BEYCHELLA IN HOTEP HISTORY:
How Beyoncé Snatched the Black Origins of Ancient Egypt
If anyone ever doubted the Blackstar that is Beyoncé, her recent performance at Coachella was a powerhouse celebration for the ages, solidifying her reign as the greatest entertainer alive. Queen Bey turned Coachella inside out with an exquisite tribute to blackness at one of the whitest venues on earth. Alongside the glorious vibrations of the Black marching band and the reenactment of Black Greek traditions, both of which paid tribute to Historically Black Colleges and Universities (HBCUs), Beyoncé introduced adoring fans to some of the most popular representations of ancient Egypt. Yes. Beyoncé is a hotep! And her reclamation of Queen Nefertiti and King Tutankhamen (King Tut) were among the blackest moments of the performance.
Hotep Defined
“Hotep” in its simplest definition is an ancient Egyptian word for peace. In recent years, the word has taken on a derogatory form to condemn Black history enthusiasts who commonly use “hotep” as a greeting while promoting misogyny and homophobia in their expressions of Black identity. Unfortunately, the comedic cooptation of hotep is too often misapplied to ridicule sincere intellectual and cultural investment in Pan African and Black radical traditions.
Leave it to Beyoncé to wrestle ancient Egypt from “fake ashy deeps,” widely referred to as hoteps, who traffic in patriarchal mythologies and conspiracy-driven histories. Beychella also counters “hotep haters” in their wholesale dismissal of Ancient Africa as intellectual and cultural folly. Instead, she “returns to the source” of Black excellence by recognizing ancient Egypt as the pinnacle of civilization and the origins of Black genius. At Beychella, Beyoncé came out in hotep eminence, and I’m here for it!
Genesis: Beychella’s Opening Act
In the beginning was Beyoncé, who emerges as the second coming of Queen Nefertiti, the Royal Wife of Amenhotep IV and a powerful ruler in her own right. Bey’s dramatic entrance included prancing replicas of King Tut’s famous image on the bodies of her female dancers. Before we see Beyoncé’s face, we see an image of Nefertiti, who beget Tutankhamen, and whose crowned profile is one of the most recognizable symbols of ancient history, perhaps second to her son’s illustrious tomb. When Queen Bey reveals herself, she cat-walked for Nut, Shu, Geb, and Ra! In other words, she worked those royal hips for the gods and sashayed toward a jamming marching band in pyramid formation! In this opening act, Beyoncé takes her station as “Queen Mother,” a beloved ancient title for African royal women.
Hotep heads would have noticed these images with ease, but whether or not the audience caught on is unclear. Beyoncé draws from ancient Nile Valley civilizations to lay the foundation for her masterpiece. In doing so, she affirms the African origins of Black excellence in the Nile Valley region. Notably, the members of the band were all dressed in what I would call “Nubian gold,” not to be mistaken for “Lemonade” or honey-bey yellow. Beyoncé’s performers invoked the wealth of ancient Nubia — a parallel kingdom that thrived to the south of Kemet (the original name for Egypt). The south was so rich in gold that the Egyptians called it “Nubia” — which stems from “nub” — the Kemetic word for this precious element. From Nubia to the Ghana and Mali empires in West Africa, there is nothing blacker than gold. Black history is rich indeed!
To Sing and Fight for Freedom
What’s striking about Beychella’s opening is that it boldly tied Ancient Africa, and Egypt in particular, to a legacy of Black genius in the African Diaspora. To underscore her point of origins, Beyoncé takes a break in the intro to perform the Black National Anthem, “Lift Every Voice and Sing.” This beautiful adjournment made it crystal clear that Beychella was a love letter to Black people. It was also right on time given the recent publication of May We Forever Stand: A History of the Black National Anthem by Black Studies scholar, Imani Perry. Dr. Perry’s social and political history of the song traces an “articulation and expression of grace and identity that existed in refuge from the violence of white supremacy.” Beyoncé’s rendition joined a long line of “black formalism” — “practices that were primarily internal to the black community,” Perry explains, “rather than those based upon a white gaze or an aspiration for white acceptance.”
