Black Genesis: The Prehistoric Origins of Ancient Egypt

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.