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ETHIOPIA, EGYPT AND THE MATTER OF AFRICA

We judge of the ancients improperly when we make our own opinions and customs a standard of comparison.

—Comte de Volney, Travels through Syria and Egypt_, 1787, 1: 275

Ethiopia fits few categories, prejudices or preconceptions. It maintains an ill-defined separateness from the rest of Africa, yet has links with Arabia and the Middle East of which it is not a part.

—David W. Phillipson, ‘Ethiopia’, 2008, 519

In 1681, Hiob Ludolf (or Job Ludolphus, as his title page called him), probably the first European scholar to make a thorough study of the history and culture of the country that came to be known as Abyssinia or Ethiopia, pointed out the pitfalls of his enterprise: ‘Concerning [the Ethiopians] there have been many large, but few true relations…. Besides that the name of “Ethiopians”… is common to so many nations, that it has rendered their history very ambiguous’ (1681, 1). And to make matters worse, complained Ludolf, this protean uncertainty surrounding Ethiopia had over the centuries attracted myth-making on a large scale:

Others there are who, to waste idle hours, and designing some fabulous inventions, or to present the platform of some imaginary commonwealth, have chosen Ethiopia as the subject of their discourse, believing they could not more pleasantly romance, or more safely license themselves to fasten improbabilities upon any other country (1–2).

The following two instances attest to just how bizarrely fanciful late-Renaissance European conceptions of the whereabouts and status of Ethiopia had become. William Cuningham, writing in the mid-sixteenth century, managed to patch together in his description of Meroë (on the Sudanese Nile and, as we shall see, one of the ancient locations of ‘Ethiopia’) a rag-bag of classical, biblical, Aksumite, patristic, Arab and crusader myths:

Meroë is an island of Nilus, sometimes called Saba, and now Elsaba, where St. Matthew did preach the Gospel. From hence came the Queen of Sheba, to hear Solomon’s wisdom. From hence also came Candaces, the queen’s eunuch, which was baptized of Philip the Apostle. But at present it is the seat of the mighty prince that we call Preter [sic] John (1559, fol. 185).

Every statement here is not merely mythic but, even as myth, thoroughly garbled. Yet Pierre d’Avity, writing half a century later, managed to assemble a riot of fantastic claims about Ethiopia that made Cuningham’s look tame:

In our time, [Prester John of Ethiopia] took the king of Mozambique in battle. He put to rout the Queen of Bersaga at the Cape of Good Hope; defeated Termides, prince of the Negroes, towards the West; and vanquished the king of Manicongo, which is right against the Island of St. Thomas, under the Equinoctial line; and afterwards one of his captains put Azamur, Basha to the Great Turk at Suaquem, thrice to rout (1615, 1086).

This Prester John is a veritable Tamburlain. Even if one accepts that as late as the seventeenth century, the whereabouts and nature of many parts of the world were for Western observers still dim and speculative, these extracts suggest that Ethiopia (or the concept ‘Ethiopia’) was at the time not only startlingly mythotropic, but had been so for a very long time. It would seem that in the notion of ‘Ethiopia’ we have to deal with a place or a space that for complex geo-historical reasons had, over many centuries, acquired rich and densely emblematic associations in European (or, initially, Mediterranean) worldviews – associations that were only very loosely connected with the actual sites or realities of the various cultures known as ‘Ethiopian’ in ancient and early modern history. My first chapters will attempt to give to some of these earliest iconic ‘Ethiopias’ a local habitation and a name.

Some confusions about the ancient identity of ‘Ethiopia’ are readily clarified; others are more elusive and will be constantly returned to in this study. In the broadest classical sense, ‘Ethiopia’ was simply a term for all of sub-Egyptian and sub-northern-littoral Africa. Greek authors from Herodotus to Diodorus Siculus increasingly confined the term to Meroitic Nubia, but would also speak vaguely of ‘other Ethiopians’ from elsewhere in Africa. By late-classical and early-Christian times, the term ‘Ethiopia’ had become more specifically attached to Aksumite and then Abyssinian Ethiopia. But mythographically, ‘Ethiopia’ alternately expanded and shrank amoeba-like in the Mediterranean and European imagination, from the time of Herodotus up to the seventeenth century, construed as anything from a small and mysterious polity at the undiscovered headwaters of the Nile to a vast landmass including almost all of sub-Saharan eastern and central Africa.

The tendency to elide distinctions among different ‘Ethiopian’ cultures of ancient north-eastern Africa that would eventually be known as Nubia, Sudan, Ethiopia and/ or Abyssinia has lasted till relatively recently. Thus Wallis Budge’s seminal work of 1928, A History of Ethiopia, Nubia and Abyssinia, while explicitly setting out to unpick the confusions surrounding the identity of ‘Ethiopia’, promptly resurrects all the ancient elisions by treating the history of Kushite Nubia on the Upper Nile and that of Aksumite and Solomonic Abyssinia as a seamless narrative. On the other hand, Budge rightly recognised another ambivalence about the ancient identity of ‘Ethiopia’ that lies at the heart of the present study; namely that where the ‘Ethiopians’ of Herodotus, Diodorus Siculus, Strabo, Pliny and other classical writers were not clearly the proto-Abyssinians, the term was readily stretched to include peoples as sharply divergent as those of the ancient civilisations of Kush, Napata and Meroë on the Upper Nile, as well as ‘the Negroes and Negroid peoples who inhabit the hot, moist lands which extend from Southern Abyssinia to the Equator’ (1928, viii). As we shall see, such fictions of assimilation would reverberate down the centuries to our own.

