The current debate over the ethnic identity of dynastic Egypt has its roots in contradictory perceptions and physical portrayals of Egypt in the ancient historical record and in academia, among travelers, historians, archaeologists and other scholars of ancient and contemporary times, and in modern popular culture. The disparate ways in which the ancient Egyptians depicted themselves in art and artifact, in symbolic representations and realistically, have served to fuel the debate.
Today, the discussion takes place largely outside the field of Egyptology.[citation needed] Scholarly consensus is that the concept of "pure race" is incoherent;[1] that applying modern notions of race to ancient Egypt is anachronistic;[2]. Archaeologist Kathryn Bard argues that, as far as skin colour is concerned, the ancient Egyptians were neither "black" nor "white" (as such terms are usually applied today).[3]
The Ancient Evidence
Egyptian texts
There is surviving ancient evidence that clearly shows that the Ancient Egyptians themselves were conscious of ethnicity, and that they distinguished themselves from other peoples - including the Nubians to the south of Egypt. In the sacred text called the Book of Gates, in the chapter dealing with the Fifth Division of the Tuat, the work notes four different groups of men[4][5] (translation by E.A. Wallis Budge):
The first are RETH, the second are AAMU, the third are NEHESU, and the fourth are THEMEHU. The RETH are Egyptians, the AAMU are dwellers in the deserts to the east and north-east of Egypt, the NEHESU are the black races and NEGROES, and the THEMEHU are the fair-skinned Libyans.
Ancient Tomb Paintings
In the many surviving tomb paintings and papyri, Egyptian men are usually painted with red skin, and the women with yellow skin. However Egyptian artisans also sometimes depicted their subjects in totally unreal colors (such as green), the purpose of which is not completely understood but may have had ritual significance.
Other origins
The Classical Observers
- Herodotus traveled to Egypt around 450 BC, when Egypt was part of the Persian Empire and the Dynastic age was nearing its end. In his writings about the Egyptians, he described them as having black skins and woolly hair. [6]Though Herodotus is regarded as the father of history, the veracity and accuracy of some of his accounts is disputed, including specifically those concerning Ancient Egypt.
- The Greek playwrite Aeschylus [525BC - 455BC], mentioning a boat seen from the shore, declared that its crew are Egyptians, because of their black complexions.[6][7]
- The philosopher and novellist Lucian [AD125-AD180] once described an Egyptian he encountered, as being black.[7]
In academia
Although questions surrounding the race of the ancient Egyptians had occasionally arisen in 18th and 19th-century Western scholarship as part of the growing interest in attempted scientific classifications of race, in academia the meme was popularised and continued throughout the 20th century in the works of George James, Cheikh Anta Diop and, to a certain extent, in Martin Bernal's Black Athena. All three have used the terms "black", "African", and "Egyptian" interchangeably,[8] despite what Snowden calls "copious ancient evidence to the contrary".[9]
While at the University of Dakar, Diop tried to establish the skin colour of the Egyptian mummies by measuring the melanin content of the skin, stating: “In practice it is possible to determine directly the skin color and, hence, the ethnic affiliations of the ancient Egyptians by microscopic analysis in the laboratory; I doubt if the sagacity of the researchers who have studied the question has overlooked the possibility.”[10]
Diop's work was well received by the political establishment in the post-colonial formative phase of the state of Senegal under Léopold Sédar Senghor, whose politics of African socialism was inspired by the Pan-Africanist Négritude movement. Diop further attempted to link Egypt to Senegal by arguing that the Ancient Egyptian language was related to his native Wolof.[11] The University of Dakar was renamed in Diop's honour after his death, to Cheikh Anta Diop University. Diop participated in a UNESCO symposium in Cairo in 1974 and he wrote the chapter about the "origins of the Egyptians" in the UNESCO General History of Africa.[12]
