Why Gods of Egypt is Whitewashing

The infamous new fantasy/action flick Gods of Egypt (released Feb. 26 this year) may have cost 140 million to make, but so far its measly box office turnout has not boded well for it. Neither have the critics shown this “re-imagining” of ancient Egyptian mythology any more mercy; RottenTomatoes.com gives it a “rotten” critical score of 12%, summing up the consensus as:

Look on Gods of Egypt, ye filmgoers, and despair! Nothing beside remains. Round the decay of this colossal wreck, boundless and bare. The lone and level sands stretch far away. (Apologies to Shelley.)

Tempted as I might sometimes feel to verify whether it’s really such a cinematic catastrophe by viewing it myself, I feel I have better uses for my money than giving the director Alex Proyas a single extra cent. But truth be told, one of the reasons Gods of Egypt put me off even before its disastrous reception was the “whitewashed” casting, by which I mean casting the majority of these “ancient Egyptian” characters with actors of European descent (Chadwick Boseman as the scribal god Djehuti, or Thoth, being the one notable exception). Now I liked Gerard Butler in 300 as much as anyone else, but seeing a Scotsman as the Egyptian god Sutekh/Set is hardly more believable than seeing Idris Elba as the Norse Heimdall.

Unfortunately Gods of Egypt is only the latest of numerous films and other pop-culture productions misrepresenting the indigenous inhabitants of the Egyptian Nile Valley. Readers may recall the same problem in 2014’s Exodus: Gods and Kings, with Joel Edgerton as the Pharaoh Ramses II. And then you have Arnold Vosloo as the titular villain Imhotep in the first two Mummy movies with Brendan Fraser, Yul Brynner as Ramses II again in DeMille’s classic The Ten Commandments, and so on. In addition to this miscasting, the native Egyptian culture very often receives other trappings more evocative of the Islamic Middle East, such as Arabic-sounding music for instance.

The thing is, the original Egyptians by and larger would not have been biologically European. In fact, it’s not even correct to say they would have looked mostly Arabian, Mediterranean, or “Middle Eastern”.

The latter misconception is understandable given that the modern Arab Republic of Egypt identifies itself as part of the larger Arabic and Middle Eastern communities, and most of today’s Egyptians do have lighter brown skin and other physical traits stereotypically associated with the Middle East and Mediterranean basins. But the fact is that, much like the inhabitants of modern Latin America, the people living in modern Egypt are of diverse heritage which incorporates not only native Egyptian but also various Middle Eastern, Mediterranean, and even southern European ancestries (e.g. see the Egyptian bar on this admixture graph).

Of course much of this is a consequence of the country’s conquest and incorporation into various empires from the Middle East and southern Europe within the last three thousand years. And given that history, extrapolating the current Egyptian population’s makeup into the ancient setting of Gods of Egypt and other productions would be like extrapolating Mexican mestizos or Afro-Brazilians into the pre-Columbian Native American civilizations.

So who would the indigenous Egyptians, who laid the groundwork of what we consider Pharaonic civilization, have been? It is fair to say that, far from being European or even Middle Eastern in appearance, they and their culture would have been native African in origin. Most probably they developed from cattle-herding African tribes roaming the savannas of the Sahara before they turned to desert around 3500 BC. When the time came for these Africans to settle along the Nile and organize themselves into larger chiefdoms that would later merge into the Egyptian nascent state, most of the foundations of classical Egyptian civilization would be laid in the southern part of the country (Upper Egypt, since it is further upriver) before they conquered the northern (Lower, or downriver) reaches.

The biological anthropologist S.O.Y. Keita, perhaps the most specialized in this topic, reports on these :

Studies of crania from southern predynastic Egypt, from the formative period (4000–3100 B.C.), show them usually to be more similar to the crania of ancient Nubians, Kushites, Saharans, or modern groups from the Horn of Africa than to those of dynastic northern Egyptians [referring to a Late Period series from 664–341 BC, regarded as a period of decline for Pharaonic Egyptian hegemony] or ancient or modern southern Europeans.

— S.O.Y. Keita and AJ Boyce, “ The Geographical Origins and Population Relationships of Early Ancient Egyptians”, Egypt in Africa (1996: pp. 25–27

Among modern populations, perhaps the ones who most closely resemble the majority of ancient Egyptians would be those living in northern Sudan, or “Nubia” (with the caveat added that these populations may still have minor Arabic admixture). More distant proxies would come from other Northeast African countries like Somalia and Ethiopia, who nonetheless share the same common Saharan African heritage as the indigenous Egyptians and North Sudanese.

However, as mentioned earlier, it is true that the Egyptian nation would incorporate migrants from multiple directions over the course of its long history — some from more southerly parts of Africa and many others from the Middle East and elsewhere in the Mediterranean basin. Many would have come as enslaved war captives and others as mercenaries fighting in the Egyptian army. And then of course there were the various foreign conquests. One of these came from Kush further south, which established a century-long regime that aimed to reinvigorate what they perceived as a decadent civilization. But most of the rest — Assyrian, Persian, Greco-Macedonian, Roman, Arab, etc. — would have come in from further north.

But, as a side note, in some cases the admixture may have gone both ways. For example, while Cleopatra’s Ptolemaic dynasty started out as an inbred Macedonian dynasty, skeletal remains of her (half?) sister have shown enough African physical traits to suggest a trend of admixture with the native population towards the dynasty’s end. So there still remains a possibility that Cleopatra herself had partial native Egyptian (African) ancestry rather than exclusively Macedonian as once thought.

So how should a movie like Gods of Egypt been cast, if not with predominantly white actors? Actors from Northeast African countries like those I named earlier are the most obvious solution. However, while they would provide an abundance of extras, I don’t think they have enough A-list actors available for Hollywood interest. On the other hand, while actors of other African ancestries might work as substitutes should Northeast Africans not be available, it would still be a bit like casting Britons to play Greeks. Alternatively, there’s always animation.

Whether or not the ethnic accuracy of the casting is Gods of Egypt is its main problem as a movie, it is still very distracting in my opinion and carries an unfortunately, if not always intentionally, racist subtext. So it deserves all the flack it’s gotten for that!

Further Reading

Ehret, Christopher. “Ancient Egyptian as an African Language, Egypt as an African Culture.” Egypt in Africa (1996): 25–7.

Godde, K. “An Examination of Nubian and Egyptian biological distances: Support for biological diffusion or in situ development?” Homo 60, no. 5 (September 2009): 389–404.

Keita, S.O.Y. “Studies of Ancient Crania from Northern Africa.” American Journal of Physical Anthropology, vol. 83 (1990): 35–48.

Keita, S.O.Y. and AJ Boyce. “ The Geographical Origins and Population Relationships of Early Ancient Egyptians.” Egypt in Africa (1996): pp. 25–27