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The current debate over the ethnic identity of dynastic Egypt has its roots in contradictory reports and perceptions accumulated since Classical times. Evidence and assumptions have been contributed by people of all walks of life, from tourists to traders to scholars, and the debate is present in academia as well as in modern popular culture. The sparsity of "hard" evidence has served to fuel the debate.
Mainstream Egyptology holds that the Ancient Egyptians were of the same ethnicity as the Egyptians of today. For example, Zahi Hawass, the head of Egypt's Supreme Council of Antiquities, states that: "... the portrayal of ancient Egyptian civilization as black has no element of truth to it ... Egyptians are not Arabs and are not Africans despite the fact that Egypt is in Africa."
Today, the scholarly consensus outside the field of Egyptology is that the concept of "pure race" is incoherent; and that applying modern notions of race to ancient Egypt is anachronistic..
Origins of the Debate
The Classical Observers
- Herodotus traveled to Egypt around 450 BC, when Egypt was part of the Persian Empire and the Dynastic age was nearing its end. In his writings about the Egyptians, he described them as having black skins and woolly hair. Though Herodotus is regarded as the father of history, the veracity and accuracy of some of his accounts is disputed, including specifically those concerning Ancient Egypt.
- The Greek playwrite Aeschylus , mentioning a boat seen from the shore, declared that its crew are Egyptians, because of their black complexions.
- The philosopher and novellist Lucian once described an Egyptian he encountered, as being black.
19th Century Observers
- In 1844 Samuel George Morton studied a number of Egyptian crania he obtained from egyptologist George Gliddon. According to his analysis the crania belonged to the two races of man, the Caucasian and the Negro.
- In 1855 Josiah C. Nott and George Gliddon published their book, Types of Mankind. The book dealt in great detail with the inhabitants of Ancient Egypt. The book was a scientific best-seller of the time, but is now associated with scientific racism. Though they believed that Negroes never inhabited Egypt, they admitted that the Egyptians presented an intermediate type between African and Asiatic races.
- In his 1871 book, Descent of Man, Charles Darwin observed Amunoph III as having strongly-marked Negroid features.
- In 1886, George Rawlinson wrote that the fundamental character of the Egyptians, with respect to physical type, language and tone of thought is Nigritic. Though he thought the Egyptians were not Negroes, he stated that the resemblance to Negroes was indisputable.
The Ancient Evidence
The Ancient Egyptian texts
There is surviving ancient evidence that clearly shows that the Ancient Egyptians themselves were conscious of ethnicity, and that they distinguished themselves from other peoples - including the Nubians to the south of Egypt. In the sacred text called the Book of Gates, in the chapter dealing with the Fifth Division of the Tuat, the work notes four different groups of men (translation by E.A. Wallis Budge):
The first are RETH, the second are AAMU, the third are NEHESU, and the fourth are THEMEHU. The RETH are Egyptians, the AAMU are dwellers in the deserts to the east and north-east of Egypt, the NEHESU are the black races and NEGROES, and the THEMEHU are the fair-skinned Libyans.
Kemet - the Black Land
One of the many names for Egypt in ancient Egyptian is km.t (read Kemet), meaning 'the black land' or 'the black one'. This is generally 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.
However, 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.
Ancient Tomb Paintings
In the many surviving tomb paintings and papyri, Egyptian men are usually painted with red skin, and the women with yellow skin. However Egyptian artisans also sometimes depicted their subjects in totally unreal colors (such as green), the purpose of which is not completely understood but may have had ritual significance.
Modern-day Afrocentrist scholarship
Further information: Afrocentric historiographyControversy surrounding the race of ancient Egyptians is an integral topic in Afrocentric historiography, and an important issue for Afrocentrism since the early years of the 20th century.
The 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. To a certain extent Afrocentrism also arose as a backlash against scientific racism (broadly speaking, a 19th-century phenomenon) which tended to attribute any advanced civilization to the immigration of Indo-Europeans.
