It's worth noting though that Arabs are not native to North Africa, so ancient Egyptians wouldn't necessarily look like many people today. They colonized the Maghreb around the 7th century. The indigenous people of that region are the Amazigh in the west and Copts in Egypt. Egypt today also has very light skinned people descended from European slaves the Turks brought in to aid their military.

Genetic testing on ancient Egyptian mummies showed they were most similar to modern day Arabs. Sub-Saharan African genes made up 6-15%, which is much lower than today's Egyptians.

From https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ancient_Egyptian_race_controve...

Interesting. I had mostly thought about the region in terms of language groups probably due to coming from a history background, which relies on written sources, rather than anthropology or archaeology.

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.

> the surviving representations of noses in statuary don't look particularly "black"

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.

Sure, that's another interpretation, and I agree that the notion of a single "black" phenotype is fundamentally incorrect, which is why I qualified it.

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.

The only reason there is any confusion about this is because the modern day Egyptian looks non African. And the only reason for this is because the indigenous population was displaced by Arab people during the spread of Islam.

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.

> 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.

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.

Most of the people bringing the statues back aimed to sell them.

Even still, why would you deface something you want to sell?

I read that as saying the nose holes on the broken statues don't look "black."

I meant that statues from Ancient Egypt with intact noses don't look particularly "black" (with all my previous qualifications on the use of that term). They don't look particularly "white" (same qualifications) to me either, they just look ... Egyptian.