Ancient Egyptian race controversy
Encyclopedia
The question of the race of ancient Egyptians was raised historically as a product of the scientific racism
of the 18th and 19th centuries, and was linked to models of racial hierarchy. A variety of views circulated about the racial identity of the Egyptians and the source of their culture. These were typically identified in terms of a distinction between "Negro" and "Caucasian" racial categories. Some accounts argued that Egyptian culture emerged from more southerly African peoples, while others pointed to influences from the north west (Asia Minor), and yet others proposed that at least the upper classes were "Caucasian".
Since the second half of the 20th century, scholarly consensus has held that applying modern notions of race to ancient Egypt is anachronistic
. Frank M. Snowden asserts that "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.". Additionally, typological and hierarchical models of race have increasingly been rejected by scientists.
In the late 20th century, the typological model was revived in the domain of Afrocentric historiography and Black nationalism
which tends to insist that Ancient Egypt was a "black
civilization", with particular focus on links to southern African cultures and on the race of specific notable individuals from Dynastic times, including Tutankhamun
, Cleopatra VII, and the king represented in the Great Sphinx of Giza
.
The earliest examples of disagreement in modern times, regarding the race of the ancient Egyptians, occurred in the work of Europeans and Americans early in the 19th century. For example, in an article published in the New-England Magazine of October 1833, the authors dispute a claim that the Ancient Egyptians “were adduced, affirmed to be Ethiopians.” Among other things, they point out (at pg 275), with reference to tomb paintings: “It may be observed that the complexion of the men is invariably red, that of the women yellow; but neither of them can be said to have anything in their physiognomy at all resembling the Negro countenance.” And (at pg 276) they state, with reference to the Sphinx: “The features are Nubian, or what, from ancient representations, may be called Ancient Egyptian, which is quite different from the Negro features.”
In his Principes Physiques de la Morale, Déduits de l'Organisation de l'Homme et de l'Univers, Constantin-François Chassebœuf
writes that "The Copts are the proper representatives of the Ancient Egyptians" due to their "jaundiced and fumed skin, which is neither Greek nor Arab, their full faces, their puffy eyes, their crushed noses, and their thick lips."
Just a few years later, in 1839, Champollion states in his work "Egypte Ancienne" that the Egyptians
and Nubians
are represented in the same manner in tomb paintings and relief
s 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
. 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."
(c. 500 AD) all the way up to the early 19th century the most dominant view was that the ancient Egyptians were the lineal descendants of Ham, through his son Mizraim
. A theory which subsequently became known as the "Asiatic Race Theory". The native Egyptians, by a literal interpretation of Biblical chronology, were believed to have arrived in Egypt from South-West Asia, usually between the 4th or 3rd millennium BC after the flood and dispersal of man at the Tower of Babel
. The descendants of Ham were traditionally considered to be the darkest skinned branch of Humanity, either because of their geographic allotment to Africa or because of the Curse of Ham
. However it became disputed at least by the 18th century whether Mizraim’s descendants, the Egyptians, were Negroid or in contrast a dark skinned Caucasian race.
Johann Friedrich Blumenbach
, a proponent of the Asiatic (Biblical) origins of the Egyptians in 1776 argued that the ancient Egyptians were "degenerated" (darkened) Caucasians, a theory also supported by Georges Cuvier
who in 1811 conducted one of the first scientific analyses of Egyptian mummies:
Thomas Joseph Pettigrew, a surgeon and antiquarian who became one of the earliest experts on mummies also agreed with Cuvier that the ancient Egyptian mummies were Caucasian, showing "not the slightest approximation to the Negro character". Very few Egyptologists or scholars of the 19th century argued against the Caucasian identification of the Egyptians through the Asiatic Race Theory, among them however was the anthropologist James Cowles Prichard
who although agreed the ancient Egyptians were not 'proper' Negroid, maintained they were a "black race", most connected to the Negroid than the Caucasian race.
The Caucasian
racial identification of (Biblical) Mizraim
and the ancient Egyptians was popularized outside scholarly literature, for example in travel books e.g. by William George Browne
in his Travels in Africa, Egypt and Syria (1806). Theological proponents of the Asiatic Race Theory such as John Kitto
further argued that the Curse of Ham
only afflicted Canaan
, not Mizraim
, asserting the Egyptians were racially dark Asiatic Caucasians and not Negroid. The leading Egyptologist of the Asiatic Race Theory in the 19th century was John Gardner Wilkinson
who argued for a literal Asiatic Caucasian ancestry for the Egyptians from Mizraim. The "Asiatic Journal and Monthly Miscellany" notes in review of Wilkinson’s book Manners and Customs of the Ancient Egyptians (1837) that the Asiatic Race Theory was the most popular view held at that time:
Other notable proponents of the Asiatic Race Theory from the 19th century included Charles Lenormant
(1842) and Reginald Stuart Poole
(1851). After the 1850s the theory still was widely supported by Egyptologists but was modified to fit an earlier Asiatic migration during prehistory falling outside of a literal interpretation of Biblical chronology. Jens Lieblein
(1866), Franz Joseph Lauth
(1869), George Rawlinson
(1881), Archibald Sayce
(1891) and Heinrich Karl Brugsch
(1891) were later proponents of the Asiatic Race Theory but were not strict Biblical literalists like Wilkinson but nonetheless still believed the Old Testament was historically accurate, but began to theorise that the Asiatic Egyptians may have not been the first to arrive in Africa. Karl Richard Lepsius
writing in 1853, considered the Egyptians (and Abyssinians) to have been a 'reddish-brown' branch of the Caucasian, but sharply distinguishable from the Negroid. Wilkinson, after analysing several ancient Egyptian crania concluded: "the formation of the skull, which is decidedly of the Caucasian variety, must remove all doubt of their valley having been people from the East." Rawlinson after studying the hair texture of several ancient Egyptian mummies considered them to be non-Negroid, writing in his History of Egypt: "The hair was usually black and straight. In no case was it ‘woolly’, though sometimes it grew in short crisp curls." He further proclaimed that the ancient Egyptians were culturally Asiatic in origin.
The Asiatic Race Theory was only first seriously challenged as late as 1894 by the Egyptologist Gaston Maspero
, who wrote: "the hypothesis of an Asiatic origin however attractive it may seem, is difficult to maintain." In response to the increasing skepticism of the Asiatic Race Theory, various alternatives were proposed, albeit related. In his treatise Der babylonische Ursprung der ägyptischen Kultur ('The Babylonian Origin of Egyptian Culture') published in the 1890s, the Professor of Semitic languages Fritz Hommel
argued that the ancient Egyptians were the descendants of the Akkadians and Babylonians. Hommel’s Babylonian theory was not popular, but received some support by the archaeologist Jacques Rougé, the son of the Egyptologist Emmanuel de Rougé who argued the ancient Egyptians were Chaldeans. By the 20th century the Asiatic Race Theory and its various offshoots were abandoned but were superseded by two new theories: the Hamitic Hypothesis
, asserting that a Caucasian racial group moved into North and East Africa from early prehistory subsequently bringing with them all advanced agriculture, technology and civilization and also the Dynastic Race Theory
, proposing that Mesopotamian invaders were responsible for the dynastic civilization of Egypt (c. 3000 BC). In sharp contrast to the Asiatic Race Theory neither of these theories propose that Caucasians were the indigenous inhabitants of Egypt, as the traditional (Biblical) Asiatic Race proponents (such as Wilkinson) maintained.
hypothesis developed directly from the Asiatic Race Theory which asserted the descendants of Ham through Mizraim
were Caucasian. However it argued that Caucasians were the inventors of agriculture and brought civilization to East Africa
, not only Egypt. It also rejected any Biblical basis (despite using Hamitic as the hypothesis name). The Hamitic Hypothesis was influenced by certain Asiatic Race Theory proponents who were less strict with their Biblical interpretation such as George Rawlinson
and subsequently could push back the arrival of the Caucasians into Egypt to an earlier date, such as the Neolithic
. John Hanning Speke
is widely considered to have been an early predecessor of the Hamitic Hypothesis, while Daniel Garrison Brinton
’s Races and Peoples (1890) was also an influential work, but the theory was not fully developed until the early 20th century.
Among the earliest proponents was the British ethnologist Charles Gabriel Seligman
, who put forward the first scientific argument for the Hamitic Hypothesis in article printed in 1913. Seligman argued in his Races of Africa (1930) that the ancient Egyptians were Caucasian "Nilo-Hamites" who had arrived in Egypt during early prehistory and introduced technology and agriculture to primitive natives they found there. The archaeologist Hermann Junker
another notable proponent of the Hamitic Hypothesis argued that these primitive natives were Bushmen
(Capoids) and not Negroids. The renowned linguist Carl Meinhof
also supported the Hamitic
theory.
The Hamitic Hypothesis was still popular in the 1960s and late 70’s and was supported notably by Anthony John Arkell and George Peter Murdock.
, a proslavery supporter and one of the pioneers of scientific racism
and polygenism
, published his book Crania Aegyptica with the intention of “proving” that the Ancient Egyptians were not black. In 1855 George Gliddon
and Josiah C. Nott
published Types of Mankind with the same intention. All three authors concluded that Egyptians were intermediate between the African and Asiatic races. They acknowledged that Negroes were present in ancient Egypt but claimed they were either captives or servants.
(1901) believed that ancient Egyptians were the African (Hamitic
) branch of the Mediterranean race
, which he called "Eurafrican". According to Sergi, the Mediterranean race or "Eurafrican" contains three varieties or sub-races, which evolved "in accordance of differing telluric and geographic conditions": the African (Hamitic) branch, the Mediterranean "proper" branch and finally the Nordic (depigmentated) branch. Sergi split the African branch into two further groups: Eastern Hamites and Northern Hamites - the ancient Egyptians of whom he classified as Eastern African Hamites
. The Copts, Sergi considered being examples of modern Eastern Hamites, and the closest modern living group affiliated with the ancient Egyptians. Sergi maintained in summary that the Mediterranean race
(excluding the depigmentated Nordic or 'white') is: "a brown human variety, neither white nor Negroid, but pure in its elements, that is to say not a product of the mixture of Whites with Negroes or Negroid peoples."
Influenced by Sergi’s identification of the ancient Egyptians as the African branch of the Mediterranean race, Grafton Elliot Smith
modified the theory in 1911. Smith believed the ancient Egyptians were a dark haired "brown race", most closely "linked by the closest bonds of racial affinity to the Early Neolithic populations of the North African littoral and South Europe". This "brown race" was not Negroid, as according to Smith the hair of the "Proto-Egyptian was precisely similar to that of the brunet South European" and "presented no resemblance whatever to the so-called ‘wooly’ appearance and peppercorn-like arrangement of the Negro’s hair". Smith’s "brown race" is though not synonymous or equivalent with Sergi’s Mediterranean race. However both Sergi and Smith agreed that the ancient Egyptians were brunette with "brown" complexions.
(1846) proposed the ancient Egyptians belonged to the Turanid race, linking them to the Tatars
, because some ancient Egyptian paintings depict Egyptians with sallow or yellowish skin:
, one of the leading Egyptologists of his day, noted that the skeletal remains found at pre-dynastic sites at Naqada
(Upper Egypt) showed marked differentiation. Together with cultural evidence, such as architectural styles, pottery styles, cylinder seals, and numerous rock and tomb paintings, he deduced that a Mesopotamian force had invaded Egypt in predynastic times, imposed themselves on the local Badarian (African) people, and become their rulers. This came to be called the “Dynastic Race Theory
.” The theory further argued that the Mesopotamians then conquered both Upper and Lower Egypt and founded the First Dynasty
.
