| Revision as of 12:23, 8 August 2009 view sourceZara1709 (talk | contribs)Extended confirmed users7,159 edits "has many dimensions" - lol; the literature explicitly mentions "Eurocentric" considerations, and you have to accept that, Wdford← Previous edit | Revision as of 12:54, 8 August 2009 view source Wdford (talk | contribs)Extended confirmed users7,165 edits added proper content to the lead section, which is neutral, balanced and referencedNext edit → | ||
| Line 1: | Line 1: | ||
| {{POV|date=July 2009}} | {{POV|date=July 2009}} | ||
| <!--Please note: this is not the article for discussing actual evidence pointing either way in this debate. This is a "history of controversy" article: please discuss it in this way, bearing in mind academic consensus, this is not a referendum on Afrocentricism.--> | <!--Please note: this is not the article for discussing actual evidence pointing either way in this debate. This is a "history of controversy" article: please discuss it in this way, bearing in mind academic consensus, this is not a referendum on Afrocentricism.--> | ||
| ⚫ | |||
| {{two other uses|the history of the controversy about the race of the Ancient Egyptians|a discussion about the actual origins of the Ancient Egyptians|Population history of Egypt|a discussion about the substance of the controversy about the race of the Ancient Egyptians of Egypt| Substance of the controversy about the race of the Ancient Egyptians}} | |||
| ⚫ | Scholarly consensus at the end of the 20th Century is that the concept of "pure race" is incoherent,<ref>Bard, in turn citing ], "Nubian, Negro, Black, Nilotic?", in ''African in Antiquity, The Arts of Nubian and the Sudan'', vol 1, 1978.</ref> and that applying modern notions of ] to ] is ].<ref>Frank M. Snowden Jr., ''Bernal's 'Blacks' and the Afrocentrists'': " Egyptians, Greeks and Romans attached no special stigma to the color of the skin and developed no hierarchical notions of race whereby highest and lowest positions in the social pyramid were based on color." ''Black Athena Revisited'', p. 122</ref><ref>Encyclopedia of the archaeology of ancient Egypt, by Kathryn A. Bard, Steven Blake Shubert, pg 277</ref><ref> </ref><ref name="Keita et al.">{{cite journal|title=Conceptualizing human variation|year=2004|last= Keita |doi=10.1038/ng1455|url=http://wysinger.homestead.com/conceptualizing.pdf}}</ref> | ||
| The most recent specific conference on the race of the ancient Egyptians was at UNESCO’s international Cairo Symposium in 1974, where more than 20 recognised international scholars debated inter alia the race of the founders of ancient Egyptian civilization. The majority view was that the ancient Egyptians were neither black nor white as per current terminology.<ref>General history of Africa, by G. Mokhtar, International Scientific Committee for the Drafting of a General History of Africa, Unesco</ref><ref>Afrocentrism, by Stephen Howe</ref> | |||
| However the issue of the race of the ancient Egyptians continues to be debated in the public arena, with particular focus on the race of specific notable individuals from Dynastic times, including ], <ref>, ], September 2007</ref> ] <ref>: "Was Cleopatra Black", 2002</ref><ref>, from '']'' magazine, ] ]. In support of this, she cites a few examples, one of which she supplies is a chapter entitled "Black Warrior Queens" published in 1984 in ''Black Women in Antiquity'', part of the ''Journal of African Civilization'' series. It draws heavily on the work of J.A. Rogers.</ref><ref>, from the ''St. Louis Dispatch'', ] ].</ref> and also the model for the ]. <ref>Irwin, Graham W. (1977). , Columbia University Press, p. 11 </ref><ref></ref> | |||
