Ancient Egyptian race controversy

Controversy surrounding the race of ancient Egyptians is an integral topic in Afrocentric historiography, and an important issue for Afrocentrism since the early years of the 20th century.

Today, the debate largely takes place outside the field of Egyptology. Scholarly consensus is that the concept of "pure race" is incoherent; that applying modern notions of race to ancient Egypt is anachronistic; and that as far as skin colour is concerned, the ancient Egyptians were neither "black" nor "white" (as such terms are usually applied today).

Origins

Further information: Afrocentric historiography

The roots of Afrocentrism lay in the repression of blacks throughout the Western world in the 19th century, most particularly in the United States. At the turn of the century, however, came a rise in black racial consciousness as a tool to overcome oppression. Part of this reaction involved a focus on black history, and counteracting what was perceived as white, eurocentric history in favour of a historical narrative of Europe (and what was viewed as its founding culture, ancient Greece) that gave blacks a more prominent role. To a certain extent Afrocentrism also arose as a backlash against scientific racism (broadly speaking, a 19th-century phenomenon) which tended to attribute any advanced civilization to the immigration of Indo-Europeans.

Specifically, this attempted rewriting of the historical narrative of Europe developed into two main forms: the claim that European civilization was founded not by the Greeks, but by the Egyptians, whose culture and learning the Greeks allegedly stole, and that the Egyptians themselves were not only African but also black. Often, Afrocentrists link the two claims, as the following quote (by Marcus Garvey) displays:

Every student of history, of impartial mind, knows that the Negro once ruled the world, when white men were savages and barbarians living in caves; that thousands of Negro professors at that time taught in the universities in Alexandria, then the seat of learning; that ancient Egypt gave the world civilization and that Greece and Rome have robbed Egypt of her arts and letters, and taken all the credit to themselves.

Both themes were to survive Garvey and to continue throughout the 20th century and up to the present day, provoking debate both in academia and in more public spheres, such as mainstream media and the internet.

In academia

Although questions surrounding the race of the ancient Egyptians had occasionally arisen in 18th and 19th-century Western scholarship as part of the growing interest in attempted scientific classifications of race, in academia the meme was popularised and continued throughout the 20th century in the works of George James, Cheikh Anta Diop, and even, to a certain extent, in Martin Bernal's Black Athena. All three have used the terms "black", "African", and "Egyptian" interchangeably, despite what Snowden calls "copious ancient evidence to the contrary".

While at the University of Dakar, Diop tried to establish the skin colour of the Egyptian mummies by measuring the melanin content of the skin, stating: “In practice it is possible to determine directly the skin color and, hence, the ethnic affiliations of the ancient Egyptians by microscopic analysis in the laboratory; I doubt if the sagacity of the researchers who have studied the question has overlooked the possibility.”

Diop's work was well received by the political establishment in the post-colonial formative phase of the state of Senegal under Léopold Sédar Senghor, whose politics of African socialism was inspired by the Pan-Africanist Négritude movement. Diop further attempted to link Egypt to Senegal by arguing that the Ancient Egyptian language was related to his native Wolof. The University of Dakar was renamed in Diop's honour after his death, to Cheikh Anta Diop University. Diop participated in a UNESCO symposium in Cairo in 1974 and he wrote the chapter about the "origins of the Egyptians" in the UNESCO General History of Africa.

Founded in 1979, the Journal of African Civilizations has continually advocated that Egypt should be viewed as a black civilization. Figures attached to the group centering around the journal include Ivan van Sertima and J.H. Clarke (who has advanced further the "Cleopatra was black" meme). Other notable proponents of the meme include Chancellor Williams. Mainstream scholarship has generally been critical of the journal: J.D. Muhly describes it as "well-intentioned but quite unconvincing and lacking in the basic techniques of critical scholarship."

The Afrocentric claim that European scholars have tried to deny significance of black people in the ancient Egyptian culture has some substance. During the European colonial era on the African continent, the prevalent European attitude was that ancient Egyptians were 'white', as the French scholar Alain Froment shows on the basis of two encyclopaedias from the 1930s.

The British Africanist Basil Davidson summarized the issue as follows:

Whether the Ancient Egyptians were as black or as brown in skin color as other Africans may remain an issue of emotive dispute; probably, they were both. Their own artistic conventions painted them as pink, but pictures on their tombs show they often married queens shown as entirely black, being from the south (from what a later world knew as Nubia): while the Greek writers reported that they were much like all the other Africans whom the Greeks knew.

Specific controversies

Controversies about 'race'

Debate in the public sphere has tended to focus more on the race of specific notable individuals from the history of Egypt, particularly Tutankhamun, Cleopatra VII and also the Great Sphinx of Giza. Such claims by Afrocentrists have not been limited to Egyptians: Carthaginian general Hannibal and Roman Emperor Septimius Severus have also been claimed as black, despite non-existent evidence, as well as the ancient Greek philosopher Socrates.

Tutankhamun

Attempted reconstructions of Tutankhamun's facial features have encountered much Afrocentric protest over concerns that he has been represented as too white.

Cleopatra VII

Further information: Cleopatra VII

Cleopatra's race and skin colour have also caused frequent debate as described in an article from The Baltimore Sun. There is also an article titled: Was Cleopatra Black? from Ebony magazine, and an article about Afrocetrism from the St. Louis Post-Dispatch that mentions the question, too. Scholars generally suggest a light olive skin colour for Cleopatra, based on the facts that her Macedonian family had intermingled with the Persian aristocracy of the time, that her mother is not absolutely known for certain, and that her paternal grandmother may have been African (or indeed from anywhere at all) which is possible but not provable. Afrocentric assertions of Cleopatra's blackness have, however, continued. The question was the subject of an heated exchange between Mary Lefkowitz, who has referred in her articles a debate she had with one of her students about the question whether Cleopatra was black, and Molefi Kete Asante, Professor of African American Studies at Temple University. As a response to Not Out of Africa by Lefkowitz, Asante wrote an article: Race in Antiquity: Truly Out of Africa, in which he emphasizes that he "can say without a doubt that Afrocentrists do not spend time arguing that either Socrates or Cleopatra were black."

Controversy about the meaning of 'Kemet'

km in Egyptian hieroglyphs

km biliteral	km.t (place)	km.t (people)

One of the many names for Egypt in ancient Egyptian is km.t (read Kemet), meaning 'the black land' or 'the black one'. The claim that Kemite referred to the fact that the people of the land had black skins, as argued by Cheikh Anta Diop, William Leo Hansberry, or Aboubacry Moussa Lam has become a cornerstone of Afrocentric historiography. This view is rejected by most Egyptologists. Generally, 'Kemet' is taken to be a reference to the fertile black soil which was washed down from Central Africa by the annual Nile inundation, and which made Egypt habitable and successful in contrast to the barren desert or 'red land' outside the narrow confines of the Nile watercourse. The use of the word kmt when referring to people is thought to be derived from the name of the land, meaning literally "those people who live in the black, fertile country." Raymond Faulkner's Concise Dictionary of Middle Egyptian translates it into "Egyptians", as do most sources.

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

See also

• Dynastic race theory
• Race in the United States
• Négritude
• Demographics of modern Egypt