Title is clickbaity though of you interpret it literally. Article does not answer “why” it was forgotten.

The article also isn't talking about "Europeans are racist and didn't appreciate black people". It's referencing about how Sudanese archaeology has been plagued by Diffusionism, a formerly dominant school of thought that's come under heavy criticism in the past 40ish years. Some people, myself included, will argue that diffusionism is a product of prejudiced ideologies and worldviews, but that's at least one step removed from what you're suggesting.

As an example: we know Carthage was a huge civilisation...until Rome razed it so we have no real idea today what ancient Carthage actually was like apart from that it was significant enough for Rome to burn to the ground.

Also, talking about "Europeans" is indicative of a total misconception of history in the period. Rome was a Mediterranean as much as a European one (north of Rome wasn't Europe as today, it was just a bunch of tribes). Many important figures that, ironically, people today say are examples of an over-emphasis on "Europeans" were Africans. Augustine being the best example, basically founded the theology of the early Church, he was a Roman but he was (in today's terms) also African. In short, trying to read the present back into the future is not smart.

As for the comment about Europeans, I was talking about modern academics (particularly of the early through late 20th century). The leading archaeologists of that period primarily came from European and American traditions. I have no idea what Augustine has to do with 20th century academia. Please feel free to enlighten me if there's a connection though.

That wasn't the claim. I will explain, although you would do just as well to go back and read what I said more closely...again. The point is: many people who are perceived to be part of the European tradition (i.e. Rome/Greece) are not Europeans. So when someone says: Europe has got a disproportionate share of work, these regions are ignored, their civilizations are ignored...this is wrong. Most of these civilizations were mutli-culutural/multi-national, and included Africa (the other big contributor would be the Middle East). Again, attempting to read the current political view onto the past. And the point about Augustine is that he was African, the point about academics who say things like: we are too Euro-centric is that they define Europe in a way that makes no historical sense (unsurprisingly, as they are usually arguing about things in the present, not anything related to history...the concept of Europe itself is not something with a clear historical meaning).

> ..the 3 classical areas of Rome, Greece, and Egypt have gotten a very disproportionate share of work...

Greece and Rome (in the sense of the empire) are literally the "classic" in so-called classical archaeology [1]. Egypt is included because it's comparable for this particular case and there's a pretty substantial overlap with "core" classical archaeology.

Again, I've written nothing about whether these areas encompass parts of Africa nor whether they were wholly European. I also haven't implicated racism as the reason for that disproportionate amount of study. The things you're criticizing aren't my views and trying to put words into my mouth isn't appreciated.

[1] https://lsa.umich.edu/classics/undergraduate-students/majors...

This is a mischaracterization in the same class as what's described in the article. Early Rome was just as tribal as the rest of Europe, and Greece has been tribal for almost its entire (ancient) existence. The major difference is that the tribes of Northern Europe seem to have been much less well documented, but they didn't live in isolation. There's ample evidence of trade routes spanning from the Iberian peninsula to the Carpathians, and across the British isles, the Nordic and Baltic states.

The "bunch of tribes" encountered by the Romans was actually a vast Celtic empire, which was itself preceded by other societies such as the Bell Beaker or Corded Ware cultures. But they've largely disappeared from the record because of the written legacy from the Greek and Roman empires.

> hinges on the current fad of 'Europeans are all racists and didn't appreciate a Black civilization', which is of course wrong.

... eh, until last century it was fashionable to attribute it to "just an Egypt copy, basically".

EDIT: On the latter topic, RE the guy who looted the Sudanese pyramids:

> He tried to sell the treasure, but at this time nobody believed that such high quality jewellery could be made in Sub-Saharan Africa.

The stuff he stole ultimately ended up in two German museums for _Egyptian_ artifacts.

Doesn't seem true to me; people seem aware of the Mayans and some of the stuff going on in Asia at the time (though generally not all).

It's an extra bummer quite simply because civilizations in the middle interact with more civilizations, and so are a great way to tie together everything else one remembers into a coherent whole.

(Umayyads conquer Sassanids and 100-200 years later have a big only-old-school-military-historicans-think-it-matters one-off battle with the Tang dynasty in like modern Tajikistan or something. What a great flashcard!)