| As far as ] is concerned, some modern scholars believe the ancient ] were "Mediterranean peoples, neither Sub-Saharan blacks nor Caucasian white but peoples whose skin was adapted for life in a subtropical desert environment."<ref>Kathryn A. Bard: ''Ancient Egyptians and the Notion of Race'', p. 104, cp. also p. 111; in: ''Black Athena Revisited'', pp. 103-111.</ref> Other scholars disagree, and have made various contrary inferences from biological, cultural and linguistic data.<ref name="zakrzewski2007">{{cite journal|first=Sonia |last=Zakrzewski|url=http://wysinger.homestead.com/zakrzewski_2007.pdf|title= Population continuity or population change: Formation of the ancient Egyptian state|doi=10.1002/ajpa.20569|year=2007}}</ref><ref name="S.O.Y. Keita & A. J. Boyce">{{cite journal|title=Genetics, Egypt, and History: Interpreting Geographical Patterns of Y Chromosome Variation|year=2005|last= S.O.Y. Keita & A. J. Boyce |doi=10.1353/hia.2005.0013|url= http://wysinger.homestead.com/keita.pdf }}</ref><ref name="Shomarka Keita (2005)">{{cite journal|title=Y-Chromosome Variation in Egypt|last=Shomarka Keita (2005)|10.1007/s10437-005-4189-4|url=http://wysinger.homestead.com/African_Archaeological_Revie__June_2005_.pdf}}</ref><ref name="Keita">{{cite journal|title=History in the Interpretation of the Pattern of p49a,f TaqI RFLP Y-Chromosome Variation in Egypt|year=2005|last=Keita|doi=10.1002/ajhb.20428|url=http://wysinger.homestead.com/keita6.pdf}}</ref><ref> </ref><ref name="S.O.Y. Keita (2005)">{{cite journal|title=Early Nile Valley Farmers, From El-Badari, Aboriginals or “European” Agro-Nostratic Immigrants? Craniometric Affinities Considered With Other Data|last= S.O.Y. Keita (2005)|doi= 10.1177/0021934704265912|url= http://wysinger.homestead.com/badari.pdf}}</ref> | |||
| Some scholars have stated that the controversy surrounding the race of ancient Egyptians involved ] and ] considerations in the 19th and 20th Century.<ref>Shavit 2001: 43-44</ref> | |||
| ==Origins== | ==Origins== | ||
Revision as of 12:54, 8 August 2009
 | The neutrality of this article is disputed. Relevant discussion may be found on the talk page. Please do not remove this message until conditions to do so are met. (July 2009) (Learn how and when to remove this message) |
Scholarly consensus at the end of the 20th Century is that the concept of "pure race" is incoherent, and that applying modern notions of race to ancient Egypt is anachronistic.
The most recent specific conference on the race of the ancient Egyptians was at UNESCO’s international Cairo Symposium in 1974, where more than 20 recognised international scholars debated inter alia the race of the founders of ancient Egyptian civilization. The majority view was that the ancient Egyptians were neither black nor white as per current terminology.
However the issue of the race of the ancient Egyptians continues to be debated in the public arena, with particular focus on the race of specific notable individuals from Dynastic times, including Tutankhamun, Cleopatra VII and also the model for the Great Sphinx of Giza.
As far as skin colour is concerned, some modern scholars believe the ancient Egyptians were "Mediterranean peoples, neither Sub-Saharan blacks nor Caucasian white but peoples whose skin was adapted for life in a subtropical desert environment." Other scholars disagree, and have made various contrary inferences from biological, cultural and linguistic data.
Some scholars have stated that the controversy surrounding the race of ancient Egyptians involved Eurocentric and Afrocentric considerations in the 19th and 20th Century.
Origins
The earliest observations in modern scholarship regarding the Egyptians were entirely based on European archaeologists in the 19th century, some of whom concluded, disdainfully, that the Ancient Egyptians were undeniably black. In his 19th century collection of work, "Egypte Ancienne" Champollion notes that the Egyptians and Nubians are represented in the same manner in tomb paintings, reliefs, and that "The first tribes that inhabited Egypt, that is, the Nile Valley between the Syene cataract and the sea, came from Abyssinia to Sennar. The Ancient Egyptians belonged to a race quite similar to the Kenous or Barabras, present inhabitants of Nubia. In the Copts of Egypt, we do not find any of the characteristic features of the Ancient Egyptian population. The Copts are the result of crossbreeding with all the nations that successfully dominated Egypt. It is wrong to seek in them the principal features of the old race."
However a secondary theory known as the Dynastic Race Theory was introduced as an explanation for the diversity between groups in pre-dynastic Egypt.
