Egypt Spars With Dutch Museum Of Ancient History
A new Dutch museum exhibit declares, “Egypt is part of Africa,” which may strike most people who’ve seen a map of the world as an uncontroversial statement.
But the exhibition in the National Museum of Antiquities in Leiden goes beyond geography. It explores the tradition of black musicians – Beyoncé, Tina Turner, Nas and others – and draws inspiration and pride from the idea that ancient Egypt was an African culture. The exhibition is intended as a helpful correction to centuries of cultural erasure of Africans.
What may sound powerful in the United States and thought-provoking in the Netherlands, however, is anathema to the Egyptian government and many of its people, who have flooded the museum’s Facebook and Google pages with complaints — sometimes racist — about what they see it as Western appropriation of their history.
Many Egyptians do not see themselves as African at all, identify much more closely with the predominantly Arab and Muslim nations of the Middle East and North Africa, and many look down on dark-skinned Egyptians and sub-Saharan Africans. And some feel it is their culture and history that are being obliterated in the Western quest to correct historical racism.
The exhibition “attacks the civilization and heritage of the Egyptians” and “distorts Egyptian identity,” said a member of parliament, Ahmed Belal, in a speech on May 2, shortly after the opening of the exhibition and around the same time, a similar fireworks over a Netflix docudrama starring the ancient Greco-Egyptian queen Cleopatra as Black.
Within weeks, perhaps aware of the appeal to its nationalist supporters, the Egyptian government sprang into action. The authority overseeing all things ancient Egypt has informed the team of archaeologists at the Leiden museum, including the exhibition’s half-Egyptian curator, that they could no longer excavate in Egypt. Until then, Dutch Egyptologists had worked in the ancient tombs of Sakkara since 1975.
“If you don’t respect our culture or heritage, we won’t work with you until you do,” said Abdul Rahim Rihan, an Egyptian archaeologist who leads a group called the Campaign for the Defense of Egyptian Civilization.
Suggestions that ancient Egypt is a cultural ancestor of modern black people are central to some forms of Afrocentrism, a cultural and political movement that arose to push back against often racist, colonialist ideas about African civilizations’ perceived inferiority to European. Black people, in this story, could be proud of their roots in the ancient kingdom that built some of the world’s greatest magnificence.
But for Egyptians, it all boils down to a hurt sense that just as Westerners looted antiquities like the Rosetta Stone from Egypt and took credit for discovering them in centuries past, they are once again taking control of ancient Egypt from the Egyptians themselves. .
The museum exhibit, “Kemet: Egypt in Hip-Hop, Jazz, Soul & Funk,” looks at how Afrocentrism has played out in music. Beyoncé and Rihanna have adorned themselves as Nefertiti, the ancient queen of Egypt; Nina Simone said she believed she was the reincarnation of Nefertiti; and Tina Turner once sang about Queen Hatshepsut – an ancient Egyptian pharaoh – in a past life.
The cover art for Nas’ 1999 album “I Am…” sculpts his features into King Tutankhamen’s famous golden mask. Miles Davis, Prince, and Erykah Badu have all borrowed inspiration from the pharaohs for lyrics, jewelry, and more.
‘Kemet’, the ancient Egyptians’ word for their country, even commissioned one audio tour narrated in Dutch, English and Arabic by Typhoon, a Dutch rapper, and a new song by Dutch rapper Nnelg about his connection to ancient Egypt.
While on tour, Typhoon acknowledges that the musicians’ perspectives “are not the only way to think about ancient Egypt”, but he nevertheless presents the exhibition as a correction of history.
“Although television programs and films in the Netherlands and the US often only project a certain image of Egypt onto the public, people with a dark skin color also lived there, past and present,” he says.
The show, whose curator, Daniel Solimanis half-Egyptian, added a rack to the description of the exhibition online in response to the “commotion” on social media. It said it was trying to explain “why ancient Egypt is important to these artists and musicians and what cultural and intellectual currents the music came from.”
Museum representatives declined to comment outside of the statement. But that defend the performance have pointed out that most critics have not visited it.
For Egyptians, how sensitive this topic became apparent during the controversy over Netflix’s “Queen Cleopatrawhen an Egyptian lawyer called for the streaming service to be banned in Egypt and the government dismissed the show as a “falsification of Egyptian history.”
Part of their anger may also stem from colorism: some Egyptians tend to identify light-skinned with the elite, perhaps the result of age-old beauty ideals that praise fair-skinned and centuries of domination by lighter-skinned conquerors from Europe and Turkey.
The anger of the Egyptians focuses in part on one Afrocentrist idea, far from being embraced by all who subscribe to Afrocentrism, namely that the Arabs who invaded Egypt in the seventh century drove out the true African Egyptians.
“This is an attack on Egyptian identity,” said Dr. Rihan, the Egyptian archaeologist. “It’s not about skin color,” he added. “When you say such things,” he said, “you take the Egyptians out of their own history, against all evidence.”
Dr. Soliman started excavating in Egypt as a student before joining the museum. He is one of the leaders of the museum-affiliated team that normally spends weeks each year in the village of Sakkara, just south of Cairo, excavating tombs from the ancient Egyptian city of Memphis.
Unlike European or American-led archaeological excavations of the past – witness the photographs of Howard Carter’s famous discovery of King Tut’s tomb – the Leiden archaeological team pays careful attention to the contributions of Egyptian workers, prominently featuring them in photographs and online diaries about the excavations of each season. Those efforts are in line with a growing trend in Egyptology to give Egyptians, once overlooked in the study of their own country’s history, greater prominence in the field.
But that mattered little after news of Dr. Soliman scattered.
The Dutch museum appeared somewhat stunned by the tone of the social media criticism, noting that while it welcomed “respectful dialogue”, racist or abusive comments would be removed.
Scholars tend to study ancient Egypt as part of the Mediterranean world, with cultural and political ties to Greece and Rome, as well as to Nubia, roughly coextensive with modern-day Sudan.
While there is no scholarly consensus on the appearance or ethnicity of the ancient Egyptians, many classicists say it is inappropriate to talk about race at that time, since the ancients did not classify people as we do today.
Contemporary Egyptians, like the dialect they speak, descend from a family tree with many branches. Greeks, Romans, Arabs, Turks and Albanians all conquered Egypt centuries ago. Circassians arrived as slaves, Levantine Arabs and Western Europeans as businessmen. Nubians still live in southern Egypt.
But it is Islam and the Arabic language that now predominate, uniting Egypt with the predominantly Arab and Muslim Middle East and North Africa rather than with the rest of the continent on which it lies.
“Egypt is in a category of its own,” says David Abulafia, a Cambridge University historian who studies the ancient world. “With everyone being lumped together, nuance has often been lost in the way African history is presented as a bloc.”
But for Typhoon, the Dutch rapper, Egyptian exceptionalism feeds on discredited European theories that “were used to determine which ancient cultures were considered important and therefore could not belong to Africa,” he says in the audio tour.
Such theories, he says, “divorced ancient Egypt from its African context.”
Nina Siegal contributed reporting from Amsterdam.