In the 1950s, the Dynastic Race Theory was widely accepted by mainstream scholarship, and the Ancient Egyptians were, therefore, considered to be “Asiatic” or “Semitic” rather than "African" or "Hamitic." Scholars, such as the Senegalese Egyptologist Cheikh Anta Diop
, fought against the Dynastic Race Theory with their own "Black Egyptian" theory and claimed, among other things, that European scholars supported the Dynastic Race Theory "to avoid having to admit that Ancient Egyptians were black". Bernal proposed that the Dynastic Race theory was conceived by so-called Aryan
scholars to deny Egypt its African roots and modern Afrocentrists continue to condemn the alleged dividing of African peoples into racial clusters as being new versions of the Dynastic Race Theory and the Hamitic hypothesis.
The Dynastic Race Theory had suggested that the original people of Ancient Egypt were "of predominantly Negroid type," but that the "civilization" was inspired by outsiders.
Contemporary consensus tends to suggest that Egyptian civilization was an indigenous Nile Valley development (see population history of Egypt
).
As part of the growing interest in attempted scientific classifications of race in academia, questions surrounding the race of the ancient Egyptians occasionally arose in 18th and 19th-century Western scholarship. The debate was popularized and held throughout the 20th century in the works of George James, Cheikh Anta Diop
, and to an extent Martin Bernal
. All three scholars have used the terms "Black," "African," and "Egyptian" interchangeably, despite what Snowden calls "copious ancient evidence to the contrary." Obviously, Diop feels that there is copious evidence to support his claims that the Egyptians were Black, including the accounts of many ancient historians, depictions of the Egyptians in art (paintings and statues), and cultural traits shared with Black Africa, such as circumcision, matriarchy, totemism, and kingship cults.
The body of scholarly work that has been dubbed "Afrocentrism" by some is a response by respected scholars to the Scientific racism
of the 18th and 19th centuries. This model assumes as a scientific fact that humanity originated in Africa (based on genetic studies and archaeological evidence) and that the "Out of Africa" position best explains the peopling of planet Earth. As it relates to Egypt, scholars such as W.E.B DuBois, Chancellor Williams, Cheikh Anta Diop, John G. Jackson, Ivan van Sertima, Martin Bernal, and Marcus Garvey reviewed the available evidence and concluded that the Ancient Egyptian society was indigenous to Africa (or AfroAsiatic in the case of Bernal) and consequently a mostly Black civilization. Journals, such as the oft criticized Journal of African Civilizations, have continually advocated that Egypt should be viewed as a Black civilization. The indigenous African model relies heavily on evidence from Greek and Egyptian historians, as well as Hebrew and Biblical traditions. Proponents of this model were swayed by the broad agreement among ancient historians that the Ancient Egyptians were Black and Black skinned. Some of the most often quoted historians are Strabo, Diodorus Siculus, and Herodotus. Recent archaeological evidence has only bolstered the belief that the Ancient Egyptian civilization was indigenous. The art (paintings and sculpture), pottery, skeletal remains, and writings left by the Ancient Egyptians also suggests to scholars that the Egyptian civilization was indigenous and mostly Black during its high periods. In the mid 20th century, the alternative models contrasted sharply with prevailing views on Ancient Egyptian society, which were thought by Diop and others to be fueled by Scientific racism. As an example, during the European colonial era, the prevalent European attitude was that ancient Egyptians were White. This view can be observed in two 1930's era encyclopedias from the French scholar Alain Froment. The opposition camp strongly rejects the Asiatic, Hamitic, Mediterranean, Turanid, and Dynastic theories, as they are often based on poor scholarship at best and Scientific racism at worst.
Some scholars have been dubbed "Afrocentrists", though they rely almost entirely on White, European sources to make their case. To paraphrase Bernal, the more that modern scholars admired the Greeks, the less they respected Greek writings on history. Herodotus affirms in numerous passages that the Egyptians were Black. Herodotus states quite directly that a Greek oracle was known to be from Egypt because she was Black, that the natives of the Nile region are "Black with heat", and that Egyptians were "Black skinned with woolly hair". Lucian, a Greek, observes an Egyptian boy and notices that he is not merely Black, but has thick lips. Diodorus Siculus mentions that the Ethiopians considered the Egyptians a colony. Appollodorus, a Greek, calls Egypt the country of the black footed ones. Aeschylus, a Greek poet, wrote that Egyptian seamen had "black limbs." Strabo mentions that the Ethiopians and Colchians are of the same race. Historians are in general agreement that the Ethiopians, Egyptians, Colchians, and people of the Southern Levant (they learned the practice from the Egyptians) were among the only people on Earth practicing circumcision, which confirms their cultural affiliations, if not their ethnic affiliation. Gaston Maspero states that "by the almost unanimous testimony of ancient historians, they (Ancient Egyptians) belonged to the African race, which settled in Ethiopia." In biblical traditions, it is agreed that Ham fathered the Black nations. Ham's sons Kush and Phut are agreed by most to be Black. However, Ham's other offspring, Mezraim and Canaan, are somehow magically not Black, although most ancient historians agree on the cultural and ethnic ties of all Ham's offspring. Finally, most historians agree that the name (KMT, or Kemit) used by Egyptians to describe themselves or their land (depending on your point of view) meant "Black." The Egyptian gods were also called by the same black designation, in addition to their individual name.
One of the foremost proponents of an alternative view of Ancient Egyptian history was Cheikh Anta Diop. Diop used a multi-faceted approach in his effort to alter popular notions of Ancient Egypt's origin and ethnic makeup. In one approach, Diop attempted to linguistically link Egypt and Africa. Furthermore, he links Egypt to Senegal by arguing that the Ancient Egyptian language was related to his native Wolof
. Diop preferred not to deal with questions of race, however scholars were compelled to react to what they saw as inaccuracies in the other approaches. Diop's work was well received by the political establishment in the post-colonial formative phase of the state of Senegal
, and by the Pan-Africanist Négritude
movement.
While at the University of Dakar, Diop tried to establish the skin color of the Egyptian mummies by measuring the melanin content of their skin. Diop stated, “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.” In the words of Diop, "The fact that Egyptians had black skin was for Herodotus an evident truth that he posits, like a mathematician, as an axiom to lead subsequently to the demonstration of more complex facts." The British Africanist Basil Davidson
summarized the issue as follows:
UNESCO
convened the "Symposium on the Peopling of Ancient Egypt and the Deciphering of the Meroitic Script" in Cairo
in 1974. At that forum Professors Diop
and Obenda presented their "Black Egyptian" theory, which was largely rejected by the other delegates. The details of Diop’s presentation, and the arguments against his conclusions, are recorded in the UNESCO General History of Africa
.
Dr. Zahi Hawass
, the former Secretary General of the Egyptian Supreme Council of Antiquities
, has stated that "The portrayal of ancient Egyptian civilization as black has no element of truth to it;" and that "Ancient Egyptians are not Arabs and are not Africans despite the fact that Egypt
is in Africa
."
Other academics in various fields contend that Ancient Egypt was fundamentally an African civilization, with cultural and biological connections to Egypt's African neighbours. Several anthropologists who study the biological relationships of the Ancient Egyptian population call for a recognition of Africa's genetic diversity when considering the racial identity of the Ancient Egyptians.
The focus of some experts who study population biology
has been to consider whether or not the Ancient Egyptians were primarily biologically African rather than to which race they belonged.
In 1996, the Indianapolis Museum of Art
published a collection of essays, which included contributions from leading experts in various fields including archaeology
, art history
, physical anthropology
, African studies
, Egyptology
, Afrocentric studies, linguistics
, and classical studies. Among the contributors were Chike Aniakor
, Molefi Kete Asante
, Robert Steven Bianchi, Arthur P. Bourgeois, Shomarka Keita
, Christopher Ehret
, Chapurukha M. Kusimba, Frank M. Snowden, Jr.
, and Frank J. Yurco. While the contributors differed in some opinions, the consensus of the authors was that Ancient Egypt was and should be considered to be an African civilization, based on Egypt's geographic location on the African continent.
Scholars, such as Diop, and Afrocentrists have claimed that Tutankhamun was black, and have protested that attempted reconstructions of Tutankhamun's facial features (as depicted on the cover of National Geographic Magazine
) have represented the king as “too white”. Evidence led Chancellor Williams to believe that King Tut, his parents, and grandpartents were Black.
Forensic artists and physical anthropologists from Egypt
, France
, and the United States
independently created busts of Tutankhamun, using a CT-scan of the skull. Biological anthropologist Susan Anton, the leader of the American team, said the race of the skull was “hard to call.” She stated that the shape of the cranial cavity indicated an African, while the nose opening suggested narrow nostrils, which is usually considered to be a Europe
an characteristic. The skull was thus concluded to be that of a North Africa
n. Other experts have pointed out that neither skull shapes nor nasal openings are a reliable indication of race, as in the case of Dravidian Blacks with narrow noses.
Although modern technology can reconstruct Tutankhamun's facial structure with a high degree of accuracy, based on CT data from his mummy, determining his skin tone and eye color
is impossible. The clay model was therefore given a flesh coloring which, according to the artist, was based on an "average shade of modern Egyptians."
Terry Garcia, National Geographics executive vice president for mission programs, said, in response to some of those protesting against the Tutankhamun reconstruction:
When pressed on the issue by American activists in September 2007, the current Secretary General of the Egyptian Supreme Council of Antiquities
, Dr. Zahi Hawass stated that "Tutankhamun was not black, and the portrayal of ancient Egyptian civilization as black has no element of truth to it;" Hawass further observed that "[Ancient] Egyptians are not Arabs and are not Africans despite the fact that Egypt is in Africa." Many modern scholars disagree with the assertion that the Ancient Egyptians were not Africans.
Ahmed Saleh, the former archaeological inspector for the Supreme Council of antiquities stated that the procedures used in the facial re-creation made Tut look Caucasian
, "disrespecting the nation's African roots."
In a November 2007 publication of Ancient Egypt Magazine
, Hawass asserted that none of the facial reconstructions resemble Tut and that, in his opinion, the most accurate representation of the boy king is the mask from his tomb. The Discovery Channel
commissioned a facial reconstruction of Tutankhamun, based on CT scans of a model of his skull, back in 2002.
Cleopatra's race and skin color have also caused frequent debate, as described in an article from The Baltimore Sun
. There is also an article entitled: Was Cleopatra Black? from Ebony magazine
, and an article about Afrocentrism from the St. Louis Post-Dispatch
that mentions the question, too. Scholars generally suggest a light olive skin color for Cleopatra, based on the following facts: her Macedon
ian family had intermingled with the Persian aristocracy of the time; her mother's identity is uncertain, and that of her paternal grandmother is not known for certain. Afrocentric assertions of Cleopatra's blackness have, however, continued.
The question was the subject of a heated exchange between Mary Lefkowitz
, who has referred in her articles to a debate she had with one of her students about the question of whether Cleopatra was black, and Molefi Kete Asante
, Professor of African American Studies at Temple University
. In response to Not Out of Africa by Lefkowitz, Asante wrote an article entitled Race in Antiquity: Truly Out of Africa, in which he emphasized that he "can say without a doubt that Afrocentrists do not spend time arguing that either Socrates
or Cleopatra were black."
In 2009, a BBC
documentary speculated that Arsinoe IV, the half-sister of Cleopatra VII, may have been part African and then further speculated that Cleopatra’s mother, thus Cleopatra herself, might also have been part African. This was based largely on the claims of Hilke Thür of the Austrian Academy of Sciences
, who in the 1990s had examined a headless skeleton of a female child in a 20 BC tomb in Ephesus
(modern Turkey
), together with the old notes and photographs of the now-missing skull. Arsinoe IV and Cleopatra VII, shared the same father (Ptolemy XII Auletes
) but had different mothers.
is unknown. Virtually all Egyptologists and scholars currently believe that the face of the Sphinx represents the likeness of the Pharaoh
Khafra
, although a few Egyptologists and interested amateurs have proposed several different hypotheses
.
