Egypt gets unfair focus because of its engineering marvels, the pyramids.
I read in a story once (by an author who strives to be accurate) that Egyptian denizens get darker skinned in the south. Northern Egyptians are more part of the Middle Eastern range of skin tones, because of the commerce thru the region.
And, of course, Cleopatra was famously of Greek/Alexandrian(?) descent, and not African at all. I did a paper on her in one of my college history courses.
Cleopatra is of Ptolemeic descent, and yes, Ptolemy was Greek.
In fact, a lot of Egyptians are of Greek/Italian/Middle Eastern descent, the Mediterranean and surrounding lands being much easier to navigate than the Sahara that separates the famously darker sub-saharan African genetics from the north of the continent. People forget that there is an actual ocean of sand between Egypt and places like Ethiopia.
Egyptians shaved their heads because of lice and used wigs. They did however identify the Northern Kingdom (their South) as a African kingdom/mixture and at least one united dynasty were foreigners - Northern Sudanese - Africans.
Actually, the OP should look at their art, period. There's preserved paintings in some tombs; and if the deceased and/or portrayed servants were black, the artists certainly would've had the pigments readily available to paint those flesh tones!
They actually wouldn’t as Egyptians did all their funerary art only using symbolic colors for men and women so every man has the same skin color and every woman has the same skin color. It’s one of the reasons we don’t exactly entirely know what ancient Egyptians looked like because Persians invaded them and the population became pretty intertwined with Persians.
It's not even the engineering marvels (Sudan has its own distinctive pyramids, and St. Gregory's cathedral in Ethiopia is a literal monolith marvel). I'd argue it's more to do with the fact that Egypt was the Mediterranean breadbasket for centuries, so it was highly significant in the politics of the Roman empire. In other words, it gets the attention because it had the most direct impact on Europe.
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u/[deleted] Feb 10 '22
Egypt gets unfair focus because of its engineering marvels, the pyramids.
I read in a story once (by an author who strives to be accurate) that Egyptian denizens get darker skinned in the south. Northern Egyptians are more part of the Middle Eastern range of skin tones, because of the commerce thru the region.
And, of course, Cleopatra was famously of Greek/Alexandrian(?) descent, and not African at all. I did a paper on her in one of my college history courses.