Really? The Romans are known for their expansionism. Who were they conquering? Who was everybody fighting against in 300?

There was plenty of interaction, but the thing about those insignificant barbaric tribes is that they aren't worth conquering either.

The Macedonian empire was technically larger, including Persia, except it was never administrated as a whole and fell into pieces just a few years after coming into existence.

(This was, in fairness, largely how the Romans represented it to themselves, regardless of how true it was, so it's maybe not surprising.)

The Kingdom of Kush, and the people who came from there are well known to Jews. Moses wife Tziporah was a Midianite (as was Jethro) and he had a second wife from Kush.

The leaders of European nations fed and feed their populations large amount of misinformation about who they are and who people outside their borders were. If a monarch was made in the image of and chosen by god, how could the greatest structures in human history not be in Europe? The solution was to whitewash as much as possible.

You see this in the restoration of art for the last few centuries, many brown/black pieces turned white all of sudden. Some claim this was unintentional, but if we look at how Africans have been treated for the past 500± years, that claim seems suspicious and sounds more like ass-covering when the fraud was revealed.

I expect this exposing of fraud to ramp up as automated translation allows us to compare notes between the great civilizations of human history in the near future.

Yeah, doesn't look forgotten to me

https://civilization.fandom.com/wiki/Amanitore_(Civ6)

> Kandake Amanitore ruled Nubia at the turning of an era. A powerful queen, feared by her enemies and beloved by her people, she was one of the last great builders of the Kingdom of Kush. Amanitore restored the Land of the Bow to its greatness following a period of turmoil. Her rule was long and her works lasting.

> At least, that is what historians have pieced together. Two millennia and one dead language later, there is little surviving written record of Amanitore in the form of scrolls or other documents. What remains is carved into the very stone of the buildings she left behind.

> The most nebulous aspect of Amanitore's life is who she was before she became queen. Indeed, her personality is a cypher. We can only interpret. One abstract depiction of the kandake shows her mercilessly slaying enemies she has already subjugated. Was it from an actual incident where she ordered the execution of rebels, or propaganda proclaiming her righteous vengeance against those who would be enemies of the state?

> Even then, her actual role as queen is difficult to pin down. Conflicting accounts of her co-ruler Natakamani depict him as either her husband or her son, though thankfully never both. Furthermore, Amanitore succeeded Kandake Amanishakheto, who was either her mother-in-law (if Natakamani was Amanitore's husband), her actual mother (if Natakamani was Amanitore's son), or some other form of relation lost to time.

> The fuzzy details of Amanitore's lineage are less important than the role she held. The title of kandake—or “candace,” as the Romans called it—roughly translates to “queen-mother,” but it did not equate to a regent ruling on behalf of an heir too young to hold power. Instead, the kandakes were independent queens who ruled alone with husband consorts or with kings in a form of co-rulership.

> Amanitore's reign took the latter form, with Natakamani as her equal. There is scant information on any aspect of her life before she became queen (around 1 BCE). Still, monuments always depict both co-rulers as adults, so she was likely in her prime when her rule began. In fact, the depictions of Amanitore and Natakamani deliberately present the two as equivalent, particularly in religious buildings, which was uncommon for the time.

> With Egypt a Roman vassal and Rome on amicable terms with Nubia, no regional conflicts threatened Amanitore's reign. The relatively peaceful time and the collaborative autonomy of co-rulership let Amanitore pursue what would become her legacy—an extended period of building that brought great prosperity to the Meroitic kingdom. Among her works were the construction of Nubian pyramids and tombs, restoration of Amun's temple in Meroe, and infrastructure projects, such as the reservoirs built near the capital.

> Amanitore also rebuilt the temple of Amun at Napata—the same temple that Roman invaders had destroyed just two decades prior. As Amanitore’s name incorporated the name of the god Amun, it is reasonable to assume its restoration was a point of pride for the busy queen. Indeed, her efforts helped revive Jebel Barkal to at least a fraction of its former glory.

> Although the queen enjoyed cordial relations with Rome, the decades-earlier reprisal raids into Egyptian (which is to say, "Roman") territory had recovered bronze statues of Augustus Caesar as spoils of war. An apocryphal tale describes Amanitore burying the decapitated head of one such statue beneath temple stairs in Meroe so Nubians would always walk over the Roman emperor responsible for razing Napata. (It was most likely Kandake Amanirenas, her predecessor, who actually did this.) Whether or not she was actually responsible for its burial, the "Meroe head" of Augustus Caesar was recovered in the early 20th Century—found beneath a flight of temple steps.