Numerous scholars of good faith, such as DuBois, Diop, and Volney, have characterized the face of the Sphinx as Black, or "Negroid." Around 1785 Volney stated, "When I visited the sphinx...on seeing that head, typically Negro in all its features, I remembered...Herodotus says: "...the Egyptians...are black with woolly hair"..." Another early description of a "Negroid" Sphinx is recorded in the travel notes of a French scholar, who visited in Egypt between 1783 and 1785. Constantin-François Chassebœuf
and French novelist Gustave Flaubert
. Flaubert traveled to Egypt in 1849 and recorded the following observation:
American geologist Robert M. Schoch
has written that the "Sphinx has a distinctive African, Nubian, or Negroid aspect which is lacking in the face of Khafre."
The meaning of "km.t." is a matter of great controversy. According to scholars, such as Diop, the Egyptians referred to themselves as "Black" people, or "km.t", and "km.t" was the etymological root of other words, such as Kam or Ham, which refer to Black people in Hebrew tradition. According to others, one of the many names for Egypt in ancient Egyptian is km.t (read Kemet), meaning 'the black land' or 'the black place.' Some believe, '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
outside the narrow confines of the Nile watercourse - which the ancients called the 'red land'. 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.
Cheikh Anta Diop
William Leo Hansberry
, and Aboubacry Moussa Lam have argued that km.t was derived from the skin color of the Nile valley people, which Diop and most Ancient Greek historians claim was black. Diop believed the Greek historians when they observed and wrote that Egyptians were black skinned. Diop and others do not differentiate between black and brown skinned people of the Nile valley, as they are all culturally, ethnically, and linguistically linked. The claim that the Egyptians have black skin has become a cornerstone of Afrocentric historiography, but it is rejected by a strong majority of Egyptologists.
Manu Ampim, a professor at Merritt College
specializing in African and African American history and culture, claims in the book Modern Fraud: The Forged Ancient Egyptian Statues of Ra-Hotep and Nofret, that many ancient Egyptian statues and artworks are modern frauds that have been created specifically to hide the “fact” that the ancient Egyptians were black, while authentic artworks which demonstrate black characteristics are systematically defaced or even "modified." Ampim repeatedly makes the accusation that the Egyptian authorities are systematically destroying evidence which “proves” that the ancient Egyptians were black, under the guise of renovating and conserving the applicable temples and structures. He further accuses “European” scholars of wittingly participating in and abetting this process.
Ampim has a specific concern about the painting of the "Table of Nations" in the Tomb of Ramses III (KV11). The “Table of Nations” is a standard painting which appears in a number of tombs, and they were usually provided for the guidance of the soul of the deceased. Among other things, they described the "four races of men," as follows: (translation by E.A. Wallis Budge:
The archaeologist Richard Lepsius documented many ancient Egyptian tomb paintings in his work Denkmäler aus Aegypten und Aethiopien. In 1913, after the death of Lepsius, an updated reprint of the work was produced, edited by Kurt Sethe. This printing included an additional section, called the “Ergänzungsband” in German
, which incorporated many illustrations that did not appear in Lepsius’ original work. One of them, plate 48, illustrated one example of each of the four “nations” as depicted in KV11, and shows the "Egyptian nation" and the "Nubian nation" as identical to each other in skin color and dress. Professor Ampim has declared that plate 48 is a true reflection of the original painting, and that it “proves” that the ancient Egyptians were identical in appearance to the Nubians
, even though he admits no other examples of the "Table of Nations" show this similarity. He has further accused “Euro-American writers” of attempting to mislead the public on this issue.
The late Egyptologist, Dr. Frank Yurco, visited the tomb of Ramses III (KV11), and in a 1996 article on the Ramses III tomb reliefs he pointed out that the depiction of plate 48 in the Erganzungsband section is not a correct depiction of what is actually painted on the walls of the tomb. Dr Yurco notes, instead, that plate 48 is a “pastische” of samples of what is on the tomb walls, arranged from Lepsius' notes after his death, and that a picture of a Nubian person has erroneously been labeled in the pastiche as an Egyptian person. Yurco points also to the much-more-recent photographs of Dr. Erik Hornung as a correct depiction of the actual paintings. (Erik Hornung, “The Valley of the Kings: Horizon of Eternity”, 1990). Ampim nonetheless continues to claim that plate 48 shows accurately the images which stand on the walls of KV11, and he categorically accuses both Yurco and Hornung of perpetrating a deliberate deception for the purposes of misleading the public about the true race of the Ancient Egyptians.
(Pun.t; Pwenet; Pwene) as their ancestral homeland. In his book “The Making of Egypt” (1939), W. M. Flinders Petrie stated that the Land of Punt was “sacred to the Egyptians as the source of their race.” E.A. Wallis Budge stated that “Egyptian tradition of the Dynastic Period held that the aboriginal home of the Egyptians was Punt…”
According to Ian Shaw in the Oxford History of Ancient Egypt:
The placement of Punt in eastern Africa is based on the fact that the products of Punt were abundantly found in East Africa but were less common or absent in Arabia. These products included gold, aromatic resins such as myrrh
, ebony
and elephant tusks. The wild animals depicted in Punt include giraffe
s, baboon
s, hippopotami, and leopard
s. Says Richard Pankhurst, in his book “The Ethiopians”: “[Punt] has been identified with territory on both the Arabian and African coasts. Consideration of the articles which the Egyptians obtained from Punt, notably gold and ivory
, suggests, however, that these were primarily of African origin. This leads us to suppose the term Punt likely applied more to African than Arabian territory.”
Other scholars disagree with this view and point to a range of ancient Egyptian inscriptions which unambiguously locate Punt in Arabia. Dimitri Meeks has written that “Texts locating Punt beyond doubt to the south are in the minority, but they are the only ones cited in the current consensus about the location of the country. Punt, we are told by the Egyptians, is situated – in relation to the Nile Valley – both to the north, in contact with the countries of the Near East of the Mediterranean area, and also to the east or south-east, while its furthest borders are far away to the south. Only the Arabian Peninsula
satisfies all these indications.”
In 2003 a newly discovered text was found in a tomb in El Kab
, a small town that is located about 50 kilometres south of Thebes. The tomb belonged to the local governor, Sobeknakht II
, and dates to the 17th dynasty (c.1600-1550 BC). Newspaper articles reported that the inscription mentions “a huge attack from the south on Elkab and Egypt by the Kingdom of Kush
and its allies from the land of Punt.”
Scientific racism
Scientific racism is the use of scientific techniques and hypotheses to sanction the belief in racial superiority or racism.This is not the same as using scientific findings and the scientific method to investigate differences among the humans and argue that there are races...
of the 18th and 19th centuries, and was linked to models of racial hierarchy. A variety of views circulated about the racial identity of the Egyptians and the source of their culture. These were typically identified in terms of a distinction between "Negro" and "Caucasian" racial categories. Some accounts argued that Egyptian culture emerged from more southerly African peoples, while others pointed to influences from the north west (Asia Minor), and yet others proposed that at least the upper classes were "Caucasian".
Since the second half of the 20th century, scholarly consensus has held that applying modern notions of race to ancient Egypt is anachronistic
Anachronism
An anachronism—from the Greek ανά and χρόνος — is an inconsistency in some chronological arrangement, especially a chronological misplacing of persons, events, objects, or customs in regard to each other...
. Frank M. Snowden asserts that "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.". Additionally, typological and hierarchical models of race have increasingly been rejected by scientists.
In the late 20th century, the typological model was revived in the domain of Afrocentric historiography and Black nationalism
Black nationalism
Black nationalism advocates a racial definition of indigenous national identity, as opposed to multiculturalism. There are different indigenous nationalist philosophies but the principles of all African nationalist ideologies are unity, and self-determination or independence from European society...
which tends to insist that Ancient Egypt was a "black
Black people
The term black people is used in systems of racial classification for humans of a dark skinned phenotype, relative to other racial groups.Different societies apply different criteria regarding who is classified as "black", and often social variables such as class, socio-economic status also plays a...
civilization", with particular focus on links to southern African cultures and on the race of specific notable individuals from Dynastic times, including Tutankhamun
Tutankhamun
Tutankhamun , Egyptian , ; approx. 1341 BC – 1323 BC) was an Egyptian pharaoh of the 18th dynasty , during the period of Egyptian history known as the New Kingdom...
, Cleopatra VII, and the king represented in the Great Sphinx of Giza
Great Sphinx of Giza
The Great Sphinx of Giza , commonly referred to as the Sphinx, is a limestone statue of a reclining or couchant sphinx that stands on the Giza Plateau on the west bank of the Nile in Giza, Egypt....
.
Origins of the controversy
In his Principes Physiques de la Morale, Déduits de l'Organisation de l'Homme et de l'Univers, Constantin-François Chassebœuf
Constantin-François Chassebœuf
Constantin François de Chassebœuf, comte de Volney was a French philosopher, historian, orientalist, and politician...
writes that "The Copts are the proper representatives of the Ancient Egyptians" due to their "jaundiced and fumed skin, which is neither Greek nor Arab, their full faces, their puffy eyes, their crushed noses, and their thick lips."
Just a few years later, in 1839, Champollion states in his work "Egypte Ancienne" that the Egyptians
Egyptians
Egyptians are nation an ethnic group made up of Mediterranean North Africans, the indigenous people of Egypt.Egyptian identity is closely tied to geography. The population of Egypt is concentrated in the lower Nile Valley, the small strip of cultivable land stretching from the First Cataract to...
and Nubians
Nubians
The Nubians are an ethnic group originally from northern Sudan, and southern Egypt now inhabiting North Africa and some parts of East Africa....
are represented in the same manner in tomb paintings and relief
Relief
Relief is a sculptural technique. The term relief is from the Latin verb levo, to raise. To create a sculpture in relief is thus to give the impression that the sculpted material has been raised above the background plane...
s and that "The first tribes that inhabited Egypt, that is, the Nile Valley between the Syene cataract
Cataracts of the Nile
The cataracts of the Nile are shallow lengths of the Nile between Aswan and Khartoum where the surface of the water is broken by many small boulders and stones protruding out of the river bed, as well as many rocky islets. Aswan is also the Southern boundary of Upper Egypt...
and the sea, came from Abyssinia
Ethiopian Empire
The Ethiopian Empire also known as Abyssinia, covered a geographical area that the present-day northern half of Ethiopia and Eritrea covers, and included in its peripheries Zeila, Djibouti, Yemen and Western Saudi Arabia...
to Sennar
Sennar
Sennar is a town on the Blue Nile in Sudan and capital of the state of Sennar. For several centuries it was the capital of the Funj Kingdom of Sennar. It had an estimated population of 100,000 inhabitants in the early 19th century. The modern town lies 17km SSE of the ruins of the ancient capital...
. 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."
Asiatic race theory
From the Early Middle AgesEarly Middle Ages
The Early Middle Ages was the period of European history lasting from the 5th century to approximately 1000. The Early Middle Ages followed the decline of the Western Roman Empire and preceded the High Middle Ages...
(c. 500 AD) all the way up to the early 19th century the most dominant view was that the ancient Egyptians were the lineal descendants of Ham, through his son Mizraim
Mizraim
Mizraim is the Hebrew name for the land of Egypt, with the dual suffix -āyim, perhaps referring to the "two Egypts": Upper Egypt and Lower Egypt....
. A theory which subsequently became known as the "Asiatic Race Theory". The native Egyptians, by a literal interpretation of Biblical chronology, were believed to have arrived in Egypt from South-West Asia, usually between the 4th or 3rd millennium BC after the flood and dispersal of man at the Tower of Babel
Tower of Babel
The Tower of Babel , according to the Book of Genesis, was an enormous tower built in the plain of Shinar .According to the biblical account, a united humanity of the generations following the Great Flood, speaking a single language and migrating from the east, came to the land of Shinar, where...