Further information: Afrocentric historiographyThe roots of Afrocentrism lay in the repression of blacks throughout the Western world in the 19th century, most particularly in the United States. At the turn of the century, however, came a rise in black racial consciousness as a tool to overcome oppression. Part of this reaction involved a focus on black history, and counteracting what was perceived as white, eurocentric history in favour of a historical narrative of Europe (and what was viewed as its founding culture, ancient Greece) that gave blacks a more prominent role.
Specifically, this attempted rewriting of the historical narrative of Europe developed into two main forms: the claim that European civilization was founded not by the Greeks, but by the Egyptians, whose culture and learning the Greeks allegedly stole, and that the Egyptians themselves were not only African but also black. Often, Afrocentrists link the two claims, as the following quote (by Marcus Garvey) displays:
Every student of history, of impartial mind, knows that the Negro once ruled the world, when white men were savages and barbarians living in caves; that thousands of Negro professors at that time taught in the universities in Alexandria, then the seat of learning; that ancient Egypt gave the world civilization and that Greece and Rome have robbed Egypt of her arts and letters, and taken all the credit to themselves.
Both themes were to survive Garvey and to continue throughout the 20th century and up to the present day, provoking debate both in academia and in more public spheres, such as mainstream media and the internet.
On the other hand, best-selling authors like David Rohl continue to push the Dynastic Race Theory through books like "Legend – the Genesis of Civilisation".
In academia
Although questions surrounding the race of the ancient Egyptians had occasionally arisen in 18th and 19th-century Western scholarship as part of the growing interest in attempted scientific classifications of race, in academia the meme was popularised and continued throughout the 20th century in the works of George James, Cheikh Anta Diop, and even, to a certain extent, in Martin Bernal's Black Athena. All three have used the terms "black", "African", and "Egyptian" interchangeably, despite what Snowden calls "copious ancient evidence to the contrary".
While at the University of Dakar, Diop tried to establish the skin colour of the Egyptian mummies by measuring the melanin content of the skin, stating: “In practice it is possible to determine directly the skin color and, hence, the ethnic affiliations of the ancient Egyptians by microscopic analysis in the laboratory; I doubt if the sagacity of the researchers who have studied the question has overlooked the possibility.”
Diop's work was well received by the political establishment in the post-colonial formative phase of the state of Senegal under Léopold Sédar Senghor, whose politics of African socialism was inspired by the Pan-Africanist Négritude movement. Diop further attempted to link Egypt to Senegal by arguing that the Ancient Egyptian language was related to his native Wolof. The University of Dakar was renamed in Diop's honour after his death, to Cheikh Anta Diop University. Diop participated in a UNESCO symposium in Cairo in 1974 and he wrote the chapter about the "origins of the Egyptians" in the UNESCO General History of Africa.
Founded in 1979, the Journal of African Civilizations has continually advocated that Egypt should be viewed as a black civilization. Figures attached to the group centering around the journal include Ivan van Sertima and J.H. Clarke (who has advanced further the "Cleopatra was black" meme). Other notable proponents of the meme include Chancellor Williams. Mainstream scholarship has generally been critical of the journal: J.D. Muhly describes it as "well-intentioned but quite unconvincing and lacking in the basic techniques of critical scholarship."
During the European colonial era on the African continent, the prevalent European attitude was that ancient Egyptians were 'white', as the French scholar Alain Froment shows on the basis of two encyclopaedias from the 1930s.
The British Africanist Basil Davidson summarized the issue as follows:
Whether the Ancient Egyptians were as black or as brown in skin color as other Africans may remain an issue of emotive dispute; probably, they were both. Their own artistic conventions painted them as pink, but pictures on their tombs show they often married queens shown as entirely black, being from the south (from what a later world knew as Nubia): while the Greek writers reported that they were much like all the other Africans whom the Greeks knew.
Specific controversies
Controversies about 'race'
Debate in the public sphere has tended to focus more on the race of specific notable individuals from the history of Egypt, particularly Tutankhamun, Cleopatra VII and also the Great Sphinx of Giza. Such claims by Afrocentrists have not been limited to Egyptians: Carthaginian general Hannibal and Roman Emperor Septimius Severus have also been claimed as black, despite non-existent evidence, as well as the ancient Greek philosopher Socrates.