> As with the confusion surrounding Amanitore's ascension, we know very little about the end of her reign. Some estimates put the date of her death at roughly 20 CE. Treasure hunters have long since plundered her tomb in Meroe.

> Despite the many unknown aspects of Amanitore, the extensive building program she left behind inspired later kandakes to expand upon her work, which in turn led to a flourishing of Meroitic culture and fortunes through the Second Century. Archaeologists continue to uncover examples of her influence, including a set of recently unearthed Nubian pyramids built during her reign.

So not exactly a fair analogy, and I don't see how your snarky low-effort comment moves the conversation forward in any way.

You can rest assured that racist reasoning ran rampant throughout world history long before someone coined the word "race" or before 18th/19th century political narratives used it in whatever particular ways.

Ok.

That doesn't actually disagree with the "20th-century theory goo" though. The goo says that colonizing European empires created "new discourses" about race that served an ideological function in their empire-building. That's a far cry from "those people over the mountains there are barbarous."

The notions of "whiteness" and "blackness," as they still function today (against increasingly strong currents of critique) are clearly something different from that. In pre-modern times, a Viking and a Frank wouldn't have seen themselves as having anything in common. But now (anachronistically) they're commonly "white."

It seems like the confusion here--and I see it repeated all over the place--comes from a failure to clarify terms like "race" and "racism."

There's "racism" in the sense of a prejudice against some other-group that we can identify because they look or act different, and they live over there and we live over here. That has probably been around as long as different kinds of people have been encountering each other.

And then there's "racism," the ideological function where European empires constructed whole new ideas about groups of people that previously would not have seen themselves as having anything in common, in the service of expansion, extraction, domination, slavery, etc.

If you think that's all goo, that's fine, but you need to provide a stronger counter-argument. None of the purveyors of the 20th-century goo actually believe that no one hated other-groups before modernity.

Race as a category was an invention to justify the form of slave trade during the settling of the Americas.

If it's not skin color, it's "those people beyond the mountains" or "the river folk to the south" or "the Babylonians" or whatever.

I'm talking about tribal/identitarian discrimination that ascribes essential natures/behaviors to "other" peoples.

This narrowly-defined and elevated notion of racism along the lines of skin color, Atlantic slave trade dynamics, state-building/citizenship discourses of the last few century, scientific racism and all other fashionable targets of criticism is ultimately just that: a narrow subset of a larger human problem.

Xenophobia and racism are completely separate concepts, although xenophobia does underly racism. It's entirely possible to construct a form of race that relies on other qualitative factors than skin color—just look at colourism, which ironically explicitly lays out non-color qualitative identifiers of "dark and light skinned"—hair type, body shape, hyperpigmentation, prevalence of certain genetic disease, whatever. These terms arose from feedback loops where racist capital dictate societal beauty standards and cultural norms. You certainly can't explain phenomena like skin bleaching or the long history of hair straitening with simple xenophobia. But, colourism is just one effect globalized racist capital has produced.

When academics talk about how racism is a problem, they definitely aren't discussing a general form of qualitative, personal discrimination. These racial structures underly our communities, our politics, our identities, here in America our state's use of slave labor in prisons, how our wealth is divided among our citizens, how we construct and discuss trade deals and foreign "charities" such as the Gates foundation, etc. simply put, you cannot discuss racism without discussing how race is embedded in the structures and processes all around us. These dynamics are easier to ignore in ethnically homogenous societies... unless of course you are a minority or immigrant.

Whiteness and blackness as we know it here in America were invented to formalize the structures of slavery here between the 15th and 18th centuries—this took centuries to move from the enslavement and sale of both Africans and indigenous Americans to a codified racial hierarchy, driven by European capital and nearly complete genocide of the indigenous people. I am sure there are similar narratives in the Congo, in Rhodesia, in South Africa, in Brazil, in European involvement in Southeast Asia, in virtually every part of the carribean and West Indies—it's colonialism, baby!

