Cleopatra - death by cocktail?

The Telegraph, UK (Allan Hall)

The Queen of the Nile ended her life in 30BC and it has always been held that it was the bite of an asp – now called the Egyptian cobra – which caused her demise.

Now Christoph Schaefer, German historian and professor at the University of Trier, is presenting evidence that aims to prove drugs and not the reptile were the cause of death.

"Queen Cleopatra was famous for her beauty and was unlikely to have subjected herself to a long and disfiguring death," he said.

He journeyed with other experts to Alexandria, Egypt, where they consulted ancient medical texts and snake experts.

"Cleopatra wanted to remain beautiful in her death to maintain her myth," he says on the Adventure Science show screened by the German television channel ZDF.

"She probably took a cocktail of opium, hemlock and aconitum. 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."

Daily Mail (Allan Hall)

Cleopartra did not die from a snake bite but from drinking a lethal drug cocktail, a German scientist said today.

The Queen of the Nile ended her life in 30 BC. Legend has always held that it was the bite of an asp - an Egyptian cobra - which caused her demise.

Now Christoph Schaefer, a German historian and professor at the University of Trier, will present evidence on a television programme tomorrow that he claims will prove that drugs and not a snake were the cause of death.

He will say that the bite of an asp would have given her an agonising death over several days. Toxicologists and zoologists believe she took a drug cocktail instead.

'Queen Cleopatra was famous for her beauty and was unlikely to have subjected herself to a long and disfiguring death,' said Schaefer, the author of a best-selling book in Germany called Cleopatra.