Lies my teachers told me

Not really sure where this belongs, but I wanted to get this off my chest for quite some time.  I want to talk about an outright lie that my teacher told me.  A lie that, while seemingly insignificant, is a part of a larger, more systematic lie.  The lie that my teacher told me was this:

"Napoleon Bonaparte shot the nose off the sphinx in Egypt because he was racist and didn't want people to see its black African features"

For years, I believe this to be true, but thanks to the internets, I found out that it was an out right lie.  Here is a picture of the Sphinx made in 1755:

Here it is from another angle:

Notice anything?  The nose is already gone by this time and it is many years before Napoleon even got there in 1789.




 If Napoleon in fact did NOT shoot off the Sphinx's nose, then he could not have been racist and offended by the Sphinx's blackness.  Furthermore, the whole idea of the Sphinx having a "black looking nose" is called into question, since the rest of the story is false.

Why is this even important?  It is because this is a part of a greater lie, which says that ancient Egyptians were black.  This is pretty much held to be true not only in Afrocentric circles, but mainstream acadamia, especially in primary education.  Now common sense tells us that if you look at a country's population today, it is a good indication of what the people looked like in the past.  If you look at modern Chinese, that's probably how ancient Chinese looked.  If you look at modern day Italians, it will be pretty much how ancient Romans looked.  Same with Central American, despite the invasion of white Spaniards, people in Guatemala look pretty much the same as they did in the ancient days.

So if you look at an Egyptian today, what would they look like?

They look pretty middle-eastern to me.

Then there is the thing about Cleopatra.  History tells us that Cleopatra was the daughter of Ptolemy, who was a Greek general under Alexander the Great.  This would make her ethnically Greek.  I don't think there is a serious historical scholar that would disagree with this.

Does this look like an African to you?

Despite the mountain of evidence that contradicts the "black Egyptian" meme, if you were to bring it up around a primary school teacher, prepared to be crucified.  However, if you speak with serious anthropologists in higher education, more of them will admit that Egyptians were not in fact black.  So why all the mis-information and double-think?  I'll let you figure that out for yourself.

I guess when it comes down to it, I'm a truth seeker.  It irks me when I've been lied to.  It bothers me that this lie about Egyptians is still going on, and it disturbs me because the people behind it have some bad political agenda.  The Napoleon lie leads to the Egyptian lie, which leads to much greater lies about this world.  I don't have the time to go into all of it, but let this blog post be a shining pin-point of truth.