undermine the African nature of ancient Egypt,,,,,, location location LOCATION !
-- Those early Egyptologists sought to take Egypt out of Africa and black skinned Africans out of Egypt. It was a conspiracy to minimize African’s role in early human civilization. Such a conspiracy could only be carried out because of the near uniform belief among whites in the inferiority of Africans. The Great Enslavement of Africans had seen to it that whites developed and maintained negative attitudes about African history and capability. What purposes and whose interests were served by the steady denial of the blackness of the ancient Egyptians? All one has to do is to examine the record and it will be clear that these scholars present a complex argument against an African Egypt. They do this despite the overwhelming nature of the facts. Location becomes the critical issue, that is, the only interpretative issue.
Let it be clear the question of the blackness of the ancient Egyptians would never have been raised except for the persistent white racism in Western history. It had not been an issue in Europe prior to the 15th century and only became an issue with the vast discoveries in Egypt during the 19th century, a most imperialistic century for Europe.
Audrey Smedley has written brilliantly about the origins of racism making the point that the concept of “race” was designed with its ideological fabrications about human differences to be used as a mechanism for maintaining “distant” and “social status place” of various peoples.[7] Race, thus established, became an instrument for determining who should have power, authority, prestige, agency, and independence. It was a status marker, restricting competition while the practitioners of racism argued for competition in a contradictory and hypocritical manner. It is no wonder that the historians born of this context held some of the same beliefs as the masses of whites. They saw Africans as morally, intellectually, physically, and culturally inferior to whites. It is easy to see how people who had devised such elaborate intellectual contortions as race would have a problem believing that “low status” people could have constructed the monuments of ancient Egypt.
Who could these Africans people be who produced the greatest civilization of antiquity? Surely in the minds of the early European scholars there had to be an explanation that showed them to be different from Africans who lived in societies contiguous to Egypt. In the eyes of those whose culture was warped by slave-trading and colonization the ancient Egyptians could not be Africans, after all Europeans were enslaving Africans! If they admitted that the Egyptians were Africans they would have to declare that they were not black. They had to be white Africans! Who during the 19th century would believe that blacks built the pyramids? What whites of the 19th century could admit that fact? In a curious ways whites of the 20th century have argued the same point but with a different twist. They ask, why do Africans want to claim Egypt? Why not claim West Africa? The obvious answer is that both are Africa, but the question itself remains a throw-back to the canard about Egypt not being Africa. Egypt and Nubia impacted on the rest of Africa as thoroughly as China impacted on parts of Asia or Greece impacted on parts of Europe.
Because Europe was working out its own relationship to its past during the last five hundred years, the historians of the West captured the ambiguity present in Europe’s own wrestling with its diversity. When they spoke of Africans they largely defined a narrow idea of a “true Negro” that usually referred to Africans from the rainforest region of the continent that had come to mean for whites, primitive, dangerous, mysterious, and the extreme of themselves physically. To satisfy their stereotypes they took physical characteristics such as the shape of lips, the width of the nose, and the size of genitalia to be definitive statements about the difference between themselves and Africans. Surely the ancient Egyptians could not be Africans. It is as if Africans would say that the only Europeans are the Scandinavians who are extremely pale, with red or blond hair, long noses, and a love of the sea. This was a wicked ideology maintained as science by some of the leading European scholars.
In effect, the ideology of white supremacy was the rocket engine that put into flight the fantastic ideas of a white Egypt, buttressed by one self-serving Egyptologists after another. The Nile Valley civilization arising about 3400 BC in historical terms and ending with the Romans dispossession around 50 BC did not evolve in isolation from the rest of Africa. Egypt was rather clearly an African civilization as connected to Africa’s history and geography as Axum or Nubia.
The fact of the blackness of the ancient Egyptians was accepted in Europe during the Renaissance. Actually prior to 1830 it was generally understood that the ancient Egyptians were black. However, after 1830, that is, after the Champollion’s deciphering of the Medu Netcher and the publication of Dominic Vivant Denon’s Description of Egypt, came the attempt to take Egypt out of Africa. Some authors have argued that the racism that produced this type of negative attitude toward black achievements was born during the slave trade as an attempt to justify morally what whites were doing to Africans physically. Few interpretative histories of European Slave Trade have dealt with the ideology of white supremacy as a generating force for much of the anti-African historiography. [8]
Egypt in the Mind of Modern Europeans
The objections to an Afrocentric historiography of Africa range from the frivolous to the serious. I place those who argue from the old racist paradigm in the category of the frivolous because they seek to argue by dismissal, to refute by ignorance, rather than engage the concrete arguments of the Afrocentric historians. The serious but off-center writers would include Frank Snowden and his folllowers like Frank Yurco. Snowden has become the standard bearer for an out-of-date, off-centeredness that borders on the marginalization of Africans in their own history. They are serious scholars, however, because they engage data but off-center because they assume a European place, a European centrality while discussing Egypt and Nubia. Both civilizations predate Greece and to make them dance around Greece is turning the tables on their heads. Snowden does this in his often cited book, Blacks in Antiquity. As I have often pointed out in discussion, Snowden’s idea is not about Blacks in Antiquity but about Blacks in the minds and thoughts of the Greeks and Romans. The Africans Snowden sees are like stones, they cannot speak for themselves, and they only become important because they are picked up by either the Greeks or the Romans. This is a strange and dangerous intellectual interpretation of African data.
