A new Dutch museum exhibit declares, “Egypt is part of Africa,” which is likely to impress most people who have viewed the world map as an undisputed statement.
But show at the National Museum of Antiquities in Leiden beyond geography. It explores the traditions of Black musicians – Beyoncé, Tina Turner, Nas and others – drawing inspiration and pride from the idea that ancient Egypt was an African culture. The exhibition is framed as a useful adaptation to centuries of cultural erasure by Africans.
However, what sounded powerful in the United States and thought-provoking in the Netherlands was a curse on the Egyptian government and many of its citizens, who flooded the museum’s Facebook and Google pages. with complaints – sometimes racist ones – about what they see as the West’s appropriation of their history.
Many Egyptians do not consider themselves African at all, they identify much more closely with the predominantly Arab and Muslim countries of the Middle East and North Africa, and many despise the Egyptians. dark-skinned and sub-Saharan Africans. And some feel that their own culture and history is being erased in an attempt to correct the historical racism of the West.
The exhibit “attacks Egyptian civilization and heritage” and “distorts Egyptian identity,” a member of Parliament, Ahmed Belal, said in a speech on May 2, shortly after the exhibit opened and around the same time fireworks broke out on a Netflix documentary depicting an ancient Greco-Egyptian queen Cleopatra as Black.
Within weeks, perhaps perceiving the appeal of nationalists, the Egyptian government took action. The body that oversees all things Ancient Egypt has informed the Leiden museum’s team of archaeologists, including the exhibit’s half-Egyptian curator, that they cannot excavate in Egypt. Can access again. Until then, Dutch Egyptologists worked in the ancient tombs at Sakkara . since 1975.
“If you do not respect our culture or heritage, then we will not cooperate with you until you do,” said Abdul Rahim Rihan, an Egyptian archaeologist who leads a group called Operation Defending Egyptian Civilization, said.
The idea that ancient Egypt was the cultural ancestor of modern-day Negroes is at the heart of some form of African-centredism, a cultural and political movement that arose. to push back against often racist, colonialist ideas of the supposed inferiority of African civilizations to European civilizations. Negroes, in this story, can be proud of their roots from the ancient kingdom that built some of the world’s most glorious structures.
But for the Egyptians, all this added to the hurt feeling that, like the West, looted antiquities like the Rosetta Stone from Egypt and took credit for its discovery. centuries ago, they once again wrested control of ancient Egypt from the Egyptians themselves.
The museum exhibition, “Kemet: Egypt in Hip-Hop, Jazz, Soul & Funk,” examines how Atheism manifests itself in music. Beyoncé and Rihanna dressed themselves up as Nefertiti, the queen of ancient Egypt; Nina Simone said she believes she is the reincarnated Nefertiti; and Miss Turner once sang about being Queen Hatshepsut – an ancient Egyptian pharaoh – in a past life.
The cover art for Nas’ 1999 album “I Am…” etched his features into King Tutankhamen’s famous golden mask. Miles Davis, Prince and Erykah Badu all borrow inspiration from pharaohs for lyrics, jewelry, etc.
“Kemet,” the ancient Egyptian word for their country, even ordered a audio tour in Dutch, English and Arabic narrated by Typhoon, a Dutch rapper, as well as a new song by Dutch rapper Nnelg about his connection to ancient Egypt.
During the tour, Typhoon admitted that the musicians’ perspective “isn’t the only way to think about ancient Egypt,” but he continued to present the exhibit as a historical correction.
“Although TV shows and movies in the Netherlands and in the United States often only project a certain image of Egypt to the public, black people also live there, both in the past and now,” he said. in.
Program, person in charge, Daniel Solimanis half Egyptian, added one declare to the description of the exhibit online in response to the “uproar” on social media. It said it was seeking to explain “why ancient Egypt was important to these artists and musicians and from which music emerged cultural and intellectual movements”.
A representative for the museum declined to comment beyond the statement. But these program protection pointed out that most reviewers didn’t visit it.
For the Egyptians, how sensitive This topic became clear in the controversy over “Queen Cleopatra” series, when an Egyptian lawyer called for a ban on the streaming service in Egypt and the government dismissed the show as “a misrepresentation of Egyptian history.”
Part of their anger can also be traced back to colorism: Some Egyptians tend to see light skin as upper class, perhaps as a result of long-standing beauty standards that consider light skin and centuries of rule by lighter-skinned conquistadors from Europe and Turkey.
The Egyptian anger was partly centered on an Afrocentrist idea, totally unacceptable to all Afrocentrists, that the Arabs invaded. The conquest of Egypt in the seventh century replaced the real African Egyptians.
Dr Rihan, an Egyptian archaeologist, said: “This is an attack on the identity of the Egyptians. He added: “It’s not about skin color. “When you say things like that,” he said, “you are taking the Egyptians out of their own history, against all evidence.”
Soliman began doing excavations in Egypt as a student before joining the museum. He is one of the leaders of the museum team, which spends weeks each year in the village of Sakkara, just south of Cairo, excavating the tombs of the ancient Egyptian city of Memphis.
Unlike European or American-led archaeological digs of the past – which witnessed photographs of Howard Carter’s famous discovery of King Tut’s tomb – the Leiden archaeological team carefully carefully highlight the contributions of Egyptian workers, highlighting them in photographs and online diary about the excavations of each season. Those efforts are in line with a growing trend in Egyptology toward helping Egyptians, once overlooked in the study of their country’s history, become more prominent in the field.
But that mattered little after news of Dr. Soliman’s exhibition spread.
The Dutch Museum was slightly stunned by the critical tone on social media, noting that, while it welcomes “respectful dialogue”, comments that are racist or offensive. will be deleted.
Scholars tend to study ancient Egypt as part of the Mediterranean world, with its cultural and political connections with Greece and Rome, as well as with Nubia, which roughly coincides with Sudan today.
Although there is no scientific consensus on the appearance or ethnic ancestry of the ancient Egyptians, many classicists consider it inappropriate to talk about race in that era, as the The ancients did not classify humans the way we do now.
Modern Egyptians, like the dialect they speak, are descendants of a branched genealogy. The Greeks, Romans, Arabs, Turks, and Albanians all conquered Egypt many centuries ago. The Circassians arrived as slaves, the Levantine Arabs and Western Europeans as businessmen. The Nubians still live in southern Egypt.
But it is Islam and the Arabic language that now prevail, uniting Egypt with the Middle East and North Africa, which are predominantly Arab and Muslim, rather than with the rest of the continent on which the country is located. there.
“Egypt has its own category,” said David Abulafia, a historian of the ancient world at Cambridge University. “By bringing everyone together, nuance is often lost in the presentation of African history, as a whole.”
But for Dutch rapper Typhoon, Egyptian exceptionalism feeds discredited European theories “used to determine which ancient cultures were considered important and therefore cannot be belongs to Africa,” he said during the audio tour.
Such theories, he said, “separated ancient Egypt from its African context”.
Nina Siegal Contribution report from Amsterdam.