. The descendants of Ham were traditionally considered to be the darkest skinned branch of Humanity, either because of their geographic allotment to Africa or because of the Curse of Ham
Curse of Ham
The Curse of Ham is a possible misnomer, for the Curse of Canaan. The curse refers to Noah cursing Ham's offspring Canaan, for Ham's own transgression against his father, according to Genesis in the Hebrew Bible. The debate regarding upon whom the curse fell has raged for at least two thousand...
. However it became disputed at least by the 18th century whether Mizraim’s descendants, the Egyptians, were Negroid or in contrast a dark skinned Caucasian race.
Johann Friedrich Blumenbach
Johann Friedrich Blumenbach
Johann Friedrich Blumenbach was a German physician, physiologist and anthropologist, one of the first to explore the study of mankind as an aspect of natural history, whose teachings in comparative anatomy were applied to classification of what he called human races, of which he determined...
, a proponent of the Asiatic (Biblical) origins of the Egyptians in 1776 argued that the ancient Egyptians were "degenerated" (darkened) Caucasians, a theory also supported by Georges Cuvier
Georges Cuvier
Georges Chrétien Léopold Dagobert Cuvier or Jean Léopold Nicolas Frédéric Cuvier , known as Georges Cuvier, was a French naturalist and zoologist...
who in 1811 conducted one of the first scientific analyses of Egyptian mummies:
Thomas Joseph Pettigrew, a surgeon and antiquarian who became one of the earliest experts on mummies also agreed with Cuvier that the ancient Egyptian mummies were Caucasian, showing "not the slightest approximation to the Negro character". Very few Egyptologists or scholars of the 19th century argued against the Caucasian identification of the Egyptians through the Asiatic Race Theory, among them however was the anthropologist James Cowles Prichard
James Cowles Prichard
James Cowles Prichard MD FRS was an English physician and ethnologist. His influential Researches into the physical history of mankind touched upon the subject of evolution...
who although agreed the ancient Egyptians were not 'proper' Negroid, maintained they were a "black race", most connected to the Negroid than the Caucasian race.
The Caucasian
Caucasian
Caucasian may refer to:*Anything from the Caucasus region**Peoples of the Caucasus or Caucasian peoples, humans from the Caucasus region**Languages of the Caucasus, languages spoken in the Caucasus region...
racial identification of (Biblical) Mizraim
Mizraim
Mizraim is the Hebrew name for the land of Egypt, with the dual suffix -āyim, perhaps referring to the "two Egypts": Upper Egypt and Lower Egypt....
and the ancient Egyptians was popularized outside scholarly literature, for example in travel books e.g. by William George Browne
William George Browne
William George Browne was an English traveller.Browne was born at Great Tower Hill, London. At seventeen he was sent to Oriel College, Oxford. Having had a moderate inheritance left him by his father, on quitting the university he applied himself entirely to literary pursuits...
in his Travels in Africa, Egypt and Syria (1806). Theological proponents of the Asiatic Race Theory such as John Kitto
John Kitto
John Kitto was an English biblical scholar of Cornish descent.-Biography:Born in Plymouth, John Kitto was a sickly child, son of a Cornish stonemason. The drunkenness of his father and the poverty of his family meant that much of his childhood was spent in the workhouse. He had no more than three...
further argued that the Curse of Ham
Curse of Ham
The Curse of Ham is a possible misnomer, for the Curse of Canaan. The curse refers to Noah cursing Ham's offspring Canaan, for Ham's own transgression against his father, according to Genesis in the Hebrew Bible. The debate regarding upon whom the curse fell has raged for at least two thousand...
only afflicted Canaan
Canaan
Canaan is a historical region roughly corresponding to modern-day Israel, Palestine, Lebanon, and the western parts of Jordan...
, not Mizraim
Mizraim
Mizraim is the Hebrew name for the land of Egypt, with the dual suffix -āyim, perhaps referring to the "two Egypts": Upper Egypt and Lower Egypt....
, asserting the Egyptians were racially dark Asiatic Caucasians and not Negroid. The leading Egyptologist of the Asiatic Race Theory in the 19th century was John Gardner Wilkinson
John Gardner Wilkinson
Sir John Gardner Wilkinson was an English traveller, writer and pioneer Egyptologist of the 19th century. He is often referred to as "the Father of British Egyptology".-Childhood and education:...
who argued for a literal Asiatic Caucasian ancestry for the Egyptians from Mizraim. The "Asiatic Journal and Monthly Miscellany" notes in review of Wilkinson’s book Manners and Customs of the Ancient Egyptians (1837) that the Asiatic Race Theory was the most popular view held at that time:
Other notable proponents of the Asiatic Race Theory from the 19th century included Charles Lenormant
Charles Lenormant
Charles Lenormant was a French archaeologist.After pursuing his studies at the Lycée Charlemagne and the Lycée Napoléon, he took up law, but a visit to Italy and Sicily made him an enthusiastic archaeologist...
(1842) and Reginald Stuart Poole
Reginald Stuart Poole
Reginald Stuart Poole was an English archaeologist and orientalist.-Life:Born in London, he was the son of the Rev. Edward Poole, a well-known bibliophile. His parents became estranged during his early childhood, and his mother, Sophia Lane Poole, took her sons to Egypt to live with her brother,...
(1851). After the 1850s the theory still was widely supported by Egyptologists but was modified to fit an earlier Asiatic migration during prehistory falling outside of a literal interpretation of Biblical chronology. Jens Lieblein
Jens Lieblein
Jens Daniel Carolus Lieblein was a Norwegian Egyptologist and magazine editor. He was a professor at the University of Oslo from 1876, the first professor of Egyptology in Norway.-Personal life:...
(1866), Franz Joseph Lauth
Franz Joseph Lauth
Franz Joseph Lauth , was a German Egyptologist.-History:...
(1869), George Rawlinson
George Rawlinson
Canon George Rawlinson was a 19th century English scholar, historian, and Christian theologian. He was born at Chadlington, Oxfordshire, and was the younger brother of Sir Henry Rawlinson....
(1881), Archibald Sayce
Archibald Sayce
The Rev. Archibald Henry Sayce , was a pioneer British Assyriologist and linguist, who held a chair as Professor of Assyriology at the University of Oxford from 1891 to 1919.- Life :...
(1891) and Heinrich Karl Brugsch
Heinrich Karl Brugsch
Heinrich Karl Brugsch was a German Egyptologist, born in Berlin. He was associated with Auguste Mariette in his excavations at Memphis...
(1891) were later proponents of the Asiatic Race Theory but were not strict Biblical literalists like Wilkinson but nonetheless still believed the Old Testament was historically accurate, but began to theorise that the Asiatic Egyptians may have not been the first to arrive in Africa. Karl Richard Lepsius
Karl Richard Lepsius
Karl Richard Lepsius was a pioneering Prussian Egyptologist and linguist and pioneer of modern archaeology.-Background:...
writing in 1853, considered the Egyptians (and Abyssinians) to have been a 'reddish-brown' branch of the Caucasian, but sharply distinguishable from the Negroid. Wilkinson, after analysing several ancient Egyptian crania concluded: "the formation of the skull, which is decidedly of the Caucasian variety, must remove all doubt of their valley having been people from the East." Rawlinson after studying the hair texture of several ancient Egyptian mummies considered them to be non-Negroid, writing in his History of Egypt: "The hair was usually black and straight. In no case was it ‘woolly’, though sometimes it grew in short crisp curls." He further proclaimed that the ancient Egyptians were culturally Asiatic in origin.
The Asiatic Race Theory was only first seriously challenged as late as 1894 by the Egyptologist Gaston Maspero
Gaston Maspero
Gaston Camille Charles Maspero was a French Egyptologist.-Life:Gaston Maspero was born in Paris to parents of Lombard origin. While at school he showed a special taste for history, and by the age of fourteen he was already interested in hieroglyphic writing...
, who wrote: "the hypothesis of an Asiatic origin however attractive it may seem, is difficult to maintain." In response to the increasing skepticism of the Asiatic Race Theory, various alternatives were proposed, albeit related. In his treatise Der babylonische Ursprung der ägyptischen Kultur ('The Babylonian Origin of Egyptian Culture') published in the 1890s, the Professor of Semitic languages Fritz Hommel
Fritz Hommel
Fritz Hommel was a German Orientalist.Hommel was born in Ansbach, Germany. He studied in Leipzig and habilitated in 1877 in Munich, where he in 1885 became an extraordinary Professor for semitic languages....
argued that the ancient Egyptians were the descendants of the Akkadians and Babylonians. Hommel’s Babylonian theory was not popular, but received some support by the archaeologist Jacques Rougé, the son of the Egyptologist Emmanuel de Rougé who argued the ancient Egyptians were Chaldeans. By the 20th century the Asiatic Race Theory and its various offshoots were abandoned but were superseded by two new theories: the Hamitic Hypothesis
Hamitic
Hamitic is an historical term for the peoples supposedly descended from Noah's son Ham, paralleling Semitic and Japhetic.It was formerly used for grouping the non-Semitic Afroasiatic languages , but since, unlike the Semitic branch, these have not been shown to form a phylogenetic unity, the term...
, asserting that a Caucasian racial group moved into North and East Africa from early prehistory subsequently bringing with them all advanced agriculture, technology and civilization and also the Dynastic Race Theory
Dynastic Race Theory
The Dynastic Race Theory was the earliest thesis to attempt to explain how predynastic Egypt developed into the sophisticated monarchy of Dynastic Egypt. The Theory holds that the earliest roots of the Ancient Egyptian dynastic civilisation were imported by invaders from Mesopotamia who then...
, proposing that Mesopotamian invaders were responsible for the dynastic civilization of Egypt (c. 3000 BC). In sharp contrast to the Asiatic Race Theory neither of these theories propose that Caucasians were the indigenous inhabitants of Egypt, as the traditional (Biblical) Asiatic Race proponents (such as Wilkinson) maintained.
Hamitic hypothesis
The HamiticHamitic
Hamitic is an historical term for the peoples supposedly descended from Noah's son Ham, paralleling Semitic and Japhetic.It was formerly used for grouping the non-Semitic Afroasiatic languages , but since, unlike the Semitic branch, these have not been shown to form a phylogenetic unity, the term...
hypothesis developed directly from the Asiatic Race Theory which asserted the descendants of Ham through Mizraim
Mizraim
Mizraim is the Hebrew name for the land of Egypt, with the dual suffix -āyim, perhaps referring to the "two Egypts": Upper Egypt and Lower Egypt....
were Caucasian. However it argued that Caucasians were the inventors of agriculture and brought civilization to East Africa
East Africa
East Africa or Eastern Africa is the easterly region of the African continent, variably defined by geography or geopolitics. In the UN scheme of geographic regions, 19 territories constitute Eastern Africa:...
, not only Egypt. It also rejected any Biblical basis (despite using Hamitic as the hypothesis name). The Hamitic Hypothesis was influenced by certain Asiatic Race Theory proponents who were less strict with their Biblical interpretation such as George Rawlinson
George Rawlinson
Canon George Rawlinson was a 19th century English scholar, historian, and Christian theologian. He was born at Chadlington, Oxfordshire, and was the younger brother of Sir Henry Rawlinson....
and subsequently could push back the arrival of the Caucasians into Egypt to an earlier date, such as the Neolithic
Neolithic
The Neolithic Age, Era, or Period, or New Stone Age, was a period in the development of human technology, beginning about 9500 BC in some parts of the Middle East, and later in other parts of the world. It is traditionally considered as the last part of the Stone Age...
. John Hanning Speke
John Hanning Speke
John Hanning Speke was an officer in the British Indian Army who made three exploratory expeditions to Africa and who is most associated with the search for the source of the Nile.-Life:...
is widely considered to have been an early predecessor of the Hamitic Hypothesis, while Daniel Garrison Brinton
Daniel Garrison Brinton
Daniel Garrison Brinton was an American archaeologist and ethnologist.-Biography:Brinton was born in Thornbury Township, Chester County, Pennsylvania. After graduating from Yale University in 1858, Brinton studied at Jefferson Medical College for two years and spent the next travelling in Europe....
