Black Genesis (18 page)

Figure 4.18. Thomas Brophy with aligned megalith AO, one of the few megaliths still standing in original position, 2003

HAM, SON OF NOAH

In Egyptology, we frequently come across the term Hamites in connection with the origins of the ancient Egyptians. As we attempt to understand why and how the Hamites are associated with the ancient Egyptians, we are often led to the Bible and the story of Noah and his sons.

In the Book of Genesis, Ham is one of the sons of Noah. Ham's children are Mizraim, Cush, Put, and Canaan, but in the Bible the names of Ham's children are also used to denote geographical places: Egypt (Mizraim), Ethiopia (Cush), Libya (Put), and Palestine (Canaan). Many biblical scholars have proposed that the name Ham meant, in ancient Hebrew, “black” and “hot,” implying that the Land of Ham was a warm, tropical region populated by Black people. The Land of Ham is thus often said to be that part of the world we call Black Africa (what has been thought of as sub-Saharan Africa). Naturally, as has always been the case with the etymology of Hebrew words in the Bible, there is a heated debate over whether this interpretation is correct, because in Genesis 9:20–25 another story is told of how Noah, while tending his vineyard, became drunk and fell asleep naked in his tent, and then Ham did something unspeakable to him,
^*37
whereupon Noah cursed Ham through Ham's youngest son, Canaan. This so-called Curse of Ham (also known as the Curse of Canaan) has generated, as we might expect, all sorts of debate and various interpretations among fundamentalists of the Bible as well as racists. To confound the issue even further, in the Bible, the Land of Ham is also unequivocally associated with the land of the pharaohs—that is, Egypt, the traditional enemy of Israel: “Israel also came into Egypt, and Jacob dwelt in the land of Ham” (Psalm 105:23) and “They forgot God their Savior, who had done great things in Egypt, wondrous works in the land of Ham, awesome things by the Red Sea” (Psalm 106:21).

As we have just seen, in the Bible, the land of Egypt is also known as Mizraim, the name of one of Ham's sons. By implication, then, we can see how biblical literalists might conclude that the Egyptians were the descendants of Ham. At any rate, we can see all these biblical interpretations as fueling the neverending conflict between Israel and Egypt—a conflict that supposedly started with the Jews in captivity
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in Egypt at the time of Rameses II (ca. 1290 BCE) and ended in 1979 with the fragile peace treaty between Israel and Egypt—the so-called Heskem HaShalom Bein Yisrael Le Mizraim.

We can note that even today Jews refer to Egypt as Mizraim. Indeed, the Egyptians themselves call Egypt Mizr, clearly a derivative of Mizraim. Of course, biblical stories are not scientific evidence for the ethnic origins of the ancient Egyptians, but we cannot ignore the possibility that such stories may be partially rooted in actual history. In any case, in these biblical stories, the term Hamites, for better or for worse, has often been adopted by scholars, particularly Egyptologists and anthropologists, in reference to the racial origins of the ancient Egyptians. Not surprisingly, this sort of labeling has generated much confusion and debate, not least by racists in Egypt and elsewhere, who are fearful of having Black Africa as the true origin of the ancient Egyptian civilization. A contemporary example of such fear is a description in a popular pocket travel guidebook: “Unfortunately, as in most developing societies, the world's population is usually categorized according to a cultural-racial hierarchy. White Westerners are at the top, Egyptians next, then Arabs, followed by Asians, and lastly Africans. While these attitudes are undoubtedly racist, they do not find violent expression toward poorer local Sudanese, for
instance.”
¹

Of course, such a racial hierarchy system is
deplorable
²
to current sensibilities of modernity, and such a ranking is by no means universally adhered to by the Egyptian people.
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Yet evidence that the guidebook's point is somewhat accurate to many people's experience is the recurrent distribution of the guidebook and the fact that its reviewers do not seem to complain about the racial hierarchy description. And as we shall see, such cultural-racial value ranking has indeed played a role in shaping scholarly Egyptology.

