From the Victorian Era to Modern Hollywood: Egypt Never Gets a Break

Question: From one mythology nerd to another I felt the need to share my outrage over something. Have you heard of the upcoming movie "Gods of Egypt"? It's supposed to be a mythological epic starring the aforementioned gods, only they were all cast as white actors. Since I've seen a lot of your blog posts dedicated to correcting pop culture misconceptions about world mythology so I wanted to hear what you thought of this one.

Oh, Hollywood, what the hell are we going to do with you?

Yes, we're aware of Gods of Egypt, although it's still in pre-production and probably won't see the light of day for a while yet. And yes, although casting is only half-done, all the actors so far are as white as white can be.

This is not awesome, and the reason it is not awesome is that Egyptian gods would presumably look Egyptian, and the ancient Egyptians were emphatically not white. A lot of the perception of them as looking kind of Caucasian comes from the nineteenth century, when egyptology suddenly came into vogue as a sort of exotic, interesting pastime for the European elite. Egyptian artifacts were being dug up and taken to Europe by amateur archaeologists and private collectors, easily avoiding any trouble from an Egyptian government that didn't have much power to prevent them and was predominantly Muslim-controlled at the time anyway and consequently didn't much care; in fact, selling ancient Egyptian relics to European tourists was one of the most booming ways to make money in Egypt for a while. Europeans, especially in England and France, held theme parties where they dressed up as Egyptians (theoretically) and ate Egyptian food (supposedly) and discussed their latest finds. Some even actually procured mummies to display and even unwrap in their salons for such parties, and disposed of them after they were done impressing their friends.

Yes, that is some people posing proudly with the thousand-year-old mummy they just unwrapped and poked around in. Please have your Virtue Extremities in the designated areas.

This pop culture craze for ancient Egypt went hand in hand with the archaeological world really starting to seriously try to study and interpret the long-gone civilization. The Rosetta Stone had finally enabled translation of some hieroglyphs at the turn of the century, and the next several decades were rife with scholarly theory, investigation and intrepretation, some of it insanely wacky. There were the hysterics that mummification was a magical process meant to create the undead, the theories that the Egyptians must have been monotheists and that all their pantheon of gods were merely aspects of the same one deity... and the idea that the Egyptians were white, which has stuck around stubbornly for centuries now. The theory went that since the Egyptians had slaves from Nubia and other areas of Africa which were depicted as of darker skin than themselves, they must have been the white "master race" of the time period, using the lesser Africans as their servants while they concentrated on their great feats of art and culture - which, of course, could never have been achieved by anyone other than white people in the first place.

It's a pretty disgusting theory, but that's the early nineteenth century for you. Slavery was still common, people were still seriously and perniciously advancing the idea that Africans and other people of color were not actually humans or at the very least inherently inferior to Europeans, and science was still trying to prove things through phrenology. It was a weird time.

At any rate, what all this means to us today is that we've got this old, shitty idea of Egyptians-as-white-people still kicking around from the days of poor scholarship of yore, and apparently it's one of the harder ones to get rid of, in spite of how stupid it is. Egypt is, of course, in Africa, within spitting distance of the Canaanite- and Arab-dominated peninsulas to its east, and you know what ancient race lived there that was white? Nobody. The answer is nobody. This is pretty obvious when you look at Egyptian art; even thousands of years later after it's been through who knows how much weathering and fading, the people depicted in Egyptian painting and sculpture are clearly not in the neighborhood of Caucasian.

Pictured above: not white people.

Of course, exactly what color skin they had is sort of up for debate, since they've been gone for thousands of years and there have since been plenty of influxes of foreign blood, from the Greco-Roman arrivals from the north, African imports from the south and west and Arab influence from the east. The last is particularly prominent in modern Egypt, which was under Ottoman rule for a long time. But European, or European-looking, they definitely were not. (Except for parts of the Ptolemy dynasty who were actually Greek. But they're a late development.)

Which brings us back around to Hollywood and its total inability to not whitewash supposedly Egyptian characters. It's that same weird old misconception we have about Egyptians-as-Caucasians, only now it's also part of the Hollywood tendency toward making the vast majority of its characters white whenever possible unless directly marketing to an audience of a different race or ethnicity. Gods of Egypt isn't doing anything new, sad to say. Elizabeth Taylor as Cleopatra is one of our most famous images when it comes to Egypt, and have you guys seen The Mummy Returns? You know, the part where Rachel Weisz, one of the whitest people on the planet, is an Egyptian princess?

But, anyway: Gods of Egypt. Alas, it is full of white people. Very talented ones, mind you (guys, I would probably pay to watch Geoffrey Rush sit in a bus station for six hours humming to himself), but it's not hard to see why so many people are disappointed in Hollywood once again deciding to tell a story about a different culture and then cast nobody who bears even a passing resemblance to them. I'm sure Jamie Lannister will probably do a fine job as Horus, but how many actors of color could have done the same but never got the chance?

We have to say we don't have high hopes for the movie itself; mythology movies have been almost uniformly awful for the past few decades, and while we'd love to be proved wrong by this one, we're not holding our breaths. But only time will tell!