To be pedantic, these aren't really the "ancient Egyptians" people usually imagine. King Ramses and Tut and that lot. When these people were buried, Egypt had already been ruled by Greeks and Romans for 300 years (longer than the USA has been a country).
Beautiful art nonetheless. It is mind-blowing how old Egyptian culture is, my mind has never been able to wrap around it. And then the centuries or millennia of settled prehistory before that!
For context, during the time that Constantine's mother was converting Rome to Christianity, Tutankhamun was as ancient as Constantine is today. During the time that Gengis Khan was conquering the Slavs, Constantine was as ancient as Gengis Khan is today. During the time that apples were falling on Newton's head, Gengis Khan was as old as Newton is today. During the time that Beethoven was going deaf, Newton was as old as Beethoven is today. During the time that the Red Baron was nicking off checkmarks on the cowl of his Fokker, Beethoven was as old as the Red Baron is today. When Gene Cernan last lifted his boot out of the regolith, the Red Baron was as old as Cernan's footprint is today.
It's the only way I can comprehend these timescales.
Actually, my answer covers more than half of written history, so to get the whole thing only a single line needs to be added at the beginning. Something like this:
During the time that Tutankhamun was reestablishing the ceremonies that his father dissolved, grapes had already been used for winemaking for as long as Tutankhamun's mummy had rested under the sands of Egypt until just recently disturbed.
the Fayum portraits help illustrate (pun) very vividly how the very incomplete archeological record and its segmented presentation in history books fills our brains with a fake, imaginary past that has little resembalance with how people actually were.
case in point: these paintings have such striking similarities with (later) Byzantine icons (frontal representation, oversized eyes, stylistic choices for representing hair etc) there is no doubt they are part of a common cultural space that lasted for millenia and in some limited forms is still alive today.
Pressumably the origins of this style predate Greco-Roman Egypt but who knows when and where it got perfect first.
> case in point: these paintings have such striking similarities with (later) Byzantine icons (frontal representation, oversized eyes, stylistic choices for representing hair etc) there is no doubt they are part of a common cultural space that lasted for millenia and in some limited forms is still alive today.
Historians have long suspected that the authors of Christian holy books were inspired by several other religions. The parallels are so numerous it's hard to ignore (this wikipedia page [1] is a starting point but it's woefully incomplete, especially with respect to Ancient Egpytian religion and Osiris/Horus)
Egypt has long been a central node in culture creation and diffusion across the "old world". One of the most striking (and not widely known) facets is its dabbling with monotheism [1].
A whole history was lost? Not at all. The area surrounding the Mediterranean has always had high variance in skin color even within a particular region. That being said, my guess is that the average “native” Egyptian was tan far before the 7th century when Arabs arrived. The population of the Levant (Syria, Lebanon…) was/is on average lighter than that of Egypt since one of the genes for “whiteness” originated there, but Egypt traded a lot with the Levant and there was some population mixture.
The notion posited by other commenters of a lighter Coptic population being more representative of the skin color of the average ancient Egyptian is dubious, though they obviously mixed less with Arabs - those two statements are not mutually exclusive. It’s also worth noting that the average Egyptian is quite ethnically Egyptian. Arabs did not just come in and massively displace Egyptian DNA. For starters there were many more Egyptians than Arabs. People in the West can say that any non-Muslim minority in the Middle East is more representative of the “real” natives of the land because of less mixture with Arabs (e.g. Assyrians). Isn’t that too convenient and somewhat ridiculous of a narrative, given the common bias against Muslims?
Your citation states continuity with additional ancestry mixing in from later migrations:
>The study stated that "our genetic time transect suggests genetic continuity between the Pre-Ptolemaic, Ptolemaic and Roman populations of Abusir el-Meleq, indicating that foreign rule impacted the [native] population only to a very limited degree at the genetic level."
Yeah, modern Egyptians are directly related to ancient Egyptians, with the biggest change being that they have significantly more subsaharan DNA than any of the tested ancient Egyptians.
Copts (Egyptian Christians) are often much lighter skinned than Muslim Egyptians. I'm guessing there was less intermarriage with the Arab invaders amongst the populace that didn't convert. You can look at Rami Malek for an example of a Copt that westerners would be familiar with.
Even with Arab gene flow, Muslim and Christian/Coptic Egyptians are very genetically similar, which shows how small Arab contribution to the Egyptian gene pool was. There is probably a bigger difference between Egyptians in the north vs south, and a much bigger difference between “city” Egyptians and Egyptians in the villages or desert. Across the Middle East, “city” people tend to be lighter, in part due to lifestyle but also often due to genetic differences (e.g. bedouins have genetic distinctions and don’t intermarry much with city folk).
Copts with lighter skin are a small minority among Egyptians with lighter skin in general. Not that it matters much, but this is interesting to me from an anthropological standpoint.
