As ዮም (Yom) | contribs • Talk • E suggested, I am just going to throw out some ideas for an article structure. It seems to me that this article would be closely affiliated with, and should cross-reference at least three other articles: Egyptomania, Egypt in the Western imagination and Afrocentrism. As I said, it probably makes sense to start with the beginnings of the "history of man" in natural history in the 18th century. The following outline is just a suggestion, and by no means complete.
The debate around the racial characteristics of the ancient Egyptians begins, I think, when the biblical account of Genesis (i.e. the origins of "mankind") began to be put under pressure by Enlightenment thinking. Many factors worked together to shape the debate: Colonization (the interests of Britain and continental Europe), the slave trade, slavery in the New World, and -- starting in 1798 -- the beginnings of systematic Egyptology as an attendant to Napoleon's Egyptian campaign. One has to keep in mind that the debate went on for almost a century before Evolution became an accepted theory in the natural sciences. African American thinkers such as Frederick Douglass and David Walker began to engage in this debate at an early stage, claiming ancient Egypt as black civilization. In the United States, the debate clearly revolved around slavery: pro-slavery writers (such as Josiah C. Nott, the author of Types of Mankind) went through great lengths to show that (1) different races existed in ancient Egypt and (2) the Egyptian ruling class was "Caucasian." The point was to show that there has never been a black civilization, therefore black Africans were subhuman and meant to be slaves. Humans were, to Nott, different species, separately created not long before the earliest records of Egyptian civilization. It is interesting to see that the structure of the debate has not changed much since then, though the interests and scientific methods are different.
Here is an outline. The bibliography is grossly incomplete since it reflects my own limited area of expertise (19th century American culture). --Jottce 08:22, 4 July 2006 (UTC)
The controversy over racial characteristics of ancient Egyptians refers to a conflict over the the racial identity of ancient Egyptians, dating back to 18th century natural history, which first attempted to systematically classify human beings. Although Egypt is geographically located in Africa, it occupies a liminal position between Africa, Europe, and Asia, and its status as civilization preceding ancient Greece and Rome gives it particular significance. Ancient Egypt was a cosmopolitan society, consisting of people of different and mixed ancestries, but participants in the debate have attempted to identify a single race to which the majority of ancient Egyptians belonged. Generally, the controversy has operated with post-Enlightenment notions of race, alien to ancient Egyptians themselves[1], but has in part supported the arguments with references to ancient Egyptian artifacts that seem to illustrate ethnic difference.
Although European scholars were the first to classify the ancient Egyptians within the categories of modern race theories, the controversy has been centered in the United States[2]. During the early 19th century, the controversy was closely linked to the slavery debate, in which ancient Egypt became the touchstone for Africa[3]: If ancient Egyptians were black, racial slavery--which was in large part justified by the claim that black Africans were incapable of civilization--would be shown as morally wrong. Following changing politics of race, the debate has shifted focus several times since then. Late 19th century Egyptologist Adolf Erman drew the dividing line in the controversy along disciplinary lines as between (European) ethnologists, who saw Egyptians as genetically linked to other Africans, and philologists, who saw them linguistically connected with Asiatic languages[4]. In the post-Civil Rights era, the debate has been shaped by the assertion from Afrocentrist scholars that (a) ancient Egyptians were black Africans and that (b) Greek culture drew much of its intellectual prowess from Egypt.
Different types of evidence have been used to contribute to the controversy: 18th century ethnologists drew from biblical sources, ancient Greek and Roman accounts and Egyptian artifacts and were mostly concerned with outward appearance as determinant of racial affiliation. In the 19th century, ethnology supplemented these types of evidence with craniology and linguistic evidence that became available after the deciphering of hieroglyphic writing. In the 20th century, then, genetic research on modern Egyptians and on the mummified remains of ancient Egyptians has added another source of evidence.
Early natural historians such as Johann Friedrich Blumenbach argued that ancient Egyptians were a mixture between "Hindus" and "Ethiopians."
Determining the genetic origin of ancient Egyptians, i.e. determining their predominant racial affiliation, has been rife with difficulties, not only because "race" itself is a conflicted concept that has changed shape significantly in its history[5]. Starting with the civil rights movement in the United States and post-colonialism in Africa and elsewhere, black scholars in all fields have intervened more forcefully to address issues of race. Ancient Egypt has become one arena of contention. Racial categories in the context of this most recent stage of the debate have been based mostly on genetics and traced through mutations; additionally they have been based on phenotype, lineage and geography. It is within this framework that the discussion of the racial identity of ancient Egyptians is generally framed today. However, because of the scarcity of usable genetic material, other clues, mostly visual and textual, continue to influence the debate.
In addition, since the scientific debate is inseparable from its political context, there is no consensus about racial categories themselves. The traditional anthropological terms Caucasoid, Negroid, and Mongoloid are widely discredited in scientific contexts and only used in narrowly defined instances[6]. The bipolar cultural categories black and white are even more inadequate when talking about genealogical affiliations, since skin tone varies within a single population grouped together by a shared history. Even a term such as "African" is considered reductive and must be framed as "from sub-Saharan and West Africa and portions of North Africa".
Following the work of the Senegalese historian and Egyptologist Cheikh Anta Diop, Afrocentrist scholarship argues that the character of ancient Egyptian society and culture most closely resembled that of other African cultures. It also asserts that Egypt remained essentially a "black" African civilization throughout the dynastic era. This is based on an interpretation and understanding of archaeological evidence pointing to Nubian, Badarian, and older Saharan cultures whose religious and cultural practices most closely resemble Egypt's own.[7]. However, it is important to acknowledge the history of Afrocentrist ideas in 18th and 19th century black thought[8].
Afrocentrist scholarship
Major responses to and critiques of Afrocentrist claims have come from the humanities. Speaking as a scholar of ancient Greece, Mary Lefkowitz's main objective is to refute the Afrocentrist claim that ancient Greek culture was derived from Egypt, she also addresses the issue of genealogy. The British historian Stephen Howe compares Afrocentrism to 19th-century European "ethnonationalism", arguing its ideas of a black Egypt are based on a notion of African cultural homogeneity that he sees as erroneous[9]. There have also been responses that take Afrocentrist positions seriously, even if they do not share them. Writing from a traditional Egyptologist's perspective, Ann Macy Roth argues that Egyptology can learn from Afrocentrist contentions if it begins to understand that they constitute valid responses to modern racism[10].
Responses to Afrocentrism
The controversy in the 19th century
Afrocentrist scholarship
Response to Afrocentrist scholarship
The idea of race
Egypt and race