In recent years, Egyptian media outlets have published sentiments from citizens in Egypt that do not believe that ancient Egyptian history is connected to the bloodline of African people today. Scholars and Egyptian government officials have accelerated their sentiments towards Afrocentric theories connected to ancient Egyptian/Kemetic history.
In 2023, Kevin was on a world tour and social media users leaked a clip from his live show where he made a comment regarding ancient Egyptians being Black people. The Egyptian government assumably saw the footage due to the video going viral on social media and receiving mass attention from Egyptians app users which came with a public announcement of Kevin Hart's inability to perform his comedy show in the country with no details of a permanent ban. According to BBC, a Dutch archaeologists was banned from an excavation project in Egypt due to their exhibition proposal which was expected to connect ancient Egyptian culture to Black or dark-skinned people but was banned along with other excavation projects. Egypt’s Council of Antiquities have the legal authority to represent the Egypt government and its right to ban media content that falsifies Egyptian history, so the chances of Afrocentric imagery or historical representation in Egypt is unlikely.
The controversy amongst archaeologists, government and media outlets contradict the research of scholars including Anthony T. Browder, an African American scholar with excavation experience in Egypt of over 20 years, believes the argument that ancient Egyptians were dark skinned people and have connection to the Black African people who populate Africa today. It’s common for people to disassociate Egypt with Africa due to its high population of Middle Eastern-Arabian people and its historical takeover from Arab and European forces, but there is a dismissal to Africans who are interested in ancient Egypt's history during its reign as well as the Nubian societies across the Northern and Eastern Africa regions.
There are arguments that say the pyramids, statues, monuments, tombs and painting representations of gods/goddesses were created by dark skinned people, while others continue to argue that they were also aliens or half-angels according to Billy Carson. Recently, Netflix was under fire for their production series, African Queens (executive produced by Jada Pinkett Smith), for the representation of Cleopatra who was portrayed by a lighter skinned, biracial Black woman but Egypt’s government claimed that the portrayal was a false portrayal. This was a very politically yet culturally framed attack against Netflix because Egypt’s Film board have not had harsh statements against historical representations of Cleopatra whom is usually portrayed by European or Mediterranean women in the past. There is a fine line between anti-blackness and falsified information in this case because it forces the audience to only accept Cleopatra as a white, European biracial woman rather than an Egyptian/Greek woman with distinctive features. Despite the Netflix actress having light skin, it seems the Egypt government believed that she was also visibly African or ethnic features.
A prominent Egyptian archaeologist and former Minister of Antiquities in Egypt, Zahi Hawass has also been outspoken on the issue. While he acknowledges that Egypt is geographically located in Africa, he has often distanced ancient Egyptian civilization from being categorized as "African" in terms of race. He has argued that ancient Egyptians were a mix of different ethnicities, including influences from the Mediterranean, Asia, and other regions, but not specifically sub-Saharan Africa. Hawass has also criticized the idea that ancient Egyptians were black Africans, stating that the depiction of ancient Egyptians in art is often misunderstood. An Egyptian writer and historian, Ahmed Osman has written several books where he explores the idea that the ancient Egyptians were not dark-skinned Africans but rather "Mediterranean" people. In his book "The Egyptian Book of the Dead: The Book of Going Forth by Day," Osman suggests that ancient Egypt's history is not tied to Africa in the way many modern scholars and activists claim.
In a book entitled, Black Athena, the author illustrates how ancient Egypt was conquered and the intentional manner in which European colonial armies invaded Egypt specifically for its high intellectual wealth. Despite evidence of Greek intellects including Plato and Socrates admitting that they received their education from school in Egypt, the efforts to acknowledge ancient Egypt’s history. Also, it’s understood that Kemet is the ancient name for the land of Egypt which has also been admitted to mean ‘the black land’, according to the University of Oxford. The entitlement of Egyptian phenotype is an extremely sensitive topic because the belief that Egypt has always been connected to the continent of Africa continues seems to not have yet reached an agreement politically or academically. Scholars in Egyptology, Black Studies and Middle Eastern studies are also silently at odds within these collegiate departments because the research isn’t consistent across scholarly journals concerning ancient Egyptian civilizations.
It appears that the true history of ancient Egypt/Kemet will depend on who’s telling the story and who wants to be a part of it...
Sources:
2. NY Timeshttps://www.nytimes.com/2023/05/10/world/middleeast/cleopatra-netflix-race-egypt.html
3. University of Oxfordhttp://www.griffith.ox.ac.uk/gri/9kemet.html#:~:text=The%20Egyptians%20called%20their%20country,area%20along%20the%20Nile%20valley.
