Netflix causes international uproar over Cleopatra

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That was a different time when it was popularly believed "black" people were incapable of civilisation so Egypt was therefore built by people who looked "nordic"

There is some stupidity in the Egyptian response to Pinkett-Smith's Netflix drama which illustrates that modern Egyptians are also ignorant of past civilisations that existed in the same geographic area.

Firstly Cleopatra was Macedonian-Greek and she spoke Greek as her first language. She interacted with Greeks and Romans who she saw as her cultural peers. She is on record as the first Ptolemy ruler to speak Egyptian. But that's hardly any great achievement given Prince Charles of England speaks English but is 100% German.

That her identity is tied with Egyptian "ethnic" identity is also incorrect. It looks like modern Egyptians want "white" Cleopatra to be Egyptian and tied their islamic and cultural values with her when infact she was a coloniser. This would be like Indians claiming Queen Victoria as an Indian Queen because she was called "Empress of India".

Secondly modern Egyptians fall for the same ignorant trap as Afro-Americans on the subject of geography. Just because a queen ruled in the same geographic area as where modern Egyptians live doesn't make her your cultural property. If anything Cleopatra should be the cultural figure for Greece and Macedonia (not Egypt).

While many African Americans show ignorance over culturally appropriating Egypt (on the one hand they get angry at Europeans for not recognizing the great diversity in Africa but then literally do the same thing by claiming Egypt as part of one "black" culture). I mean saying just because Egpyt is in Africa means they are black is like saying India is in Asia so Indians are the same Chinese

But Egyptians do the same thing. Modern Egyptians claiming they are the same stock of people who built the pyramids is like Spanish saying they built the pyramids in Mexico. Modern Egyptians are descended from migrants who are ethnically/culturally nothing to do with ancient Egypt. The head of antiquities in Egypt, Zawi Hawass may also want to check his own ignorance when he makes projected comments about what Egyptians looked like or who built the pyramids (but again that's another story)

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You displayed sanity in this post...until the last paragraph....when you suddenly lost your mind.

WTF are you talking about in the last paragraph?

Most modern Egyptians ARE indeed mostly descended from the people who built the Pyramids at Giza five thousand years ago.

When and how do you think that the ancient Egyptians vanished? And who told you that they vanished?

Its true that Spaniards who live in Madrid cant claim that "their ancestors built the Pyramids in Mexico", but modern Mexicans can and do claim that. Most modern Mexicans are Mestizo (mixed European and Native American ancestry)and may not be 100 percent pure Aztecs, but most have a lot of pre columbian indigenious blood. And in some rural areas the modern peasants still speak Nahuatl, or Maya, or Zapotec, or whatever. So they can, and do, claim the builders of Teotihuacan as their own ancestors.

The Egypt of the Pharoahs ended with the Persian Empire around 600 BC. Then Egypt was ruled by Greeks, then Romans, and then by the Byzantines. And the Pagan gods were replaced by Coptic Christianity, and finally the Arab followers of Mohammed swept through Egypt in 700 AD- and absorbed Egypt and North Africa into the Muslim Arab culture of today.

But these invaders only added some DNA to the local mix, they didnt replace the local DNA.

So there has been a lot of cultural discontinuity between the Egypt of the Pharoahs and modern Egypt. But thats not the same thing as racial discontinuity.

I know some Egyptians were upset about Anwar Sadat being portrayed by an actor they thought was too dark. I have not looked into whether or not anyone in that country was upset over the Cleopatra or Moses films, but unless that lawyer cites those movies as equally objectionable, it will certainly give me pause. There were also Cleopatra TV movies in my part of the world not so very long ago in which U.S. and British actors portrayed Egyptians and Romans. There was only outrage when Roland Emmerich made a movie set in Egypt, within the last decade I think that received criticism for being "whitewashed." One of the first Egyptologysts to counter the out of Europe or purely Semitic ethnicity of ancient Egyptians was E.A. Wallis Budge over a century ago and it is now generally understood that they were not a homogeneous population.

That is interesting.

1) Sadat WAS darker skinned than typical Arab Egyptians and most Americans would label him as "Black" if he were to walk down an American street.

2)Sadat was one quarter Black (his mother's mother was Sudanese).

In the Jim Crow American south his one quarter Black ancestry would get him legally labeled as being "Black".

But the sad thing is...a college buddy from Pakistan told me-- that his being part Black made him "low" in modern Egyptian society, and that was part of his hardscrabble humble background that he had to over come to become head of his country.

