The vicious ignorance of the identity politics-obsessed left was rarely better displayed than when it was announced that Israeli actor Gal Gadot had been picked to play Cleopatra in a new film. The tiny, cerebrally-challenged leftist puddle that is Twitter immediately erupted with its trademark brainless yapping. “Whitewashing!” they shrieked.
“An Arab or black actress should play the role!” they howled. (Oddly, none of them have said a word about “blackwashing” Joan of Arc, David Copperfield or Alexander Hamilton. But I digress. If I keep thinking like that, I’ll almost start believing that the Great Replacement is more than a looney, right-wing conspiracy theory.)
But, as anyone with even the most passing knowledge of actual Egyptian history (as opposed to the woke fantasies of the left) knows, Cleopatra was Macedonian by ancestry. Her family came to power when Alexander the Great’s empire was divided after his death. Assuming that Cleopatra must have been black because she was queen of Egypt is like assuming that Queen Victoria was brown because she was Empress of India.
For modern woke-ism, the relative dearth of (black) African civilisations to rival the likes of Rome, Greece or Persia is a nagging historical problem. If, say, Carthage won’t be obligingly black (they were Semitic Phoenicians), maybe the Egyptians could fit the bill?
Ancient Eqyptian art depicts people in every colour from black to tan, orange, white – and blue or green. Besides, Ancient Greek art often depicts the very European Greeks as orange, too. So ancient art is not exactly a reliable guide. But modern DNA technology is teasing out more reliable answers.
Despite claiming in its headline that “scientists now know” whether Egyptians were black or white, this Big Think article is curiously reticent about actually straight-up telling us. Reading between the lines, however, one gets the impression that the answer is not the one they were fishing for.
A group of international researchers, using unique methods, have overcome the barriers to do just that. They found that the ancient Egyptians were most closely related to the peoples of the Near East, particularly from the Levant. This is the Eastern Mediterranean which today includes the countries of Turkey, Iraq, Israel, Jordan, Syria, and Lebanon.
In other words, Semitic, Caucasoid people. You know: white. Or, at best, a bit tan.
Despite the “we were kings” fantasies of the “Black History” types, there’s not much black African DNA to be found in modern Egypt – and even less back in the days of its glory.
Modern Egyptians share 8% of their genome with central Africans, far more than ancient ones, according to the study, published in the journal Nature Communications. The influx of Sub-Saharan genes only occurred within the last 1,500 years. This could be attributed to the trans-Saharan slave trade or just from regular, long distance trade between the two regions. Improved mobility on the Nile during this period increased trade with the interior, researchers claim.
Egypt over the span of antiquity was conquered many times including by Alexander the Great, by the Greeks, Romans, Arabs, and more. Researchers wanted to know if these constant waves of invaders caused any major genetic changes in the populace over time. Group leader Wolfgang Haak at the Max Planck Institute in Germany said, “The genetics of the Abusir el-Meleq community did not undergo any major shifts during the 1,300 year timespan we studied, suggesting that the population remained genetically relatively unaffected by foreign conquest and rule”[…]
The oldest mummy sequenced was from the New Kingdom, 1,388 BCE, when Egypt was at the height of its power and glory. The youngest was from 426 CE, when the country was ruled from Rome.
So Egypt has remained stubbornly “Eastern Mediterranean” (whispers: white) for millennia.
Well, that won’t do. So, naturally, they’ll keep on fishing and hoping.
One limitation according to their report, “all our genetic data were obtained from a single site in Middle Egypt and may not be representative for all of ancient Egypt.” In southern Egypt they say, the genetic makeup of the people may have been different, being closer to the interior of the continent.
Researchers in future want to determine exactly when Sub-Saharan African genes seeped into the Egyptian genome and why. They’ll also want to know where ancient Egyptians themselves came from.
Big Think
Because heaven forbid that they should have to admit that Ancient Egyptians were Caucasoids: “wypipol” with suntans.
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