Is Egyptian queen Nefertiti white? Black twitter thinks not

Archaeologist, explorer, and T.V. host, Joseph Gates may not have anticipated that his 3D reconstruction of Queen Nefertiti would have caused the uproar it did on Twitter, but that’s exactly what he got when he excitedly unveiled a “white” queen Nefertiti on the Today Show.

Gates then took the conversation to twitter:

But black twitter did not agree with the depiction. Many called Gates’ revelation “whitewashing”. “Whitewashing” means to erase the contribution or presence of a minority group in a historical event and attribute it to white people.

But others disagreed, citing that the queen is in fact not Black.

About the Queen: Nefertiti was a Great Royal wife who ruled with her husband at arguably one of the wealthiest periods of Ancient Egypt and who helped usher in monotheism in Egypt. It is alleged that she ruled as Pharaoh at some point during her life. Her bust, a sculptor crafted by the chief sculptor during her husband’s reign, Tuthmose, was found in 1912 by German archaeologists and now sits in a Berlin museum.

Nefertiti has become a global icon of feminine beauty and power, but questions resurface every so often about her image and aesthetics. In 2009, some archaeologists argued that the bust had been airbrushed to make the “queen adhere more to the ideals of beauty of the time”.

What do you think? Does it matter? It appears that whichever group gets to claim her can clamor to her beauty and power as their own.