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.
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".
Diop was particularly attached to the "black Egyptians" idea. His thesis dedicated to the topic had been rejected by the University of Paris in 1951, but after it had been published in the popular press as a book titled Nations nègres et culture (Negro Nations and Culture) in 1955, he successfully defended it in 1960. 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."
Noted historian Basil Davidson wrote that:
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.
—
Modern-day non-Afrocentrist scholarship
Archaeologist Kathryn Bard argues that, as far as skin colour is concerned, the ancient Egyptians were neither "black" nor "white" (as such terms are usually applied today).
The Language Element
The Ancient Egyptian language has been classified as one of the Afro-Asiatic language family. The Afro-Asiatic languages comprise the following sub-families.
Afro-Asiatic languages are indigenous to both Middle Eastern Caucasians and Sub-Saharan Africans. Of the six subfamilies of Afro-Asiatic, the Semitic languages form the only Afro-Asiatic subfamily that exists in both Africa and Asia. The other five of the six Afro-Asiatic subfamilies are restricted to the African continent. Though by numbers, most speakers of Afro-Asiatic languages are middle eastern, the greatest amount of linguistic diversity is found in Sub-Saharan Africa. The majority of the diversity in the Afro-Asiatic language family is found in Ethiopia where diverse languages exist in close geographic proximity. Even though Semitic is spoken outside Africa, it too may be indigenous to Ethiopia. In Black Athena, Bernal argues that Afro-Asiatic emerged in the in Great Rift Valley, and the people speaking the Egyptian language migrated from this region, Northwest to what is now Egypt.
In the public sphere
Debate in the public sphere has tended to focus more on the race of specific notable individuals from the history of Egypt, particularly Tutankhamun and Cleopatra VII. Attempted reconstructions of Tutankhamun's facial features have encountered much Afrocentric protest over concerns that he has been represented as too white.
Cleopatra's race and skin colour have also caused frequent debate. 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.
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.
Notes
- Egyptology News» Blog Archive » Hawass says that Tutankhamun was not black
- 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.
- Snowden, p. 122 of Black Athena Revisited
- ^ The Negro, pp18, WEB Du Bois
- ^ Anthon, Charles (1851). "Complexion and Physical Structure of the Egyptians". A classical dictionary,.
{{cite book}}: External link in|chapterurl=|chapterurl=ignored (|chapter-url=suggested) (help) - Morton, Samuel George (1844). "Egyptian Ethnography".
{{cite book}}: External link in|chapterurl=|title=(help); Unknown parameter|chapterurl=ignored (|chapter-url=suggested) (help) - General Remarks on "Types of Mankind"
- Nott (1855). "Negro Types". Types of Mankind.
{{cite book}}: External link in|chapterurl=|chapterurl=ignored (|chapter-url=suggested) (help) - The Descent of Man
- Rawlinson, George (1886). "The People of Egypt". Ancient Egypt.
{{cite book}}: External link in|chapterurl=|chapterurl=ignored (|chapter-url=suggested) (help) - http://www.sacred-texts.com/egy/gate/gate20.htm
- http://www.ancientegyptonline.co.uk/bookgates5.html
- ^ 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
- 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
- Snowden pp.117-120
- Muhly: "Black Athena versus Traditional Scholarship", Journal of Mediterranean Archaeology 3, no 1: 83-110
- Davidson, Basil (1991). African Civilization Revisited: From Antiquity to Modern Times. Africa World Press.
- Bard, p. 111 of Black Athena Revisited.
- Black Athena, pp 88
- Tutankhamun was not black: Egypt antiquities chief, AFP, September 2007
- Baltimore Sun: "Was Cleopatra Black", 2002
- Tyldesley, p. 30, suggests Cleopatra V as the most likely candidate.
- Tyldesley p. 32
- Snowden pp.120-121 of Black Athena Revisited.
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.