Bey’s singing of the Black National Anthem affirmed Black cultural traditions, but it also imagined the links between culture and politics, oppression and resistance, and the audacity of Black people to survive and excel in the face of enormous obstacles. Just as Dr. Perry traces the history of “singing and fighting for freedom,” Beyoncé performs the Black National Anthem in sequence with “Freedom,” a riveting song she originally recorded with Kendrick Lamar, conjuring our individual and collective strength to live in truth.
Hotep History
The whitewashed images of ancient Egypt that continue to flood popular media pale in the face of Black cultural productions. Queen Bey offered a counterforce to these decrepit images throughout the entirety of her show. Her wardrobe changes only reiterated (for the people in the back) the African origins of ancient Kemet. Notably, the shield on Bey’s hoodie features her art (represented by the honey bee) in the tradition of Black Power, invoking the spirit of Black Panthers and the power and beauty of Queen Nefertiti. On the back of her all-black ensemble, these four images sit below two lesser known ancient icons — the wings of Maat and the eye of Herut (also known as the Eye of Horus by the Greeks).
Maat is the feathered Kemetic goddess who represents truth, balance, order, harmony, reciprocity, law, and justice. (An image of her is tattooed below Rihanna’s chest.) The eye of Herut, which appears on top of a pyramid, represents the power of wisdom, knowledge, and intuition. It is a “third eye” that symbolizes protection. It is also the blueprint for the design on the back of the U.S. $1 bill, which features the Great Seal of the United States.
Indeed, conspiracy theorists obsessed with freemasonry and the Illuminati have identified symbols like these in Beyoncé’s wardrobes and Jay Z’s videos. And Beychella did not disappoint. Although the song “Formation” opens with the line, “y’all haters corny with that illuminati mess,” Beyoncé does not abandon the controversial images. Even the horns, resembling the head of Baphomet, make a predictable appearance.
Despite the outrageous claims of satanic worship (a familiar distortion of African indigenous religions, including Vodun), the power of ancient Egyptian symbolism and cosmology continue to stunt on modern science and philosophy. Beyoncé’s regular usage of these symbols, which is not coincidental, suggests that she is in tune with a specialized body of knowledge. When she calls on her ladies to “get in formation,” it serves as a double-entendre to get (in)formation, because knowledge is power.
Back to Black
Beyoncé upholds a Black Egypt with intention and precision, and her images of Queen Nefertiti were Africanized to say the least. The glory of snatching Nefertiti’s image from the claws of Europeans hell bent on projecting her as Caucasoid will go down in hotep history. But in all sincerity, Beyoncé’s reclamation of ancient Egypt is critically important in this moment as white scientists, artists, and new age explorers continue to play mind tricks with race and representation.
Recall several months ago, during Black History Month no less, the Today Show unveiled a life-like bust of Queen Nefertiti that looked more like Rachel Dolezal in a Halloween costume than the carvings from ancient Egypt. Despite the insistence that the 3D replica was an accurate and “spot on” reconstruction of the queen’s actual face, modern technology cannot reveal skin color, to which the creator readily admits. These same scientists have routinely ignored the work of Dr. Cheikh Anta Diop, who invented the melanin dosage test to finally put the question of skin tone and racial categorization to rest. His procedure has been conveniently dismissed as pseudohistory. Unsurprisingly, Black Twitter dragged the 3D bust by its uraeus, exposing the white supremacist ideologies that continue to erase thousands of years of Black reign in ancient Egypt.
This recent desecration of Nefertiti’s image is connected to a similar representation of King Tut by the same French forensic artist, Elisabeth Daynes. In 2005, she collaborated with National Geographic, which recently apologized for its history of racist story-making, to recreate a replica of King Tut’s face. In addition to capturing his “Caucasoid features,” Daynes admits that her selection of skin tone was an artistic choice, and she used a “flesh tone” reportedly “the average shade of a modern-day Egyptian.” Amazingly, she concedes that skin color of the ancient Egyptians “varied from very dark to very light.” In both instances, Daynes’ preference for light skin was bolstered by Hollywood’s hackneyed mutations in the movies “God’s of Egypt” and “Exodus.”
