Even the least educated among us knows something of ancient Egypt. For instance, there is a strain of Afro-centrism that insists the ancient Egyptians were black. They go through the list of pharaohs, pointing out how each one had distinctly African features. The “Hotep” thing grows out of this. The sort of people who attend a Juneteenth festivals will have the word “Hotep” attached to them in some way. Black business people will put this on their business card or website to signal to other blacks that they are down with the cause.
It is complete nonsense, of course, but the reason we know it is nonsense is the Eqyptians preserved their past in memorials of stone, often filled with hieroglyphs so precise that we can know the exact order of their rulers, four thousand years after their time. The Egyptians were so careful preserving their dead rulers that we have fully intact mummies in our museums. Using modern science, we now know how they looked in life and how they fit into the emerging genetic mosaic of the human family.
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