So ...Egyptians spat upon him for being Black in his youth, but now wanna make him lighter skinned in a movie!

Human beings are a trip.

If your concern is pure scientific accuracy you would cast Cleopatra as (more or less) White-ish(but you wouldnt have her played by Nicole Kidman). And you make Sadat Black.So Egyptians are right about their ancient ruler but wrong about the more modern ruler. But like Westerners Egyptians have...other agendas...than just pure accuracy...apparently.

That is colourism. It's a scourge of virtually the entire equatorial world. The source in ancient times is that the aristocracy never ventured in the sun while workers became sun-burnt after toiling in the heat.

Following colonialism the European masters found it expedient to overlay white supremacy although the Persian speaking Mughals already ruled northern India for 800 years so there was a perception (at least among the muslims including the ancestors of your Pakistani buddy) that darker skinned Indian women might be suitable concubines but for marriage and children better to find find a fair skinned Persian wife. Not surprisingly the Arab rulers of Egypt had similar sentiments.

I have a lot of problems with Zawai Hawass. I'm not sure if you are aware but Hawass has a colourful history and his PhD supervisor was none other than Dr Mark Lehner who was a follower of Edgar Cayce and Zachariah Sitchin. The latter two are into UFO/alien origins of civilisation and are wholly eurocentric and believe civilisation started in Sumer and moved into Egypt.

Hawass has made a number of stupid comments and he has been somewhat of the cuff statements about race and Egypt.

What's the bottom line?

There are three dimensions to who built the pyramids and sphinx
1. culture - we can safely say the modern Egyptians have zero (0) cultural affinity with old kingdom Egyptians.
2. geography - according to Eurocentric archaeology the original builders of the pyramids are from the Levant because modern Egyptians look physically like those from that region. But correlation doesn't equal causation (you should know that?). More modern studies point to the roots of what would become the earliest Nile civilisations from 2 sources. The first is tribes that moved from the Sahara as the once arable region became desert. The second are tribes that moved from south of the Nile north,

It's the last point where Hawass has made a fool of himself. In the 1990s he said categorically black subsaharans could not have contributed to Egypt but subsequent archaology has proven his assertions are wrong and that upper Egypt civilisations that existed in Sudan and the horn of Africa were contemporaneous with lower Egypt. This is why I am saying Hawass needs to check his own bias

3, The final dimension is that of time. Growing evidence including water erosion over the sphinx suggest the tribes that first settled and formed the earliest civilisations along the Nile were likely contemporaneous with when the Sahara desert was green and arable. The idea that nobody lived in Egypt when what is north Africa when it was teeming with life, rainfall and good soils is entirely ignorant. Growing evidence shows that the people who first lived in Egypt were of more broader african origin than simply Arabic looking people. it's easy to project based on current populations but Hawass lies when he speaks so confidently of the population profile of pre-dynastic Egyptians.

I find it curious nobody in Egypt raised a peep when this horrific production was made


Double standards

Totally.

Just sayin'.

Yup. A white Jesus doesn't make any sense. That always bugged me whenever I had to walk into a church.

Jesus has got a seriously dodgy-looking beard there… I’m shocked.

But the "Berlin bust" isn't Cleopatra - it's Queen Nefertiti, and it's not Roman, being created around 1340 BC in the workshop of royal court sculptor Thutmose.
Maybe you're thinking of something else?

See: https://www.smb.museum/en/museums-insti ... nefertiti/ and https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nefertiti_Bust




Fixed that for you.

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I dont know how to post, or link to still pics and articles. Only motion picture videos.

So....

GO TO WIKI by typing "Cleopatra" into Google search.

At that Wiki article You will see a big photo of something that the articles IDs as "the Berlin Bust".

That something is a different thing than the famous pic of Nefertititi you are showing.

It is a stone bust without paint on it of...a different, and much more ordinary looking chic. That chic being Cleopatra. She aint bad, but she aint as glamorous looking as Nefertiti. And Cleo looks just like she looks on the hundreds of coins minted during her reign - that you can also google.

Your Nefertitit portrait was (as our art history teacher said) "the forerunner of the covers of all fashion magazines". And she was the first "cover girl".

Oh thank god. Hawass seriously get's on my nerves with his "Raiders of the Lost Ark" stunts he pulls prior to any major excavation in Egypt. He's so embarrassing.

Depends which image of Nefertiti you use



something tells me the Berlin Bust is a caricature