THE HALF-HAMITES THEORY

A theory that was very popular in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries suggested that the Hamites were a Mediterranean people who had migrated to central or eastern Africa and interbred with the Negroes there to produce a Negroid-Hamitic race of black-skinned people with fine Caucasian-like features. Examples were thought to be the Tutsi and the
Masai.
³
For example, in 1930 the British ethnologist Charles Gabriel Seligman even claimed that the Hamites were a subgroup of the Caucasian race and that all the major achievements of the African people were, in fact, the result of Hamites who had migrated into central Africa as Europeans and brought along with them all the know-how of civilization, which they then passed on to the inferior Black
race.
⁴
In other words, the alleged Black Hamites were the product of a purer and superior Hamitic race. The conclusion was therefore that the Black Hamites should be regarded as superior to the “black negroes” by virtue of their alleged Mediterranean or Caucasian origins. According to C. G. Seligman,

Apart from relatively late Semitic influence . . . the civilizations of Africa are the civilizations of the Hamites, its history is the record of these peoples and of their interaction with the two other African stocks, the Negro and the Bushmen, whether this influence was exerted by highly civilized Egyptians or by such wider pastoralists as are represented at the present day by the Beja and Somali. . . . The incoming Hamites were pastoral “Europeans”—arriving wave after wave—better armed as well as quicker witted than the dark agricultural
Negroes.
⁵

These false and rather blatantly racist views were finally challenged by many scholars in the 1950s and '60s, but so deep-rooted was the belief that Black Negroes were inferior to Black Hamites that such views are still entertained by some misguided and uneducated people, making it difficut to remove them once and for all. We must recognize, of course, that the Hamite controversy is not a simple one and that there are many gray areas in this debate that are far too complex to do full justice to them here. Suffice it to say, however, that until very recently the very idea that an advanced Black race from sub-Saharan Africa was at the source of the ancient Egyptian civilization, and perhaps even of all civilization, was disturbing to many Western people and was pure anathema to those who held Eurocentric views. Thus we still find in textbooks the dubious Mediterranean or Levantine or Sumerian-Babylonian labels listed to explain the origin of the ancient Egyptians, while precious little is said of the far more plausible Black African influence. True, some Egyptologists do at times express their opinions that there could be a central African or east African origin of the ancient Egyptians, but such views are diluted by the use of such terms as Hamitic, Half-Hamitic, and Hamitic pastoralists that still imply a Mediterranean European origin. For example, Henry Frankfort, the renowned director of the prestigious Warburg Institute and professor of preclassical history, uses such terminology when he writes, “. . . somatic and ethnological resemblances, and certain features of their language, connect the ancient Egyptians firmly with the Hamitic-speaking people of East Africa. It seems that the Pharaonic civilization arose upon the north-east African Hamitic
substratum”
⁶
and “the profound significance which cattle evidently possessed for the ancient Egyptians allows us to bring an entirely fresh kind of evidence to bear on the problem. . . . In the life of the Hamites or Half-Hamites, cattle played an enormous
part . . .,”
⁷
and “. . . that North and East African substratum from which Egyptian culture arose and which still survives among Hamitic and half-Hamitic people
today.”
⁸

Even allowing that scholars tend to think that lexicological complexity is a requirement of academic writing, we note that the term “Black African” is clearly avoided by the otherwise very open-minded professor Henry Frankfort. It seems that such jargon is unfortunately still used to avoid directly stating that there is a Black African origin of the pharaohs' culture and race. In addition, after Champollion deciphered the hieroglyphs in 1822, scholars who monopolized Egyptology were not scientists but classicists, historians, linguists, and humanists, as we have seen in chapter 1. These academics held ancient Greece as the source of all cultural achievements. As such, Egyptologists of the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries were very different from those of today, who are, by and large, unbiased and more scientifically minded. In those early days of Egyptology, the tendency was to consider the first dynasty of pharaohs (ca. 3100 BCE) to be the actual origin of the ancient Egyptian civilization. No hard evidence suggested earlier or different origins for the so-called dynastic period.

