Look the statue in the article with an intact nose, and also the statues of the seated pharoahs at Abu Simbel. To my eyes, they just look a lot like egyptian people today, stylized for artistic purposes.
From https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ancient_Egyptian_race_controve...
Looking at the sources for that wiki article, this appears to be one of the largest and most recent DNA studies on ancient Egyptian remains: https://www.nature.com/articles/ncomms15694.
Edit: To stay on topic, my textbook in a two semester art history survey ("Janson's") said that the defacement of Egyptian statues was due to religious iconoclasm without further specifics. I'm going to accept this as the mainstream academic consensus in the early 21st century. Perhaps unsurprisingly, this matches the general thesis of the parent article.
I think this says the exact opposite of what you want it to say. The fact that they survived, may be that they were sufficiently non-"black" looking to leave them alone. Phenotypes come in ranges especially for black people, so a "black" nose is anything from the nose of a random Scandinavian to that of a Sudanese persons.
Anyways, the theory would be easily tested by finding examples of statues with the supposedly unacceptable noses that survive today, and see if they can be correlated with the ones Europeans took.
The other thing that doesn't make sense about the theory is that if the Europeans actually respected the Ancient Egyptian culture enough to want the statues, why would they deliberately damage the presumably very valuable artifacts?
It would would be like someone buying a Van Gogh painting only to destroy it.
Whether or not the noses were intentionally destroyed or not it is most parsimonious to believe that the indigenous people of Egypt were African people. Thinking they werent would be like looking at the population of The United States today and believing the Native Americans were white (and if we didn’t have photographic evidence of the natives we can be sure that would have been suggested, and if anyone suggested otherwise they would have been met with “what a crackpot theory!”).
In either case, the Europeans revered ancient Egypt for sure. But this is only because of their mention in the Bible and their interaction with the Ancient Greeks. But when Western Europeans got there, the people who lived in Egypt looked more like them than Africans. But this is only because of the displacement of the indigenous population serval centuries earlier.
Of course, Egypt is part of the African continent. But I suspect that what you mean by African here is a set of physical phenotypical features that we sometimes pin on that term today.
There no evidence to suggest that was the only phenotype in ancient Egypt. If anything, artifacts seem to suggest that the population was multiethnic, comprised of a variety of phenotypes. That shouldn't be surprising - it was the central metropolis and power of the ancient western world, like NYC or London today, so it attracted people from everywhere.
> But this is only because of the displacement of the indigenous population serval centuries earlier.
As referenced in another comment, recent genetic analysis of ancient egyptian remains have disproved this, and demonstrated that they weren't so different from other modern middle eastern populations, and were also related to sub-saharan populations.
I wonder why?
A few things that this theory falls utterly short on:
- Reliefs that were never exported or even found by colonists are often defaced.
- Pharaonic texts specifically reference the practice of defacement and treat it as an act distinct from general vandalism or theft.
- Works show other systematic damage unrelated to racial issues (from the article, statues receiving offerings had their right hands removed, and those providing them had their left hands removed).
- Single reliefs show noses removed on some figures but not others, even when the preserved noses look substantially non-European (e.g. the article's last photo).
- Defacements aren't random, or tied to ethnicity; instead, politically inconvenient rulers like Hatshepsut are overwhelmingly erased while others (even close family members) are not.
- Where text accompanies figures, the names of the defaced figures are also defaced. Which requires knowledge of Ancient Egyptian, a motive to target specific historical figures, and a concern with matters unrelated to appearance.
- Weathering on in situ works commonly suggests noses were removed much closer to their creation than to the 1800s. (This is less clear for works brought to Europe, but that opens the question of simple fragility.)
All of that is above and beyond questions of evidence for the practice, or historical context that Egyptian statues with black features were actually convenient for some racist theories like Samuel Weston's. There's basically no racist practice colonists wouldn't have been willing to engage in, certainly. But advancing specific claims that are inconsistent with huge amounts of evidence is rightly considered a fringe belief.
If you can do that, you can’t put anything past that person/culture.
