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(King Tut, the actual one.)
“Fake News”. “Disinformation”. “Selective Facts”.
What’s reality anyway?
What did the ancient Egyptians look like? A new exhibition at National Museum of Antiquities in Leiden, the Netherlands, has sparked controversy by including a contemporary artwork that appears to depict the Pharaoh Tutankhamun as Black.
“Kemet: Egypt in Hip-Hop, Jazz, Soul and Funk” pairs Egyptian antiquities from the museum’s collection with work inspired by ancient Egyptian culture by created by musicians of the African diaspora, including Miles Davis, Erykah Badu, Beyoncé, and Rihanna.
The National Museum of Antiquities is renowned for its Egyptology collection. This is not some modern art museum pulling this stunt.
It’s one thing when Netflix decides to africanize Cleopatra, but a museum doing this is very consciously blurring the line between fact and fiction in a time when reality is already under siege and quite a few of their patrons have a loose grip on actual history.
“This is a very difficult topic and that is the thing with this exhibition: I think you really have to give it a chance,” Daniel Soliman, museum’s Egyptian and Nubian curator, told The Art Newspaper. “There are Egyptians, or Egyptians in the diaspora, who believe that the pharaonic heritage is exclusively their own. The topic of the imagination of ancient Egypt in music, predominantly from the African diaspora, Black artists in different styles, jazz, soul, funk, hip-hop, had long been ignored.”
Jazz has nothing to do with ancient Egypt. African-American musical styles did not come out of ancient Egypt. The ancient Egyptians are extinct. They were not African. And Egypt is currently an Arab country.
Talking about the “imagination of ancient Egypt” is a topic for a bad pop culture studies paper, not something that a museum should be flirting with. But the Tumblr fantasies of 2003 became the academic journals of 2013 and now the formal institutional reality of 2023.
They seem to have romanticized Africa. If they had experienced the real thing, they might have a different perspective.
No they wouldn’t, they would keep on romanticizing the black noble savages as the white man Rousseau taught them to.
Any savagery they could not evade or cover up will be blamed on the white man’s colonialism, imperialism, and racism. Just ask Obama or Colin Kaepernick all about it.
They should be introduced to a hungry pride of lions.
Oh, we have mountain lions up here. One of the advantages they have down in San Jose, is no mountain lions downtown (but the humans are more dangerous 🙂
Yes, I’m not scared of mountain lions but the gutter criminals here are definitely dangerous. I can’t even step outside my door without having to be cautious.
So much black envy and hatred of others.
Proverbs 27:4 Wrath is cruel, and anger is outrageous; but who is able to stand before envy?
Well, when you have little or no history of your own, written language not having existed in sub-Saharan Africa, you have to appropriate the history of others.
Just trying to rewrite history to favor one race its too bad their so busy in trying to change everything to suit the PC crowd
North Africa is not West Africa where these US blacks get some of their dna. West Africa has its own sublime ancient culture of Ile- Ife, Ghana and Zambia also have ancient unique cultures. The blues come from West Africa.
This is a case of pathetic kow-towing to American blacks by way of saying: we know how much you like bling…
Holland/ the Netherlands will soon not be a country, they are destroying their sole economy, farming and are importing muslims and feral sub Saharan’s by the ship load.
>“There are Egyptians, or Egyptians in the diaspora, who believe that the pharaonic heritage is exclusively their own.
Rubbing the fact that modern Egypt’s identity is a tad farcical in the face of modern Egyptians is one bright spot in all of this historical revisionism.
One of the odd things I came across reading Richard Burton is that in the mid-1800s the Egyptians considered themselves better fighters than the Turks.
Like trying to claim Moses was Black without anything to back them up
Blacks have been appropriating Judaism since slave days. The entire “four hundred years” narrative is taken right from the Bible, in a prediction that G0d makes to Abraham. Except that it wasn’t four hundred years of Egyptian bondage; the counting started much earlier. One could go on and on about the cultural appropriation, but one thing is certain: There are certain loons, who are listened to, who claim that the “real” Jews are black and that the Jews of European or Middle Eastern ancestry are frauds. Certainly some Jews are black, but the majority are of Middle Eastern or North African (i.e., white) ancestry. And some are very white indeed, coming from northern Europe. But once blacks really get their teeth into the whole “black Jews” thing, there’ll be no living with them. They hate us enough as is!
Thanks Lightbringer!
This cultural theft or misappropriation has been going on all my life. Yet, claiming Tut or Cleopatra were black means taking credit for royal rule and absolute power over the people. Added to such “credits” are claims of divinity, incest, and the murder of family.. Anyone feeling good about such should question their values and explain how it represents an accomplishment for anyone alive today.
I saw the King Tut exhibition in San Francisco, must have been 1979. The good old days 🙂
Seems like only yesterday, the world was fresh and new 🙂
I saw it too, when I was a kid. I don’t remember where. Probably Milwaukee or Chicago.
“when the world was fresh and new.” I remember those days. And everything seemed so big.
Like San Francisco in the 1950s. Safe and clean. Macy’s had a huge Christmas tree. My parents took me to see that.
I went to San Fran when I was fifteen, back in 1979. It was beautiful.
I live in nearby San Jose now but I don’t visit. Anybody who watches or reads news knows about the severe problems there.
I can have my car vandalized or get stabbed here. There’s no reason to drive to another city for one of those things to happen for sure. And even though the derelict “homeless” problem here is bad, there isn’t human feces on city sidewalks. Plenty of piss, though.
I was with some chick yesterday who took a piss right on the grass in the park down the street. She didn’t even squat. I have bad judgement when it comes to chicks. I held a blanket around her but her ass was hanging out in public because it wasn’t big enough to cover her totally.
I don’t know what I’m doing.