holybat:
waiting—for—the—sun:
queennubian:
vintagegal:
Really?
yes really. Cleopatra was black. Not european. Not white, not light skinned. Not elizabeth taylor and every other white woman that portrayed her after, not these white girls…like you who because they don’t know the history THINK that cleopatra is white.
Egypt was in Africa, which was formally named Khemet, land of the Blacks.
When white people potray POC it is a racist action. It is an erasure of a people. It is white washing. And it is blantant.
Thank you.
Okay… While I do agree that most of the characters were white n the movie and shouldn’t have been… Cleopatra was NOT black and neither were people of the egyptian race. They described themselves as lighter skinned than the nubians (Who were black) but darker skinned than, let’s say, the lebanese.
The egyptians are far more similar in race to arabians. According to studies done to mummies scientists have found that the common egyptian now days is of the same racial characteristics that they used to be thousands of years ago. So, yeah, they aren’t AND WEREN’T black. Please, look at pictures of egyptian people now days.
That said, Cleopatra was NOT egyptian. She was from the Ptolemaic dynasty, meaning that she was of Macedonian race and legacy. Ancient Macedonia = Helenistic Kingdom located AT THE NORTH OF GREECE = EAST EUROPE.
The ethnicity of the Ancient Egyptians is one of those real hot-button topics. Some historians define them as “black”, meaning in this instance Sub-Saharan Africans…and some crackpot Caucasian nutjobs claim that they were “white”, referring to artistic depictions of them as having blue eyes, some of the red-haired mummies (most of these are simply grey-haired individuals that used henna, but some are red-haired) and texts like the one that refers to the “blue eyed Horus”.
Best evidence we have suggests that the majority were neither. I say “majority”, because the Egyptians weren’t all one enthnicity. They defined themselves as either being of the land of Kmt or not (and Kmt, by the way, refers to soil colour, not skin colour - to be “of the land of Kmt” is not to call one’s self “black”). For them, being Egyptian was a matter of language and culture, not ethnicity. There was a dynasty of Pharoahs of Nubian origin who absolutely embraced Egyptian language and customs, and there were others, such as Yuya (father of Queen Tiye and grandfather of Akhenaten) who, evidence indicates, may have been Asiatic or Mitannian in origin.
There were influences from both the interior of Africa and the Levant….research on the pre-Dynastic period indicates that geographically, the northern and southern parts of Egypt showed this influence in different depending on where they were situated.
Art can’t tell us all we need to know, either, as it usually didn’t offer a realistic representation nor was meant to do so. Egyptians were depicted as physically very different from, say, Nubians (“black” Africans) and those of Asiatic races. A particular depiction of Queen Tiye, showing her with features that are apparently sub-Saharan, is often used as an argument, but this ignores the fact that other depictions of the Queen show her with different features, and we have the extremely well-preserved mummies of both her parents, Yuya and Tuyu…Yuya is described as non-typically Egyptian in appearance (as described above, it has been theorised that he or his ancestors were not Egyptian born) and Tuya looks like a modern Egyptian woman of today.
Essentially, modern concepts of race are anachronistic in discussing Ancient Egypt. Physically, it seems probable that most of the population resembled the modern Egyptian population. But it was located at an international crossroads, and there were many racial influences converging. What was important to them, though, was less ones “blackness” or “whiteness”…it was whether one was culturally Egyptian. And if you were, then you were clearly superior :)
Exactly! Egypt was extremely cosmopolitan and people of all colors could be considered Egyptian. They seemed more concerned with cultural and linguistic purity than race. The construct of race as we know it in the U.S. didn’t even exist in ancient Egypt. So, in terms of casting for Egypt-centric productions, actors with a range of different skin tones would be most accurate.
I think people also need to remember that most ancient Egyptian mummies are those of royalty or high-ranking members of society. Royal Egyptians were notoriously in-bred and so weren’t representative of most of the population.
