Egyptian identity: history, culture, and national consciousness

Egyptian Identity

The Identity of Egyptians

The controversy about the identity of the ancient Egyptians has been going on for generations, but only now that (everywhere in the world) Africans are achieving their much-delayed social and financial equity with Europeans has the controversy really heated up. Previously, there were few voices "out there" to contradict white redactionist claims that the great civilizations of ancient Africa had their origins among white people. For the most part, the few critics of such theories were white themselves, and not too sorry when the white-origins advocates tried to shut them up. Sometimes it was like, "Ok, I have done my duty as a scientist by remarking how unlikely it is that whites founded any of Africa's great ancient civilizations. Now that everyone has jumped on my case about it, I can relax and follow the crowd with a clear conscience."

In point of fact, some of the most hysterical claims about the non-black origins of African civilizations were put forth. Great Zimbabwe, for instance, has been attributed to all kinds of non-black people, from a lost tribe of Israel to a branch of Japeth's (the son of Noah's to whom is attributed the siring of the white-races) family that somehow escaped mention in the Bible. One of the champions of this point-of-view was non-other than Cecil Rhodes, for whom the Rhodes Scholarship was named as well as Rhodesia; in his later years he became a notorious racist and said things about indigenous Africans that would make him look like a lunatic had he said them today.

Of course, racism is the driver for such outrageous denials but it is racism that is based on a simple misunderstanding. If a casual observer (especially a white one) is asked who inhabits Africa today, he responds by saying "blacks" but what he really means is Negroes. However, while most Africans are dark skinned and might even describe themselves as black, most Africans are not necessarily Negroes. In fact, the world is full of places where "black people" have developed who are not Negroes; Australia has the Aborigines, South India has the Dravidians, and the South Pacific has the Solomon Islanders; though these groups resemble each other in many ways they are completely unrelated to each other, and similarly, African Negroes are very largely unrelated to the other ethnic groups in Africa. They are about as related as say the Italians are to the Irish. The modern population of Egypt is largely composed of what anthropologists refer to as people of "Eastern-Hamitic Stock." This means that modern (as well as ancient) Egyptians are more closely related to the North African Berbers, Tuaregs, Fulas, and Tibbus than to Negroes. Egyptian Negroes live in the southern part of the country (which borders on ancient Nubia) and account for less than 1% of the modern population of Egypt.