An argument of the frivolous school is that the ancient Egyptians were not black and not Africans. Of course, the Egyptians were both black and African, neither fact is difficult to determine or to observe historically, geographically, culturally, or linguistically. If we mean by African a person or people whose historical cultural antecedents are in the continent of Africa no one can deny that the ancient Egyptians, so-called Pharaonic Egyptians, were Africans. It is, by the way, frivolous, almost ludicrous, to argue as David Kelley argued that the white South Africans who come to the United States ought to be called Africans Americans. The whites of South Africa find their historical antecedents in Europe and in European cultures, not in Africa. Indeed their more recent domicile in Africa did little to erase their understanding of themselves as culturally different from Africans people among whom they lived. Had they been Africans in the historical sense the past sixty years in South Africa would have been quite different. The fact that they were Europeans who believed in white supremacy led directly to their problems with Africans.
Now in a prehistoric sense science confirms the African origin of humanity and in that regard we may be said to all be Africans. However, in the period of history, where signs and symbols have created unique articulations of our experiences with environment and other humans, and where our responses have been reflected in art, writing, architecture, designs, clothes, structures of governance, and motifs of thought and behavior. Differentiation has created distinct and unique human communities. We do not have the same specific cultures or histories although in palter of concentric lines we might be able to interpret our specific experiences from the smallest unit to larger units until we embrace the world. This is why it is necessary for a scientific historiography to distinguish the imaginary from the real, the illusion from the concrete. Thus, the ancient Kemites, Egyptians if you will, were African people. They reflected the same responses to history as their continental neighbors and for the most part knew little outside of the Nile valley.
Secondly, they were black skinned people even during he rather late period when the Greeks came to Egypt to study and travel. The Greeks saw the Egyptians a black skinned and the most common word used to describe the Egyptians ‘color was melanchroes, black skinned. Had the Greeks wanted to describe them as white they would have used leucochroes but they did not. Neither did they say phrenychroes, which is brown or red skinned. The very use of the word melanchroes from the same root for words such as melanin, melanite, Melanesia, and so forth meant that there was no confusion or complex in the mind of the either Herodotus or Aristotle on this subject. I am the first to admit that both may have been bad scientists on some subjects but on the people they actually saw with their own eyes I find them credible. As to the historical method it is better to accept the witness of these ancient Greeks than late 20th century interpreters. Aristtotle says in Physiognomonica that the Egyptians and Ethiopians are very black. This passage is translated in the Loeb as”too black” indicating that Aristotle saw the Ethiopians, Greek for burnt faces, and the Egyptians as black skinned people. He did not say the Ethiopians are “too black” but rather that both of them were very black.[9]
Aristotle’s commentary was made prior to the Greek invasion of Africa under Alexander the Macedonian and during the end of a period begun around the 6th century BC when Thales of Miletus had entered school in Egypt. Thales studied philosophy in Egypt and subsequently became the first Greek philosopher. Aristotle is usually seen as one of the major Greek writers but rarely has he been quoted on the color of the Ethiopians and Egyptians. An observation on the complexion of the Egyptians made in the 4th century BC. Indeed no implication is necessary when we recall the two statemnts made by Herodotus in the second book of Histories.
Herodotus claims that the people of Colchis, wherever it was located near the Black Sea and whatever its history was in reference to Egyptian conquerors, looked like the Egyptians. But what is the reason this 5th century Greek historian makes such a definite claim that he Colchians are descended from the Egyptians. He writes that they are “black skinned and have wooly hair.” This is not the description of a European person or an Asian person. Herodotus has come under patricidal declamations by European historians who once called him the Father of History but who increasingly find him problematic. Of course, Herodotus was a product of his time and was limited in his scope and often wrote things that were fanciful. The complexion of the ancient Egyptians was not fanciful, however. In fact he knew precisely what he was talking about and although a few translators have used the term “dark skinned” for Herodotus’ description of the ancient Egyptians most admit that melanchroes is black skinned. It is good to remember that Herodotus had no bones to crack on this issue. He did not have the consciounsess of contemporary Europeans. Africans had not been victims of enslavement and had not been deprived of heritage and history. When Herodotus wrote his book, Alexander had not even been born. Thus, he was simply making an identification statement. The Colchians looked just like the Egyptians with their black skin and wooly hair. It was plan to him that Egypt was different geographically from other nations such as Greece and Persia.
Herodotus recounts a conversation that carried on between Greeks about women who were foreigners. At first it seemed that the women spoke like doves, that is, birds, to the Greeks, then when one of the women learned the Greek language, the Greeks said that the women now spoke like human beings. The Greeks referred to the doves as black to indicate that they were Egyptians. Herodotus says that the account he heard said “two black doves flew away from egyptian Thebes and while one directed its flight to Libya, the other came to them. She alighted on an oak, and sitting there began to speak with a human voice.”[10] Furthermore, he writes: “The Dodonaeans called the women doves because they were foreigners, and seemed to them to make a noise like birds.”[11] He then says that “…by calling the dove black the Dodonaeans indicated that the woman was an Egyptian.”[12]
1] See. Georg Hegel, Reason in History. Trans. R. Hortman. Indianapolis: Bobbs-Merrill, l982, p.3; W. Breasted, Development of Religion and Though in Ancient Egypt.. 1911; and Gaston Maspero, Histoire ancienne des peuples de l’Orien. Paris: Hachette, 1917, pp. 17-18.
[2] Arnold Toynbee, A Study of History. London: Oxford University Press, l987, Volume One, pp. 5-23.
[3] J. D. Fage, A History of West Africa. London: Oxford University Press, 1969, pp. 2-14.
[4] See Molefi Kete Asante, The Afrocentric Idea. Philadelphia: Temple University Press, 1999.
[5] Katherine Bankole, Slavery and Medicine. New York: Garland Press, l997.
[6] Black Issues in Higher Education, May, 1996.
[7] Audrey Smedley, Race in North America: The Origin and Evolution of a Worldview. Boulder, Colo.: Westview Press, l998, 2nd Ed., pp. 23-26.
Posted By: DAVID JOHNSON
Saturday, November 3rd 2012 at 12:27AM
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