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© AlamyA German scientist says it is unlikely renowned beauty Cleopatra (famously played by Elizabeth Taylor, left) committed suicide via the bite of an Egyptian cobra as this would have been 'agonising and disfiguring'
Cleopatra 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.

The African queen, played by Elizabeth Taylor in the 1963 film with Richard Burton as her on-screen and real-life lover, modelled herself on the reincarnation of an Egyptian goddess during her reign.

After losing the Battle of Actium, her Roman beau Marc Antony is said to have committed suicide.

Cleopatra followed suit, according to tradition by killing herself by means of an asp bite on August 12, 30 BC.

Her legacy survives in numerous works of art and the many dramatisations of her story in literature and other media, including Shakespeare's tragedy Antony and Cleopatra, Jules Massenet's opera Cléopâtre as well as the Burton-Taylor epic.

In most depictions, Cleopatra is portrayed as a great beauty and her successive conquests of the world's most powerful men are taken to be proof of her aesthetic and sexual appeal.

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© Joe McDonald/CorbisEgyptian cobra
'It was this aspect, her beauty which she cherished so much, which made me journey with other experts to Alexandria, Egypt, where we 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 ZDF entitled "Cleopatra's Death: How did the last female Pharaoh really die?"

'She probably took a cocktail, which, back then 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.

'We consulted eminent zoologists and toxicologists; a snake bite would have been too uncertain and taken too long.'

Dietrich Mebs, one of those poison specialists, said he thought the drug cocktail was 'much more a favourite than the snake. She would have had to drink it because there was no method of injecting oneself at the time.'

The programme displays ancient texts that record the potion as being a popular method of suicide - and assassination - at the time she lived.