Cleopatra's royal barge on the Nile

Cleopatra VII (69–30 BC) was the last active ruler of the Ptolemaic Kingdom of Egypt, the Greek-speaking dynasty founded by Ptolemy, a general of Alexander the Great. She ruled from 51 BC until her death in 30 BC, from Alexandria, and was known for her alliances with Julius Caesar and later Mark Antony. The Ptolemaic kings kept large, richly decorated river barges for travel on the Nile, and ancient writers say Cleopatra and Caesar journeyed up the river together in 47 BC.

The most famous description of her barge does not come from the Nile. Plutarch, writing more than a century later in his Life of Antony, tells how in 41 BC she answered Antony's summons by sailing up the Cydnus River to Tarsus, in what is now southern Turkey, in a barge with a gilded stern, purple sails and silver oars, rowed to the music of flutes, while she reclined under a canopy of cloth of gold, fanned by attendants. The meeting began her political and personal alliance with Antony.

This illustration is an imagined royal barge scene on the Nile inspired by that account, not a picture of the Tarsus meeting. Cleopatra and Antony were defeated by Octavian at Actium in 31 BC, and she died in Alexandria in 30 BC.