The circulation of a light-bright King Tut, along with a shoddy interpretation of his DNA code, fueled a frenzy among white power nationalists and alt-right racists to erroneously claim European ancestry of the frail pharaoh. Never mind the fact that King Tut’s body was surrounded by giant images of brown-skinned people on the walls of his tomb, and the few images of Nefertiti have prominent features that could never be classified as Caucasoid. For two centuries, scholars and cultural producers have enshrined white supremacist ideologies through the racialization of the ancient Egyptians — a practice that has been maintained since Napoleon’s invasion in the late 18th century. Beycella, on the other hand, put a death knell in white racist fantasies of Caucasoid Egyptians. Not only did she remake Nefertiti’s image to resemble the few carvings of the queen’s face, including prominent lips and nose, it appears that Nefertiti’s image on Beyoncé’s hoodie is also adorned with a wave of baby hair, a quintessential Black-girl style.
Hotep Legacies
Make no mistake, Beyoncé joined a special cohort of Black entertainers who have drawn inspiration from Nile Valley civilizations, and particularly Egypt, as the birthplace of supreme Black excellence. In 1992, Michael Jackson released a 9-minute video for the blockbuster hit “Remember the Time,” which was set in ancient Egypt dipped in unapologetic blackness. And when our shining Prince Rogers Nelson left this dimension and transformed into a falcon, we learned that the “Purple One” had an infinity for the mysteries of ancient Egypt. In the final years before his transition, he identified with a symbol that was a remix of the Egyptian ankh and wore shades for his third eye. Prince believed Egyptian philosophy unlocked the keys to the universe, including music. And of course, Earth, Wind and Fire, Alice Coltrane, Stevie Wonder, Sun Ra, and Erykah Badu, all knew this to be true, and they have incorporated Egyptian symbols in cover art and lyrics for their iconic albums.
African American intellectual history, centered on reclaiming the Black/African origins of ancient Kemet, is powerful armor in the battle against white supremacy and the colonization of knowledge. As early as David Walker’s 1829 “Appeal to the Colored Citizens of the World,” or the 1951 “We Charge Genocide” petition submitted by the Civil Rights Congress before the United Nations, Black freedom fighters have rejected white racist fantasies of Caucasoid Africans. Pioneers of Black Studies such as Carter G. Woodson, W.E.B. Du Bois, and Cheikh Anta Diop, laid a foundation for Afrocentric scholars, including Asa Hilliard and Anthony Browder, to document the African origins of ancient Egypt with unquestionable evidence in painstaking detail.
While the most notable scholars in the “vindicationist” tradition are men, the first person to write a history of ancient Egypt was a Black woman by the name of Drusilla Dunjee Houston. In 1926, she published the Wonderful Ethiopians of the Ancient Cushite Empire. Her research was not a mere intellectual curiosity. Like all Black scholars of Ancient Africa, the reclamation of African origins was a political intervention designed to dispel the myths of Black inferiority used to justify white domination. And like Beyoncé and Imani Perry, Houston was not the least bit concerned about appealing to white audiences. This race woman used her research and talents to affirm Black life.
Whether or not Beyoncé knows this history is beside the point. Our cells have memory. Her tribute to Blackhood, from Kemet to Texas, was a divine representation of the evolution of her art. Perhaps, Bey’s insistence on tapping into ancient images correlates with the undeniable growth of her music in recent years. Will her interventions in “hoteppery” be recognized like her contributions to feminism? Because Bey hotepped the hell out of that show into our collective consciousness, urging Black people across the globe to “know thy self.”
Let us all bow our heads and say, “Amen-Ra.” She did that.
ABOUT THE AUTHOR
La TaSha Levy is a Black Studies scholar whose research and teaching spans African American political history. Follow her @tashaspeaks on Twitter and dr.tasha38 on Instagram.