’s Races and Peoples (1890) was also an influential work, but the theory was not fully developed until the early 20th century.
Among the earliest proponents was the British ethnologist Charles Gabriel Seligman
Charles Gabriel Seligman
Charles Gabriel Seligman FRS was a British ethnologist. Born in London, Seligman studied medicine at St. Thomas' Hospital....
, who put forward the first scientific argument for the Hamitic Hypothesis in article printed in 1913. Seligman argued in his Races of Africa (1930) that the ancient Egyptians were Caucasian "Nilo-Hamites" who had arrived in Egypt during early prehistory and introduced technology and agriculture to primitive natives they found there. The archaeologist Hermann Junker
Hermann Junker
Hermann Junker was a German archaeologist best known for his discovery of the Merimde site in the West Delta in Lower Egypt in 1928.-Selected Publications:* Die Grabung auf dem Mastabafeld von Gizeh. Vienna: Akademie der Wissenschaft, 1912....
another notable proponent of the Hamitic Hypothesis argued that these primitive natives were Bushmen
Bushmen
The indigenous people of Southern Africa, whose territory spans most areas of South Africa, Zimbabwe, Lesotho, Mozambique, Swaziland, Botswana, Namibia, and Angola, are variously referred to as Bushmen, San, Sho, Barwa, Kung, or Khwe...
(Capoids) and not Negroids. The renowned linguist Carl Meinhof
Carl Meinhof
Carl Friedrich Michael Meinhof was a German linguist and one of the first linguists to study African languages.-Early years and career:...
also supported the Hamitic
Hamitic
Hamitic is an historical term for the peoples supposedly descended from Noah's son Ham, paralleling Semitic and Japhetic.It was formerly used for grouping the non-Semitic Afroasiatic languages , but since, unlike the Semitic branch, these have not been shown to form a phylogenetic unity, the term...
theory.
The Hamitic Hypothesis was still popular in the 1960s and late 70’s and was supported notably by Anthony John Arkell and George Peter Murdock.
Scientific racism
In the early 19th century, slavery in the United States was still being justified, based in part on the assumption that black people were intellectually inferior, and pro-slavery advocates were thus unreceptive to any suggestion of advanced black civilizations. In 1844, Samuel George MortonSamuel George Morton
Samuel George Morton was an American physician and natural scientist. Morton, reared a Quaker but became Episcopalian in midlife, was born in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania, and graduated from the University of Pennsylvania in 1820. After earning an advanced degree from Edinburgh University in...
, a proslavery supporter and one of the pioneers of scientific racism
Scientific racism
Scientific racism is the use of scientific techniques and hypotheses to sanction the belief in racial superiority or racism.This is not the same as using scientific findings and the scientific method to investigate differences among the humans and argue that there are races...
and polygenism
Polygenism
Polygenism is a theory of human origins positing that the human races are of different lineages . This is opposite to the idea of monogenism, which posits a single origin of humanity.- Origins :...
, published his book Crania Aegyptica with the intention of “proving” that the Ancient Egyptians were not black. In 1855 George Gliddon
George Gliddon
George Robins Gliddon was an English-born American Egyptologist. He was born in Devonshire, England. His father, a merchant, was United States consul at Alexandria where Gliddon was taken at an early age....
and Josiah C. Nott
Josiah C. Nott
Josiah Clark Nott was an American physician and surgeon. He was also an author of surgical, yellow fever, and race theories.-Biography:...
published Types of Mankind with the same intention. All three authors concluded that Egyptians were intermediate between the African and Asiatic races. They acknowledged that Negroes were present in ancient Egypt but claimed they were either captives or servants.
Mediterranean "brown" race
The Italian anthropologist Giuseppe SergiGiuseppè Sergi
Giuseppe Sergi was an influential Italian anthropologist of the early twentieth century, best known for his opposition to Nordicism in his books on the racial identity of ancient Mediterranean peoples...
(1901) believed that ancient Egyptians were the African (Hamitic
Hamitic
Hamitic is an historical term for the peoples supposedly descended from Noah's son Ham, paralleling Semitic and Japhetic.It was formerly used for grouping the non-Semitic Afroasiatic languages , but since, unlike the Semitic branch, these have not been shown to form a phylogenetic unity, the term...
) branch of the Mediterranean race
Mediterranean race
The Mediterranean race was one of the three sub-categories into which the Caucasian race and the people of Europe were divided by anthropologists in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, following the publication of William Z. Ripley's book The Races of Europe...
, which he called "Eurafrican". According to Sergi, the Mediterranean race or "Eurafrican" contains three varieties or sub-races, which evolved "in accordance of differing telluric and geographic conditions": the African (Hamitic) branch, the Mediterranean "proper" branch and finally the Nordic (depigmentated) branch. Sergi split the African branch into two further groups: Eastern Hamites and Northern Hamites - the ancient Egyptians of whom he classified as Eastern African Hamites
Hamites
Hamites is a genus of heteromorph ammonite that evolved late in the Aptian stage of the Early Cretaceous and lasted into the Cenomanian stage of the Late Cretaceous. The genus is almost certainly paraphyletic but remains in wide use as a "catch all" for heteromorph ammonites of the superfamily...
. The Copts, Sergi considered being examples of modern Eastern Hamites, and the closest modern living group affiliated with the ancient Egyptians. Sergi maintained in summary that the Mediterranean race
Mediterranean race
The Mediterranean race was one of the three sub-categories into which the Caucasian race and the people of Europe were divided by anthropologists in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, following the publication of William Z. Ripley's book The Races of Europe...
(excluding the depigmentated Nordic or 'white') is: "a brown human variety, neither white nor Negroid, but pure in its elements, that is to say not a product of the mixture of Whites with Negroes or Negroid peoples."
Influenced by Sergi’s identification of the ancient Egyptians as the African branch of the Mediterranean race, Grafton Elliot Smith
Grafton Elliot Smith
Sir Grafton Elliot Smith, FRS FRCP was an Australian anatomist and a proponent of the hyperdiffusionist view of prehistory.-Professional career:Smith was born in Grafton, New South Wales...
modified the theory in 1911. Smith believed the ancient Egyptians were a dark haired "brown race", most closely "linked by the closest bonds of racial affinity to the Early Neolithic populations of the North African littoral and South Europe". This "brown race" was not Negroid, as according to Smith the hair of the "Proto-Egyptian was precisely similar to that of the brunet South European" and "presented no resemblance whatever to the so-called ‘wooly’ appearance and peppercorn-like arrangement of the Negro’s hair". Smith’s "brown race" is though not synonymous or equivalent with Sergi’s Mediterranean race. However both Sergi and Smith agreed that the ancient Egyptians were brunette with "brown" complexions.
Turanid race
The Egyptologist Samuel SharpeSamuel Sharpe (scholar)
Samuel Sharpe was an English Unitarian Egyptologist and translator of the Bible.-Life:He was the second son of Sutton Sharpe , brewer, by his second wife, Maria , and was born in King Street, Golden Square, London, on 8 March 1799, baptised at St. James's, Piccadilly...
(1846) proposed the ancient Egyptians belonged to the Turanid race, linking them to the Tatars
Tatars
Tatars are a Turkic speaking ethnic group , numbering roughly 7 million.The majority of Tatars live in the Russian Federation, with a population of around 5.5 million, about 2 million of which in the republic of Tatarstan.Significant minority populations are found in Uzbekistan, Kazakhstan,...
, because some ancient Egyptian paintings depict Egyptians with sallow or yellowish skin:
Dynastic race theory
In the early 20th century, Sir William Matthew Flinders PetrieWilliam Matthew Flinders Petrie
William Matthew Flinders Petrie FRS , commonly known as Flinders Petrie, was an English Egyptologist and a pioneer of systematic methodology in archaeology and preservation of artifacts...
, one of the leading Egyptologists of his day, noted that the skeletal remains found at pre-dynastic sites at Naqada
Naqada
Naqada is a town on the west bank of the Nile in the Egyptian governorate of Qena. It was known in Ancient Egypt as Nubt and in classical antiquity as Ombos. Its name derives from ancient Egyptian nub, meaning gold, on account of the proximity of gold mines in the Eastern Desert.Naqada comprises...
(Upper Egypt) showed marked differentiation. Together with cultural evidence, such as architectural styles, pottery styles, cylinder seals, and numerous rock and tomb paintings, he deduced that a Mesopotamian force had invaded Egypt in predynastic times, imposed themselves on the local Badarian (African) people, and become their rulers. This came to be called the “Dynastic Race Theory
Dynastic Race Theory
The Dynastic Race Theory was the earliest thesis to attempt to explain how predynastic Egypt developed into the sophisticated monarchy of Dynastic Egypt. The Theory holds that the earliest roots of the Ancient Egyptian dynastic civilisation were imported by invaders from Mesopotamia who then...
.” The theory further argued that the Mesopotamians then conquered both Upper and Lower Egypt and founded the First Dynasty
First dynasty of Egypt
The first dynasty of Ancient Egypt is often combined with the Dynasty II under the group title, Early Dynastic Period of Egypt...
.
In the 1950s, the Dynastic Race Theory was widely accepted by mainstream scholarship, and the Ancient Egyptians were, therefore, considered to be “Asiatic” or “Semitic” rather than "African" or "Hamitic." Scholars, such as the Senegalese Egyptologist Cheikh Anta Diop
Cheikh Anta Diop
Cheikh Anta Diop was a historian, anthropologist, physicist, and politician who studied the human race's origins and pre-colonial African culture. He is regarded as an important figure in the development of the Afrocentric viewpoint, in particular for his theory that the ancient Egyptians were...
, fought against the Dynastic Race Theory with their own "Black Egyptian" theory and claimed, among other things, that European scholars supported the Dynastic Race Theory "to avoid having to admit that Ancient Egyptians were black". Bernal proposed that the Dynastic Race theory was conceived by so-called Aryan
Aryan
Aryan is an English language loanword derived from Sanskrit ārya and denoting variously*In scholarly usage:**Indo-Iranian languages *in dated usage:**the Indo-European languages more generally and their speakers...
scholars to deny Egypt its African roots and modern Afrocentrists continue to condemn the alleged dividing of African peoples into racial clusters as being new versions of the Dynastic Race Theory and the Hamitic hypothesis.
The Dynastic Race Theory had suggested that the original people of Ancient Egypt were "of predominantly Negroid type," but that the "civilization" was inspired by outsiders.
Contemporary consensus tends to suggest that Egyptian civilization was an indigenous Nile Valley development (see population history of Egypt
Population history of Egypt
The land currently known as Egypt has a long and involved population history. This is partly due to its geographical location at the crossroads of several major cultural areas: the Mediterranean, the Middle East, the Sahara and East Africa...
).
Indigenous African hypothesis
Cheikh Anta Diop
Cheikh Anta Diop was a historian, anthropologist, physicist, and politician who studied the human race's origins and pre-colonial African culture. He is regarded as an important figure in the development of the Afrocentric viewpoint, in particular for his theory that the ancient Egyptians were...
, and to an extent Martin Bernal
Martin Bernal
Martin Gardiner Bernal is a Professor Emeritus of Government and Near Eastern Studies at Cornell University. He is a scholar of modern Chinese political history...
. All three scholars have used the terms "Black," "African," and "Egyptian" interchangeably, despite what Snowden calls "copious ancient evidence to the contrary." Obviously, Diop feels that there is copious evidence to support his claims that the Egyptians were Black, including the accounts of many ancient historians, depictions of the Egyptians in art (paintings and statues), and cultural traits shared with Black Africa, such as circumcision, matriarchy, totemism, and kingship cults.
