Black egyptians?

["Robert Firth" <robertjf@xxxxxxxxxxxxxx>]

Folks

Ancient Egypt is something I do know a bit about.

No, the AEs were definitely not "negroid", as their
art makes clear.  But note: AE art is very, very
realistic in respect of form, but sometimes highly
conventional in respect of colour.  Statues in
particular used the natural colour of the stone, so
while we know what Chephren or Rameses II
looked like, we can't deduce that the former was
black and the latter yellow, merely that one was
sculpted in diorite and the other in sandstone.

Likewise with paintings.  The colours we see today
are the same as were painted - the AEs wrought for
eternity and used imperishable, mineral paints -
but by the same token they only had a very limited
palette.  Men are painted red and women yellow,
and that is obviously a convention.

Moreover, the southern neighbours of the Egyptians
weren't the Blacks of today - in those times, the
"forest negro" was confined to West Africa, and the
rest  of the continent was inhabited by Ethiopians,
Nubians, Pygmies, Bushmen &c.  There is essentially
no discernable cultural influence from Pharaonic Egypt
to the ancestors of today's black Americans.

On the other paw, there were very large cultural influences
from Egypt to the Mediterranean world - which every
historian of Greece from Herodotus onward has freely
admitted.  To me, the "Black Egyptian" movement is
not about restoring Egypt to her rightful place.  On the
contrary, many of its advocates show an appalling
ignorance of Egyptian history, culture, and language.
It is more about trying to put down the white man:
"you stole it all from our ancestors, yah, yah."

Rather as if I were to claim that the Parthenon was just
a copy of Stonehenge, and the British invested everything
useful in 3000BC.  And I have oral legends to prove it.

TTFN
Robert