The Hamitic Hypothesis '' white people '' wow !!!!
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.
The Hamitic concept flip-flopped many times further in this period. During the rise of German nationalism the Hamites even became Germans who ‘civilized’ all ‘inferior’ parts of the world where any inexplicable trace of civilization could be found. As anthropology and archeology advanced a bit more and it was too ludicrous to assume that these people could have been full white Caucasians they settle for them being a brownish race that was not Negroid, and then somehow a Hamitic- Semitic people emerged who again were sort of brown but were somehow also Semitic. Never mind the fact that there is no ethnic group that can be called Semitic as this word refers in the strictest sense to a group of language types and not race or ethnicity.
In the final analysis, the word Hamite began in allegory, continued in racism and pseudo academia and should end in nothingness. It has been marred with so many historical inaccuracies, political schemes and racist pseudo scholarship that indeed it is not a word that applies to anything at all except a hallmark of Euroccentricity. The word has been bandied about so much that I think those that use it may not necessarily be racist but just really uninformed of its real history. This is just a brief overview of the words origins and uses over the years but there are many more details that can be gone into. I am sure we will find when people begin using more realistic and anthropologically correct words to describe ancient peoples, the picture of the origins of humankind will be crystal clear to those for whom there may be some ambiguity or misconception.