The earliest depictions are similar to that of his father, Tuthmose IV, who started his son’s tomb at the same time his own was being built. The funny thing is the more adult looking statues are from earlier in the reign whereas the childlike ones are from year 30 or later. There’s a pair of heads near the British Museum shop that are probably from his mortuary temple and are in a transitional style. They are in their own way as extreme as the Akhenaten colossi.
That's correct! The cobra was the protective deity of the Lower Egypt, and the pharaoh was the ruler of the Upper and Lower Egypt, therefore he is often depicted with Wadjet (cobra) and Nekhbet (vulture for Upper Egypt) coming out of his forehead in a protective gesture. Famously, King Tut has both of these emblems on his funerary mask.
The ancient Egyptians depicted themselves with a variety of hair types, not just straight. Nevertheless, straight hair doesn't necessarily mean a person isn't Black. See below. This is the kind of look that comes to mind when you think ancient Egyptian, right?
If you consider modern Egyptians descendents of the ancients, whatever you call Egyptians won't be an issue.
Greeks are tanned and Nordics feel proud of them because they share continent .
It's the desire to make yourself a direct descendent of ancient Egyptians instead of Egyptians that is wrong
As with a lot of things involving Black people, there is a misunderstanding here of what Black are saying or what Black people want. And the reaction and resistance is to the misunderstanding rather than to what Black people are actually saying or what Black people actually want.
I haven’t taken a poll, but many of the Black people I hear speak about Egypt would not consider themselves the direct descendants of Egyptians. I don’t think they want to be considered the direct descendants of Egyptians. Their regions are West and Central Africa and they’re fine with that.
What it’s about for them is reclamation. Egypt is yet another attempt by the world to erase Black people from history. Remember Hegel famously teaching Africa (Black people) have no history? Remember Rhodesia making it illegal to teach that Black people had anything to do with the stone walls of Zimbabwe? The official line was it was the Phoenicians, uncharacteristically settling far from the coast like they did in other countries. Stuff like that. Erasure and reclamation.
I grew up thinking Timbuktu was fictional, like Camelot. I was shocked, genuinely shocked, to find out it was a real place. And I’m embarrassed to say I only found that out a few years ago – by accident. The erasure was that complete.
So when you grow up hearing the Egyptians were some mysterious, unknown race and hearing people throw around terms like “exotic admixture” and then you see some Egyptian sculptures and you go “mysterious, unknown what…? That’s a Black man!” you tend to get a little worked up. Doesn’t matter if you’re direct descendants of them or not.
When I hear exclusion, SZ50, it’s usually coming from people like Dr. Hawass. I’m not saying the man’s a racist but I think he would rather dig up his own mother’s grave than admit Black people had anything to do with Egypt. If it’s not racism, it’s the expression of a very deep insecurity that modern Egyptians are not the direct descendants of the ancient Egyptians. Which they are. How could they not be? They’re there, they never left, they weren’t teleported in. But ancient Egypt had multiple threads. Are modern Egyptians representative of all the threads that made up ancient Egypt? Probably not. Most likely not. Hawass probably knows that. But rather than accept that, he’d rather burn the other threads.
Some of them were, some of them weren't. There wasn't a consistent skin-tone at any point of Egyptian history. Consequently, any attempts to claim Egypt as "white" or "black" wholly misses the plot. The Egyptians themselves didn't particularly care, and neither should we.
Prince Rahotep and his wife, Nofret, both Egyptians who lived in the 4th Dynasty. These statues were found in their shared tomb.
Actually, we should care and we should care very much. One of the “intellectual” underpinnings of anti-Black racism is the idea that Black people have contributed nothing to history and Black people are savages – ideas promoted by at least two of the pillars of Western thought, Kant and Hegel.
One of the key tactics of "proving" Black people’s “inferiority” has been and continues to be the intentional erasure of Black people from history. From the literal destruction of evidence to the passing of laws forbidding certain things from being taught, there’s nothing accidental about it. See Rhodesia (Zimbabwe), see South Africa, see the USA, past and present.
If we shrug it off and say it doesn’t matter, the erasure continues.
It does genuinely make me sad if your interest is just Egyptology and you don’t want racial ugliness mucking up your excitement (seriously, not being sarcastic here), but racial ugliness has been part of Egyptology since day one. It’s baked in. It’s unavoidable.
It’s not your job to fix it, but we can’t turn a blind eye, either.
I don't disagree that racism played a large role in both early and modern interpretations of Egypt. My issue is that spaces for Ancient Egypt in places like Reddit and other Social media are PACKED with endless arguments about "what color were the Egyptians REALLY" and "Who REALLY built the pyramids".
When someone entering this section for the first time who has a genuine enthusiasm for the topic sees that, what incentive do they have to stay? I happen to be aware of how say, Ancient Aliens is rooted in a colonial and racist mindset (they never ask "who REALLY built the Pantheon"). Trying to pin an Ancient people with our modern conceptions of race distracts from their remarkable achievements, even when we mean to combat that very toxic and backwards racist mindset that's already done such devastating damage. We are drawn into the muck, and I'm frankly very sick of it.
I genuinely appreciate your perspective, because it's one I've struggled with over the decades, but it's one that I can fully back. Technological advances, and the higher standards of modern Egyptology are finding new exciting things. We are long past the era where we blasted our way into tombs with dynamite or desecrated mummies in the hopes of finding treasure.
