Queen Tiye, Great Royal Wife of Amenhotep III, mother of Akhenaten and grandmother of Tutankhamun.
Ancient Egyptian artists preserved her likeness more than 3,300 years ago.
In 1954, Hollywood cast white American actress Judith Evelyn to portray her in The Egyptian.
An absolutely uncanny resemblance, wouldn't you say?
Apparently, historical accuracy stopped at the costume department.
@akcay_nurettinn Many Chinese don't even know the existence of this law. The wide spread resentment of 🦃 in China has nothing to do with this law. You are just trying to bring the Chinese government into this
Egypt is the most revealing case of all.
Ancient Egypt, with its pyramids, its philosophy, its mathematical precision, its medicine, its legal systems, its art that still stops people in museum halls, is acknowledged as one of the great civilizations of human history.
And for most of Western academic history, it was also systematically, carefully, persistently de-Africanized.
Ancient Egyptians were depicted as lighter than the evidence suggests.
The obvious geographical and cultural connections to the rest of Africa were minimized.
The Nile Valley civilizations that predated the dynastic period were underdiscussed.
Cheikh Anta Diop spent his career arguing that ancient Egypt was an African civilization.
Not Mediterranean. Not racially ambiguous. Not a separate category inserted between "real" Africa and "real" civilization.
African.
The reaction from Western academia was not engagement.
It was dismissal. It was decades of institutional resistance. It was the particular fury of a field that had built its understanding of the ancient world on the careful, necessary, structurally load-bearing separation of Egypt from the continent it sits on.
Because if Egypt is African, then the sentence "Africa had no civilization before Europe arrived" doesn’t just need revision.
It becomes incoherent.
Not just false, but the precise inversion of the truth.
And not just about one dynasty or one period but about the foundational story of Western civilization itself, which drew substantially from Egyptian knowledge in mathematics, medicine, architecture, philosophy.
Which means Western civilization did not bring knowledge to Africa.
It learned from it.
The mummies are still there.
The DNA studies have complicated every clean narrative.
Diop’s work has been increasingly vindicated by genetic and archaeological evidence.
The resistance continues anyway.
But the instinct, the deep structural instinct to separate the civilization you want to celebrate from the continent you needed to be empty, that instinct shaped the field for generations.
You cannot claim the pyramids and also claim the continent that built them had no history.
You cannot do both with a straight face.
They tried anyway.
@nxt888 well if you watch TV in the USA, we are told that 'aliens' built all the old mysterious massive monuments in the ancient world... because 'they' don't want us to know what humans were capable of in the ancient world...
The archaeological consensus is increasingly clear and increasingly detailed.
The pyramids were built by ancient Egyptians.
Not slaves. That’s a later myth, partly biblical in origin, comprehensively contradicted by the evidence.
Workers’ villages have been excavated near Giza.
We have records of their rations, their medical care, their organized labor gangs that gave themselves names.
We have the Papyrus of Merer, an actual ancient diary discovered in 2013, written by an inspector who helped transport limestone for the Great Pyramid.
A firsthand account, in Egyptian, describing the logistics of the construction in administrative detail.
The tools were copper chisels, wooden sledges, ramps and, depicted in their own tomb paintings, water poured ahead of sledges to reduce friction on sand.
The mathematics involved was precise enough to align the Great Pyramid to true north with an accuracy that still impresses engineers today.
The granite came from Aswan, 800 kilometers away.
The logistics alone represent an organizational achievement of the first order.
Now here is the thing worth noticing.
Nobody asks who really built the Palace of Knossos.
Nobody publishes bestselling books suggesting the Greeks couldn’t possibly have engineered the Parthenon without outside assistance.
Nobody makes a documentary implying the Persians didn’t actually build Persepolis.
Nobody insists the Chinese couldn’t possibly have constructed the Great Wall.
Yet somehow, when it comes to Egypt, human ingenuity is no longer considered explanation enough.
The "mystery" of pyramid construction, the cottage industry of alternative theories, the aliens, the lost civilizations, the suspiciously unnamed advanced races, exists in the specific shape it does because the Egyptians were African.
The moment you return Egypt to Africa, the mystery evaporates.
It becomes what it always was: a sophisticated civilization building sophisticated things.
The mystery was never about engineering.
It was about making African genius unthinkable.
China is jamming Indian Army drones as clashes between India and China continue near Indian-occupied Arunachal Pradesh.
Indian drones are falling like Rafales, but before they can even take off, Chinese are cooking Indian forces like toys with their advanced technology.
🇮🇳🇨🇳
In 1324, Mansa Musa of Mali made a pilgrimage to Mecca.
He traveled with 60,000 people and 100 camel-loads of gold.
He gave away so much gold in Cairo that he collapsed the regional gold market for a decade.
A decade. From generosity on a journey.
His empire covered more territory than Western Europe. His capital, Niani, was a center of scholarship, trade, and governance sophisticated enough that visiting Arab historians wrote about it with undisguised admiration.
This was not a primitive society waiting for civilization to arrive.
This was a civilization.
One of the great ones. By any measure that wasn’t specifically designed to exclude it.
The colonizers who arrived in West Africa centuries later did not bring civilization to a void.
They dismantled something that was already there.
The textbooks that don’t mention Mansa Musa at all, not once, not a paragraph, are not gaps in education.
They are a decision. Made deliberately. Maintained consistently.
Because his existence changes the sentence.