar ethnic group in the regional capital Makhachkala. Radio and television programs are broadcast here in 14 languages, but as more of the region’s 60-percent rural population moves to cities in search of work, the smaller languages are at risk of vanishing, Shamilyev said. And while there is a regional law reinforcing the status of Russian as an official language, “there is no law on national languages, no law to protect and develop the languages that are disappearing,” he said.

Factory director Akhmedov is living proof of how times are changing. Asked how a simple welcome would sound in Kubachinsky, he hesitated, then let a few words of Russian slip in while he spoke. “He spends too much time in the city,” laughed one of the factory’s workers. After an embarrassed smile, Magomedov repeated the phrase fluently. “There is a risk these languages will disappear,” he said, “but we preserve them in our hearts.”

Was the famous Egyptian Queen and ruler Cleopatra a black woman? And what evidence exists to decide the issue one way or another?

First of all, we could find no definitive evidence from the ancient texts which clearly state Cleopatra’s race or color. Further, the camp of scholars who say she was definitely white as well as the camp which says she was without a doubt black both rely on assumptions and anecdotal information which by themselves do not and cannot definitively decide the issue.

Thus, let us state what we know. Ancient Egypt was a predominantly black nation owning its origin more so to African peoples from the areas of ancient Ethiopia and Nubia (roughly modern day Sudan) than to the peoples of the Middle East. Therefore, the original and foundation population was a black population. Nevertheless, Egypt was the center of the ancient world. As such and as a result of the fertile Nile Valley as well as trade and invasions, Egypt absorbed peoples from throughout the ancient world ranging from Mesopotamians (ancient Iraqis) to the early Jews of the Christian Bible. It was also invaded by a host of people including the Hyksos, a mysterious group call the Sea Peoples, the Persians, the Greeks and the Romans.

The net result of all this intermingling was that over time the people of Northern (called Lower Egypt because of the flow of the Nile) Egypt became more mixed or lighter in complexion that the people of Southern (Upper) Egypt.

As for Cleopatra, the foundation of her family lineage was Macedonian Greek. Alexander the Great died shortly after conquering Egypt. After his death, control of Egypt fell around 305 BC to one of his generals named Ptolemy. He established the Ptolemy line of Pharaohs who ruled Egypt for the next 200 years. Cleopatra was the last pharaoh in the Ptolemy line.

Now, for those who would have us believe that Cleopatra was white, the above fact settles the issue. They say she was Macedonian Greek and that’s the end of it. However, to accept their position requires that one believe that for over 200 years there was no intermarriage or even intercourse between the Ptolemy line and members of the native Egyptian population.

Such a position is impossible to believe, especially given the fact that the ancient Greeks virtually idolized the Egyptians and their institutions. Indeed, shortly after conquering Egypt, Alexander the Great visited the Great Pyramid at Gisa and declared himself son of the Egyptian god Ammon Ra. Without in any way diminishing the accomplishments of the ancient Greeks themselves, the historical record is clear that the Greeks adopted everything Egyptian from many of their gods to most of their laws. The writings of Greeks ranging from Aristotle to Herodotus are full of praise and admiration for the Egyptians. Aristotle, considered one of the wisest men who ever lived, praises the Egyptians in his Metaphysika saying among other things, “Egypt was the cradle of mathematics because the caste of priests were given great leisure, schole.”

Thus, it is impossible to believe that the Ptolemy line or any other Greeks would have separated themselves from and not intermarried with a people they so greatly admired.

Specifically regarding Cleopatra, let us establish that there were several Cleopatra’s in Egyptian history. The one of legend and about which most people speak was actually Cleopatra VII. She was the daughter of Ptolemy XII called Auletes and Cleopatra V known as Tryphaenea.

If Cleopatra VII had any black blood, it would have come from her father’s side of the family. There is some reason to believe that Auletes’ mother, Cleopatra’s grand mother, was a black woman. There is little doubt that Auletes himself was not a pure Macedonian Greek. His birth was frequently referred to as being “irregular on his mother’s side.” This almost certainly means that his mother, Cleopatra’s grandmother, was not Macedonian Greek. But was she black? This is where I part company with those Afro-centric historians who say Cleopatra was definitely black. There is simply no description or labeling of Cleopatra’s grandmother to be found in the ancient historical record. We simply do not know for sure whether Cleopatra’s grandmother was a black woman. All we can be reasonably sure of is that Cleopatra was of mixed ethnic or racial background. She was part Macedonian Greek and part something else.

Finally, the fact that Auletes’ mother may have been black did not seem to bother the Greeks and the Egyptians. His mixed background was known and he still became pharaoh. It was the Romans who caused the problem and may have indirectly caused the destruction of the information which could have established whether or not Cleopatra was black.

At this time (80 BC to 51 BC) Auletes, Ptolemy XII, was paying tribute to Rome as both an ally and to avoid being invaded. Our research suggests that a move began in the Roman Senate to challenge Auletes’ right to be Egyptian Pharaoh in the Ptolemy line because he was not pure Macedonian Greek. Auletes (a scoundrel and playboy who spent little time actually ruling Egypt) did two things to beat back the challenge to his rule. He bribed two powerful Roman senators, Ceasar and Crassus, to block the issue from coming up in the Roman Senate and just in case that failed he began hiding and destroying evidence about his mother. This is probably the reason that today we can find so little evidence about his mother’s background.

The bottom line is that Cleopatra VII was not pure Macedonian Greek. She was almost certainly of mixed ethnic or racial background. That mixture may have been a grandmother who was black but we simply do not know for sure because Auletes appears to have hidden evidence of his mother’s background in order to defeat a Roman (not Greek or Egyptian) challenge to his rule.