19th century archaeology and anthropology was thoroughly racist. It was a time where explorers could rediscover something like Great Zimbabwe and go "We found the Lost Tribe of Israel" because there's no way that the native inhabitants living among the site could possibly have built such an exquisite structure. It was a time where racism wasn't "dark-skinned people are bad" but rather "let me give you a lecture on how the physiology proves that these savages are incapable of reaching the higher thought patterns that are necessary for civilization to exist." It was also a time where Americans were the cultural backwater of the world, and the forefront of scientific racism were Europeans wandering around their empires, seeking greater justification for why they had to be the ones to rule over the lesser peoples.

It's only in the latter half of the 20th century that the field stops presupposing that Europeans are better than everybody else and they start trying to more objectively and holistically evaluate life in other societies and compare them. There's still a large contingent of popular anthropology that hasn't caught up to that memo yet, and the general field of pseudoarchaeology absolutely thrives on it.

There's a reason that people treat the methods of construction of the Pyramids as some unsolved mystery but not, say, the Colosseum. And it's not because we don't have the evidence for the Pyramids--we have the written records that discuss pyramid construction, we have the letters from the Pharoah complaining about his workforce!

Egyptians weren't dark-skinned "savages". If you had to fit them into 19th C racial groups (which Americans are still obsessed with) they would be white.

Only modern black nationalists believe that the Ancient Egyptians were black.

The Pyramids are thought to have been very difficult to build because they are obviously very difficult to build with the technology available at the time. Remember that they were ancient even to the Romans and the Greeks.

Thinking the Pyramids would be difficult to build has absolutely nothing to do with race or racism.

But there are some progressions. For instance, Egyptian architecture is more "primative" than roman. Most everything in egypt is a gravity structure, big blocks piled atop each other. They didnt do connectors or mortar, let alone concrete. They did not progress along the tech tree the way that rome did. That doesnt mean that egyptian people are less smart, just that the ancient culture in egypt did not evolve new technology as quickly as others.

It's worth noting that the pyramids were more ancient to Julius Caesar than Caesar is to us by a significant margin.

>They didnt do connectors or mortar, let alone concrete.

I personally chalk that sort of stuff up to living where the climate is set to easy mode.

Compare construction that predates building code in wealthy coastal California to poor rural Maine and you'll find the latter is routinely within spitting distance of compliant with modern code because that's just what you need if you want your project to resist nature for a "worth the effort of building it" amount of time.