Black Genesis: The Prehistoric Origins of Ancient Egypt

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. *39 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 Hamiticspeaking
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