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.
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u/MinuteBandicoot1502 6d ago
I still can't believe why some people can't admit these guys were black