Finally, however, in the 1920s, British Egyptologist Flinders Petrie began to cause a breach in this consensus. Petrie's excavations revealed evidence of what, at first, appeared to him as a completely different culture—in fact, so different from that of the dynastic Egyptians that he mistook it for the culture of a new race that had come from outside Egypt to cohabitate with more primitive people in the Nile Valley. Further investigations eventually showed that this was not a new race at all, but rather an older, prehistoric phase of the Egyptian culture. Petrie and his fellow Egyptologists were baffled by the distinct difference between this prehistoric or predynastic people and the early dynastic people of the Egyptian civilization. Unable to explain how the ancient Egyptians appeared to have started their civilization with a fully formed language, a complex system of writing, an advanced science, a very mature and sophisticated religion, artwork that nearly surpassed classical Greek art, monumental architecture that still astounded the world, and construction engineering and technology that would tax even modern contractors, Egyptologists theorized that some superrace of invaders had come into the Nile Valley and kick-started the civilization for the Egyptians. This alleged super-race was thought to have come from the east, fueling the popular view that it was in the Orient, especially in Mesopotamia, that we could find the birthplace of the Egyptian civilization. We can be thankful that this theory began to lose hold when evidence began to mount that pointed to, as a root for ancient Egypt, a homegrown civilization—probably one with some influence from the prehistoric pastoralists in the adjacent eastern and western desert regions. This is more or less the position of many Egyptologists today, even though the evidence, as we will see, is stacking up in favor of an origin outside the Nile Valley—somewhere in the far west, not east, of the river, and pointing toward the distant corner with Sudan and Libya that leads into sub-Saharan, Black Africa.

BLACK ATHENA

To be fair, it is also true to say that today there is an uneasy feeling among more open-minded Egyptologists about this racial origin issue—a sense that their older peers could have been wrong and that the notion of a Black African origin for ancient Egypt ought to be given serious consideration. In other words, Egyptologists today are hedging their bets and are also wary not to be drawn into a huge cultural blunder and fall into the same intellectual grave that their older peers dug with their own hands.

We can take, for example, the case of
Black Athena
of the late 1980s. Martin Bernal, a professor emeritus of Near Eastern Studies at Cornell University, developed a deep interest in Egyptology through the influence of his grandfather, the eminent Egyptologist Sir Alan Gardiner. Bernal's quest began when he was intrigued by a strange paradox in Egyptology: though many ancient Greek scholars insisted that the Greeks had received much of their knowledge from the Egyptians, Egyptologists insisted that it was the Egyptians who had received much of their knowledge from the Greeks. Bernal openly proposed that modern Egyptologists should let the ancient Greeks speak for themselves; they should take seriously their claims rather than see them as fanciful stories. In 1987 Bernal published
Black Athena,
a three-volume opus in which he argued in favor of an “Afro-Asiatic” origin for the Egyptian civilization and, by implication, the same for the Greek civilizations. He openly denounced the Eurocentrism of the late nineteenth and twentieth centuries, arguing that it was not supported by scientific
evidence.
⁹
A heated academic debate ensued between the Eurocentrics and the Afrocentrics. Egyptologists pulled rank and accused Bernal of poor scholarship and lack of evidence to support his theory. Cambridge Egyptologist John Ray accused Bernal of confirmation bias, and Egyptologist James Weinstein claimed that Bernal was ignoring archaeological evidence by relying only on Greek reports—thereby implying that the reports of modern Egyptologists were somehow more reliable. So persistent and effective were these attacks on Bernal's scholarship that today the mere mention of
Black Athena
in academic circles is anathema, even heretical, and Afrocentrism is considered a pseudoscience and, to some, even a dangerous practice. One of the most zealous opponents of Afrocentrism is Clarence Walker, professor of Black American History at the University of California, Davis. Ironically, Walker is himself a Black American who was born in Texas. According to Walker, “Afrocentrism is a mythology that is racist, reactionary, and essentially therapeutic. . . . [It] places an emphasis on Egypt that is, to put it bluntly, absurd. . . . There is no evidence that the ancient Egyptians were black as we understand that term
today.”
¹⁰

The born-and-bred-American Walker insists that he is not African, that he has never been to Africa and has no desire to go there. He sees himself as “an old-fashioned intellectual critic” and adds, “I don't like a lot of work being done in the field. . . . Just because you want to believe the world was created by black people doesn't make it
so . . .”
¹¹
Actually, though many may disagree with Walker about the ancient Egyptians, it is possible to find admirable the fact that he does not think his own Blackness should affect his scholastic conclusions. This may be a hopeful indicator that personal ethnicity should not affect our scientific or scholarly conclusions. Further, perhaps there is a problem of terminology—it may be accurate to label these commentators as Afrocentrists, for Afrocentrism is a pseudoscience, but only in the same way that Eurocentrism should be considered a pseudoscience. Both imply an attempt to fit data and observations into a box of preconceived notions. If the data, on balance, indicates that the people who originated the pharaonic civilization of Egypt were indeed Black Africans, then drawing such a conclusion need not be labeled Afrocentric or anti-Eurocentric—it may be thought of simply as accurate.