The body of scholarly work that has been dubbed "Afrocentrism" by some is a response by respected scholars to the Scientific racism
Scientific racism
Scientific racism is the use of scientific techniques and hypotheses to sanction the belief in racial superiority or racism.This is not the same as using scientific findings and the scientific method to investigate differences among the humans and argue that there are races...
of the 18th and 19th centuries. This model assumes as a scientific fact that humanity originated in Africa (based on genetic studies and archaeological evidence) and that the "Out of Africa" position best explains the peopling of planet Earth. As it relates to Egypt, scholars such as W.E.B DuBois, Chancellor Williams, Cheikh Anta Diop, John G. Jackson, Ivan van Sertima, Martin Bernal, and Marcus Garvey reviewed the available evidence and concluded that the Ancient Egyptian society was indigenous to Africa (or AfroAsiatic in the case of Bernal) and consequently a mostly Black civilization. Journals, such as the oft criticized Journal of African Civilizations, have continually advocated that Egypt should be viewed as a Black civilization. The indigenous African model relies heavily on evidence from Greek and Egyptian historians, as well as Hebrew and Biblical traditions. Proponents of this model were swayed by the broad agreement among ancient historians that the Ancient Egyptians were Black and Black skinned. Some of the most often quoted historians are Strabo, Diodorus Siculus, and Herodotus. Recent archaeological evidence has only bolstered the belief that the Ancient Egyptian civilization was indigenous. The art (paintings and sculpture), pottery, skeletal remains, and writings left by the Ancient Egyptians also suggests to scholars that the Egyptian civilization was indigenous and mostly Black during its high periods. In the mid 20th century, the alternative models contrasted sharply with prevailing views on Ancient Egyptian society, which were thought by Diop and others to be fueled by Scientific racism. As an example, during the European colonial era, the prevalent European attitude was that ancient Egyptians were White. This view can be observed in two 1930's era encyclopedias from the French scholar Alain Froment. The opposition camp strongly rejects the Asiatic, Hamitic, Mediterranean, Turanid, and Dynastic theories, as they are often based on poor scholarship at best and Scientific racism at worst.
Some scholars have been dubbed "Afrocentrists", though they rely almost entirely on White, European sources to make their case. To paraphrase Bernal, the more that modern scholars admired the Greeks, the less they respected Greek writings on history. Herodotus affirms in numerous passages that the Egyptians were Black. Herodotus states quite directly that a Greek oracle was known to be from Egypt because she was Black, that the natives of the Nile region are "Black with heat", and that Egyptians were "Black skinned with woolly hair". Lucian, a Greek, observes an Egyptian boy and notices that he is not merely Black, but has thick lips. Diodorus Siculus mentions that the Ethiopians considered the Egyptians a colony. Appollodorus, a Greek, calls Egypt the country of the black footed ones. Aeschylus, a Greek poet, wrote that Egyptian seamen had "black limbs." Strabo mentions that the Ethiopians and Colchians are of the same race. Historians are in general agreement that the Ethiopians, Egyptians, Colchians, and people of the Southern Levant (they learned the practice from the Egyptians) were among the only people on Earth practicing circumcision, which confirms their cultural affiliations, if not their ethnic affiliation. Gaston Maspero states that "by the almost unanimous testimony of ancient historians, they (Ancient Egyptians) belonged to the African race, which settled in Ethiopia." In biblical traditions, it is agreed that Ham fathered the Black nations. Ham's sons Kush and Phut are agreed by most to be Black. However, Ham's other offspring, Mezraim and Canaan, are somehow magically not Black, although most ancient historians agree on the cultural and ethnic ties of all Ham's offspring. Finally, most historians agree that the name (KMT, or Kemit) used by Egyptians to describe themselves or their land (depending on your point of view) meant "Black." The Egyptian gods were also called by the same black designation, in addition to their individual name.
One of the foremost proponents of an alternative view of Ancient Egyptian history was Cheikh Anta Diop. Diop used a multi-faceted approach in his effort to alter popular notions of Ancient Egypt's origin and ethnic makeup. In one approach, Diop attempted to linguistically link Egypt and Africa. Furthermore, he links Egypt to Senegal by arguing that the Ancient Egyptian language was related to his native Wolof
Wolof language
Wolof is a language spoken in Senegal, The Gambia, and Mauritania, and is the native language of the Wolof people. Like the neighbouring languages Serer and Fula, it belongs to the Atlantic branch of the Niger–Congo language family...
. Diop preferred not to deal with questions of race, however scholars were compelled to react to what they saw as inaccuracies in the other approaches. Diop's work was well received by the political establishment in the post-colonial formative phase of the state of Senegal
Senegal
Senegal , officially the Republic of Senegal , is a country in western Africa. It owes its name to the Sénégal River that borders it to the east and north...
, and by the Pan-Africanist Négritude
Négritude
Négritude is a literary and ideological movement, developed by francophone black intellectuals, writers, and politiciansin France in the 1930s by a group that included the future Senegalese President Léopold Sédar Senghor, Martinican poet Aimé Césaire, and the Guianan Léon Damas.The Négritude...
movement.
While at the University of Dakar, Diop tried to establish the skin color of the Egyptian mummies by measuring the melanin content of their skin. Diop stated, “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.” In the words of Diop, "The fact that Egyptians had black skin was for Herodotus an evident truth that he posits, like a mathematician, as an axiom to lead subsequently to the demonstration of more complex facts." The British Africanist Basil Davidson
Basil Davidson
Basil Risbridger Davidson MC was a British historian, writer and Africanist, particularly knowledgeable on the subject of Portuguese Africa prior to the 1974 Carnation Revolution....
summarized the issue as follows:
Diop and others refer to the color used in Egyptian paintings as "dark red", which is well within the bounds of Black racial homogeneity. To expand, the skin pigment used in Egyptian paintings to refer to Nubians can range "from dark red to brown to black." This can be observed in paintings from the tomb of the Egyptian Huy, as well as Ramses II's temple at Beit el-Wali.
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 NubiaNubiaNubia is a region along the Nile river, which is located in northern Sudan and southern Egypt.There were a number of small Nubian kingdoms throughout the Middle Ages, the last of which collapsed in 1504, when Nubia became divided between Egypt and the Sennar sultanate resulting in the Arabization...
): while the Greek writers reported that they were much like all the other Africans whom the Greeks knew.
Reception in modern scholarship
Modern scholars who have studied Ancient Egyptian culture and population history have responded to the controversy over the race of the Ancient Egyptians in different ways.UNESCO
UNESCO
The United Nations Educational, Scientific and Cultural Organization is a specialized agency of the United Nations...
convened the "Symposium on the Peopling of Ancient Egypt and the Deciphering of the Meroitic Script" in Cairo
Cairo
Cairo , is the capital of Egypt and the largest city in the Arab world and Africa, and the 16th largest metropolitan area in the world. Nicknamed "The City of a Thousand Minarets" for its preponderance of Islamic architecture, Cairo has long been a centre of the region's political and cultural life...
in 1974. At that forum Professors Diop
Diop
Diop is a surname, and may refer to:* Aïda Diop* Birago Diop* Boubacar Boris Diop* Cheikh Anta Diop* DeSagana Diop* Djibril Diop Mambéty Senegalese film director, brother of Wasis Diop* Mamadou Diop* Mustapha Papa Diop...
and Obenda presented their "Black Egyptian" theory, which was largely rejected by the other delegates. The details of Diop’s presentation, and the arguments against his conclusions, are recorded in the UNESCO General History of Africa
General History of Africa
The ' is a two-phase project undertaken by UNESCO from 1964 to the present. The 1964 General Conference of UNESCO, during its 13th Session, instructed the Organization to undertake this initiative after the newly independent African Member States expressed a strong desire to reclaim their cultural...
.
Dr. Zahi Hawass
Zahi Hawass
Zahi Hawass is an Egyptian archaeologist, an Egyptologist, and former Minister of State for Antiquities Affairs. He has also worked at archaeological sites in the Nile Delta, the Western Desert, and the Upper Nile Valley....
, the former Secretary General of the Egyptian Supreme Council of Antiquities
Supreme Council of Antiquities
The Supreme Council of Antiquities is the branch of the Egyptian Ministry of Culture responsible for the conservation, protection and regulation of all antiquities and archaeological excavations in Egypt...
, has stated that "The portrayal of ancient Egyptian civilization as black has no element of truth to it;" and that "Ancient Egyptians are not Arabs and are not Africans despite the fact that Egypt
Egypt
Egypt , officially the Arab Republic of Egypt, Arabic: , is a country mainly in North Africa, with the Sinai Peninsula forming a land bridge in Southwest Asia. Egypt is thus a transcontinental country, and a major power in Africa, the Mediterranean Basin, the Middle East and the Muslim world...
is in Africa
Africa
Africa is the world's second largest and second most populous continent, after Asia. At about 30.2 million km² including adjacent islands, it covers 6% of the Earth's total surface area and 20.4% of the total land area...
."
Other academics in various fields contend that Ancient Egypt was fundamentally an African civilization, with cultural and biological connections to Egypt's African neighbours. Several anthropologists who study the biological relationships of the Ancient Egyptian population call for a recognition of Africa's genetic diversity when considering the racial identity of the Ancient Egyptians.
The focus of some experts who study population biology
Population biology
Population biology is a study of populations of organisms, especially the regulation of population size, life history traits such as clutch size, and extinction...
has been to consider whether or not the Ancient Egyptians were primarily biologically African rather than to which race they belonged.
In 1996, the Indianapolis Museum of Art
Indianapolis Museum of Art
The Indianapolis Museum of Art is an encyclopedic art museum located in Indianapolis, Indiana, United States. The museum, which underwent a $74 million expansion in 2005, is located on a campus on the near northwest area outside downtown Indianapolis, northwest of Crown Hill Cemetery.The...
published a collection of essays, which included contributions from leading experts in various fields including archaeology
Archaeology
Archaeology, or archeology , is the study of human society, primarily through the recovery and analysis of the material culture and environmental data that they have left behind, which includes artifacts, architecture, biofacts and cultural landscapes...
, art history
Art history
Art history has historically been understood as the academic study of objects of art in their historical development and stylistic contexts, i.e. genre, design, format, and style...
, physical anthropology
Physical anthropology
Biological anthropology is that branch of anthropology that studies the physical development of the human species. It plays an important part in paleoanthropology and in forensic anthropology...
, African studies
African studies
African studies is the study of Africa, especially the cultures and societies of Africa .The field includes the study of:Culture of Africa, History of Africa , Anthropology of Africa , Politics of Africa, Economy of Africa African studies is the study of Africa, especially the cultures and...
, Egyptology
Egyptology
Egyptology is the study of ancient Egyptian history, language, literature, religion, and art from the 5th millennium BC until the end of its native religious practices in the AD 4th century. A practitioner of the discipline is an “Egyptologist”...
, Afrocentric studies, linguistics
Linguistics
Linguistics is the scientific study of human language. Linguistics can be broadly broken into three categories or subfields of study: language form, language meaning, and language in context....
, and classical studies. Among the contributors were Chike Aniakor
Chike Aniakor
Chike Aniakor is a Nigerian painter. A native of Abatate, Aniakor received his first artistic training at Ahmadu Bello University, receiving his master's degree in 1974; he received a doctorate in art history from Indiana University in 1978, writing his dissertation on Igbo architecture...
, Molefi Kete Asante
Molefi Kete Asante
Molefi Kete Asante is an African-American scholar, historian, and philosopher. He is a leading figure in the fields of African American studies, African Studies and Communication Studies...
, Robert Steven Bianchi, Arthur P. Bourgeois, Shomarka Keita
Shomarka Keita
Shomarka Omar Yahya Keita M.D., DPhil., is an American physician and anthropologist. He is affiliated with the National Human Genome Center of Howard University and the Department of Anthropology of the Smithsonian Institution....
, Christopher Ehret
Christopher Ehret
Christopher Ehret , a professor at the University of California at Los Angeles, is a writer on African history and African historical linguistics, particularly known for his efforts to correlate linguistic taxonomy and reconstruction with the archeological record...
