Race of ancient Egyptians

The racial characteristics of ancient Egyptians have been a subject of debate and controversy dating back to 18th century natural history. Ironically, the Egyptians considered themselves part of a distinct race, separate from their neighbors.^[1]^[2]

Mainstream consensus is that ancient Egypt was a mixed-race gestalt of African and Middle Eastern ethnicities.^[3] There are alternative views, however. Afrocentric scholars such as Martin Bernal and Cheikh Anta Diop claim that dynastic Egypt was from its inception – and remained throughout several millennia – a primarily black, African civilization.

Background

Race

Modern scientific view

The term race distinguishes one population of an animal species (including human) from another of the same species. The most widely used human racial categories are based on visible traits (especially skin color, facial features and hair texture), genes, and self-identification. Conceptions of race, as well as specific racial groupings, vary by culture and over time, and are often controversial, for scientific reasons as well as because of their impact on social identity and identity politics. Some scientists regard race as a social construct while others maintain it has genetic basis.

Since the 1940s, some evolutionary scientists have rejected the view of race according to which any number of finite lists of essential characteristics could be used to determine a like number of races. For example, the convention of categorizing the human population based on human skin colors has been used, but hair colors, eye colors, nose sizes, lip sizes, and heights have not. Many social scientists think common race definitions, or any race definitions pertaining to humans, lack taxonomic rigour and validity. They argue that race definitions are imprecise, arbitrary, derived from custom, have many exceptions, have many gradations, and that the numbers of races observed vary according to the culture examined. They further maintain that "race" as such is best understood as a social construct, and they prefer to conceptualize and analyze human genotypic and phenotypic variation in terms of populations and clines instead.

Many scientists, however, have argued that this position is motivated more by political than scientific reasons. Others also argue that categories of self-identified race/ethnicity or biogeographic ancestry are both valid and useful, that these categories correspond to clusters inferred from multilocus genetic data, and that this correspondence implies that genetic factors contribute to unexplained phenotypic variation among groups.

Ancient Egyptian view

The Egyptians considered themselves part of a distinct race, separate from their neighbors.^[4]^[5] Most modern Egyptologists believe the Egyptians thought of themselves as Egyptian people, not African, Mediterranean, White, or Black people. They discovered wall paintings that contrast Egyptian [1], Nubian [2], Berber[3], and Semitic peoples [4].

Racism and colonialism

In the 19th century, supporters of slavery and colonialism began to use racism to justify the exploitation of African and Native Americans. They argued that the harsh northern climates had forced Europeans to develop a greater intellect than any other race. They also argued that people such as Sub-Saharan were incapable of living freely in a civilized world and were naturally inclined towards slavery.

Black nationalist and psychoanalyist Frantz Fanon wrote in his book Black Skin, White Masks that the history of white racism, colonialism, and oppression leads blacks, often out of an inferiority complex, to seek out and repond with historical proof of black civilization. He traced this ongoing dialectic and the role it played in his own development:

I rummaged frenetically through all the antiquity of the black man. What I found there took away my breath. In his book L'abolition de l'esclavage Schoelcher presented us with compelling arguments. Since then, Frobenius, Westermann, Delafosse-- all of them white-- had joined the chorus: Segou, Djenne, cities of more than a hundred thousand people; accounts of learned blacks (doctors of theology who went to Mecca to interpret the Koran). All of that, exhumed from the past, spread with its insides out, made it possible for me to find a valid historic place. The white man was wrong, I was not a primitive, not even a half-man, I belonged to a race that had already been working in gold and silver two thousand years ago.

However, he later decided that the issue was not essential to the plight of black people:

Let us be clearly understood. I am convinced that it would be of the greatest interest to be able to have contact with a Negro literature or architecture of the third century before Christ. I should be very happy to know that a correspondence had flourished between some Negro philosopher and Plato. But I can absolutely not see how this fact would change anything in the lives of the eight-year-old children who labor in the cane fields of Martinique or Guadeloupe.

Research

Genetics

Mummies

Language

One of the many names for Egypt in ancient Egyptian is km.t (read "Kemet"), meaning "black land". More literally, the word means "something black". The use of km.t "black land" in terms of a place was generally in contrast to the "deshert" or "red land": the desert beyond the Nile valley. When used to mean people, km.t "people of Kemet", "people of the black land" is usually translated "Egyptians". This word that the Egyptians used to describe themselves was never used to describe other peoples of Africa.

Culture

Art

File:NefertitiBust.jpg

Ancient egyptian artwork of the queen Nefertiti, wife of Akhenaten, and the mother in law and probable stepmother of the Pharaoh Tutankhamun.