Akhenaten and the 18th Dynasty
Considerable debate has emerged in regards to the nature of Akhenaten's features, with some scholars saying that his wide lips, nose, and head shape is the result of a disease like Marfan's Syndrome or Frolich's Syndrome
Tutankhamun
 | This section needs expansion. You can help by making an edit requestadding to it . (February 2009) |
Attempted reconstructions of Tutankhamun's facial features have encountered much Afrocentric protest over concerns that he has been represented as too white in one of the three presentations that has been most widely published..
Cleopatra VII
Further information: Cleopatra VIICleopatra's race and skin colour have also caused frequent debate as described in an article from The Baltimore Sun. There is also an article titled: Was Cleopatra Black? from Ebony magazine, and an article about Afrocetrism from the St. Louis Post-Dispatch that mentions the question, too. Scholars generally suggest a light olive skin colour for Cleopatra, based on the facts that her Macedonian family had intermingled with the Persian aristocracy of the time, that her mother is not absolutely known for certain, and that her paternal grandmother may have been African (or indeed from anywhere at all) which is possible but not provable. Afrocentric assertions of Cleopatra's blackness have, however, continued. The question was the subject of an heated exchange between Mary Lefkowitz, who has referred in her articles a debate she had with one of her students about the question whether Cleopatra was black, and Molefi Kete Asante, Professor of African American Studies at Temple University. As a response to Not Out of Africa by Lefkowitz, Asante wrote an article: Race in Antiquity: Truly Out of Africa, in which he emphasizes that he "can say without a doubt that Afrocentrists do not spend time arguing that either Socrates or Cleopatra were black."
Great Sphinx of Giza
Over the years some casual observers, as well as at least one forensic artist, have characterized the face of the Great Sphinx of Giza as "negroid", while others have just as emphatically denied the negroid character of the Sphinx's face.
One of the earliest known descriptions of a "negroid" Sphinx is recorded in the travel notes of French scholar Constantin-François de Chassebœuf, Comte de Volney, who visited Egypt between 1783 and 1785. Volney described it as "typically Negro in all its features." Likewise, French novelist Gustave Flaubert traveled to Egypt in 1849 and recorded the following observation:
We stop before a Sphinx ; it fixes us with a terrifying stare. Its eyes still seem full of life; the left side is stained white by bird-droppings (the tip of the Pyramid of Khephren has the same long white stains); it exactly faces the rising sun, its head is grey, ears very large and protruding like a negro’s, its neck is eroded; from the front it is seen in its entirety thanks to great hollow dug in the sand; the fact that the nose is missing increases the flat, negroid effect. Besides, it was certainly Ethiopian; the lips are thick …
More recently, in 1992, the New York Times published an article reporting the findings of Frank Domingo, a senior forensics artist with the New York City Police Department who had traveled to Egypt to take exact measurements of the Sphinx's head. Domingo, credited with convening the first national gathering of forensic artists almost ten years earlier, generated a model of the head of the Sphinx both by hand and utilizing computer graphics, and determined that the Sphinx represented a person other than Khafra. According to Robert M. Schoch of Boston University, "forensic expert Frank Domingo of the New York Police Department has definitively proven that the face of the Sphinx face of the Sphinx and the face seen on signed statues of Khafre are not of the same person." Schoch further wrote that the "Sphinx has a distinctive 'African,' 'Nubian,' or 'Negroid' aspect which is lacking in the face of Khafre."
Subsequent to the article reporting Domingo's findings, the New York Times published a letter to the editor submitted by then Harvard professor of Orthodontics Sheldon Peck, who concurred with Domingo's findings, adding:
The analytical techniques…Detective Frank Domingo used on facial photographs are not unlike methods orthodontists and surgeons use to study facial disfigurements. From the right lateral tracing of the statue's worn profile a pattern of bimaxilliary prognathism is clearly detectable. This is an anatomical condition of forward development in both jaws, more frequently found in people of African ancestry than in those from Asian or Indo-European stock.
