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Comment by joshuamcginnis | Hacker News Reader

I once took an Africana Studies course at UMass Boston and the professor taught us that the noses were broken off the statues due to the hatred of black peoples by white explorers over millennia. She also taught us that the ancient Egyptians were black and that it was black people that built the pyramids. When I innocently asked her why the slides she showed us seemed to show Egyptians as having more middle eastern appearance, she scolded me on my prejudice and denial. I dropped the class shortly thereafter.

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Ironically, modern day Egyptians actually have slightly more Sub-Saharan African genetic markers than the Ancient Egyptians did.

Several genetic analyses have been done on Ancient Egyptian mummies, and they tend to be most closely related to modern-day people of the Levant (Syria/Lebanon).

So if your professor was calling them black as in Sub-Saharan, the genetic evidence says otherwise. If she meant black as in dark skin, then sure, it's the Egyptian sun we're talking about after all.

Source (one of many): https://www.washingtonpost.com./news/speaking-of-science/wp/...

Old Egyptians where closer related to modern Europeans than to modern Egyptians.

image: https://user-images.githubusercontent.com/516118/44733984-52...

source: https://www.nature.com/articles/ncomms15694

Also remember that the Gebelein mummy and Ramses had red hair.

At least one person in that class must have picked that class for an "easy A", wrote class papers and exams as was required, and thought they got a great deal out of it. Education is a market, you know, you buy a grade and you pay with studying. The less you pay, the better the deal, and everyone loves a good deal.

That is infuriating, disturbing, comical, and depressing at the same time.

Maybe something about the Nubian rulers? Guest workers? I don't know.

The Nubians were a different group of people than most of the ancient Egyptian rulers we know. Nubians were in the South.

True, but they had close relationships with ancient Egypt, including various periods of rule by and of Egypt proper, and their cultural artifacts and practices were very heavily Egyptianized, to a point where it's a fine distinction whether something is Nubian or Egyptian, for a period of something like a thousand years

There were, however, a bunch of Pharaohs with some Nubian roots. Notably, Amenemhat I, the founder of the 12th dynasty, probably had a Nubian mother.

They were rare, though.

We need to stop having these discussions here. HN users are broadly unequipped to deal with the subject of the "blackness" of Ancient Egyptians. Immediately citing limited genetic studies (as conveyed by a popular newspaper) rather than attempting to understand and sustain reasoned discourse on the sociopolitical dynamics of race is a dead giveaway.

Suffice it to say, the genetic evidence shows that Egyptians (and their southern neighbors) are an indigenous African population, with the current residents of the region generally descendents of the people who were there 1, 2, 3, 4, and 5 thousand years ago. The question of their blackness is a political one - as blackness itself is a social construct of the modern age, predicated on appearance and political necessity rather than strict ancestry, and generally inapplicable to ancient populations. In this case, the continuous and vehement insistence that Egyptians were not "black", over a century and a half of Western scholarship and backed by varying rationales as the years proceeded, is useful as a study in the politics of race and perceived technical and societal capability.

No one gets so up in arms about whether or not the Ancient Greeks were "white" (Super-Alpine white).

Edit: I suppose I asked for it, considering my audience. Thank you for living up to my worst expectations. (Seriously, delete the post.)

Ah, the academy's amazing tap dance to obscure simple but inconvenient facts. Love it.

I feel like I'm being concise. Blackness is a designation of political expediency. It's not a genetic distinction. HN commenters routinely confuse this point. Ergo, this is a poor topic for us to discuss.

You seem to be hinting at something scandalous; please do be upfront.

Bro, I'm tenure track, I speak fluent nonsense, do your thing, it's all good.

Thank you for confirming just the kind of person I'm speaking too. I look forward to writing your Wikipedia article's "Controversy" section.

Have you considered that showing up to a thread and saying everyone else is too stupid to understand whatever you’re trying to share, then being surprised that your comment goes over poorly, seems like the real manifestation of ignorance?

In any case, don’t do this here. If you have something to say, be straightforward about it and don’t insult your readers.

I fail to see what's confusing, and the tone is appropriate, considering the parent.

Someone got GPT3 to output grievance studies parlance I see. That is to say that this post is identical to the nonsensical gibberish that machines currently output.

I think you are getting downvoted because a) you are asking to shut down a subject that is interesting to people. Talking about stuff is how people get educated. If you have an opinion or something to add, state it. Shutting down a topic because you judge the audience is too narrow to understand it makes... b) you come across as a snotty elitist who has an axe to grind.

I don't see how understanding how ancient people looked is a political study. Yes, race is highly political, but it can be a political and historical topic. Individuals can be interested in what humans used to look like (and this is not limited to blackness) without being interested in the politics.

No one is up in arms. People are just interested. The Ancient Greeks are decidedly caucasian, there is not much discussion around that because most scholars agree.

We make models of what we think prehistoric humans and sapiens looked like and there is much interest in that without it being political. People just like knowing stuff about the past, about their ancestors. Just because some assholes politicize this sort of thing, just because some teachers push their politically charged racial bias on others does not mean that the whole topic is exclusively socio-political.

Citing genetic studies is completely valid. Real science is non-political so I'd say that's a totally rational way to approach the question of what did the people of one of the most sophisticated ancient civilizations look like.

Thank you for taking the time to give your analysis. I disagree with much of it. I ask you to bear with me as I explain myself. The subject of race is inherently political, and, specifically with regards to Egyptians, mired in decades of bad faith. Much of early Egyptology was dedicated to "proving" that Ancient Egyptians weren't "black." This is, of course, impossible; "blackness" is not a objectively-defined designation. It's a contextually-driven decision by observers and the self.

So, again, the most interesting question becomes not of whether or not Egyptians were black - by the modern definition of blackness (itself predicated in part on notions of separating African populations), they weren't, nor where they white, or Middle Eastern, or Levantine. The most interesting question is why the assertion that they weren't black is so vociferous. That's the character of the parent and several of its replies, not clear-eyed curiosity. They represent a conclusion, not an investigation.

It's in this light - in observing this echo chamber - that I felt the need to protest, and I feel justified in doing so. Humor me and assume, for a moment, that "Egyptians were not black," being rooted in a pre-geneology, anthropology-nascent scientific understanding, is itself a political assertion. What does the rest of this discussion look like, then? How, in your default perspective, is it not political? Because of the genetic studies cited? What do those studies actually say, and what about the model you've built around them is actually an intellectual leap?

That's the conversation I want to have. Not, "Oh boy ain't my Negro Studies professor dumb?".

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