this post was submitted on 11 Oct 2024
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Just because Egypt is in Africa doesn't automatically make Egyptians black. Look at a map. Northern Africa and Egypt were just as much part of southern Europe and the Middle East.
Hell look at the written records of the pharaohs. Ramseses II (Ozymendias, of King of kings, look upon his works all ye mighty and despair fame) reasserted control of Canaan and Phoenicia, led military campaigns into Syria and the Levant, and also led expeditions into Nubia. That indicates a clearly more established connection to the Middle East than to elsewhere in Africa at the height of ancient Egypt (height of the new kingdom).
except that Egyptians were black some 4000 years ago, 2000 years for upper Egypt, it is quite literally named the "land of the blacks" after all that is what Egypt means, latter ancient civilizations in lower Egypt were not black and eventually upper Egypt too because of migration from Asia and Europe which in turn created migrations of the then Egyptians into at first upper Egypt and then Ethiopia and Sudan. Almost the entirety of what people think of when they think of "ancient Egypt" was made by black people not all but most.
It's named "Black Land". Their southern neigbors were black. why would they call themselves something that wouldn't distinguish themselves from everyone else? It's called black land because of the distinction between "Kemet" - Black Land, the Nile valley, and "Deshret" - Red Land, the surrounding desert.
But hey, afrocentrists gonna afrocenter
Egypt is from Greek and definitely doesn't mean that. The Egyptian endonym was kmt (traditionally pronounced as kemet), which is interpreted as "black land" (km means "black", -t is a nominal suffix, so it might be translated as black-ness, not at all "quite literally land of the blacks"), most likely referring to the fertile black soil around the Nile river. Trying to interpret that as "land of the blacks" should be suspicious already due to the fact people would hardly name themselves after their most ordinary physical characteristic; the Egyptians might call themselves black only if they were surrounded by non-black people and could view that as their own special characteristic, but they certainly neighboured and had contact with black peoples. And either way one has to wonder if the ancient views of white and black skin were meaningfully comparable to modern western ones. On the other hand, the fertile black soil most certainly is a differentia specifica of the settled Egyptian land that is surrounded by a desert.
someone got their Egyptology degree from Queen Cleopatra.
Egypt was actually pretty well mixed between lower Saharan Africans, Greeks, Turks, etc. that's because Egypt was a trusted trade route between many successful economies around the Mediterranean sea.