Founded in 1979, the Journal of African Civilizations has continually advocated that Egypt should be viewed as a black civilization.[13][14] Figures attached to the group centering around the journal include Ivan van Sertima and J.H. Clarke (who has advanced further the "Cleopatra was black" meme). Other notable proponents of the meme include Chancellor Williams.[15] Mainstream scholarship has generally been critical of the journal: J.D. Muhly describes it as "well-intentioned but quite unconvincing and lacking in the basic techniques of critical scholarship."[16]
The Afrocentric claim that European scholars have tried to deny significance of black people in the ancient Egyptian culture has some substance. During the European colonial era on the African continent, the prevalent European attitude was that ancient Egyptians were 'white', as the French scholar Alain Froment shows on the basis of two encyclopaedias from the 1930s.[17]
The British Africanist Basil Davidson summarized the issue as follows:
Whether the Ancient Egyptians were as black or as brown in skin color as other Africans may remain an issue of emotive dispute; probably, they were both. Their own artistic conventions painted them as pink, but pictures on their tombs show they often married queens shown as entirely black, being from the south (from what a later world knew as Nubia): while the Greek writers reported that they were much like all the other Africans whom the Greeks knew.[18]
Specific controversies
Debate in the public sphere has tended to focus more on the race of specific notable individuals from the history of Egypt, particularly Tutankhamun, Cleopatra VII and also the Great Sphinx of Giza. Such claims by Afrocentrists have not been limited to Egyptians: Carthaginian general Hannibal and Roman Emperor Septimius Severus have also been claimed as black, despite non-existent evidence,[19] as well as the ancient Greek philosopher Socrates.[20]
Tutankhamun
Attempted reconstructions of Tutankhamun's facial features have encountered much Afrocentric protest over concerns that he has been represented as too white.[21]
Cleopatra VII
Cleopatra's race and skin colour have also caused frequent debate as described in an article from The Baltimore Sun.[22] There is also an article titled: Was Cleopatra Black? from Ebony magazine, [23] and an article about Afrocetrism from the St. Louis Post-Dispatch that mentions the question, too.[24] Scholars generally suggest a light olive skin colour for Cleopatra, based on the facts that her Macedonian family had intermingled with the Persian aristocracy of the time, that her mother is not absolutely known for certain,[25] and that her paternal grandmother may have been African (or indeed from anywhere at all) which is possible but not provable.[26] Afrocentric assertions of Cleopatra's blackness have, however, continued. The question was the subject of an heated exchange between Mary Lefkowitz, who has referred in her articles a debate she had with one of her students about the question whether Cleopatra was black, and Molefi Kete Asante, Professor of African American Studies at Temple University. As a response to Not Out of Africa by Lefkowitz, Asante wrote an article: Race in Antiquity: Truly Out of Africa, in which he emphasizes that he "can say without a doubt that Afrocentrists do not spend time arguing that either Socrates or Cleopatra were black."[27]
Meaning of 'Kemet'
km biliteral | km.t (place) | km.t (people) | |||||||||
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One of the many names for Egypt in ancient Egyptian is km.t (read Kemet), meaning 'the black land' or 'the black one'. The claim that Kemite referred to the fact that the people of the land had black skins, as argued by Cheikh Anta Diop,[28] William Leo Hansberry,[28] or Aboubacry Moussa Lam[29] has become a cornerstone of Afrocentric historiography.[28] This view is rejected by most Egyptologists.[30] Generally, 'Kemet' is taken to be a reference to the fertile black soil which was washed down from Central Africa by the annual Nile inundation, and which made Egypt habitable and successful in contrast to the barren desert or 'red land' outside the narrow confines of the Nile watercourse.[28][31] 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."[28] Raymond Faulkner's Concise Dictionary of Middle Egyptian translates it into "Egyptians", as do most sources.[32]
Notes
- ^ Bard, in turn citing B.G. Trigger, "Nubian, Negro, Black, Nilotic?", in African in Antiquity, The Arts of Nubian and the Sudan, vol 1, 1978.
- ^ Snowden, p. 122 of Black Athena Revisited
- ^ Bard, p. 111 of Black Athena Revisited.
