An Italian Egyptologist has rediscovered the twin babies of Cleopatra VII and Mark Antony at the Egyptian museum in Cairo.

Giuseppina Capriotti, an Egyptologist at Italy's National Research Council, found the statues of the babies Alexander Helios (Sun) and Cleopatra Selene (Moon) in the museum that were discovered near the temple of Dendera on the west bank of the Nile in 1918, according to Discovery News.

Capriotti identified the twins based on some iconographic analysis published by the Polish Centre of Mediterranean Archaeology at the University of Warsaw.

According to her description, the sculpture was 33 feet long and showed two naked children, a boy and a girl. The boy had a sun-disc on his head, while the girl had a lunar disc and a crescent. Both discs have been decorated with udjat-eye, also called the eye of Horus, a common symbol in Egyptian art.

"It shows two naked children, one male and one female, of identical size standing within the coils of two snakes. Each figure has an arm over the other's shoulder, while the other hand grasps a serpent," Giuseppina Capriotti, an Egyptologist at Italy's National Research Council, told Discovery News.

"Unfortunately the faces are not well preserved, but we can see that the boy has curly hair and a braid on the right side of the head, typical of Egyptian children. The girl's hair is arranged in a way similar to the so-called melonenfrisur (melon coiffure) an elaborated hairstyle often associated with the Ptolemaic dynasty and Cleopatra particularly," she added.

Capriotti also explained to Discovery News that the sculpture was an example showing the blend of Egyptian myths and Greek tradition. While the moon is a deity in Egypt, the name Selene (moon) has been added to the twin girl's name (Cleopatra Selene) in accordance with Greek tradition.

It is been said that the twins are not Cleopatra's first children as she already had two children Julius Caesar and Ptolemy Philadelphus.

Cleopatra, who has been regarded as the most beautiful woman of all time, was said to be the last pharaoh of Egypt.

Several theories have been suggested as to how Cleopatra died. According to legend, the beautiful woman died of snake bite, but a Daily Mail report said that a study conducted in 2010 by Christoph Schäfer, German historian and professor at the University of Trier, claimed that Cleopatra died after consuming a cocktail drug.

Egypt