Love for African Culture The Greeks themselves had a thing for Ancient Egypt and Phoenicia, borrowing their math, science, philosophy, religion, writing and some customs. Both festivals also involved participants waggling sculpted phalluses in commemoration of the dismemberment Osiris' member was replaced by a wooden one, as a fish ate it; Dionysos was of course a fertility god and also "the party god," so the association with phalluses came naturally.
The Greeks loved Egypt so much that eventually the Pharaoh set aside a city-sized chunk of land for them to build the colony of Naucratis on. Egypt itself was seized by Alexander and became Greek as time went on.
It remained one of the bastions of Hellenism for centuries and its capital one of the numerous Alexandrias, the only one that really endured under the name note The city of Kandahar, the second-largest city in Afghanistan, was probably another, but as you can see its name has changed quite a bit.
The city of Δ°skenderun in what is now the Hatay Province of Turkey has a closer name "Δ°skender" is the Turkish version of "Alexander", and also it was more usually known as "Alexandretta"β"Little Alexandria"βuntil the s or 30s , but it is much smaller. Some scholars have posited that the tragedy of Oedipus Rex was lifted wholesale from an earlier Egyptian version. It would definitely explain things such as Oedipus becoming King of Thebes the Greek city being named after the old Egyptian capital and fighting a Sphinx.
Ancient Egypt is still heavily revered today by some groups. They also believe that modern Egyptians are not native and come from the invaders. On the flip side, some white supremacist groups also like to claim Ancient Egypt for their own and believe that Ancient Egyptians were all white and had zero relation to the rest of Africa. As to point 3 in particular, two of the greatest and most famous kings of the New Kingdom provide good examples: Amenhotep III is commonly portrayed with some African features, which tracks with strong suggestions that his mother, Mutnofret, was of Nubian origin, while Ramses II is known from his mummy to have been a relatively fair-skinned redhead, which tracks with strong suggestions that his family, which originated in the eastern part of the Nile Delta, had some roots among foreigners from Southwest Asia or perhaps even Europe.
