We also found more evidence of prehistoric astronomy in the region when southwest of Bagnold Circle, 250 kilometers (155 miles) away in the wadi Karkur Talh region on the north of Jebel Uwainat at a latitude of 21.98 degrees north, we found an apparent solstice sunset marker. At a large rock face with western exposure, which contains glyphs of giraffes and human figures, there is an outcrop or mound on the cliff face about twelve feet high. Scrambling up the rock mound, we found on it a number of skillfully engraved marks, including an obvious arrow pointing toward the northwest horizon. Returning with our electronic compass we measured the arrow as pointing approximately 26 degrees north of west, for an azimuth of 296 degrees, which marks the sunset on the day of summer solstice. This type of skillfully engraved rather than painted art tends to be on the more ancient end of the spectrum of rock art in the region. Given that the rock face also contained images of giraffes, we estimate that this solstice marker may predate 6000 BCE. In addition, when we were en route from Bagnold’s Circle to the Gilf Kebir region, traveling not far from the Libyan border, we came across a large, isolated standing stone that protruded more than 1 meter (3 feet) out of the ground. Located in the middle of a long, narrow, flat basin, or wadi, that was convenient for our jeeps to drive on because of its featureless flatness, this stone was smooth, cylindrically shaped, and standing only a few degrees off vertical. It appeared likely to have been placed by humans, possibly as a gnomon with both solar and phallic allusions.
Figure 4.16. Isolated standing stone north of Jebel Uwainat, oriented slightly off zenith and possibly a prehistoric gnomon.
Bagnold Circle gives all indications of being from the Neolithic epoch. It is probably a vestige left by traveling pastoralists whose temporary settlements dot the desert region that lead from the circle to Gilf Kebir and, in all likelihood, had their permanent abode in the wadis and plateaus of the Gilf Kebir and Jebel Uwainat mountains. The similarities of both the stones and the astronomical alignments of the Bagnold Circle and the Calendar Circle at Nabta Playa strongly suggest that we are dealing with the same Late Neolithic people whose images are present in the rock art of Gilf Kebir and, more prolifically, at Jebel Uwainat. Further, at Jebel Uwainat, the engraved arrow that we discovered and that quite plausibly was intended to mark the summer solstice sunset was probably associated with the same extended cultural group. More explorations are necessary to find the human remains of these astro-ceremonialists and navigators of the Egyptian Sahara, but these findings contribute another important aspect to our story of how their knowledge of astronomy, desert navigation, rudimentary agriculture, and domestication of cattle were important elements in the creation of the pharaonic state when, around 3400 BCE, the Sahara became super-arid and forced these mysterious desert dwellers to migrate eastward into the Nile Valley.
Figure 4.17. Elevated horizontal rock face at the northern edge of Jebel Uwainat, with engraved linear features and arrow pointing to the summer solstice sunset
So, with such thoughts in mind, we set out on what was a scorchingly hot and rugged drive to Gilf Kabir. We will pick up this story at the end of chapter 5. Meanwhile we ask: Who were these mysterious people that populated the Egyptian Sahara in such remote antiquity? How did they look? Can we refer to them as Egyptians? Perhaps most intriguing of all, where had they come from in the first place?
Figure 4.18. Thomas Brophy with aligned megalith AO, one of the few megaliths still standing in original position, 2003
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 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 deplorable2 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 distribu
tion 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 Hamitic-speaking 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
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. Ironically, Walker is himself a Black American who was born in Texas. According to Walker, “Afrocentrism is a mythology that is racist, reactionary, and essentially therapeutic. . . . [It] places an emphasis on Egypt that is, to put it bluntly, absurd. . . . There is no evidence that the ancient Egyptians were black as we understand that term today.”10
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