, Chapurukha M. Kusimba, Frank M. Snowden, Jr.
Frank M. Snowden, Jr.
Frank M. Snowden, Jr. , was an American Professor Emeritus of Classics at Howard University, and one of the foremost authorities on blacks in classical antiquity....
, and Frank J. Yurco. While the contributors differed in some opinions, the consensus of the authors was that Ancient Egypt was and should be considered to be an African civilization, based on Egypt's geographic location on the African continent.
Specific current-day controversies
Since the 1970s, the issues regarding the race of the ancient Egyptians have been "troubled waters which most people who write (in the United States) about ancient Egypt from within the mainstream of scholarship avoid." The debate, therefore, takes place mainly in the public sphere and tends to focus on a small number of specific issues.Tutankhamun
National Geographic Magazine
National Geographic, formerly the National Geographic Magazine, is the official journal of the National Geographic Society. It published its first issue in 1888, just nine months after the Society itself was founded...
) have represented the king as “too white”. Evidence led Chancellor Williams to believe that King Tut, his parents, and grandpartents were Black.
Forensic artists and physical anthropologists from Egypt
Egypt
Egypt , officially the Arab Republic of Egypt, Arabic: , is a country mainly in North Africa, with the Sinai Peninsula forming a land bridge in Southwest Asia. Egypt is thus a transcontinental country, and a major power in Africa, the Mediterranean Basin, the Middle East and the Muslim world...
, France
France
The French Republic , The French Republic , The French Republic , (commonly known as France , is a unitary semi-presidential republic in Western Europe with several overseas territories and islands located on other continents and in the Indian, Pacific, and Atlantic oceans. Metropolitan France...
, and the United States
United States
The United States of America is a federal constitutional republic comprising fifty states and a federal district...
independently created busts of Tutankhamun, using a CT-scan of the skull. Biological anthropologist Susan Anton, the leader of the American team, said the race of the skull was “hard to call.” She stated that the shape of the cranial cavity indicated an African, while the nose opening suggested narrow nostrils, which is usually considered to be a Europe
Europe
Europe is, by convention, one of the world's seven continents. Comprising the westernmost peninsula of Eurasia, Europe is generally 'divided' from Asia to its east by the watershed divides of the Ural and Caucasus Mountains, the Ural River, the Caspian and Black Seas, and the waterways connecting...
an characteristic. The skull was thus concluded to be that of a North Africa
North Africa
North Africa or Northern Africa is the northernmost region of the African continent, linked by the Sahara to Sub-Saharan Africa. Geopolitically, the United Nations definition of Northern Africa includes eight countries or territories; Algeria, Egypt, Libya, Morocco, South Sudan, Sudan, Tunisia, and...
n. Other experts have pointed out that neither skull shapes nor nasal openings are a reliable indication of race, as in the case of Dravidian Blacks with narrow noses.
Although modern technology can reconstruct Tutankhamun's facial structure with a high degree of accuracy, based on CT data from his mummy, determining his skin tone and eye color
Eye color
Eye color is a polygenic phenotypic character and is determined by two distinct factors: the pigmentation of the eye's iris and the frequency-dependence of the scattering of light by the turbid medium in the stroma of the iris....
is impossible. The clay model was therefore given a flesh coloring which, according to the artist, was based on an "average shade of modern Egyptians."
Terry Garcia, National Geographics executive vice president for mission programs, said, in response to some of those protesting against the Tutankhamun reconstruction:
The big variable is skin tone. North Africans, we know today, had a range of skin tones, from light to dark. In this case, we selected a medium skin tone, and we say, quite up front, 'This is midrange.' We will never know for sure what his exact skin tone was or the color of his eyes with 100% certainty. ... Maybe in the future, people will come to a different conclusion.
When pressed on the issue by American activists in September 2007, the current Secretary General of the Egyptian Supreme Council of Antiquities
Supreme Council of Antiquities
The Supreme Council of Antiquities is the branch of the Egyptian Ministry of Culture responsible for the conservation, protection and regulation of all antiquities and archaeological excavations in Egypt...
, Dr. Zahi Hawass stated that "Tutankhamun was not black, and the portrayal of ancient Egyptian civilization as black has no element of truth to it;" Hawass further observed that "[Ancient] Egyptians are not Arabs and are not Africans despite the fact that Egypt is in Africa." Many modern scholars disagree with the assertion that the Ancient Egyptians were not Africans.
Ahmed Saleh, the former archaeological inspector for the Supreme Council of antiquities stated that the procedures used in the facial re-creation made Tut look Caucasian
Caucasian race
The term Caucasian race has been used to denote the general physical type of some or all of the populations of Europe, North Africa, the Horn of Africa, Western Asia , Central Asia and South Asia...
, "disrespecting the nation's African roots."
In a November 2007 publication of Ancient Egypt Magazine
Ancient Egypt magazine
Ancient Egypt is a magazine that deals with the subject of Egyptology. It is published bi-monthly.Ancient Egypt magazine is pitched somewhere between an academic journal and a travel magazine - bringing the spectacular sights of the ancient world together with the latest archaeological discoveries...
, Hawass asserted that none of the facial reconstructions resemble Tut and that, in his opinion, the most accurate representation of the boy king is the mask from his tomb. The Discovery Channel
Discovery Channel
Discovery Channel is an American satellite and cable specialty channel , founded by John Hendricks and distributed by Discovery Communications. It is a publicly traded company run by CEO David Zaslav...
commissioned a facial reconstruction of Tutankhamun, based on CT scans of a model of his skull, back in 2002.
Cleopatra VII
The Baltimore Sun
The Baltimore Sun is the U.S. state of Maryland’s largest general circulation daily newspaper and provides coverage of local and regional news, events, issues, people, and industries....
. There is also an article entitled: Was Cleopatra Black? from Ebony magazine
Ebony (magazine)
Ebony, a monthly magazine for the African-American market, was founded by John H. Johnson and has published continuously since the autumn of 1945...
, and an article about Afrocentrism from the St. Louis Post-Dispatch
St. Louis Post-Dispatch
The St. Louis Post-Dispatch is the major city-wide newspaper in St. Louis, Missouri. Although written to serve Greater St. Louis, the Post-Dispatch is one of the largest newspapers in the Midwestern United States, and is available and read as far west as Kansas City, Missouri, as far south as...
that mentions the question, too. Scholars generally suggest a light olive skin color for Cleopatra, based on the following facts: her Macedon
Macedon
Macedonia or Macedon was an ancient kingdom, centered in the northeastern part of the Greek peninsula, bordered by Epirus to the west, Paeonia to the north, the region of Thrace to the east and Thessaly to the south....
ian family had intermingled with the Persian aristocracy of the time; her mother's identity is uncertain, and that of her paternal grandmother is not known for certain. Afrocentric assertions of Cleopatra's blackness have, however, continued.
The question was the subject of a heated exchange between Mary Lefkowitz
Mary Lefkowitz
Mary R. Lefkowitz is an American classical scholar and Professor Emerita of Classical Studies at Wellesley College. She is best known to non-Classicists for her anti-Afrocentrism book, Not Out of Africa . She is the widow of Sir Hugh Lloyd-Jones.-Biography:Lefkowitz earned her B.A...
, who has referred in her articles to a debate she had with one of her students about the question of whether Cleopatra was black, and Molefi Kete Asante
Molefi Kete Asante
Molefi Kete Asante is an African-American scholar, historian, and philosopher. He is a leading figure in the fields of African American studies, African Studies and Communication Studies...
, Professor of African American Studies at Temple University
Temple University
Temple University is a comprehensive public research university in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania, United States. Originally founded in 1884 by Dr. Russell Conwell, Temple University is among the nation's largest providers of professional education and prepares the largest body of professional...
. In response to Not Out of Africa by Lefkowitz, Asante wrote an article entitled Race in Antiquity: Truly Out of Africa, in which he emphasized that he "can say without a doubt that Afrocentrists do not spend time arguing that either Socrates
Socrates
Socrates was a classical Greek Athenian philosopher. Credited as one of the founders of Western philosophy, he is an enigmatic figure known chiefly through the accounts of later classical writers, especially the writings of his students Plato and Xenophon, and the plays of his contemporary ...
or Cleopatra were black."
In 2009, a BBC
BBC
The British Broadcasting Corporation is a British public service broadcaster. Its headquarters is at Broadcasting House in the City of Westminster, London. It is the largest broadcaster in the world, with about 23,000 staff...
documentary speculated that Arsinoe IV, the half-sister of Cleopatra VII, may have been part African and then further speculated that Cleopatra’s mother, thus Cleopatra herself, might also have been part African. This was based largely on the claims of Hilke Thür of the Austrian Academy of Sciences
Austrian Academy of Sciences
The Austrian Academy of Sciences is a legal entity under the special protection of the Federal Republic of Austria. According to the statutes of the Academy its mission is to promote the sciences and humanities in every respect and in every field, particularly in fundamental research...
, who in the 1990s had examined a headless skeleton of a female child in a 20 BC tomb in Ephesus
Ephesus
Ephesus was an ancient Greek city, and later a major Roman city, on the west coast of Asia Minor, near present-day Selçuk, Izmir Province, Turkey. It was one of the twelve cities of the Ionian League during the Classical Greek era...
(modern Turkey
Turkey
Turkey , known officially as the Republic of Turkey , is a Eurasian country located in Western Asia and in East Thrace in Southeastern Europe...
), together with the old notes and photographs of the now-missing skull. Arsinoe IV and Cleopatra VII, shared the same father (Ptolemy XII Auletes
Ptolemy XII Auletes
Ptolemy Neos Dionysos Theos Philopator Theos Philadelphos , more commonly known as "Auletes" or "Nothos" , was an Egyptian king of Macedonian descent...
) but had different mothers.
Great Sphinx of Giza
The identity of the model for the Great Sphinx of GizaGreat Sphinx of Giza
The Great Sphinx of Giza , commonly referred to as the Sphinx, is a limestone statue of a reclining or couchant sphinx that stands on the Giza Plateau on the west bank of the Nile in Giza, Egypt....
is unknown. Virtually all Egyptologists and scholars currently believe that the face of the Sphinx represents the likeness of the Pharaoh
Pharaoh
Pharaoh is a title used in many modern discussions of the ancient Egyptian rulers of all periods. The title originates in the term "pr-aa" which means "great house" and describes the royal palace...
Khafra
Khafra
Khafra — also Khafre — was an Egyptian pharaoh of the Fourth dynasty, who had his capital at Memphis. According to some authors he was the son and successor of Khufu, but it is more commonly accepted that Djedefre was Khufu's successor and Khafra was Djedefre's...
, although a few Egyptologists and interested amateurs have proposed several different hypotheses
Great Sphinx of Giza
The Great Sphinx of Giza , commonly referred to as the Sphinx, is a limestone statue of a reclining or couchant sphinx that stands on the Giza Plateau on the west bank of the Nile in Giza, Egypt....
.
Numerous scholars of good faith, such as DuBois, Diop, and Volney, have characterized the face of the Sphinx as Black, or "Negroid." Around 1785 Volney stated, "When I visited the sphinx...on seeing that head, typically Negro in all its features, I remembered...Herodotus says: "...the Egyptians...are black with woolly hair"..." Another early description of a "Negroid" Sphinx is recorded in the travel notes of a French scholar, who visited in Egypt between 1783 and 1785. Constantin-François Chassebœuf
Constantin-François Chassebœuf
Constantin François de Chassebœuf, comte de Volney was a French philosopher, historian, orientalist, and politician...
and French novelist Gustave Flaubert
Gustave Flaubert
Gustave Flaubert was a French writer who is counted among the greatest Western novelists. He is known especially for his first published novel, Madame Bovary , and for his scrupulous devotion to his art and style.-Early life and education:Flaubert was born on December 12, 1821, in Rouen,...
. 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….
