Dutch Museum Renowned for Egyptology Collection Displays Fake ‘Africanized’ King Tut – “I think you really have to give it a chance”

(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.

https://www.frontpagemag.com/museum-renowned-for-egyptology-collection-displays-fake-africanized-king-tut/

One thought on “Dutch Museum Renowned for Egyptology Collection Displays Fake ‘Africanized’ King Tut – “I think you really have to give it a chance””

  1. The ancient Egyptians looked very much like the Egyptians of today. They themselves, as a people, were not Black. Neither were they White. In general, they had light brown skin with varying shades, but facial features were not like Black Africans or Black Americans of today.
    The Nubians who lived in ancient Egypt, were Black. Many were taken from Nubia (today Southern Sudan), as slaves after wars with ancient Egypt. Their decendants either remained as slaves, or managed to become freemen and entered the military, the police (yes, ancient Egypt has a police force), or became freemen merchants, farmers. Some married Egyptians. Some even entered the service of Pharoah in the royal palace and the harem. Some Nubian women actually became secondary wives of the Pharoah himself and 1 or 2 might even have been the chief Queen of Egypt.
    Towards the end of ancient Egypt, Nubia conquered Egypt and there were 150 years of Nubian Pharoahs.
    But the ancient Egyptians, as a distinct people, from the beginning to the end of their civilization, were not Black or did not look like Black Africans or USA Blacks.

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