For JC to get aboard:
“Cleopatra ruled in Egypt long before the Arab settlement in North Africa,” said Dr, Sally Ann Ashton, a research scientist and author of Cleopatra and Egypt, who appears in the documentary. “If the maternal side of her family were indigenous women, they would’ve been African, and this should be reflected in contemporary representations of Cleopatra.”
Err, no, the maternal side would have been Egyptian. Which is not what we mean by “African” these days. Which, in that part of the world, generally starts in Nubia.
They really are flogging this one, aren’t they? She was Macedonian Greek. We know this. We have always known this. The ancient Egyptians were not Nubians. She was not black. They are engaging in revisionism.
It’s a simple fraud. All these people do is bet on the likelihood that American blacks are stupid, ignorant, and perpetually prone to taking offence. Which is rather racist of the fraudsters, don’t you think?
Ahem, Mr Tim, but May 16th and 15th seem to be AWOL.
By God, they’re back. Jesu that was quick.
Netflix looked at Anheuser Busch and said “Oh yeah? Top this!”
Actually, this is enough of a catastrophe that I’m surprised Disney didn’t make it.
Is it alleged that the Arabs wiped out the native population??
I recall reading that the Ptolemaic Pharoahs were indeed pasty faced, but there were a minority of earlier native dynasties who were darker while the majority of dynasties were paler and their relative hues were not a matter of concern to the people of Ancient Egypt provided that they were culturally Egyptian. If only we could follow their example…
The US government officially classifies Egyptians (and other North Africans) as “white”.
Egyptians are just as much “African” as both Japanese and SriLankans are both “Asian”.
I understood that the maternal side of the family was also the paternal side.
“the Arab settlement in North Africa”
And yet we never talk about the Norman settlement of England or the Spanish settlement of Mexico. What can the explanation be?
Because they don’t want you talking about the African, Indian or Arab settlements of England, dearieme??
If there’s one thing that the reaction to James’s Queen Cleopatra has highlighted, it’s that, despite how progressive we may think we now are, the world still isn’t ready to accept the idea of people of color thriving in a historical context.
Clearly the writer isn’t familiar with the British scene where ‘people of colour’are massively over represented in every single aspect of broadcasting. May be different in the Arab world, obviously.
Also am curious on two fronts?
– I thought only Whites could be racist?
– The other races apparently co- exist peacefully everywhere else in the world in the fashion of a 1960s Coke commercial and any tensions are always the fault of White people. I’m not sure I get that sense from the article enough
3/10 – must try harder..
https://www.quora.com/How-reliable-of-a-scholar-is-Egyptologist-Sally-Ann-Ashton-a-k-a-Kemet-Expert
Having visited Egypt twice (the proper bits, not Sharm…..) I feel I can safely say that the current occupants of Egypt had fuck all to do with the Pyramids, Karnak or the tombs in the Valley of the Kings.
MC
So she’s the Egyptology equivalent of Bill Nye the science guy?
I’m pretty sure that the Copts are descendants of the Ancient Egyptians and they’re not noticeably black. We also have these:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fayum_mummy_portraits
Having visited Egypt twice (the proper bits, not Sharm…..) I feel I can safely say that the current occupants of Egypt had fuck all to do with the Pyramids, Karnak or the tombs in the Valley of the Kings.
From what I remember of the UK, you’d have no trouble believing the current occupants had fuck all to do with creating an Empire on which the sun ever set. Must have been some other Brits. Organising a piss-up in a brewery would challenge them. And that’s before you include the effniks they’ve let colonise them.
Seeing that the Ptolemys were known for marrying their sisters, we can safely assume that her mother wasn’t black African.
Did she know who her father was? If yes, that’s pretty conclusive.
Can’t add much to Longrider’s comment right at the top, except that the Carthaginians, further west along the coast, were undoubtedly semitic, so even the folk the Greeks ruled over may not have been “African” in the narrow-minded sense of the American race industry. I mean, we’re talking about a place that’s still has border disputes with a Levantine country to this day. Its people were far more likely to resemble the inhabitants of that region than those in modern-day Nigeria or Zimbabwe.
Even setting aside the Greek aspect it would be a bit like casting Jackie Chan as Kemel Ataturk. I mean, they were both Asian, right? (And they call us racist.)
“If there’s one thing that the reaction to James’s Queen Cleopatra has highlighted, it’s that, despite how progressive we may think we now are, the world still isn’t ready to accept …”
… lies.
One does think of Cassius Clay calling himself Muhammad Ali. As I remember it, Muhammad Ali was an Albanian, and a lying double crossing treacherous back stabber. In other words a splendid politician. And a dealer in Sudanese slaves on a colossal scale.
Though I’ll admit he sold some white slaves as well as hordes of blacks. And his troops did defeat some British detachments after the Brits captured Alexandria.
The most entertaining deed that comes to mind was his pretending to negotiate with the Mamelukes, and massacring the lot. Well one is said to have escaped.
Well, of course Cleopatra was African, she was born in Africa and ruled a chunk of it.
What she was *not* was “African” in the sense attributed to it by uneducated “African-Americans”.
She was a descendant of one of the deputies of Alexandar – the guy who founded the great library in Alexandria with no help from any “African-American”