Black Genesis: The Prehistoric Origins of Ancient Egypt

5
THE BIBLE, THE HAMITES, AND THE BLACK MEN
Now this is the genealogy of the sons of Noah: Shem, Ham, and Japheth. And sons were born to them after the
flood. . . . The sons of Ham were Cush, Mizraim (the name of Egypt), Put, and Canaan.
GENESIS 10:1–8
Because Ham’s name meant both “ black” and “ hot,” Ham’s descendants had to come from Black Africa.
DAVID GOLDENBERG, THE CURSE OF HAM: RACE AND SLAVERY IN EARLY JUDAISM, CHRISTIANITY AND ISLAM
In practice it is possible to determine directly the skin color and hence the ethnic affiliations of the ancient
Egyptians by microscopic analysis in the laboratory; I doubt if the sagacity of the researchers who have studied
the question has overlooked the possibility.
CHEIKH ANTA DIOP
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 *38 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