Currently, the debate over the race of ancient Egyptians is well known in popular culture. With every new piece of media featuring the ancient civilization, the race of the actors playing its citizens is often highly discussed and contested. For the past few centuries, the (racial) claim to ancient Egypt has great significance, for it is credited as one of the world’s greatest civilizations that innovated beyond what was thought possible for the age.
How did this all start?
The contested claim to Egypt began around the 1840s, when Samuel Morton, an American phrenologist, published his study that concluded (almost as a side note) that white people were the majority in ancient Egypt, and black people had been subservient. As it was universally recognized as one of the ancient world’s greatest civilizations, to name Egyptian people specifically as ‘white’ and ‘black’ rather than a not-yet identified people of color played upon the racial tensions of Morton’s day. Morton’s claim sparked resistance largely from African-American abolitionists that sought to defend their racial past and “[fight] back against assertions that they were the product of a separate and lesser creation.”1 Mia Bay, “The Historical Origins of Afrocentrism,” Amerikastudien / American Studies 45, no. 4 (2000): 508.
After a century-long pause, the debate over the Egypt’s racial past resumed (notably at the end of the Black Power Movement), sparked by Senagalese historian Cheikh Anta Diop’s The African Origin of Civilization, a scientifically-approached work that claimed that human civilization began in Africa and was begun by black Africans; all other great civilizations around the world grew from the black example. This study is considered foundational to the movement, as it is “an example of a document that portrays Africans as the subject, rather than the object of history.”2 Victor Oguejiofor Okafor, “Diop and the African Origin of Civilization: An Afrocentric Analysis,” Journal of Black Studies 22, no. 2 (1991): 266.
What evidence do these scholars prove their claims?
First, it was important to establish as a historical, immutable fact that Egyptians were racially black. Diop’s book began this work, as he claimed that Egyptologists had been lying in order to preserve a myth that Egyptians were white, or simply not black. This claim worked to convince his audience that Egyptology as a whole has been, in part, an effort to keep black people subjugated and away from their history of great achievements.
Building on this work, Afrocentrists traced detailed lineages that sought to explain definitively how Egyptians were black and not another people of color. For example, author Wayne Chandler writes:
“The blacks of ancient Ethiopia referred to themselves as the Anu. When Osiris brought forth this exodus out of Ethiopia into Egypt we must also remember that the term Egypt did not exist, for it too is Greek. Though the ancient Egyptians called their land Khem, Kemit, or Kmt (which means black in their language or land of the blacks) never did those blacks of the Old Kingdom refrain from identifying themselves with the Anu.”3Wayne Chandler, “Of Gods and Men: Egypt’s Old Kingdom,” in Egypt Revisited ed. Ivan Van Sertima (New Brunswick: Transaction Publishers, 1989), 122.
To further support this argument, Chandler states that ancient historians (such as Herotodus) agreed upon the fact that Egyptians were a dark-skinned people that originally came from Ethiopia.
Once a solidly black past was established, it was important to invest importance and pride into this past through lengthy descriptions of Ancient Egyptian achievements and spirituality. In claiming the actions of what they consider some of the greatest rulers of the world, Afrocentrist writers assert the high competency of black people as a race. Of various Eighth Dynasty rulers, Phaon Goldman, for example, contends that “…only those who are deliberately duplicitous would refuse to publish the consistently recurring attributions of Negro parentage or African physiognomy, to a host of the rulers of ‘the greatest royal family to ever rule anywhere.’”4Phaon Goldman, “The Nubian Renaissance,” in Egypt Revisited ed. Ivan Van Sertima (New Brunswick: Transaction Publishers, 1989), 269.
Similarly, Asa G. Hillard, a professor of educational psychology, argues of Egyptian rulers that “[w]hen we view these rulers…we see that they were indigenous African people. Moreover, we see that they were world leaders. Most important of all, they were world leaders at a time when the head of state truly was regarded as the representative of the One God on earth…”5Asa G. Hillard, “Waset, The Eye of Ra and the Abode of Maat: The Pinnacle of Black Leadership in the Ancient World,” n Egypt Revisited ed. Ivan Van Sertima (New Brunswick: Transaction Publishers, 1989), 211. These authors claim racial ownership of these rulers and their achievements and use it to prove a far-reaching historical record of grandeur for black people.
What was at stake?
The Afrocentric imagination of Egypt was a reaction to the consistently negatively portrayed ancestral past of black people. Much of the argument over who gets to claim Ancient Egypt and, more importantly, all of its leaders and creations, stemmed from a need to reorient black/African history towards serving its subjects rather than degrading them. The Afrocentric conception of Egypt was an effort to reconstruct history so that it included a narrative of past black achievement so that black people could have a solidly black past that had, to this point, been denied them.
How have other scholars criticized this movement?
One of the most famous oppositions to these claims comes from classicist Mary Lefkowitz’s book, Not Out of Africa: How Afrocentrism Became an Excuse to Teach Myth As History. The work is ultimately a response to Martin Bernal’s Black Athena, which she argues misrepresents both Greek and Egyptian history in an effort to “lessen European cultural arrogance.”6 Mary Lefkowtiz, Not Out of Africa: How Afrocentrism Became an Excuse to Teach Myth As History, qtd. in Norma Thompson, “Review,” International Journal of the Classical Tradition 3, no. 4 (1997): 531. Lefkowitz argues that they falsely portray African history in a way that only harms the legitimacy of those who are trying to lift it up.
Historian Clarence Walker’s We Can’t Go Home Again: An Argument about Afrocentrism acknowledges the importance of Egypt in “black cultural nationalism,”7 Clarence Walker, We Can’t Go Home Again: An Argument about Afrocentrism (New York: Oxford University Press, 1989), 1. but ultimately questions its usefulness when attempting to consider it sound historical study. Walker disagrees completely with the characterization of a shared black past as completely out of the control of its subjects. In his view, while oppression has marred the past of the black race overall, to falsify history and claim Egypt only serves to chip away at the legitimacy of Afrocentric thought. For Walker, Afrocentrists see it as only useful to engage in studies of the black past, the black present, and the black future. As a result, these categories become unnecessarily racialized and separate from the rest of history, preventing any accurate understanding of the complex past.
Conclusions
In claiming Egypt (or, at least its “important dynasties”8 James Brunson, “Ancient Egyptians: ‘The Dark Red Face Myth,” in Egypt Revisited ed. Ivan Van Sertima (New Brunswick: Transaction Publishers, 1989), 56.) as a black society, Afrocentric scholars sought to reclaim black history from a long legacy of oppression. There existed a strong investment to devote importance in a shared past that understood and emphasized leadership and nobility as qualities natural to black people. However, in asserting this new understanding of black history as fact, Afrocentric literature drew (and continues to draw) criticism that undermined the movement and its effective qualities overall. Nonetheless, the rewriting of Egyptian history as black history follows the human tendency to reexamine the past in order to understand what is happening in the present. To claim Egypt as black was an attempt to insert black people into traditional, widely accepted high culture. It was to turn black history into a cycle wherein they would soon rise again and claim the greatness that once belonged to the black race.
