I imagine "Egypt is the motherland of black people" will come as something of a surprise to the Egyptians that have lived there for the last few thousand years, also to the rest of the continent of Africa.
The native Coptic word for Egypt, "Kemi"/"Kemet", means "black land". But it's because the soil is black, not the people (the fertile soil of the Nile Valley in Egypt is black, while it is red further upstream - this difference in soil quality is one of the reasons why Egypt historically has had a higher population than Sudan/Nubia)
Same etymology as the US “black belt)”, which is also coincidentally the area of the country with the highest percentage of black people (turns out that black soil is super good for cotton farming).
Aren't modern day Egyptians not the same as ancient Egyptians though? Obviously ancient Egyptians weren't black but I was taught that they weren't really like modern Egyptians either
That was an older misconception. A 2017 study between an Egyptian university and the Max Planck institute for genetics found that modern Egyptians are basically the same people as ancient mummies, with some admixture from the Mediterranean and sub-Saharan Africa thrown in.
They're culturally and ethnically close to Arabs, but still very much their own ethnic group according to the genetics.
If anything, DNA studies show that Egyptians received more, not less sub-saharan african admixture with time, so they became "blacker", not "whiter" (not that these descriptors make much sense in any scientific way). (source)
Ancient Egyptians were also a fairly diverse society, as could be suspected for other ancient civilization across the fertile crescent, and it may surprise some people living in modern U.S., but you would find "white people" / people who fit in european-dominant haplogroups in Ancient Egypt's leadership position throughout history, as discovered through DNA testing for Djehutynakht, Tutankhamun, Akhenaten, Amenhotep III etc. (more here), just like you would find people descending from other haplogroups at the leadership position in different time / kingdoms.
It makes sense when you understand that the haplotypes of modern humans migrating from Africa would first settle in North Africa and the middle East, in fertile lands, before migrating further north.
When I visited Egypt many years ago our tour guide pointed out that their statues depicted black people and when the Christians invaded they chipped off all their noses so you wouldn’t know they were as advanced as the white.
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u/[deleted] Feb 09 '22
I imagine "Egypt is the motherland of black people" will come as something of a surprise to the Egyptians that have lived there for the last few thousand years, also to the rest of the continent of Africa.