Cleopatra ruled Egypt as a shrewd political operator who eliminated her own siblings to keep the throne, and this film follows historian Neil Oliver as he tests that reputation against the archaeological record. The starting point is a skeleton excavated in Ephesus, Turkey, that researchers believe belongs to Arsinoe, Cleopatra's younger sister, killed on the orders of Cleopatra and Mark Antony after she was exiled there as a rival claimant. Oliver travels between Egyptian sites and the Turkish excavation, weighing ancient texts and forensic evidence against the seductress image that has dominated popular accounts since antiquity. The film argues for a different figure: a ruler who used marriage, alliance, and murder as calculated tools of statecraft rather than romantic impulse. Alexandria's palace politics and Rome's shifting loyalties provide the backdrop, but the throughline stays on the sister's bones and what they might confirm about a queen willing to kill family to hold power.