The First Ethiopians. Malvern van Wyk Smith
art must be seen as projecting images of Egypt’s traditional ‘enemies’ quite different from conceptions of the same people in Egyptian daily life. The pharaonic topos of the ‘wretched Nubian’ was part of official propaganda and thus dominated Egypt’s monumental tradition, at the same time as the realistic apprehension of Egypt’s Nubian neighbours in terms of mimesis may have been much less hostile. This may well be so, but it must remain an open question whether subsequent observers (Greeks, Romans and early Christians) would have understood, let alone sustained, such a subtle distinction.
Nevertheless, complex as the history may be of the extent to which the later pharaohs of the Eighteenth Dynasty and their Ramesside successors thought of themselves as close to or very different from Nubians, what is undeniable is that it would be precisely the representation of the non-Nubian African or Negroid type which emerged in this period that would become an established ethnic icon and would, in turn, determine later Greek and Roman visual stereotypes of African peoples, as both Frank Snowden (1970) and Jean Vercouter (1976) have pointed out. Vercouter links the emergence of this image specifically to the continuing threat from Kushite Nubia from the fifteenth century BP onwards, resulting in the development and circulation of an ‘extremely schematic’ Negroid type that became not only standard in Greece and Rome, but iconic in much Western art: ‘the canons adopted by the Egyptians for the iconography of the Black determined, at least partially, those of the Western world at large’ (1976, 33, 46).
Depictions of Nubian and other African peoples, then, were not always stereotyped, and distinctions among them, and between them and Egyptians, were not always readily made, though frequently emphasised. Such contradictions and paradoxes in Dynastic ethnography are inevitable in the context of the massive span of Egyptian history. Not only did aesthetic conventions and ethnic perceptions change – even in the very slow cultural clockwork of three millennia of Dynastic Egypt – but so too did both the ethnic make-up of Egypt and its ruling castes, as well as its political imperatives and affiliations. Five hundred years after Ramesses II, when the Nubian Kushite pharaohs of the Twenty-fifth Dynasty ruled Egypt, a radically different pharaonic iconography obtained, as is obvious from a comparison of the representations of the Nubian ruler Taharqa (690–664 BCE) on his shrine (now in the Ashmolean Museum, Oxford) with those of Ramesses himself. And if one accepts that Taharqa is depicted as unmistakably ‘African’ in the sense of being at least schematically ‘Negroid’, one would have to concede that many of these ‘Negroid’ features also appear in representations of several pharaohs of earlier millennia.
Indeed, if one surveys a cross-section of the extant likenesses of Egypt’s pharaohs ensconced in the world’s great collections of Egyptology, it becomes clear that the crucial question to ask is not whether these rulers were ‘African’, but which of Africa’s peoples they represent, and why they developed the sharp distinctions between themselves and other Africans that they did.
Among such unmistakably African images we might count the fragment of a head presumed to be that of Narmer (ca 3100 BCE), the putative founder of Dynastic Egypt, now in University College, London (UC 15989); or the limestone statue of Khasekhemwy (ca 2700 BCE), last king of the Second Dynasty, now in the Ashmolean Museum, Oxford; or the granite head of an unidentified Third-Dynasty king (ca 2600 BCE) now in the Brooklyn Museum (46.167); or the figure of King Sahure (ca 2458–2446 BCE) now in the New York Metropolitan Museum; or, also in University College, the bust of Senwosret III (ca 1878–1841 BCE; UC 13249) of the Twelfth Dynasty – another Dynasty which Martin Bernal considers to have been ‘black’ (1987, 242).
Amenhemhat I (1991–1962 BCE), founder of this Dynasty, made much of the fact that he was a ‘son of a woman of Ta-Seti’, from the Aswan region (Franke, 1995, 737). Frank Yurco, commenting on two heads purportedly of Amenhemhat I (now in the Metropolitan Museum of Art), mentions that ‘extant royal portrait heads depict Amenhemhat I with strongly Nubian features, and such features recur among his successors’ (2001, 49, figures 2.8a and 2.8b). These two portrait busts are, however, described on the museum’s own display labels as not of Amenhemhat I, but of an unknown pharaoh of the much more diffracted Thirteenth Dynasty, when more than 70 pharaohs ruled sporadically in different parts of Egypt over a period of a century and a half. The busts represent a markedly ‘narrow African’ – indeed, specifically ‘Khoisanoid’ – figure, suggesting that this ruler descended from the most ancient Nile Valley stock.
