As you may, or may not know, I am the web-mistress of a little site called
"Ancient Egypt: the Mythology." This website has been my baby for almost 10 years now, and it has brought me a lot of joy during that time. It has been a sorely neglected baby for about a year now, but ambitious plans of a re-design, plus the chaos of moving from San Diego, California to South Carolina have both conspired to keep me too unmotivated to put serious work into it. My bad.
I still receive emails frequently about the site. Probably about half of them are questions or comments from kids regarding their schoolwork. "Thanks for your site, I got an 'A' on my report!" That kind of stuff. Given that the web site was originally put together as a school project of my own, those emails warm the cockles of my heart.
The other 50% of messages I get are about the race of the ancient Egyptians. I tried in my
FAQ to address those questions, but they keep coming. For the simple, "What race were they?" questions, I simply direct the writer to the FAQ and leave it at that. However, frequently, I get messages like this:
Subject: She was usually portrayed with black skin, although she was not a negro.
From: "GL"
Date: Sun, March 12, 2006 9:58 pm
To: Netjert@egyptianmyths.net
Egypt is in AFRICA GET A CLUE! THE TRUTH IS OUT!
The very intelligent writer is referring to my page about
color symbolism in ancient Egyptian art. This page and the FAQ itself seem to get a certain number of people all riled up. If you haven't read it yet, please do. It is quite interesting.
My typical response to messages such as this (and this is one of the nicer ones that I have received) is to lament that they can't afford a keyboard with a working caps lock button and delete the message. What else can I do? My FAQ already addressed the race question. To quote myself, "Ancient Egypt was the most successful and longest lasting civilization on Earth, and it was African." The people who choose to ignore this or misconstrue my words are not going to change their opinion of me or the race of the ancient Egyptians no matter what I reply. In the early years, I actually made some attempts to help them understand where I was coming from, and quickly learned that it is fruitless.
A few days ago, I received the following email (quoted in its entirety):
Subject: Queen Ahmose-Nefertari
From: "Nikki"
Date: Mon, April 17, 2006 6:10 pm
To: Netjert@egyptianmyths.net
I have thoroughly enjoyed reading about the Egyptian myths on your site. I am using information found on your site and other references for a paper I am writing. However, I was a little confused about one term "negro" found in the following:
"One of the few real-life people to be deified, Queen Ahmose-Nefertari was the patroness of the necropolis. She was usually portrayed with black skin, although she was not a negro."
"Negro" (not to be confused with the Spanish negro meaning the color black, etc) is a term "coined" during the slave trade of African slaves to America and other places. It refers specifically to these slaves and their descendant. "Negro" is no longer a politically correct term for usage in educational and or scholarly writings.
So your statement reads that Ahmose-Nefertari ..was not an African-American or a descendent of a member of the Trans-Atlantic slave trade...which of course sounds ridiculous.
Do you mean to say that she is not of African origin? That is slightly different from the offensive "negro" term. Or do you mean to say that she is African but not of the dark-skinned Africans? Or do you mean to say that she is not"Negroid" similar to Caucasoid and Mongoloid which are terms so archaic as to not even be found in common usage in magazines like National Geographic, etc which could find legitimate reasons to use such terms. Or do you mean to say she is not Nubian, from the region known as Nubia?
It is a little unclear in an otherwise excellent website what you are stating Queen Ahmose-Nefertari to not be. My assumption would be you mean to indicate that she is not of African origin or descent. That she is not racially mixed with any of the tribes of Africa. Which I'm sure you could find a clearer way of stating.
Besides that one term, I consider this site to be one of the best I have found so far.
Thank you, Nikki
My first thought when I opened the email was, "Oh here we go again!" But then as I read Nikki's message, I began thinking, "You know what, she has a point. A lot of people do assume the word 'Negro' to have a negative connotation. I certainly didn't intend to offend anybody, but I can see what she means."
The following is my reply to her:
Subject: Re: Queen Ahmose-Nefertari
From: netjert@egyptianmyths.net
Date: Mon, April 17, 2006 9:32 pm
To: "Nikki"
I simply meant that Ahmose-Nefertari was not a sub-Saharan African woman. I could have said that she wasn't a "sub-Saharan African woman," but I'm not sure that would have communicated clearly the point I was making. As the article that I mentioned her in refers to color symbolism in Egyptian art, I was using her depiction in Egyptian art as an example to show that skin color often had nothing to do with "race." Perhaps a better, or more politically correct term, would be "black." Again though, as the article was about colors, I thought that it would have been a confusing choice of words. "She was shown with black skin, although she was not black."
Ahmose-Nefertari was obviously African and of African decent. Egypt is in Africa after all. The clearest and most succinct way I could find to explain that she was not black was with the term negro. No offense is meant to anyone.
Obviously, word choice regarding races is a heated topic, and I appreciate your respectful question. Thank you.
April
I never anticipated that starting a site about ancient Egypt would involve me with issues about race and racism. After all, they lived
so long ago, why would anybody
care what race they were? I have since learned that there is a movement in the academic world (particularly by African-American scholars) to prove that ancient Egyptians were black and that the classical world (Greece, Rome) stole everything they ever knew from ancient Egypt. A prominent book published in 1987 called
Black Athena by Martin Bernal really kick-started this movement. There are several books out there specifically written to to refute his claims. Mr. Bernal wrote a book to refrute their refrutations, and so on.
Without getting into the nitty-gritty, based on the emails I have received, it seems that the motivation behind this school of thought is to prop up the self-esteem of African-Americans. The thinking goes, although stated more eloquently than this:
"Ancient Egyptians were black people. They did awesome stuff! African-Americans are black people! Ergo, we are awesome too!"
Well, first of all, ancient Egyptians weren't black people. Egypt was smack-dab at the crossroads of three continents, Africa, Asia and Europe. All archaelogical studies have shown that physically the Egyptians were a mixture of blacks, whites and Asians. Some Egyptians were more black than others, some were more white than others, and so on. (By black and white, I am speaking of physical characteristics only) But pretty much, they were a mix of everything. Further, the Egyptians themselves felt that they were unique from whites, blacks and Asians. In their eyes, they were something else. They were something
better: they were
Egyptian. Personally, I think that answer should be good enough for anybody. Let the Egyptians tell you what race they were.
Even if the ancient Egyptians were black, the ancestors of African-Americans were taken (in the worst sense of the word) from west Africa, south of the Sahara, 1,000 years after the ancient Egyptian civilization fell. A claim that African-Americans are descended from the Egyptians just not true.
Now, if African-Americans were not descended from the Egyptians, and I don't think they were, does that mean that African-Americans don't have any ancestors worth to be proud of? Of course not!
Mali (including Timbuktu) and Great Zimbabwe were both fantastic African civilizations built by black people and are worthy of the cultural pride that some African-Americans seem to need.
Further, how about the fantastic accomplishments of African-Americans themselves? African-Americans spent 400 years in slavery, and then were repressed and segregated even after emancipation for another hundred years. But within the past 50 years African-Americans have made unprecedented achievements such as:
- holding political office in the Senate and the House of Representatives, Secretary of State (including a black woman), governors, mayors and on and on
- sitting two justices on the Supreme Court
- winning multiple Academy awards (the incomprarble Sidney Poitier, Whoopi Goldberg, Louis Gossett, Jr. and of course Denzel and Halle.)
- currently there are four CEOs of Fortune 500 companies
Let's not forget the cultural contributions by African-Americans such as jazz, the blues and hip-hop. Plus, countless amazing black authors and poets such as Toni Morrison, Maya Angelou, Ralph Ellison and others...
Now that is something to be proud of...
Labels: ancient egypt, rant