Every single aspect of the development of racism was ultimately driven by European capital. When countries "decolonialized" the west simply replaced formal state oppression with oppression through trade deals and proxy wars, which could not take course without European capital and violence. Make no mistake, European wealth is racist blood money.

This attitude of "oh the form of racism I learned about on Mister Roger's Neighborhood is just xenophobia with a different name" is just completely ignorant of the past 150-200 years of analysis of race and racism. I recommend these books if you have any serious inclination of discussing race:

* "Black Reconstruction" and "the souls of black folk", by WEB du Bois.

* "Settlers: The Mythology of the White Proletariat from Mayflower to Modern" by J. Sakai

* Toni Morrison's "the origin of others" directly addresses your attitude towards racism—after all, though racism is distinct from xenophobia, xenophobia is necessary for racism.

* "Color Stories: Black Woman and Colorism in the 21st century (intersections of race, ethnicity, and culture)" by JeffriAnne Wilder.

* "redefining race: Asian american panethnicity and shifting ethnic boundaries" by Dina Okamato.

* "Marxism and the National and Colonial Question" by Joseph Stalin. Note, I am not a Stalin fan, but he's a decent essayist and laid out an excellent argument for separating the concepts of state sovereignty and nationhood, which is basically a collective recognition of being part of a shared people. You see this in the "union" part of the soviet union and the 56 nations of China, though this is frequently disingenuously translated as "ethnic groups".

* building off the above book, "The Nine Nations of North America" is a must read. This was written by Joel Garreau.

* "Racial ideas and the impact of imperialism in Europe": https://www.tandfonline.com/doi/abs/10.1080/1084877980857986...

* "the color complex: the politics of skin color in a new millennium." by Kathy Russell

This is also neglecting vast swathes of racial dynamics across central and South America, Asia, Australia and Polynesia—you really can fill up entire libraries with how racism is distinct (materially, culturally, subjectively) from xenophobia and manifests through labor exploitation and capital transfer.

I didn't downvote, but I'm not really following what you're saying.

You do realize that slavery, racism and every despicable thing imaginable was the normal state of humanity for 99.999% of our 200,000+ year history? How many languages have names for a group of people based on some common attribute of that people, far before the 17th/18th century? A lot.

The question is whether "race" as we understand it today was understood that way then. And it wasn't. Not that we can see.

19th century pseudo-anthropology and earlier built up a whole concept of race which essentially defined humanity into subspecies. There was Negroid, Caucasoid, Mongoloid, etc. and these were then attached to specific supposedly scientifically defined traits that went far beyond the colour of skin or shape of eye. That is what is generally meant by race, _still_. And it turns out this is complete and total bunk. There's more genetic diversity and difference within Africa between "blacks" than there is between non-Africans and Africans. So the category of race is of absolutely no use except as a historical or ethno-linguistic-cultural designation, and there as well, it's a pretty crappy one. What do Kenyans and West Africans and African Americans have in common other than skin colour? Very little -- not linguistically, not genetically, and not much culturally, either, but they do share a history of being categorized together as "black" by Europeans.

By saying "people always did this" you're ignoring a very specific meaning of race that has been used to justify, and still is, some pretty stupid _specifically_ awful crap. By calling "race" into question, we try to deal with that crap.

Yes, humanity has always used difference as a way of justifying oppression. But this specific kind of imagined difference, it's important to analyze because it's a very _modern_ designation, without a scientific basis, and it had a very specific purpose, and still does for people who like to peddle pseudo-scientific superiority theories around it.

I don't know off the top of my head whether the Romans widely knew of the Histories, but it certainly undercuts your claim that these broader categorizations are a recent invention. The Athenians and Spartans clearly recognized a racial idea broader than the cultures of their individual polities.

If you don't accept the distinction of course you're going to be blind to dependent concepts. That's just a basic failure of communication.

I make very arbitrary example. Lets take Poles and Russians. Both usually pale skinned, slavish people. Still they have such huge cultural and historical differences that they could not by any change form a single political entity.

Still there could be individuals among them that could argue that darker skinned people who are descendants of their nationals are not really Polish, Russian because of their skin color.

These people are racists. The people who argue that Poles are not Russians are not racists. These are just rational persons.

Who is "they?" Are you referring to some distinct race of people?