The racial constituency of Egypt and the provenance of its civilisation were debated throughout the late-eighteenth and early-nineteenth centuries in the controversies surrounding slavery and its abolition. Simple error played a large part. Volney, for instance, thoroughly confused the mythic Ethiopians of Homer and Diodorus Siculus with the ‘other’ or Negroid Ethiopians of later ethnography (as we shall see), and could thus claim that ‘with them originated philosophy and the science of the stars’ (1795, 330). In 1801, the artist Luigi Mayer proposed that (what was left of) the head of the Sphinx was ‘strongly marked with the characteristics of the negro form’ (22) and devised plates to support this view. The first European travellers since Roman times who managed in the late-eighteenth century to penetrate the Nile Valley south of Aswan, on encountering the more rudimentary and, in some cases, cave-based Egyptian temples of Nubia, assumed them to be more ancient than their resplendent Egyptian counterparts and thus to have served as models for these (Waddington and Hanbury, 1822; Hoskins, 1835).
From a combination of such accounts, anticipated by late-eighteenth-century savants such as Volney, Dupuis, Champollion and James Bruce, and repeated throughout abolitionist polemics, arose the conviction that pharaonic culture was wholly Nubian or Ethiopian in origin. The error proved tenacious and was still proposed by Prince Puckler Muskau in 1845 (2: 94). Though Bayard Taylor in 1854 and Heinrich Brugsch in 1877 demolished beyond all doubt the fantasy of the greater antiquity of these Nubian temples, the primacy of Nubian/ Ethiopian culture had by then become, and would remain, an article of faith in the developing racial polemics of the nineteenth century. This claim continues to be made by Martin Bernal (1987, 244).
In Britain, a major chapter in the dispute was the ‘Negro Question’ controversy of the early 1850s, sparked by Carlyle’s ‘Occasional Discourse on the Nigger [sic] Question’ in Fraser’s Magazine (1848), to which Dickens contributed one of his most offensive pieces, ‘The Noble Savage’ (1853), and John Stuart Mill one of his most spirited retorts. Mill drew on the Abbé Grégoire’s work to argue that ‘the earliest known civilization … was a Negro civilization. The original Egyptians are inferred, from the evidence of their sculptures, to have been a Negro race: it was from Negroes, therefore, that the Greeks learnt their first lessons in civilization’ (1850, 29–30). Not surprisingly, both the reckless recruitment of ancient Egypt by white racists and the equally baseless counterclaims by Grégoire, Mill and others have resonated down the past century and a half in the utterances of, particularly, African-American cultural spokespersons in the cause of reclaiming the history and dignity of black people. In 1923, Marcus Garvey would assert: ‘Every student of history, of impartial mind, knows that the Negro once ruled the world, when white men were savages and barbarians living in caves; … that ancient Egypt gave the world civilization and that Greece and Rome have robbed Egypt of her arts and letters’ (cited by Lefkowitz, 1996, 7). Even before that, J.H. Breasted’s History of Egypt (1909) had attempted to provide an Africanist interpretation of the foundations of Egyptian civilisation, setting in motion ideas that, as we shall see, William Leo Hansberry and Cheikh Anta Diop would develop further.
At issue for such authors were the grossly racist and Eurocentric interpretations of African and specifically Egyptian civilisation then still current among Western authorities (see Trigger, 1990; Robertshaw, 1990; Holl, 1990; Mudimbe, 1994). According to then-dominant hyperdiffusionist theories, notably the so-called Hamitic hypothesis and Flinders Petrie’s supposition (1920, 1939) that the making of Dynastic Egypt had been the work of a ‘conquering Semitic race’, all African cultural achievement had been imported from outside the continent (MacDonald, 2003). Works such as Maurice Delafosse’s The Negroes of Africa (1922/1931) and H. Alimen’s The Prehistory of Africa (1955) developed notions that ancient Egyptian civilisation was the product of southwest Asian or ‘Hamitic’ conquest or settlement, and that civilisation had spread from Egypt into a benighted Africa. Bruce Trigger puts it well: ‘Diffusionists argued that all of these traits [of civilisation] originated outside of Africa and had been brought there by prehistoric white colonists, whose creative abilities had ultimately been destroyed as a result of miscegenation with blacks’ (1990, 311). He reminds us, however, that official pharaonic propaganda, emblazoned on all monumental art, had always served to enhance just such interpretations of Egyptian achievement by its xenophobic insistence on this civilisation’s superiority over all its African neighbours.
Many factors continue to contribute to the image of ancient Egypt as divorced from Africa. A traditional professional stand-off between orthodox Egyptologists on the one hand, and African archaeologists on the other, has tended to minimise – or at least to impair understanding of – the complex cultural and ethnic reciprocities of ancient north-east Africa out of which Egyptian prehistory emerged. At issue have been familiar professional sensitivities. In the words of J. Craig Venter, ‘discoveries made in a field by someone from another discipline will always be upsetting to the majority inside’ (cited by Gibbons, 2006, 7). One of the aims of the present study is to find some synergies among just such hitherto separate disciplines.
But a kind of racism has also been at work. Peter Mitchell remarks that ‘Ancient Egypt and its successors have often been treated so distinctly from the rest of Africa as to make one wonder whether they were located on the same landmass’ (2005, xix). As late as 1990, David O’Connor could complain that ‘the magisterial Cambridge Ancient History’ paid only cursory attention to Egypt’s relations with Africa (1990, 250), and Peter Robertshaw that ‘Egyptology and African archaeology … have long been remarkably divorced from each other, as is evident, for example, from the policy of various African archaeological journals of excluding Pharaonic Egypt from their terms of reference’ (1990, 12). According to Stuart Tyson Smith ‘the application of an anthropological approach in Egyptian and especially Nubian archaeology is still rare’ (2003, xvi). Conversely, Théophile Obenga has lamented that ‘Egyptology … is a source that has so far not been used for the history of Africa’ (1981, 78).
A further restraining factor may be the exploitative and imperialist foundations of Egyptology itself, and hence a reluctance on the part of Africanists to become involved. Phiroze Vasunia has no ‘doubt that Europe’s militarism and colonialism contributed directly to the founding and subsequent institutionalization of [the modern discipline of Egyptology]’ (2001, 245). An isolationist Nile-bound vision of ancient Egypt remains typical of much scholarly Egyptology – see, for instance, Toby Wilkinson’s Early Dynastic Egypt (1999), which offers a view startlingly limited compared to that found in his more recent Genesis of the Pharaohs (2003). As late as 2003, O’Connor would still criticise ‘the parochialism affecting the study of early Africa…. Egypt is typically discussed with little reference to other North African cultures’ (1).
Part of the problem, however, is both the scarcity of archaeological evidence of any substantial contact between ancient Egypt and the rest of Africa, and also the wild surmises that have been made in the context of such a vacuum. The proposition that there must have been substantial interaction between ancient Egypt and the rest of Africa is urged by both logic and Africanist sentiment. Maynard W. Swanson sums up the argument that may be made:
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