Some scholars have characterized the dolichocephalism of certain Egyptian royalty in the Tutmosid line as "family traits," rather than racial characteristics. Ray Johnson, director of the University of Chicago's research center at Luxor, describes the oddly shaped, quartzite head of an Egyptian princess, thought to be that of Meritaten,[5],[6] the daughter of Akhenaten, as "most likely a family trait exaggerated by the artistic style of the period" and that it "It simply falls within the normal range of human variation." The press release of the Tutankhamun CT scan states:

Tutankhamun had a very elongated (dolichocephalic) skull. The cranial sutures are not prematurely fused, so this is most likely due to normal anthropological variation rather than any pathology. Cleft Palette and Overbite. The king had a small cleft in his hard palette (the bony roof of his mouth), not associated with an external expression such as a hare-lip or other facial deformation. His lower teeth are slightly misaligned. He has large front incisors and the overbite characteristic of other kings of from his family (the Tuthmosid line).[7]

Contrary to earlier scholarship, the exaggeratedly dolichocephalic heads of Amarna artists are thought to be a stylistic affectation meant to accentuate a normal cranial feature, as in the case King Tutankhamen. Further, the king was neither genetically deformed nor the subject of head binding. As a result of CT scans conducted of King Tutankhamun's skull in 2005, it was found that, although "Tutankhamun had a very elongated (dolichocephalic) skull," "The cranial sutures are not prematurely fused...." In fact, with the king's age estimated between 18 and 20 years, "All of the cranial sutures [were] still at least partly open." Head binding affects the way in which cranial sutures fuse and would have been detected by the CT scan. The conclusion by medical experts was that Tut's dolichocephalism was "most likely due to normal anthropological variation...." [8]

The Great Sphinx of Giza

Over the centuries, numerous writers and scholars have recorded their impressions and reactions upon seeing the Great Sphinx of Giza. French scholar Constantin-François de Chassebœuf, Comte de Volney visited Egypt between 1783 and 1785. He is one of the earliest known Western scholars to remark upon what he saw as its "typically Negro" countenance.

"...[The Copts] all have a bloated face, puffed up eyes, flat nose, thick lips; in a word, the true face of the negro. I was tempted to attribute it to the climate, but when I visited the Sphinx, its appearance gave me the key to the riddle. On seeing that head, typically negro in all its features, I remembered the remarkable passage where Herodotus says: 'As for me, I judge the Colchians to be a colony of the Egyptians because, like them, they are black with woolly hair. ...'".[9]

Upon visiting Egypt in 1849, French author Gustave Flaubert echoed de Volney's observations. In his travelog chronicling his trip, he wrote:

We stop before a Sphinx; it fixes us with a terrifying stare. Its eyes still seem full of life; the left side is stained white by bird-droppings (the tip of the Pyramid of Khephren has the same long white stains); it exactly faces the rising sun, its head is grey, ears very large and protruding like a negro’s[10], its neck is eroded; from the front it is seen in its entirety thanks to great hollow dug in the sand; the fact that the nose is missing increases the flat, negroid effect. Besides, it was certainly Ethiopian; the lips are thick….[11]

Scientific consensus

Alternative views

Afrocentrism and Pan-Africanism

1911 copy of the NAACP journal *The Crisis*

Henry Sylvestre-Williams created the Pan African Organization in 1897. One of the organization's stated goals was to "promote and protect the interests of all subjects claiming African descent, wholly or in part, in British colonies and other places especially Africa, by circulating accurate information on all subjects affecting their rights and privileges as subjects of the British Empire, by direct appeals to the Imperial and local Governments."

In 1900, he held the first Pan African Conference. The three-day conference took place on July 23 to July 25. After the conference was over Williams began touring, lecturing, and starting new branches of his Pan African Organization.

One of the attendees of the 1900 conference and the most influential early proponents of Pan-Africanism was W.E.B. Dubois. DuBois researched West African culture and attempted to construct a pan-Africanist value system based on West African traditions. Dubois's ideas were able to reach a wide audience, because of his prolific writing. He wrote weekly columns in the Chicago Defender, the Pittsburgh Courier, the New York Amsterdam News, and the Hearst-owned San Francisco Chronicle. He also worked as Editor-in-Chief of the NAACP publication, The Crisis.

Eurocentrism

Much of the "eurocentric" sentiment and argument concerning Egyptian racial traits stems from thulist or otherwise occult interest in an "Aryan" Egyptian kingdom.

References

^ The Civilization Of Ancient Egypt
^ http://homelink.cps-k12.org/teachers/filiopa/files/AC383EB269C648AAAA659593B9FC358C.pdf
^ That this view is mainstream is recognized even by alternative accounts, such as Afrocentrism.
^ The Civilization Of Ancient Egypt
^ http://homelink.cps-k12.org/teachers/filiopa/files/AC383EB269C648AAAA659593B9FC358C.pdf

Bibliography

Noguera, Anthony (1976). How African Was Egypt?: A Comparative Study of Ancient Egyptian and Black African Cultures. Illustrations by Joelle Noguera. New York: Vantage Press.
Raymond Faulkner. "Concise Dictionary of Middle Egyptian". Griffith Institute; Rep edition (January 1, 1970) ISBN 0900416327
James P. Allen. "Middle Egyptian : An Introduction to the Language and Culture of Hieroglyphs". Cambridge University Press (November 4, 1999). ISBN 0521774837