10 PhDs Say The Ancient Egyptians Were WHAT!?! | Expert Perspectives

A hierarchy of race like that developed by Morden, Nahum, and still deployed today by white supremacists cannot be sustained if not one but two great black civilizations arose in Africa at the dawn of history. It is therefore entirely appropriate and even necessary to confront constructions of race for Nubia and Egypt in the recent past and acknowledge both civilizations as African and black. So did you face any of that type of backlash or harsh feedback from your stance on HPE? So, yes, but interestingly, I haven't received any harsh feedback from Egyptologists. When I go around and I give talks on this subject, the Egyptologists who've been in the audience of my talk are very receptive and they think that this is really important work and that I need to keep forging ahead with it. But I have gotten negative feedback, especially over email from Egyptians. So it's an interesting conundrum where there are some Egyptians who will tell me, I mean, these are people I don't know who are just like finding out how to contact me and send me an email and say, what you're doing is wrong. The ancient Egyptian culture was not a black culture. Modern Egyptians are not black people. What you're doing is dangerous. You need to stop saying this, which, of course, I'm not going to stop saying this. And I try to explain what my work is about. And I also try to explain our perspective in America on what black is, is different from a lot of the rest of the world. And so I try to explain our American context of that word. But, yeah, it's I've definitely gotten some harsh feedback. First off, the Egyptians, of course, were African, and we have evidence from Herodotus and other sources that Africans tended to be black, that they were a range of colors that would constitute black today. And they were actually the Greek words that are used for them is black. Now, don't misunderstand me. I am not saying that the ancient Egyptians were not black as we Americans perceive it. They were the way we define black with mixed race, one drop rule, the way we define black as a positive thing. The Egyptians were black. So you're suggesting maybe these people migrated north? Yes. Yes. So their culture did end up well, really, really east to the Nile Valley, east and north. East and north. Yeah, I see. So today in Egypt, the archaeologists often refer to, and I've been there, to connections between ancient Egyptian culture and the Sumerian culture and the Crete culture and the Persian culture. Yet when you visit Egypt, especially around the Aswan in the southern part of the Nile, you see mostly black people. Yes. Yeah. And we know from the anthropological evidence that the people just predating the dynastic civilization in the Naptapai region were black African people. I can sympathize with the impulse to sort of to be very strident, to be very argumentative, to be very certain, to act very certain about the blackness of the ancient Egyptians, because for the for the longest time, the very longest time, there was this prevailing idea that black is Africa and Africa is less than, right, that no matter what happens, no matter how you cast it, any time you fall on the wrong side of that dividing line between black and not black, even not between black and white, whatever is coming from that black side is going to be less than. And it's it took people being willing to challenge that orthodoxy and sometimes in a very ill-informed way, right? Sometimes, you know, just took people coming up and going, I feel like this. And so I'm going to say it and make it right. And it turns out they actually were in some ways. Right. Because now we can look at Egypt and say the ancient Egyptians are an African civilization. These are people who, by and large, we probably would have looked at and thought, oh, these are black people. And when it comes to the 25th dynasty, a lot of people are going to commonly call them the black pharaohs. You see it online. You know, there's books written titled that so on and so forth. Do you feel like that distinction has to be made? And how I ask that is I've noticed online a lot of people don't seem to think that for some reason you could be black and be Egyptian. And I've always kind of disagreed with that because I feel like even though the ancients weren't colorblind, per se, I feel that you could be black and be Egyptian. Would you say that is correct? Yes, I think I think so. For instance, as I told you before, this kind of, for instance, of Nubian warriors that were settling in Egypt, at some time they were living a perfectly Egyptian life and they collaborated with the Egyptians and so on. I don't know if you have in mind, for instance, the representation of people carrying a colossal statue. There are rows of people, of young people, young soldiers, something like that. And you find Nubians, Egyptians, Libyans and so on. There was this kind of idea that the local rulers rule, in fact, over, say, multicultural society, probably in which the military component was quite important. Military contingents made Nubians of people from Asia, from Libya and so on. So I think it was perfectly normal that these people, they were black, so they married Egyptians or inversely, Nubian women, they married Egyptians and so on. I think there is some evidence, for instance, in the documents of the New Kingdom of this kind of, I don't know, of marriage between people from different geographical or cultural or ethnical roots. And I think it was no problem at all. As I said before, they could reach very important positions in the kingdom. And for instance, in the late Bronze Age, it was quite normal that very Nubians or very high local position, they built wonderful and excellent tombs in Egyptian style, they reached important positions in the Egyptian administration and so on. So why not when black people or people from Nubia, they became far out? Well, they continue to represent themselves sometimes with their very distinctive physical characteristics and so on. It was, I think, no problem at all. I've worked in prisons now for 18 years. That was my first time I'd been in a prison. And the teacher who picked me up at the stations, she said, well, you are looking at this as Africa. And I was like, well, yeah, of course, of course I am. And she said, well, you know, because she said that's how they, you know, my students see it. I said, well, how else would they see it? And I remember her looking slightly confused. And and then the first sort of interaction I had with one of her students was he came in the room and he said, you know, ancient Egypt is African. I went, yeah, of course. And I thought I hadn't heard him properly. And he said, I said it was like African, as in black African. And I'm like, yeah, and what's your point? And I think it was only really that after that experience that I thought, am I in some kind of bubble here or something? You know, and I started to actually look into the sort of background, really the sort of which we're starting to talk about a little bit more in terms of colonial approaches, but still not not directly the racism that Egyptology is founded upon. And at that point, it was almost like a sort of light bulb moment. I thought, well, why why is this still the case? When we, you know, are we still stuck, you know, a hundred years sort of previously in this kind of racist ideology? Why is nobody challenging this? Because other disciplines had. So anthropology had looked very hard at itself in terms of looking at its colonial kind of past. It just seemed that Egyptology was kind of almost stuck there and it didn't really want to talk about it. So so for me, it always was African. It was a bit of a shock to me when I actually started looking a bit deeper into this and then started having conversations with people and seeing how they responded to that. I think that the further back in history you go, the blacker the Egyptians are, and by black, I don't merely mean dark skin, but also with other Negro characteristics. You have spent much of your life studying the history of the ancient Egyptians. Who were the ancient Egyptians? How did they look? Here you have the first king of the earth, the very first. And the Egyptians, the ancient Egyptians, looked like this man. You can see that he has those traits that are associated with the black feature, those features associated with the black race, which are even more pronounced than many of the people here. It was this man who unified the Nile Valley from upper to lower Egypt, and this was three thousand three hundred years before Jesus Christ. You can see by his features and those of the pharaohs and kings that will follow it. You can see that they were not a people that started as whites and became progressively more black. They were instead a black people, an authentic black people, but which never ceased to be blacks. You can see that the first man, the Egyptians were black men like black men that you see in Africa now.