- ^ http://www.sacred-texts.com/egy/gate/gate20.htm
- ^ http://www.ancientegyptonline.co.uk/bookgates5.html
- ^ a b The Negro, pp18, WEB Du Bois
- ^ a b Anthon, Charles (1851). "Complexion and Physical Structure of the Egyptians". A classical dictionary,.
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suggested) (help) - ^ Snowden p.116 of Black Athena Revisited.
- ^ Snowden p. 116
- ^ Chris Gray, Conceptions of History in the Works of Cheikh Anta Diop and Theophile Obenga, (Karnak House:1989) 11-155
- ^ Alain Ricard, Naomi Morgan, The Languages & Literatures of Africa: The Sands of Babel, James Currey, 2004, p.14
- ^ UNESCO, "Symposium on the Peopling of Ancient Egypt and the Deciphering of the Meroitic Script; Proceedings", (Paris: 1978), pp. 3-134
- ^ Snowden p. 117
- ^ Homepage of the Journal of African Civilizations
- ^ Snowden pp.117-120
- ^ Muhly: "Black Athena versus Traditional Scholarship", Journal of Mediterranean Archaeology 3, no 1: 83-110
- ^ Froment 1994, p. 38
- ^ Davidson, Basil (1991). African Civilization Revisited: From Antiquity to Modern Times. Africa World Press.
- ^ Snowden pp.120-121 of Black Athena Revisited
- ^ Black Athena revisited, p. 4
- ^ Tutankhamun was not black: Egypt antiquities chief, AFP, September 2007
- ^ Baltimore Sun: "Was Cleopatra Black", 2002
- ^ "Was Cleopatra Black?", from Ebony magazine, February 1 2002. In support of this, she cites a few examples, one of which she supplies is a chapter entitled "Black Warrior Queens" published in 1984 in Black Women in Antiquity, part of the Journal of African Civilization series. It draws heavily on the work of J.A. Rogers.
- ^ "Afrocentric View Distorts History and Achievement by Blacks", from the St. Louis Dispatch, February 14 1994.
- ^ Tyldesley, p. 30, suggests Cleopatra V as the most likely candidate.
- ^ Tyldesley p. 32
- ^ Race in Antiquity: Truly Out of Africa By Molefi Kete Asante
- ^ a b c d e Shavit 2001: 148
- ^ Aboubacry Moussa Lam, "L'Égypte ancienne et l'Afrique", in Maria R. Turano et Paul Vandepitte, Pour une histoire de l'Afrique, 2003, pp. 50 &51
- ^ Bard, Kathryn A. "Ancient Egyptians and the Issue of Race". in Lefkowitz and MacLean rogers, p. 114
- ^ Kemp, Barry J. Ancient Egypt: Anatomy Of A Civilization. Routledge. p. 21. ISBN 978-0415063463.
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(help) - ^ Raymond Faulkner, A Concise Dictionary of Middle Egyptian, Oxford: Griffith Institute, 2002, p. 286.
References
- Mary R. Lefkowitz: "Ancient History, Modern Myths", originally printed in The New Republic, 1992. Reprinted with revisions as part of the essay collection Black Athena Revisited, 1996.
- Kathryn A. Bard: "Ancient Egyptians and the issue of Race", Bostonia Magazine, 1992: later part of Black Athena Revisited, 1996.
- Frank M. Snowden, Jr.: "Bernal's "Blacks" and the Afrocentrists", Black Athena Revisited, 1996.
- Joyce Tyldesley: "Cleopatra, Last Queen of Egypt", Profile Books Ltd, 2008.
- Alain Froment, 1994. "Race et Histoire: La recomposition ideologique de l'image des Egyptiens anciens." Journal des Africanistes 64:37-64. available online: Race et Histoire Template:Fr icon
- Yaacov Shavit, 2001: History in Black. African-Americans in Search of an Ancient Past, Frank Cass Publishers