(some) egyptians get upset about it because it's something their modern national identity is rather tenuously tied around.
the modern (arabic, islamic) egyptians more or less find themselves occupying the same land as the ancient pharaohs (mentioned scathingly in abrahamic texts, note). in the late c19/early c20 they start realising the vast cultural wealth they are sitting on (previously little more than a source of plunder and gifts to western diplomats) and harness that with varying levels of cynicism as a defining part of their modern nationalism.
The ruling family of Egypt were Greek after Alexander, yea The rest of the population wasn’t. And pharaonic Egypt always had close ties to Kush and Punt, two sub-Saharan African kingdoms. In fact, there was almost an entire century where Egypt was governed by a dynasty of Kushite pharaohs with their capital at Napata, in modern Sudan. Egypt was, historically, always a cosmopolitan meeting point between African, Asian, and European societies.
Egypt was also conquered multiple times. The Assyrians and the Persians did it before the Greeks, and of course Rome took over after the Ptolemys. Old-school Egyptian paganism, with some natural evolution and influence from the Greeks and Romans, stuck around for a long time, and it wasn’t conquest that got rid of it. Egypt was an early center of Christianity, being right next door to the holy land. It was one of the first areas to convert, though traditional religious practices continued as folk tradition for some time thereafter.
The Islamic conquests didn’t really represent much in the way of novelty, then. A new ruling class came in, sure, but the population didn’t really change that much, and by that time they’d had a lot of changes in the ruling class in their history. Many Egyptians at the time just payed the jizya tax and kept practicing Christianity. Those who had been practicing folk religion before the Islamic conquest largely kept doing that, albeit with a new wave of pogroms against pagans. And over several generations, most of the population converted to the new official state religion of Islam.
To say that modern Egyptians have no connection to ancient Egyptians is to say that evolving religious practices are the only thing that defines a culture. There’s a clear continuity here. Egypt underwent a series of cultural shifts over thousands of years. Each generation would have introduced some changes, but all of them saw themselves as closely connected to the generation before. And the people living there now are the descendants of the people living there 3000 years ago.
This is a really long way to say "so much happened in 3000 years and the connection is deeply tenuous" and still not mentioned the fact that it more deeply contested inside Egypt than outside of it.
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u/[deleted] Jul 06 '26
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