Cleopatra was not Egyptian by ancestry

Cleopatra VII belonged to the Ptolemaic dynasty, founded by a Macedonian Greek general under Alexander. She is said to be the first Ptolemaic ruler to learn the Egyptian language.

Context

After Alexander the Great died in 323 BCE, his general Ptolemy took control of Egypt and later ruled as king, founding a dynasty that lasted until Cleopatra's death in 30 BCE. The court was run in Greek, and the royal family married mostly within itself, including brother-sister marriages.

Cleopatra VII became joint ruler in 51 BCE. The ancient writer Plutarch says she spoke many languages and did not need an interpreter with several foreign peoples, and that she was unlike her predecessors in learning Egyptian. She also presented herself to Egyptians in traditional terms, including identification with the goddess Isis.

A caveat is that the identity of her mother is not firmly known. Her father was Ptolemy XII, but some historians suggest her mother may not have been a Ptolemaic princess, so a small non-Greek ancestry cannot be fully ruled out. Her paternal line, however, was Macedonian Greek.

This matters because modern portrayals sometimes assume she was ethnically Egyptian or of any particular background, and the surviving evidence does not settle that detail beyond her dynasty's origins.

Greek remained the language of government in Ptolemaic Egypt, which is why a ruler who also used Egyptian stood out to later writers.