Another item may be simple sun exposure. Manual workers in any tropical country are much darker-skinned compared to white collar workers. Basically anywhere in subtropics its considered posh to look as white as possible, see massive business ie in India with skin whitening. You won't see many self-tanning creams in shops there but tons of whitening ones.
Those who had portraits made of them when they died, like the Fayum Portraits, tended to be wealthier Egyptians who weren't outside working in the sun as much as the poorer ones.
Also, the Fayum area that "Fayum Portraits" gets its name from is not too far from Cairo, which is in the Northern part of Egypt, where peoples skin color tended to be lighter than those in the far south of Egypt, as you got closer to what was Nubia.
These aren't photographs. Skin color was often used for artistic purposes and to impart symbolic meaning. Egyptians in particular were conventionally depicted with reddish or yellowish skin to indicate life or vitality, with light blue or white highlights to showcase lighting and contours.
Red skin for men and yellow skin for woman is a convention of tomb paintings. Those are the stylized paintings on walls with the stereotypical technique of combining a side view and a frontal view into a single 2D representation. Mummy portraits belong to a different, later genre that is far less stylized and more realistic. The skin tones, in particular, are more true to life in mummy portraits than tomb paintings.
Whitening the skin and features of important figures in history is a habit of western civilization. Im never surprised when I see the deception continue in western academia.
Those African shaped noses didnt break themselves. The recently discovered Egyptian statues and other art that survived for thousands of years submerged in the Mediterranean Sea with African facial features unscathed prove that there is an agenda that continues.
From the article: "People depicted in the portraits were upper-class, say curators."
They are literally pointing out that these are portraits of aristocrats, whom it is very well-known would likely be of non-Egyptian, if not mixed, origin at the time they were buried. No one is making a claim that this is what the average Egyptian looked like in the article.
Now if you still think its appropriate to argue that modern Egyptians represent a population replacement demographic, well, you're free to I guess, but I'd wager there weren't enough conquerors to replace the entire or even the majority of the population.
Also, Copts and Amazighe are also African, so "African shaped noses" is sorta weird to say, never mind the prominence of similarly shaped noses to Copts and Amazighe in Ethiopians and adjacent populations in the Horn of Africa. I know "what you mean" but what I mean is that we sorta eliminate a whole lotta physical and cultural differences when we talk about some essential unity of Africa lying in looking some particular way.
The first female pharaoh was described in contemporary texts as being blonde. There are blonde mummies and archeologists tried to pass them off as having had their hair 'lightened' but that has recently been shown to be completely made up and that they are natural blondes. What bias does it show that a false narrative of 'lightening hair' was wholly made up? Not the one you are trying to push.
>The first female pharaoh was described in contemporary texts as being blonde.
Never heard this claim, but it's a weak argument to rest on if we believe it to be true.
Naturally blonde and red haired black people arent that uncommon. Furthermore, if we are being honest, every genetic trait on this planet is represented in a subset of the African population.
Every variation of hair color, eye color, skin color, eye lid, etc...naturally occur among the population.
> Naturally blonde black people arent that uncommon.
Yes, they are, which is why every reference to “naturally blonde black people” focusses on one group—Melanesians of the Solomon Islands—as the emblrmatic group, of whom about 5-10% are naturally blonde, which would be an incredibly tiny share of the overall Black population, if they were racially Black in the first place, rather than dark skinned Pacific Islanders.
These traits including naturally gray and white hair are recessive but they exist in the black African population, literally millions in number. People just rarely talk about or catalogue them outside of the African continent. Black subsaharan African parents give birth to children with every variety of these traits with regular frequency, this has been true for atleast all of Africa's recorded history.
> These traits including naturally gray and white hair are recessive but they exist in the black African population, literally millions in number.
There are over a billion racially black (by recent sub-Saharan African descent) people in the world. “Literally millions” is tenths of a percent of that population—quite rare.
The point is surprisingly ancient Egyptians were much closer to modern day Arabs and Europeans than modern day Egyptians who are recent migrants from sub Saharan Africa
I would be more skeptical of the deception idea if it was isolated and had no precedent. This Euro style global scale racism and forcefed history revision through colonization isn't a component of other major civilizations.
My statement is not controversial. I would expect 7 billion people from diverse backgrounds agree and the billion or so beneficiaries in an echo chamber disagree.
This would be somewhat more convincing if there wasn't a whole rabbit hole of "black Egypt" pseudohistory (with and without ancient aliens) - before you complain, this doesn't mean that people with dark skin weren't involved in the extremely long history of that civilization.
The absurd alien narrative is a minor fringe belief at best and has no factual basis.
The history of Europeans making false self serving claims across the spectrum of knowledge on the other hands has centuries long established fact and easily proven evidence backing it.
> Harvard Art Museums, “Funerary Portraits from Roman Egypt: Facing Forward,” breaks down what scientific investigations of these portraits reveal about life and death in Egypt 2,000 years ago.
Beautiful art nonetheless. It is mind-blowing how old Egyptian culture is, my mind has never been able to wrap around it. And then the centuries or millennia of settled prehistory before that!