Jean Leclant has argued that the Eleventh Dynasty had also had strong Nubian connections. A life-sized statue of the founder of the Dynasty, Mentuhotep I (ca 2060–2010 BCE), also in the New York Metropolitan Museum, is an unmistakably Nilotic figure. A relief from the mortuary temple of Mentuhotep II (ca 2000 BCE) at Thebes shows one of his queens as distinctly Nubian or ‘African’ (Leclant, 1997a, 76, cat. 84). A carved silhouette relief of the king in the same temple shows him with strongly Nubian features, including the ‘Nubian fold’ of later Kushite pharaohs, while a painted sandstone figure, also from here, shows him with a black face – although this may have been the iconic colour of the ‘dead’ Osiris (Oakes, 2003, 55.). But by the Middle Kingdom, the Aswan or First-Cataract region had been a zone of cultural and ethnic interaction for millennia, and many members of Egypt’s ruling elites deriving from this area would have been of some or even dominant Nubian origin.
For the many such, two quartzite statues of Heqaib, a Sixth Dynasty official from Elephantine, dating from about 2300 BCE and now in the Aswan Museum and the New York Metropolitan Museum of Art respectively, are prototypical (Franke, 1995, 741–742; Bonnet, 1997a, cat. 40). The powerful round head, broad face, sturdy neck, full lips and pronounced ‘Kushite’ naso-facial folds declare Heqaib to have been not only Nubian, but the kind of Old-Kingdom model that the Twenty-fifth Dynasty Kushite pharaohs would invoke a millennium and a half later as part of a policy of archaisation aimed at establishing their Nubian culture and iconography as features that had simply always been part of the Egyptian heritage.
I shall return to these matters, but we must now turn to the questions around which most of my discussion so far has been circling: just who were the ancient Egyptians, and where had they, as well as fundamental features of their culture, come from? While the discussion so far might suggest that they could simply be considered as having always been ‘black African’ or a version thereof, such an image was increasingly not part of their self-perception.
We have to turn to some of the awkward ambivalences and major controversies that lurk behind the issues raised so far. The questions just raised may be rephrased as follows: Was Dynastic Egyptian civilisation wholly (or at least foundationally) ‘African’ and/ or ‘black’ in origin, character and self-perception, in the sense in which these epithets would now be understood by, say, West African or African-American cultural historians and theorists? Put differently, what evidence and arguments could be put forward to support the reiterated claims of one such theorist, Molefi Kete Asante, that ‘ancient Egyptians were black’ (cited by Celenko, 1996,116)?
The issue has over the last two decades become inextricably wound up in two related debates in the ‘culture wars’ of the North American academy. One of these is the discourse of Afrocentrism, a militant recuperative project inspired by an assertive African-American redefinition of the foundations and history of Western civilisation. The other debate, often recruited in support of the former, is the spirited controversy raised by Martin Bernal’s study of the reputedly ‘Afro-Asiatic’ (i.e., Semitic-Phoenician-Egyptian) origins of Greek and hence Western civilisation in his work Black Athena (1978). A cynic might observe that my earlier questions, put this way, would appear to have little to do with either ancient Egypt or ancient Africa, but everything to do with contemporary racial and cultural politics, and are therefore best abandoned. These issues cannot, however, be ignored in a study of the origin and history of European perceptions of Africa and its people, and of the impact on such perceptions of the ideas that ancient Egyptians had of themselves and of their relationship with the rest of the Africa they knew. I must therefore attempt, first to assess the provenance, status and continuing motivations of relevant Afrocentrist projections of ancient Egypt as ‘black’ and ‘Negroid’, and then turn to the more subtle and challenging thesis of Martin Bernal.
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