Dirty Hands: Assessing Egyptology’s Racist Past in the Age of Black Lives Matter

Photo by sophia valkova on Unsplash

Disclaimer: The views presented in the following text are independent and not reflective of views presented by the University of California, Berkeley, or the Badé Museum of Biblical Archaeology.

The Black Lives Matter (BLM) movement, with catalysts often traumatic, unconscionable, and profound, has pushed our country to climb towards a peak of tension which will (hopefully) be surmounted to create lasting, positive change regarding race relations, systematic racism, and police brutality. Fighting the good fight, as they say, requires a deeper level of engagement, not just combatting present-day thinking but also the entrenched and dismal traditions of our country’s history. The longitudinal and latitudinal fight against the many dubious facets of U.S. history creates countless corners around which issues such as racism may hide. Similarly, many academic disciplines are rooted in their founders’ societal enculturation. Operating within such disciplines, or absorbing knowledge disseminated from such fields, means that we must grapple with the racist, power-struggling, and intellectually-deceiving pillars upon which this country’s academia is grounded.

Egyptology, the study of the language, history, art, and civilization of ancient Egypt, is a discipline rooted in European and American colonialism. It is a discipline built by those in power, originally founded by white males, and often warped to fit their agendas. Founder Egyptologists defined ancient Egypt through its relationship to the West. The West, during the early formation of Egyptology as a discipline, included France, Germany, and Britain; these were the colonial powers at the time. I suggest that Western scholars were influenced by their countries’ colonialist agendas and their cultural baggage to emphasize the separation of ancient Egypt from Africa. (If you find yourself subconsciously realizing that Egypt is a country located on the continent of Africa, you are not alone). Ancient Egypt was established by European imperial powers as their direct ancestor. This was in stark contrast to then-modern Egypt being characterized by Imperial powers as uncivilized, ‘less than,’ or lowly. This sets up a dichotomy: when Europe was the direct inheritor of Egypt, it was successful. Now having been estranged by its Middle Eastern (or ancient African) influence, it has devolved. Maintaining this image was justification for the presence of European imperial powers in Africa. Fields like Egyptology were used to romanticize the Egyptian past and consequently brought about the birth of Egyptomania, the increased reception and popular interest of ancient Egypt in the West, which has only recently been explored by current scholars. One rationale given for European colonization was that it gave Africa (then-modern Egypt) the influence, money, and leadership it needed to ‘revive’ its glory days. [1]. 

I would like to be able to say that time has broken down or corrected the unseemly traditions from early Egyptology. Unfortunately, this statement is partially false, as shown by the following example. I am an Egyptologist and my department is titled “Near Eastern Studies.” The example of my department’s title (which they have elected to change this year) reaffirms that not all the euro-centric stipulations of Egyptology as a discipline have been corrected. BLM has cultivated an atmosphere where we question the why of how we feel and what we do. Egyptologists must adopt this critical lens and fully disconnect our discipline from its colonial past. Although current work is slowly accomplishing this goal, the founding fathers of Egyptology and their harmful biases continue to live on in the scholarship of modern, American Egyptologists. I, as a multi-racial, African American woman in the year 2021, now find myself tracing the lasting tendrils of racial bias in my discipline from its foundation through America’s more recent history. I would suggest that the initial separation of ancient Egypt from Africa by European scholars not only advanced the colonialist agenda of denying Egypt’s “African-ness,” but also bolstered the justification of slavery in the United States by implicitly countering the idea that the ancient culture of Egypt was an African culture. The cultural framework within which early Egyptology existed has created a foundation from which its perception could continue to impact scholarship. American scholars adopted European definitions of the relationship between Egypt and the West and used this mentality to support an atmosphere conducive to slavery.

The decipherment of hieroglyphs in 1822 prompted even more European interest in ancient Egypt with the decipherment of hieroglyphs in 1822, although European interest began earlier. This is concurrent with the spread of European colonialism across Africa. The question of ancient Egyptians’ racial identity was central to these discussions. This discourse was linked to the development of prejudiced ideas of racial hierarchy. The chauvinistic belief that human “races” compete --like predator and prey --with one another for success and fall into a strict social hierarchy is drawn from social Darwinism as well as obsolete pseudo-sciences, like craniometry and anthropometry.

