Black Genesis: The Prehistoric Origins of Ancient Egypt

pastoralists that had themselves likely come from the Tibesti-Ennedi highlands and, going further back in time, had their
source in eastern Africa. In other words, the evidence is overwhelmingly in favor of a black-skinned African origin for
the Egyptian civilization.
Yet is it possible to prove this via some sort of direct measurements?
IT IS ALL IN THE MELANIN
A great advocate of the African origins model as well as a believer in the Black African origins of the ancient Egyptians
was the Senegalese anthropologist and radiocarbon physicist Cheikh Anta Diop. Hailed by many as one of the greatest
African historians, Diop was studying for a physics doctorate in Paris in 1951 when he caused a huge stir at the
university because his Ph.D. thesis on the Black African origins of ancient Egypt was rejected as unsuitable by his
assessors. Not being easily discouraged, Diop boldly labored for nine more years to make the evidence in his thesis so
airtight that, when he resubmitted the thesis again, this time it was grudgingly accepted. Hardened by those struggles and
the bias he encountered against the African origins idea, Diop went further and published his thesis under the title
Nations Nègres et Culture, and very soon he became a national hero and the major defender of the African origins theory.
In his native country of Senegal, Diop founded the Radiocarbon Laboratory at the University of Dakar, became its first
director, and used this cutting-edge technology to continue his research on the ethnic origins of the Egyptian civilization.
Diop’s argument was simple and straightforward: it was possible to know the skin color of an ancient corpse by
microscopic analysis of the melanin content in the body. His critics countered by saying that this method was not
foolproof and that possible contamination of the embalming unguents and the deterioration of the corpse over the
centuries made the result dubious, but these objections were in turn addressed by Diop. In 1974 Diop presented his
findings to a large number of professional Egyptologists and anthropologists at the People of Ancient Egypt symposium
in Cairo organized by UNESCO World Heritage. He was largely ignored. Diop died in 1986, leaving behind numerous
publications as well as recorded interviews on radio and television. Following is a concise overview of Diop’s thesis. 18
Figure 5.1. Cheikh Anta Diop.
DIOP AND THE CAUSE OF HIS STRUGGLES
Diop starts by recounting that in 1971 the Kenyan anthropologist Louis S. B. Leakey, in his final report at the Seventh
Pan-African Congress of Prehistory at Addis Ababa, proved that more than one hundred fifty thousand years ago humans
that were morphologically similar to us were living in central Africa around the great lakes that feed the Nile. Diop
explains how this starling discovery opened a reappraisal of the ethnology of the ancient Egyptians and humankind as a
whole. Leakey even thought he had found the very spot where the adventure of modern man had begun: the beautiful,
snow-capped Rwenzori Mountains between Uganda and the Democratic Republic of Congo, traditionally known as the
Mountains of the Moon and discovered by Henry Morton Stanley in 1885. These mountains stand between Lake Albert
and Lake Edward and are the highest source of the Nile River. Rwenzori means “rainmakers,” a name inspired by the
almost permanent rain clouds that cover the peaks of these mysterious mountains. According to Leakey, humans
dispersed from here to inhabit the rest of Africa and, eventually, the whole planet. The implication was that modern
humans, being from a warm and humid climate that caused the natural melanin in their pigmentation to darken, were
originally black-skinned Africans. It was, therefore, from this Black stock that the other races of humans were formed.
Other than migrating southward, eastward, and westward, these original humans could also go northward to two main