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Revision as of 23:21, 6 February 2009 by Wapondaponda (talk | contribs) (deleted content from arguments/evidence article, will self revert)(diff) ← Previous revision | Latest revision (diff) | Newer revision → (diff)The current debate over the ethnic identity of dynastic Egypt has its roots in contradictory reports and perceptions accumulated since Classical times. The scarcity of "hard" evidence has served to fuel the debate. 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 travelled to Egypt around 450 BC, about 2000 years after the Pyramid Age and when Egypt was part of the Persian Empire. 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 , (also during the Persian Empire period,) mentioning a boat seen from the shore, declared that its crew are Egyptians, because of their black complexions.
- The philosopher and novellist Lucian , who lived long after the Dynastic Era, 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 two different 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. They expressed inter alia the belief that Negroes never inhabited Egypt, as well as that the Egyptians presented an intermediate type between African and Asiatic races.
- In his 1871 book, Descent of Man, Charles Darwin expressed his belief that a statue of Amunoph III displayed 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 his belief that the resemblance to Negroes was indisputable.
Population history of the Egyptians
The modern populations of Egypt have been classified as belonging to the Caucasian race. Egypt has experienced several migrations during its history, the last of which occurred in 639 AD, when region was invaded by Muslim Arabs. As a result, Arabic became the official language, the Egyptian language and its descendant, Coptic, became extinct by the 17th Century. The relationship between Modern Egyptians and Ancient Egyptians is an important part of the debate over race in Ancient Egypt.
Predynastic Egypt
Several studies involving human remains have concluded that Egypt has been a heterogeneous population from predynastic times, consisting of both Negroid and Non-Negroid populations. Human Remains from the South, Upper Egypt, have been describes as having strong Negroid characteristics. Whereas Lower Egypt in the North was less Negroid. In 1905 David Randall-MacIver analysed 1560 skulls from Thebes. Based on the elaborateness of graves, he concluded that during predynastic periods, Negroid people were the social equal of others. He also observed that there was equal representation of Negroids and Non-Negroids in the low and high class populations. According to McIver's study, the Negroid element was very pronounced in predynastic periods, but the Negroid form had significantly diminished by Roman times. McIver suggests that at some time, Non-Negroids must have gained the upper hand. The traditional view has been that Non-Negroid northerners invaded the southern Negroid population. However most Egyptologists today believe it was the Southern populations that invaded the North ushering in the Dynastic period.
Dynastic period
The Dynastic period begins in 3150BC and ends in 30BC with the Roman Conquest. There were several migrations into and out of Egypt that had significant impacts on the Egyptian population. Libyans, Asiatics and Nubians at various times settled in Egypt. For example, around the 2000 BC the Egyptians colonized much of Nubia. Whereas in the 8th Century BC, Nubian Kings conquered Egypt.
DNA Studies
A number of DNA studies on modern Egyptians indicate that there has been significant gene flow from both Sub-Saharan Africa and Asia. A recent study by Krings et al revealed two mitochondrial DNA clines. A Eurasian mtdna cline runs from northern Egypt to Southern Sudan. The second cline of Sub-Saharan mtdna extends from Southern Sudan to Northern Egypt. The results suggest significant bidirectional gene exchange between Egypt and Nubia within the last few thousand years. A study using the Y-chromosome of modern Egyptian males found similar results. African haplogroups are predominant in the South but infrequent in Northern Egypt. The predominant haplogroups in the North are characteristic of other Arabic populations.
Ancient Tomb Paintings
In the many surviving tomb paintings and papyri, Egyptians depict themselves in a wide variety of colors, but predominant color used was reddish-brown. 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.For example, paintings from the tomb of Huy, the Egyptian governor of Nubia during the reign of King Tutankhamun (1336–1327 BC), pictures Nubians bringing tribute for Egypt’s pharaoh. The scene shows a wide variety of Nubians. Some are in Egyptian dress, including a woman riding in a cart. Others, including children, appear in Nubian dress. The skin color of the Nubian men ranges from dark red to brown to black; skin tones for some of the women are lighter.
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.
- Berber
- Chadic
- Egyptian
- Semitic
- Cushitic
- Omotic 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. 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
There have been numerous controversies regarding the race of specific notable individuals from the history of Egypt, particularly the Great Sphinx, Tutankhamun and Cleopatra VII.