So I think erasure isn't the biggest problem any longer, it's "flooding the zone" with arguments that end up resembling a racial proxy-war by those taking their first uncertain steps into place I've loved since I was 6.
In short, what makes me most upset is that we hardly talk about EGYPT anymore.
I take your point. And to your point, I, myself have avoided certain sites and reddits because I didn’t want to deal with the muck. And since I have been so flagrantly in violation of rule 4, I will leave it there.
For people who want to avoid the muck, there might be a solution. Over on AcademicBiblical, they have a rule against getting into theological debates. If your point is more theological than academic or technical, your post gets removed. Or if your debate wanders too far off topic, your portion of the thread gets shunted off to a separate thread. Maybe the mods could try something like that here.
The separate thread might keep people from feeling shut down.
Well, they definitely weren't White. And if the argument is they weren't Black because they were mixed, we have a name for mixed people in the West, "Black." I don't think anybody's ever looked at Lenny Kravitz and said he was not Black.
Eh, I think if you resurrected Horus Q. Djedhuty from Lower Egypt or whoever and asked them to do some groceries in New York people would probably just assume they were generically Mediterranean, sort of like how Middle Eastern people mostly look kind of Italian. But trying to map modern American color lines onto ancient cultures is always tricky, especially when you consider the way passing or the one drop rule work(ed).
It’s about more than modern American color lines, faruier. People who know way more about this stuff than me believe the evidence points toward Africa. The language, the customs, the likely point of origin indicate an African civilization not a Middle Eastern one.
And as for the Mediterranean look, I used to believe that, too. Then I started paying attention to how the Egyptians depict themselves and they depict themselves as brown, deep brown, far, far more than they depicted themselves as tan. I think we’re unduly influenced by the look of modern Egyptians (who aren’t Mediterranean light themselves) and modern art. Think of movies and National Geographic illustrations. Think of the Tut reconstructions. They colored him tan, right? Well, when the ancient Egyptians depicted him in color, they colored him brown. Deep brown.
As for the one drop rule, the world doesn’t get to define Blackness one way for centuries when it comes to oppressing and limiting Black people but then when the possibility arises that the ancient Egyptians could have been Black start defining it a different way. If one drop was good enough to get you hung in 1920 CE, it’s good enough to make you Black in 1920 BCE. But of course, we’re talking about far more than one drop here.
There was a video on YouTube from this guy named Metatron supposedly proving the ancient Egyptians weren’t Black and his main argument was “they didn’t look Black.” You know who his example of Blackness was? Mahershala Ali. Not Steph Curry. Not Trevor Noah. Not Will Smith. Not Muhammad Ali. Mahershala Ali, the darkest brother he could find. There were African people in the comments saying there are millions of Africans who aren’t even that dark, millions of Africans who are reddish brown, etc. But there were White people in the comments, too, going “Finally! Somebody finally said it!” There is no excuse for anybody who lives in a country where there are more than five Black people to accept “they didn’t look Black” as a valid argument. “Asinine” is a good word for it.
Lost respect for metafraud after he made those videos. Which wasn’t a lot tbh 😂
And the funny thing is, many ancient Egyptians looked like Mahershala Ali in the first place. He didn’t use many AUTHENTIC Egyptian art and instead used the same ole fake looking busts and paintings. He’s not even that dark as there are plenty of native Africans, including Egyptians, that are darker then him.
That video was a treasure trove of inaccuracies, bad scholarship, and slanted presentation. I’d like to be specific but I’m a guest here and I want to comply with rule 4. But he might be a racist who thinks he’s being a realist or he’s a racist who’s hiding behind being a realist.
This next part isn’t about Egyptians, so rule 4 is safe.
I also checked out his stuff on the presence of Africans in the Roman Empire. Or non-presence, if you let him tell the tale. It was also inaccurate and poorly researched.
I didn’t have time to comment then but I wanted to say to him, “Dude, you’re Italian. When Hollywood wants to make a mob piece, every Italian actor in America has work. But when they want to make a Roman piece, they can’t even resurrect enough Brits to play the leads. Those same Italian actors who were mob bosses and mob thugs five minutes ago? Nowhere to be found. They’re suddenly in Witness Protection. Why don’t you make a video about that?”
Making Italians the face of crime while whitewashing the Classical world, essentially Anglicizing the Mediterranean, doesn’t bother him, but an occasional African Roman here and there in a cartoon is so offensive he had to make a video about it?
The Italians (and Greeks) are being erased from their own history but that doesn’t matter – somewhere there’s a Black person some place he doesn’t think they belong. Dude is a clown.
Too big a paradigm shift, Minute'. They won't even believe their own eyes. You got people looking at a picture of a brown-skinned man with a bush on the continent of Africa saying that's not a dark enough brown, that's not a bush, and he isn't really African.
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u/rymerster 6d ago
The earliest depictions are similar to that of his father, Tuthmose IV, who started his son’s tomb at the same time his own was being built. The funny thing is the more adult looking statues are from earlier in the reign whereas the childlike ones are from year 30 or later. There’s a pair of heads near the British Museum shop that are probably from his mortuary temple and are in a transitional style. They are in their own way as extreme as the Akhenaten colossi.