In the early 20th century, the foundational English Egyptologist and archeologist Sir William Flinders Petrie directly engaged with the question of ancient Egyptian race by proposing what is now called the “Dynastic Race Theory.” This theory suggested that skeletal remains from Predynastic (pre-3100 BCE) sites in the south of Egypt indicated the presence of two different races. He claimed that one race possessed noticeably larger (read: Caucasian) skeletal structures and cranial capacities than the other. Petrie equated larger skulls with higher intelligence. He concluded that this proved the existence of a ruling elite that invaded Egypt from Mesopotamia. According to Petrie, the conquering of Egypt by this ruling elite also ensured Egypt’s future prosperity; the elites exposed the Egyptian population to advanced culture like architecture, writing, and religious systems. By implying that ancient Egyptian culture would not have developed successfully without a Mesopotamian influence, Petrie’s theory denied any African origin to the civilization of Egypt. Therefore, the success of ancient Egyptian culture was ascribed to be outside of Africa; and so ancient Egypt was removed from an African context. Such academic frameworks, which divorced Egypt from its African context, justified the imperialist and colonialist agenda of the 19-20th century English and other European scholars. These models or theories used the same racial hierarchy drawn from European institutional practices, including settler colonialism and slavery, to justify how a culture like ancient Egypt could have prospered despite being located on the continent of Africa. This separation from Africa also made the study of Egypt, identified in Europe since the time of the Greeks as a birthplace for (Western) civilization, more palatable for European scholars [2]. Again, it should be noted that early Egyptologists placed Western society (Europe & the U.S.) as the direct inheritor of Egyptian culture. Manipulating a historical context to justify (then) contemporary thinking to the point of establishing the superiority and inferiority of certain cultures also provided a basis for American studies of ancient Egypt.

Petrie's English perspective on issues of race is somewhat softer than that of his American contemporaries. American Egyptologist George Glidden and American surgeon and anthropologist Josiah C. Nott drew strongly upon 19th-century American ideas surrounding a racially-designated society. Glidden supplied Egyptian skulls to U.S. physician Samuel Morton, the founder of craniometry. Glidden urged Morton to determine whether the ancient Egyptians were African. In a 2020 lecture at the Hutchins Center for African & African American Research, modern Egyptologist Dr. Stuart Tyson Smith referenced a quotation from correspondence between Glidden and Morton. Glidden wrote, “I am hostile to the opinion of the African origin of the Egyptians…In any rate, they are not and never were Africans, still less negros.” Together Nott and Glidden authored the 1854 text Types of Mankind which was largely based on Morton’s theory, which asserted a racial hierarchy through biology, bolstering the notion of scientific racism. Nott echoed the sentiments of his colleagues. A slavery advocate himself, Nott held the notion that any racial mixing between ancient Egyptians and the inferior African civilizations, such as the Nubian Kingdom, resulted in the decline of ancient Egyptian civilization. In 1844, before the publication of Types of Mankind, Samuel Morton used the skull measurements provided to him by Glidden to concluded that “negroes were numerous in Egypt but their social position in ancient times was the same that it now is, that of servants and slaves.” Glidden, Nott, and Morton used scientific means to support ancient Egyptian civilization having a racially-designated society. This historical foundation aided in justifying the same societal constructs that were being supported in a pre-civil war United States.

Likewise, the then-contemporary racist biases in the antebellum United States permeated all aspects of American life, including Egyptology. Although racism and slavery would have undoubtedly still existed in America, Egyptology was indeed influenced by and used to justify the biases of the time. Glidden and Nott exemplified the manipulation of scholarship to fit contemporary needs by defining ancient Egypt as a successful society that abided by a racial hierarchy. By creating a historical example that justified and reinforced scientific racism, Glidden and Nott bolstered American pre-civil war thinking through history and science. The work of Glidden and Nott was also used by others who may have benefited from maintaining American racialized biases. Physicians like Henry Patterson or Samuel Adolphus Cartwright used the publication Types of Mankind to prove the inferiority of Black people and their predisposition to enslavement. These points exemplify an argument that was utilized to historicize and naturalize a world that included slavers and enslaved. Finding historical or scientific means to justify the inferiority of Black people contributed to the support of institutions like slavery.