Controversy about the meaning of 'Kemet'
| km biliteral | km.t (place) | km.t (people) | |||||||||
|
|
|
One of the many names for Egypt in ancient Egyptian is km.t (read Kemet), meaning 'the black land' or 'the black one'. Generally, 'Kemet' is taken to be a reference to the fertile black soil which was washed down from Central Africa by the annual Nile inundation, and which made Egypt habitable and successful in contrast to the barren desert or 'red land' outside the narrow confines of the Nile watercourse. The use of the word kmt when referring to people is thought to be derived from the name of the land, meaning literally "those people who live in the black, fertile country." Raymond Faulkner's Concise Dictionary of Middle Egyptian translates it into "Egyptians", as do most sources.
The claim that Kemite referred to the fact that the people of the land had black skins, as argued by Cheikh Anta Diop, William Leo Hansberry, or Aboubacry Moussa Lam has become a cornerstone of Afrocentric historiography. This view is rejected by most Egyptologists.
See also
Notes
- Bard, in turn citing B.G. Trigger, "Nubian, Negro, Black, Nilotic?", in African in Antiquity, The Arts of Nubian and the Sudan, vol 1, 1978.
- Frank M. Snowden Jr., Bernal's 'Blacks' and the Afrocentrists: " Egyptians, Greeks and Romans attached no special stigma to the color of the skin and developed no hierarchical notions of race whereby highest and lowest positions in the social pyramid were based on color." Black Athena Revisited, p. 122
- Encyclopedia of the archaeology of ancient Egypt, by Kathryn A. Bard, Steven Blake Shubert, pg 277
- Race and Human Variation
- Keita (2004). "Conceptualizing human variation" (PDF). doi:10.1038/ng1455.
{{cite journal}}: Cite journal requires|journal=(help) - General history of Africa, by G. Mokhtar, International Scientific Committee for the Drafting of a General History of Africa, Unesco
- Afrocentrism, by Stephen Howe
- Tutankhamun was not black: Egypt antiquities chief, AFP, September 2007
- Baltimore Sun: "Was Cleopatra Black", 2002
- "Was Cleopatra Black?", from Ebony magazine, February 1 2002. In support of this, she cites a few examples, one of which she supplies is a chapter entitled "Black Warrior Queens" published in 1984 in Black Women in Antiquity, part of the Journal of African Civilization series. It draws heavily on the work of J.A. Rogers.
- "Afrocentric View Distorts History and Achievement by Blacks", from the St. Louis Dispatch, February 14 1994.
- Irwin, Graham W. (1977). Africans abroad, Columbia University Press, p. 11
- Kathryn A. Bard: Ancient Egyptians and the Notion of Race, p. 104, cp. also p. 111; in: Black Athena Revisited, pp. 103-111.
- Zakrzewski, Sonia (2007). "Population continuity or population change: Formation of the ancient Egyptian state" (PDF). doi:10.1002/ajpa.20569.
{{cite journal}}: Cite journal requires|journal=(help) - S.O.Y. Keita & A. J. Boyce (2005). "Genetics, Egypt, and History: Interpreting Geographical Patterns of Y Chromosome Variation" (PDF). doi:10.1353/hia.2005.0013.
{{cite journal}}: Cite journal requires|journal=(help) - Shomarka Keita (2005). "Y-Chromosome Variation in Egypt" (PDF).
{{cite journal}}: Cite journal requires|journal=(help); Text "10.1007/s10437-005-4189-4" ignored (help)CS1 maint: numeric names: authors list (link) - Keita (2005). "History in the Interpretation of the Pattern of p49a,f TaqI RFLP Y-Chromosome Variation in Egypt" (PDF). doi:10.1002/ajhb.20428.
{{cite journal}}: Cite journal requires|journal=(help) - Shomarka Keita: What genetics can tell us
- S.O.Y. Keita (2005). "Early Nile Valley Farmers, From El-Badari, Aboriginals or "European" Agro-Nostratic Immigrants? Craniometric Affinities Considered With Other Data" (PDF). doi:10.1177/0021934704265912.
