Three thousand years ago Queen Nefertiti was the “lady of all women”. Today, Queen Bey, as Beyoncé is otherwise known, could be described as the monarch for all single ladies.
Egyptian officials, however, appear to have finally grown tired of comparisons between the chief consort of the pharaoh Akhenaten and a musician who five years ago dressed as Nefertiti at the Coachella festival in 2018 and sold merchandise dedicated to the Egyptian queen.
They have banned Dutch archaeologists from the country in a bitter dispute over a museum exhibition that portrays black American singers, performers, and musicians as the rulers of ancient Egypt, according to the British newspaper “The Times”.
In the latest battle in a culture war over the representation of ancient Egypt’s civilization as black and African, the Dutch National Museum of Antiquities (RMO) in Leiden incurred the wrath of Cairo over its exhibition, entitled Kemet, meaning the “black land”.
It explores the ancient civilization through jazz, soul, and funk music to show the “significance of ancient Egypt and Nubia in the work of musicians from the African diaspora”.
It features portrayals of Beyoncé and Rihanna as Nefertiti, and representations of the pharaohs, including the American rapper Nas as Tutankhamun and Eddie Murphy as Ramesses. It comes after an international row over the Netflix casting of Adele James, a black British star, as Cleopatra.
“In Egyptology, the science that deals with ancient Egypt, Egypt has long been studied primarily as part of the Mediterranean region,” the museum said, “but many musicians with African roots emphasize that ancient Egypt is an African culture”.
Charges of “falsifying history” and an “Afrocentric” approach have led to Egypt’s antiquities service banning Dutch archaeologists from the important Saqqara burial ground near Cairo, which is home to the earliest pyramids.
Egypt’s El Fagr newspaper said the exhibition was “highly provocative and requires an explanation” against charges of “support for Afrocentric ideas that try to rob the ancient Egyptian civilization of its people”.
“Should they have made it clear that the exhibition is about non-Egyptian African musicians? This is consistent with history, reality, and logic, as they were not and will not be Egyptians,” Hossam Zidan, the archaeology correspondent, wrote.