Types of Mankind is a glaring example of how American historical scholarship was influenced by then-contemporary beliefs and society. Re-contextualizing the idea that Egypt is indeed a part of Africa and that separating the two is inextricably linked with historically racist acts like slavery will allow us to begin to understand how those entrenched ideals still affect our modern understanding of ancient cultures. In the February 2008 issue of National Geographic, there is a picture of an African-looking man wearing ancient Egyptian-looking garb overlaid with the heading “The Black Pharaohs: conquerors of ancient Egypt.” The article goes on to discuss a series of kings from the kingdom of Kush located in ancient Nubia (Nubia was located directly south of ancient Egypt) who came to rule ancient Egypt during the Third Intermediate Period (1070-712 BCE). The term “Black Pharaohs'' is presented as a celebration of black culture being found within a successful historical context. Opposingly, it calls into question why these specific Kushite pharaohs are black and not…. all other pharaohs? This implicit opposition reinforces the position that ancient Egyptians were not in themselves black (from Africa). The term “Black Pharaohs” reveals an Egyptological bias that still exists today that has framed Kush as black within the context of ancient Egypt, and ancient Egypt as well, not black. Aside from engaging with the actual question of whether ancient Egyptians can have dark skin or be continentally African, “Black Pharaohs'' engages with the modern concept of racism and presupposes it onto an ancient context, implying that the Kushite pharaohs are an acceptably black version of the implied not-black ancient Egyptians. This unconscious association diminishes blackness through comparison and its dubious origins can be traced right back to the Petries, Gliddens, and Notts of the Egyptological world.

A team of international scientists led by the University of Tubingen and the Max Planck Institute for the Science of Human History published a study in 2017. The study analyzed DNA from 151 mummified ancient Egyptian individuals radiocarbon dated to roughly between 1388 BCE to 426 CE. The mummies were recovered from a site located near the Faiyum Oasis, near modern Abusir el-Meleq in Egypt. The study revealed that most of the DNA showed high levels of affinity with populations of the Middle East. Only one DNA sample showed an affinity with North African populations. Although this study set out to scientifically ascertain the racial origins of ancient Egyptians, their sample pooling fails to account for the roughly 2,000 years of ancient Egyptian history that existed outside of the dates on which the sample site was occupied. Additionally, the study fails to include any other Nile Valley individuals for comparisons, or any sampled DNA from other Northern Egyptian locations. Even so, I am only enumerating a few of the problems with the study’s argumentation. 

Clearly, there are some glaring holes in the foundations of such a study, but the biases that the results support are clear and haunting. Mainstream scholars, with the present conversation in mind, protest that ancient Egyptians were neither black nor white and that the idea of race as we now know it may not have existed in ancient times. Overlaying the modern notion of race onto an ancient civilization only strives to seize ownership of ancient Egypt and perpetuate the tradition of any divide. Any characterization of the race of the ancient Egyptians is the product of modern cultural definitions, not of scientific studies. By American standards, yes, ancient Egyptians could be ‘Black.’ But the ideology, pain, and history that comes with being ‘Black’ in the U.S. do not hold true for ancient Egyptians. We should understand the historical connotations of what the imposition of modern cultural terms has done for our interpretations of history and adjust accordingly [2]. We should instead understand the interaction between disciplines like Egyptology and history without imparting modern notions onto history itself. 

This discussion is not meant to re-appropriate ancient Egyptian culture for black Africans or African Americans. The objectives of this piece are 1) to understand how history is interpreted through the lens of cultural baggage; 2) to explore whether the intent to separate ancient Egypt from Africa was malicious or otherwise; and 3) to assess the extent to which that intent permeated into other facets of culture and history. These are facts that we now need to grapple with and strive to counteract. The question of race in ancient Egypt stems from Egyptology’s central and disturbing role in the creation of theories related to racial hierarchies and scientific racism that led to the justification of discriminatory thinking and acts like those in the United States. Many early Egyptologists failed to ignore their cultural baggage when interpreting ancient Egyptian culture. Understanding the role that Egyptology and many other academic institutions played in disseminating racial viewpoints requires us to go back and assess what we consider facts in and of themselves. Additionally, such shortcomings require us to determine how their thinking has influenced our interpretations and scholarship. If this had been done and current scholarship had worked to correct the unjust distinction between ancient Egyptians and their neighbors like the Nubians, it is entirely possible that titles like “The Black Pharaohs” would be nonexistent.

Because of its location, the country of ancient Egypt was a crossroads between many of the ancient civilizations that surrounded it, but it should not be isolated or separated. Re-contextualizing the past allows us to understand how biases unfamiliar to the ancient cultures have affected how we see them, their people, and how they have been used in place of how we see ourselves and our own. In that same lecture mentioned above, Dr. Smith mentioned fellow Egyptologist Dr. Bruce Williams who pointed out that an ancient Egyptian transported to the American South in the days of segregation would not be allowed to sit at the Woolworth’s lunch counter, would have to go to the back of the bus and would be barred from facilities reserved for whites.