{{cite journal}}: Cite journal requires|journal=(help)CS1 maint: numeric names: authors list (link) - Shavit 2001: 43-44
- Champollion-Figeac, Egypte Ancienne. Paris: Collection L'Univers, 1839, p.27
- Bard p.106
- lefkowtiz p. 7
- Lefkowitz p. 8
- Marcus Garvey: "Who and what is a Negro", 1923. Quoted by Lefkowitz.
- Snowden p.116 of Black Athena Revisited.
- Snowden p. 116
- Chris Gray, Conceptions of History in the Works of Cheikh Anta Diop and Theophile Obenga, (Karnak House:1989) 11-155
- Alain Ricard, Naomi Morgan, The Languages & Literatures of Africa: The Sands of Babel, James Currey, 2004, p.14
- UNESCO, "Symposium on the Peopling of Ancient Egypt and the Deciphering of the Meroitic Script; Proceedings", (Paris: 1978), pp. 3-134
- Snowden p. 117
- Homepage of the Journal of African Civilizations
- Snowden pp.117-120
- Muhly: "Black Athena versus Traditional Scholarship", Journal of Mediterranean Archaeology 3, no 1: 83-110
- Froment 1994, p. 38
- Davidson, Basil (1991). African Civilization Revisited: From Antiquity to Modern Times. Africa World Press.
- Snowden pp.120-121 of Black Athena Revisited
- Black Athena revisited, p. 4
- The Androgynous Pharaoh? Akhenaten had feminine physique
- [http://www.umm.edu/news/releases/akhenaten_deformities.htm
- Tutankhamun was not black: Egypt antiquities chief, AFP, September 2007
- Baltimore Sun: "Was Cleopatra Black", 2002
- "Was Cleopatra Black?", from Ebony magazine, February 1 2002. In support of this, she cites a few examples, one of which she supplies is a chapter entitled "Black Warrior Queens" published in 1984 in Black Women in Antiquity, part of the Journal of African Civilization series. It draws heavily on the work of J.A. Rogers.
- "Afrocentric View Distorts History and Achievement by Blacks", from the St. Louis Dispatch, February 14 1994.
- Tyldesley, p. 30, suggests Cleopatra V as the most likely candidate.
- Tyldesley p. 32
- Race in Antiquity: Truly Out of Africa By Molefi Kete Asante
- Irwin, Graham W. (1977). Africans abroad, Columbia University Press, p. 11
- Gustave Flaubert, Francis Steegmüller (1996). Flaubert in Egypt, ISBN 9780140435825, p. 55
- Peck, Sheldon (1992-07-18). "Sphinx May Really Be a Black African", New York Times
- ^ Shavit 2001: 148
- Kemp, Barry J. Ancient Egypt: Anatomy Of A Civilization. Routledge. p. 21. ISBN 978-0415063463.
{{cite book}}: Cite has empty unknown parameter:|coauthors=(help) - Raymond Faulkner, A Concise Dictionary of Middle Egyptian, Oxford: Griffith Institute, 2002, p. 286.
- Aboubacry Moussa Lam, "L'Égypte ancienne et l'Afrique", in Maria R. Turano et Paul Vandepitte, Pour une histoire de l'Afrique, 2003, pp. 50 &51
- Bard, Kathryn A. "Ancient Egyptians and the Issue of Race". in Lefkowitz and MacLean rogers, p. 114
References
- Mary R. Lefkowitz: "Ancient History, Modern Myths", originally printed in The New Republic, 1992. Reprinted with revisions as part of the essay collection Black Athena Revisited, 1996.
- Kathryn A. Bard: "Ancient Egyptians and the issue of Race", Bostonia Magazine, 1992: later part of Black Athena Revisited, 1996.
- Frank M. Snowden, Jr.: "Bernal's "Blacks" and the Afrocentrists", Black Athena Revisited, 1996.
- Joyce Tyldesley: "Cleopatra, Last Queen of Egypt", Profile Books Ltd, 2008.
- Alain Froment, 1994. "Race et Histoire: La recomposition ideologique de l'image des Egyptiens anciens." Journal des Africanistes 64:37-64. available online: Race et Histoire Template:Fr icon
- Yaacov Shavit, 2001: History in Black. African-Americans in Search of an Ancient Past, Frank Cass Publishers