American geologist Robert M. Schoch
Robert M. Schoch
Robert M. Schoch is an associate professor of Natural Science at the College of General Studies, a 2 year non-degree granting unit of Boston University. He received his Ph.D...
has written that the "Sphinx has a distinctive African, Nubian, or Negroid aspect which is lacking in the face of Khafre."
The meaning of 'Kemet'
| km biliteral | km.t (place) | km.t (people) |
The meaning of "km.t." is a matter of great controversy. According to scholars, such as Diop, the Egyptians referred to themselves as "Black" people, or "km.t", and "km.t" was the etymological root of other words, such as Kam or Ham, which refer to Black people in Hebrew tradition. According to others, one of the many names for Egypt in ancient Egyptian is km.t (read Kemet), meaning 'the black land' or 'the black place.' Some believe, 'Kemet' is taken to be a reference to the fertile black soil which was washed down from Central Africa by the annual Nile
Nile
The Nile is a major north-flowing river in North Africa, generally regarded as the longest river in the world. It is long. It runs through the ten countries of Sudan, South Sudan, Burundi, Rwanda, Democratic Republic of the Congo, Tanzania, Kenya, Ethiopia, Uganda and Egypt.The Nile has two major...
inundation, and which made Egypt habitable and successful in contrast to the barren desert
Desert
A desert is a landscape or region that receives an extremely low amount of precipitation, less than enough to support growth of most plants. Most deserts have an average annual precipitation of less than...
outside the narrow confines of the Nile watercourse - which the ancients called the 'red land'. 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.
Cheikh Anta Diop
Cheikh Anta Diop
Cheikh Anta Diop was a historian, anthropologist, physicist, and politician who studied the human race's origins and pre-colonial African culture. He is regarded as an important figure in the development of the Afrocentric viewpoint, in particular for his theory that the ancient Egyptians were...
William Leo Hansberry
William Leo Hansberry
William Leo Hansberry was an American scholar and lecturer. His was the older brother of real estate broker Carl Augustus Hansberry, uncle of award-winning playwright Lorraine Hansberry and great-granduncle of actress Taye Hansberry.-Biography:Hansberry was born on February 25, 1894 in Gloster,...
, and Aboubacry Moussa Lam have argued that km.t was derived from the skin color of the Nile valley people, which Diop and most Ancient Greek historians claim was black. Diop believed the Greek historians when they observed and wrote that Egyptians were black skinned. Diop and others do not differentiate between black and brown skinned people of the Nile valley, as they are all culturally, ethnically, and linguistically linked. The claim that the Egyptians have black skin has become a cornerstone of Afrocentric historiography, but it is rejected by a strong majority of Egyptologists.
Ancient Egyptian art
Ancient Egyptian tombs and temples contained thousands of paintings, sculptures, and written works, which reveal a great deal about the people of that time. However, their depictions of themselves in their surviving art and artifacts are rendered in sometimes symbolic, rather than realistic, pigments. As a result, ancient Egyptian artifacts provide sometimes conflicting and inconclusive evidence of the ethnicity of the people who lived in Egypt during dynastic times.Manu Ampim, a professor at Merritt College
Merritt College
Merritt College is a two-year community college located in the Oakland Hills in Alameda County, California. The school's enrollment is approximately 6,000 students. The college is named after physician Dr...
specializing in African and African American history and culture, claims in the book Modern Fraud: The Forged Ancient Egyptian Statues of Ra-Hotep and Nofret, that many ancient Egyptian statues and artworks are modern frauds that have been created specifically to hide the “fact” that the ancient Egyptians were black, while authentic artworks which demonstrate black characteristics are systematically defaced or even "modified." Ampim repeatedly makes the accusation that the Egyptian authorities are systematically destroying evidence which “proves” that the ancient Egyptians were black, under the guise of renovating and conserving the applicable temples and structures. He further accuses “European” scholars of wittingly participating in and abetting this process.
Ampim has a specific concern about the painting of the "Table of Nations" in the Tomb of Ramses III (KV11). The “Table of Nations” is a standard painting which appears in a number of tombs, and they were usually provided for the guidance of the soul of the deceased. Among other things, they described the "four races of men," as follows: (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 EgyptiansEgyptiansEgyptians are nation an ethnic group made up of Mediterranean North Africans, the indigenous people of Egypt.Egyptian identity is closely tied to geography. The population of Egypt is concentrated in the lower Nile Valley, the small strip of cultivable land stretching from the First Cataract to...
, the AAMU are dwellers in the deserts to the east and north-east of Egypt, the NEHESU are the black races, and the THEMEHU are the fair-skinned Libyans.
The archaeologist Richard Lepsius documented many ancient Egyptian tomb paintings in his work Denkmäler aus Aegypten und Aethiopien. In 1913, after the death of Lepsius, an updated reprint of the work was produced, edited by Kurt Sethe. This printing included an additional section, called the “Ergänzungsband” in German
German language
German is a West Germanic language, related to and classified alongside English and Dutch. With an estimated 90 – 98 million native speakers, German is one of the world's major languages and is the most widely-spoken first language in the European Union....
, which incorporated many illustrations that did not appear in Lepsius’ original work. One of them, plate 48, illustrated one example of each of the four “nations” as depicted in KV11, and shows the "Egyptian nation" and the "Nubian nation" as identical to each other in skin color and dress. Professor Ampim has declared that plate 48 is a true reflection of the original painting, and that it “proves” that the ancient Egyptians were identical in appearance to the Nubians
Nubians
The Nubians are an ethnic group originally from northern Sudan, and southern Egypt now inhabiting North Africa and some parts of East Africa....
, even though he admits no other examples of the "Table of Nations" show this similarity. He has further accused “Euro-American writers” of attempting to mislead the public on this issue.
The late Egyptologist, Dr. Frank Yurco, visited the tomb of Ramses III (KV11), and in a 1996 article on the Ramses III tomb reliefs he pointed out that the depiction of plate 48 in the Erganzungsband section is not a correct depiction of what is actually painted on the walls of the tomb. Dr Yurco notes, instead, that plate 48 is a “pastische” of samples of what is on the tomb walls, arranged from Lepsius' notes after his death, and that a picture of a Nubian person has erroneously been labeled in the pastiche as an Egyptian person. Yurco points also to the much-more-recent photographs of Dr. Erik Hornung as a correct depiction of the actual paintings. (Erik Hornung, “The Valley of the Kings: Horizon of Eternity”, 1990). Ampim nonetheless continues to claim that plate 48 shows accurately the images which stand on the walls of KV11, and he categorically accuses both Yurco and Hornung of perpetrating a deliberate deception for the purposes of misleading the public about the true race of the Ancient Egyptians.
The Land of Punt
The ancient Egyptians viewed the Land of PuntLand of Punt
The Land of Punt, also called Pwenet, or Pwene by the ancient Egyptians, was a trading partner known for producing and exporting gold, aromatic resins, African blackwood, ebony, ivory, slaves and wild animals...
(Pun.t; Pwenet; Pwene) as their ancestral homeland. In his book “The Making of Egypt” (1939), W. M. Flinders Petrie stated that the Land of Punt was “sacred to the Egyptians as the source of their race.” E.A. Wallis Budge stated that “Egyptian tradition of the Dynastic Period held that the aboriginal home of the Egyptians was Punt…”
According to Ian Shaw in the Oxford History of Ancient Egypt:
The placement of Punt in eastern Africa is based on the fact that the products of Punt were abundantly found in East Africa but were less common or absent in Arabia. These products included gold, aromatic resins such as myrrh
Myrrh
Myrrh is the aromatic oleoresin of a number of small, thorny tree species of the genus Commiphora, which grow in dry, stony soil. An oleoresin is a natural blend of an essential oil and a resin. Myrrh resin is a natural gum....
, ebony
Ebony
Ebony is a dense black wood, most commonly yielded by several species in the genus Diospyros, but ebony may also refer to other heavy, black woods from unrelated species. Ebony is dense enough to sink in water. Its fine texture, and very smooth finish when polished, make it valuable as an...
and elephant tusks. The wild animals depicted in Punt include giraffe
Giraffe
The giraffe is an African even-toed ungulate mammal, the tallest of all extant land-living animal species, and the largest ruminant...
s, baboon
Baboon
Baboons are African and Arabian Old World monkeys belonging to the genus Papio, part of the subfamily Cercopithecinae. There are five species, which are some of the largest non-hominoid members of the primate order; only the mandrill and the drill are larger...
s, hippopotami, and leopard
Leopard
The leopard , Panthera pardus, is a member of the Felidae family and the smallest of the four "big cats" in the genus Panthera, the other three being the tiger, lion, and jaguar. The leopard was once distributed across eastern and southern Asia and Africa, from Siberia to South Africa, but its...
s. Says Richard Pankhurst, in his book “The Ethiopians”: “[Punt] has been identified with territory on both the Arabian and African coasts. Consideration of the articles which the Egyptians obtained from Punt, notably gold and ivory
Ivory
Ivory is a term for dentine, which constitutes the bulk of the teeth and tusks of animals, when used as a material for art or manufacturing. Ivory has been important since ancient times for making a range of items, from ivory carvings to false teeth, fans, dominoes, joint tubes, piano keys and...
, suggests, however, that these were primarily of African origin. This leads us to suppose the term Punt likely applied more to African than Arabian territory.”
Other scholars disagree with this view and point to a range of ancient Egyptian inscriptions which unambiguously locate Punt in Arabia. Dimitri Meeks has written that “Texts locating Punt beyond doubt to the south are in the minority, but they are the only ones cited in the current consensus about the location of the country. Punt, we are told by the Egyptians, is situated – in relation to the Nile Valley – both to the north, in contact with the countries of the Near East of the Mediterranean area, and also to the east or south-east, while its furthest borders are far away to the south. Only the Arabian Peninsula
Arabian Peninsula
The Arabian Peninsula is a land mass situated north-east of Africa. Also known as Arabia or the Arabian subcontinent, it is the world's largest peninsula and covers 3,237,500 km2...
satisfies all these indications.”
In 2003 a newly discovered text was found in a tomb in El Kab
El Kab
El Kab is an Upper Egyptian site on the east bank of the Nile at the mouth of Wadi Hillal, about 80 km south of Luxor, consisting of prehistoric and Pharaonic settlements, rock-cut tombs of the early 18th Dynasty , remains of temples dating from the Early Dynastic period to the Ptolemaic...
, a small town that is located about 50 kilometres south of Thebes. The tomb belonged to the local governor, Sobeknakht II
Sobeknakht II
Sobeknakht II was an important local Governor at El-Kab and a supporter of the Theban 16th or 17th dynasty during the Second Intermediate Period...
, and dates to the 17th dynasty (c.1600-1550 BC). Newspaper articles reported that the inscription mentions “a huge attack from the south on Elkab and Egypt by the Kingdom of Kush
Kingdom of Kush
The native name of the Kingdom was likely kaš, recorded in Egyptian as .The name Kash is probably connected to Cush in the Hebrew Bible , son of Ham ....
and its allies from the land of Punt.”
See also
- Dynastic race theoryDynastic Race TheoryThe Dynastic Race Theory was the earliest thesis to attempt to explain how predynastic Egypt developed into the sophisticated monarchy of Dynastic Egypt. The Theory holds that the earliest roots of the Ancient Egyptian dynastic civilisation were imported by invaders from Mesopotamia who then...
- NégritudeNégritudeNégritude is a literary and ideological movement, developed by francophone black intellectuals, writers, and politiciansin France in the 1930s by a group that included the future Senegalese President Léopold Sédar Senghor, Martinican poet Aimé Césaire, and the Guianan Léon Damas.The Négritude...
- Demographics of modern EgyptDemographics of EgyptEgypt is the most populous country in the Middle East and the third-most populous on the African continent . Nearly 100% of the country's 80,810,912 people live in three major regions of the country: Cairo and Alexandria and elsewhere along the banks of the Nile; throughout the Nile delta, which...