Black Nefertiti

Howard Sutherland writes:

On the home page of the Daily Telegraph website, I noticed the advertisement on the right side for a prescription eyelash-growing product called Latisse. I’ll refrain from comment about what a perceived need for a prescription medication to help women grow longer eyelashes says about a society’s state of decadence.

What caught my eye is that, at least when I was looking at the Telegraph’s site, the advert took the form of a slideshow along a chronological timeline featuring such champions of eyelashdom as Marlene Dietrich. In itself, not surprising. The first point along the eyelash chronology, however, is at 4000 B.C. At that point in history, a photo of a model dressed as a Pharaonic Egyptian queen turns up. She is dressed to look like the famous bust of Nefertiti now in Berlin. Let’s pass over the minor fact that Nefertiti lived in the 14th century B.C., not the 41st. The attention-getter is that the model is clearly black—a Bantu African or perhaps a black American or West Indian. Whatever that bust of Nefertiti may be, one thing it certainly is not is a statue of a Bantu African.

The notion that the Pharaonic Egyptians were black Africans has been thoroughly debunked (and was a notion nobody entertained before the 20th century advent of black power movements, anyway). Nevertheless, we have here presented to us as fact—or at least very strongly insinuated—that black women reigned over a black Egyptian civilization over 6,000 years ago. Certainly that is the impression the social-controlling advertising agency that made this slideshow wants to give. Combine this with the way Ancient Egypt is presented to us today as the mother civilization preceding and giving wisdom to classical antiquity—hence to all of Western civilization—and the message we are meant to get is clear. Our civilization is an illegitimate, predatory and parasitic thief, stealing the legacy of an older, higher Black civilization.

Perhaps only now, with Barack Hussein and Michelle Obama enthroned at 1600 Pennsylvania Avenue, are we poised to reclaim that lost, ultimate civilization’s heights! Wanna bet we see Michelle sporting a Nefertiti head-dress sometime soon? HRS

Kilroy M. writes from Australia:

With all this discussion concerning the “reconstruction” of the “first European,” I am surprised that nobody has yet countered by citing the bust of Queen Neferetiti, who is clearly a North African Caucasoid, at least according to the representations of her via the famous bust on display at the Berlin Museum. Nevertheless, I hear apparently that that too is a fake. Be that as it may, other sculptures of her (the authenticity of which has not, to my knowledge been questioned) do not disclose a flat nose and protruding brow or lower jaw, rather, the accentuated features are definitely of a European character. In my meanderings of classical literature, I was often struck by the descriptions of ancient peoples: red hair, alabaster skin … all apparently living in and around the Mediterranean. Hanibal is just another example …

LA replies:

Yes, the question of “black Egypt” is a part of this. “Black Egypt” idea cannot survive a visit to the Egyptian wing of the Metropolitan Museum of Art in NYC. The Egyptians themselves made it crystal clear what the racial types of the Egyptians were. You saw some faces that seemed to be an admixture of Negro, but overwhelmingly they are of a distinctive, quasi-Mediterranean type. The Egyptian artists were explicit: they showed women as light, men as reddish (just like real life, where men tend to be more darker and more flushed than women), and blacks are shown as foreigners briinging tribute, or, occasionally as slaves. There are some Pharoanic faces that have a Negroid cast, but, again, these are race-mixed types, not blacks, and they are in a small minority.

Kilroy replies:

Several years ago I purchased a re-print of A H Sayce and R Peterson’s Race in Ancient Egypt & The Old Testament (Washington Summit Publishers, 1993). It’s a 144 page dissertation on precisely this topic. Are you familiar with it? I also have J W Jamieson’s The Nordic Face: A Glimpse of Iron Age Scandinavia (The Cliveden Press, 1982), a pamphlet that catalogues the facial reconstruction of various scull remains of Scandinavian indigenies from the Iron Age: they are then given contemporary hair-cuts and clothes and show how identical they are to the average typical Scandinavian walking the streets of Oslo or Stockholm today. It’s the revers of what this Alice Roberts character has done. Although I note that Robert’s subject was found in what’s presently Romania, it’s interesting to compare her attitude to that of Jamieson (i.e. why pick dark skin?). If in twenty seven years attitude can change so radically among European (scientific) elites, I’m not sure whether to hold out hope or be in fear of the next twenty seven.

Posted by Lawrence Auster at May 20, 2009 03:47 PM | Send