That said, I don't really buy into the theory being presented here. I would need to see some documentary evidence supporting it first, such as a common cultural association at the time of "broad noses" with "Africans" or an attempt to portray ancient Egypt as a Caucasian society. People knew where Egypt was. The pyramids, temples and other signs of civilization were still there. Knocking the noses off of the statues wouldn't hide anything.
Also, I never said anything about white people. I was talking specifically about the Western Europeans who put people in Zoos.
I think your comment perfectly illustrates the lengths people will go to and the ways in which they will contort their minds in order to uphold an strange idea that is dear to their hearts, however...
Ironic that I was pointing out that you're doing exactly this.
>Putting people in Zoos is a good thing? It dehumanizes Europeans to say that it is sick to put people in Zoos?
Are you even going to attempt to argue in good faith?
>Also, I never said anything about white people.
Of course you didn't! Then your racism would be overt. But your anti European narrative is an increasingly common one that has infested academia and is creeping into industry.
https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html
Edit: it looks like you've been using HN primarily for ideological and political battle. We ban accounts that do that, so please stop doing that too.
The Africans they encountered had virtually no technology and no government, and looked like different creatures. It wasn't something that required rationalization. There's far less malice in this than you'd like to see.
As far as I am aware, there is no credible evidence that Egyptians strongly represented south African phenotypes or had the same shade of skin. It is a modern internet meme. Lay off the propaganda.
If you don't want to be banned, you're welcome to email [email protected] and give us reason to believe that you'll follow the rules in the future.
These are your words. These are your thoughts.
He said those words. Word by word. Word. By Word.
The known world to you consists of various tribes of humans who all share rather similar physical phenotypes (white skin, soft, slightly curly to straight hair, similar facial features), with reasonably similar technology (metalworking, beasts of burden, farming, government of some sort, written language, the wheel) and suddenly you discover a group of beings with none of these things - no written language, no cultivated land, no domesticated animals, no wheel, no metalworking, and on top of all this, they look totally different from anyone you've ever seen.
It did not take evilness or malice of any kind on the part of medieval Europeans to reason that these beings, if they were human, were less human than they were. Morality is cultural and relative, you cannot demonize historic cultures through your enlightened lense.
So no, these are more than just "my words," this is a rational sentiment for a medieval European in the historic context. Globalization is a modern phenomenon. Why do you think there was incentive to put these people in zoos?
The problem with this is that it is 100% incorrect. After 1492 (and to a lesser extent before then), Western Europeans were fully aware of African Civilization, particularly those in West Africa.. They traded with them. They wrote correspondences to them, see: "Letters to the King of Portugal" [0]. Africans obviously farmed, starting between the years 8000 and 6000 BCE [1], the metalworking of West Africans is and was well known [1]. During the Iron Age "A profitable trade had developed by which West Africans exported gold, cotton cloth, metal ornaments, and leather goods north across the trans-Saharan trade routes, in exchange for copper, horses, salt, textiles, and beads. Later, ivory, slaves, and kola nuts were also traded" [2]. They had governments obviously (see reference [0]). They had the wheel "Nubians from after about 400 BCE used wheels for spinning pottery and as water wheels. It is thought that Nubian waterwheels may have been ox-driven" [3]. Heck, even the largest university of the middle ages (12th century) was located in Mali, in West Africa, and it wasn't even something that was unknown to Europeans [4] & [5]. I could go on and on.
So all of what you are saying is based totally off of what _you_ think and not any facts, or even what Europeans that encountered Africans thought. What you are saying is entirely based off of your lack of knowledge of African and apparently even European history.
The inferiority idea developed later, specifically in America as a rationalization of the slave trade. It was literally something that was made up to justify what they were doing.
[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Afonso_I_of_Kongo [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/History_of_West_Africa#Prehist... [2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/History_of_West_Africa#Iron_Ag... [3] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wheel#History [4] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Timbuktu#Education [5] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/University_of_Timbuktu
--edited for clarity
As the theory goes, in order to make the statues seem like high art, it was necessary to make the culture seem more like the ancient Greeks and Romans. Removing their noses made it so the viewer could more easily read the statues as "like us," rather than the "primitive" countries of black people that Europe was busy exploiting.