The Great Sphinx of Giza
A number of writers have described the face of the Sphinx as having features that are Ethiopian, Nubian, African or Negro, as opposed to Grecian, Coptic or Arabian (Semitic). These writers include the French philosopher Constantin-François Chassebœuf, Gustave Flaubert, and W.E.B. Du Bois.The exact identity of the model for the Sphinx is unknown as there are no known written records that proclaim its identity. Almost all Egyptologists and scholars currently believe that the face of the Sphinx represents the likeness of the Pharaoh Khafra, whose statues have been located near the Sphinx and who is held to be the creator of the statue. A few Egyptologists and interested amateurs have made several conflicting hypotheses regarding the identity of the Sphinx, but at present, no definitive proof exists.See also Great Sphinx of GizaIn 1992, the New York Times published a letter to the editor submitted by then Harvard professor of orthodontics Sheldon Peck, who noted of the Sphinx that is shows “an anatomical condition of forward development in both jaws, more frequently found in people of African ancestry than in those of Asian or Indo-European stock."
Tutankhamun
Attempted reconstructions of Tutankhamun's facial features have encountered much Afrocentric protest over concerns that he has been represented as too white.Although modern technology can reconstruct Tutankhamun's facial structure with a high degree of accuracy based on CT data from his mummy, correctly determining his skin tone is impossible.
Afrocentrism
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. 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.
Meaning of 'Kemet'
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One of the many names for Egypt in ancient Egyptian is km.t (read Kemet), meaning 'the black land' or 'the black one'. 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. 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.
Contemporary academic debates
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."
The Afrocentric claim that European scholars have tried to deny significance of black people in the ancient Egyptian culture has some substance. 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.
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.
- 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) - ^ Zakrzewski (2006). "Population Continuity or Population Change:Formation of the Ancient Egyptian State" (PDF). doi:10.1002/ajpa.20569.
{{cite journal}}: Cite journal requires|journal=(help) - MacIver. "chapter 9". The Ancient Races of the Thebaid.
{{cite book}}: External link in|chapterurl=|chapterurl=ignored (|chapter-url=suggested) (help) - ^ Krings. "mtDNA Analysis of Nile River Valley Populations: Genetic Corridor or a Barrier to Migration?" (PDF). PMID PMC1377841.
{{cite journal}}: Check|pmid=value (help); Cite journal requires|journal=(help) - Lucotte (2001). "Brief communication: Y-chromosome haplotypes in Egypt" (PDF). doi:10.1002/ajpa.10190.
{{cite journal}}: Cite journal requires|journal=(help) - Biological and Ethnic Identity in New Kingdom Nubia
- [http://oi.uchicago.edu/museum/nubia/huy.html Nubia Gallery
- Black Athena, pp 88
- Snowden pp.120-121 of Black Athena Revisited.
- Constantin-François Chassebœuf saw the Sphinx as "typically negro in all its features"; Volney, Constantin-François de Chasseboeuf, Voyage en Egypte et en Syrie, Paris, 1825, page 65
- "...its head is grey, ears very large and protruding like a negro’s...the fact that the nose is missing increases the flat, negroid effect. Besides, it was certainly Ethiopian; the lips are thick.." Flaubert, Gustave. Flaubert in Egypt, ed. Francis Steegmuller. (London: Penguin Classics, 1996). ISBN 9780140435825.
- Du Bois, William Edward Burghardt (1915). The Negro. (New York: Henry Holt and Company, 1915).
- Hassan, Selim (1949). The Sphinx: Its history in the light of recent excavations. Cairo: Government Press, 1949.
- Abstract Sheldon Peck, Department of Orthodontics at Harvard
- To the Editor (1992-07-18). "Sphinx May Really Be a Black African". Retrieved 2007-10-18.
{{cite news}}:|last=has generic name (help); Check date values in:|date=(help); Cite has empty unknown parameter:|coauthors=(help) - Tutankhamun was not black: Egypt antiquities chief, AFP, September 2007
- "discovery reconstruction".
- Science museum images
- Bard p.106
- lefkowtiz p. 7
- Lefkowitz p. 8
- Marcus Garvey: "Who and what is a Negro", 1923. Quoted by Lefkowitz.
- ^ Shavit 2001: 148
- 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
- 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.
- 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.
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