Lastly, I am not a deconstructionist. The field of Egyptology has somewhat awoken to the ties that bind and advances are being pursued. The scholarship of Dr. Stuart Tyson Smith previously mentioned aims to continuously engage in the conversation of relations between ancient Nubia and ancient Egypt. Dr. Stacy Davidson recently formed an entirely independent group of Egyptologists who have created a survey to collect data that directly addresses the challenges, inequalities, and lack of diversity presenting in the field. Dr. Vanessa Davies is engaging with the integration of previously ignored black colleagues into mainstream Egyptology. Ventures such as the American Sudensese Archaeological Resource Center (https://amsarc.org/), the William Leo Hansberry Society (https://hansberrysoc.org/), and the Nile Valley Collective (nilevalleycollective.org) are all creating organizational spaces for minority voices to be expressed.  Also inspiring is the newly formed diversity committee created by the American Research Center in Egypt, one of the most important professional organizations for Egyptologists. Such efforts help Egyptology to shed its colonialist past and reframe future research. The work still left to be done in de-racist-ifying Egyptology may not always belong at the forefront of modern contentious issues, but it is one problem that can be dismantled in support of the grueling climb that movements like BLM are pushing this country to overcome.

FOOTNOTES

[1] Henceforth, by the terms “Africa” and “African” I am referring to the continent and the peoples of all credence who live upon it.

[2] Ancient Egypt also plays a large role in the revival of and interest in Black diaspora culture in the United States. A subculture of Afrocentrism, Hotep culture, is a relatively new phenomenon in the U.S. that utilizes ancient Egyptian history as a symbol of Black pride. Ideologies like this have sparked contention between a perceived “ownership” of Egyptian history by Black Americans or modern Egyptians. The backlash to the Hotep movement points to a seizing of history and culture from modern Egyptians who argue they have a (more direct) historical ownership of ancient Egyptian culture. Ideally, history belongs to anyone with whom they identify. This piece offers no opinion in support of either side of this debate. 

BIBLIOGRAPHY OF WORKS CITED/SUGGESTIONS FOR FURTHER READING:

Baum, Bruce David. The Rise and Fall of the Caucasian Race: a Political History of Racial Identity. New York: New York University Press, 2008.

Davies, Vanessa. “Egyptological Conversations on Race and Science.” Rockefeller Archive Center Research Reports, 2018, 1–12. https://www.academia.edu/43587339/Egyptological_Conversations_on_Race_and_Science.

Derry, D. E. “The Dynastic Race in Egypt.” The Journal of Egyptian Archaeology 42 (1956): 80–85. https://doi.org/10.2307/3855126.

Gourdine, Jean-Philippe, Shomarka Keita, Jean-Luc Gourdine, and Alain Anselin. 2018. “Ancient Egyptian Genomes from Northern Egypt: Further Discussion.” OSF Preprints. August 16. doi:10.31219/osf.io/ecwf3.

Lefkowitz, Mary, and Guy Maclean Rogers. Black Athena Revisited. Chapel Hill, NC: Univ. of North Carolina Press, 1996.

Mokhtar, G., ed. General History of Africa II: Ancient Civilizations of Africa. Paris: United Nations Educational, Scientific, and Culture Organization, 1981. https://www.sahistory.org.za/sites/default/files/file%20uploads%20/general_history_africa_ii.pdf.

Said, Edward W. Orientalism. London: Penguin Books, 2019. 

Smith, Stuart Tyson. “Black Pharaohs? Egyptological Bias, Racism and Egypt & Nubia as African Civilizations.” Hutchins Center for African & African American Research. Lecture. Accessed February 22, 2021. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4QK7P0Bdpj0&ab_channel=HutchinsCenter.

Smith, Stuart Tyson. “People.” Essay. In Oxford Encyclopedia of Ancient Egypt 3, edited by Donald B Redford, 3:27–32. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2001.

Wilkinson Toby A.H. Early Dynastic Egypt. London: Routledge, 2001.

Young, Robert. “Egypt in America: Black Athena, Racism and Colonial Discourse,” July 21, 2007. http://robertjcyoung.com/Egypt.pdf. 

BIO

Jess Johnson is a multi-racial Ph.D. student in the Near Eastern Studies department at UC Berkeley. She received her B.A in Art History from New York University in 2013 and her M.A in Egyptian Art History and Archaeology and a Graduate Certification in Museum Studies from the University of Memphis in 2015-16. Her M.A thesis focused on the synecdochical relationship between Gate Guardians and the demon Ammit in New Kingdom Books of the Dead. Jess's interests include Art History, Demonology, and iconographic constructions within religious texts, tombs, and temple wall decorations. Jess is also interested in the museological well-being of Egyptian collections and their public outreach ability. She has over ten years of experience working in the museological field within university settings, galleries, and auction houses. She hopes to continue both her Egyptological and Museum Studies passions interchangeably through pursuing a career as a Curator.

(c) 2021 Jess Johnson