The concept of the Hamite shifted in the 19th century with the intervention of not only scientific racism but also the discovery of the wonders of Egypt by French explorers and archeologists in the time of Napoleon. While it had long been considered, (given the fact that European concepts of race and origins were largely Judeo- Christian) that Egypt was a black land and thus “hamitic”, the discovery of the wonders of Egyptian civilization and of course the knowledge passed on the by Greek historians and legends that they owed much of their knowledge to Egypt, meant that there now had to be some real intellectual acrobatics to ‘whiten’ Egypt. The Hamitic Hypothesis was born, and in it the Hamites were now ‘white’ people! At different times they were seen as an invading race that taught the blacks that existed in Egypt everything they knew, and at others they were a miraculously indigenous white race that was the mother of Egyptian civilization! The core of this hypothesis was simply to ‘prove’ that any achievement in Africa had to be as a result of an invading white or near white race. The Hamite went from being the cursed father of African people, doomed to slavery, to being some superior, civilizing white or near white race in order to rationalize the presence of ‘civilization’ in Egypt.
Posted By: DAVID JOHNSON
Tuesday, October 26th 2010 at 6:37PM
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