Whatever the ancient Mediterranean world might have understood under the rubric ‘Ethiopia’, as well as other terms for what we now know as ‘Africa’, must initially have been mediated through Egypt. While ancient Egyptians may have had no concept of a continent we know as ‘Africa,’ they nevertheless fostered a host of different and often conflicting notions of the lands and peoples to their south, notions in turn inherited by later Mediterranean cultures. One might say of Ethiopia and Egypt what Ladislas Bugner, introducing the first volume of the mammoth survey The Image of the Black in Western Art (1976), says about the origin of European images of black people: ‘From the beginning to the end of the classical period Egypt continued to disseminate the image of the black’ (6). My first chapters will therefore be concerned with such conceptions the ancient Egyptians might have had of the lands and peoples to the south of their natural border with Nubia, the First Cataract. I shall also explore several related and still contentious issues, such as arguments for the African origins and character of ancient Egypt itself; and, more pertinently, the extent to which Dynastic Egyptians acknowledged these, and, if they did, how they configured such putative connections.

Of course, to speak of Egypt, Ethiopia and Africa in the above terms is to invoke a series of anachronisms. The question whether ancient Egyptians thought of themselves as ‘white’ or ‘black’ or ‘African’, and of Nubian and other ‘Ethiopians’ as more ‘black’ or ‘African’ than themselves, presupposes ethnocultural distinctions that may have had little meaning between two and five thousand years ago. As far as human time goes, the continent itself has always been there, but the concept of ‘Africa’ itself has always been a construct. Ran Greenstein reminds us that any investigation into the ancient historical identity of the continent and the relation among any of its parts must always be a contentious operation:

Africa did not exist prior to its discursive constructions in political and geographical terms by Europeans and indigenous people alike. This is not to deny that the landmass we now know as Africa exists independently of our conceptions of it. Rather, it is to argue that it derives its meaning as a coherent unit from such conceptual operations (1993, 22).

He also points out that in the ancient Mediterranean world ‘southern Europe, north-eastern Africa, and western Asia [might] have comprised a single “continent”’ (22) in ways that would have seemed much more coherent than the geographically determined identity of Africa that we now recognise. In similar vein, Martin W. Lewis and Kären E. Wigen (1997) propose a North Africa aligned to the ancient Middle East in such a way that it is hardly part of the sub-Saharan continent at all. The difficulties posed by such ‘conceptual operations’, and by any attempt to retrieve from antiquity those that might have shaped and expressed Egyptian and hence later classical notions of ‘Ethiopia’ and the larger domain that would come to be known as ‘Africa’, are manifold.

Not only is information on the distant past of any of the territories that would over time come to be known as ‘Ethiopia’ often extremely thin, but the various ‘Ethiopias’ with which this study is concerned seem always to have been mythic constructs in the symbolic discourse of another culture. The term was unknown to the ancient Egyptians; it was in fact coined by the Greeks.

When Homer invokes the land of the Ethiopians early in the Iliad – ‘Zeus left for Ocean Stream to join the worthy Ethiopians at a banquet, and all the gods went with him’ (1: 423–424) – and again in the Odyssey – ‘Poseidon had gone among the far-off Ethiopians – the Ethiopians who dwell sundered in twain, the farthermost of men, some where Hyperion sets and some where he rises’ (1: 22–24) – he was as likely to have been referring to some dimly understood, even actual, geographical entity as he was to have been employing a formulaic trope for legendary space. Classicists usually point out that Homer’s ‘eastern’ and ‘western’ Ethiopians are inspired by myth-enshrouded conceptions of the identities of dark-skinned peoples on either side of the ‘Erythraean Sea’ or the north-west Indian Ocean – they are Indians and sub-Egyptian Africans (Heubeck et al., 1988; Mayerson, 1993).

I shall return to these identifications. For the moment it is sufficient to note that even if Homer’s ‘Ethiopia’ was a literary trope as much as a locality, somewhere it must have had its origins in the cultural exchanges of archaic Mediterranean peoples, just as its identity must have been shaped first by the cosmologies of ancient Egypt, and then by those of archaic Greece. Frescoes at Knossos and Thera depict Negroid Africans, so Mycenaeans must have had a word for ‘Negro’, which was likely to have been the original of the Greek άίθίοψ (Heubeck et al., 1988, 1: 75–6).

Further problems arise when one considers the immense time spans involved, and the inevitable conceptual and epistemological distortions involved in a modern assessment of what Homer and his sources could have understood by the term ‘Ethiopia’. It is now generally agreed that the Homeric epics had taken their present shape by about the mid-eighth century BCE (Heubeck, 1988; Coleman, 1996), but by then Dynastic Egyptians must have had concepts of the area Homer calls ‘Ethiopia’ that would have been at least two millennia older. As we shall see, the seventh and eighth centuries BCE constituted a crucial period of transformation in Egyptian-African relations. Furthermore, Egyptians did not use the terms ‘Ethiopia’ and ‘Ethiopians’, but spoke more generally of ‘nehessy’, meaning something like ‘southern foreigners’, to indicate more or less the same people.

We cannot presume a straight transference of such concepts from one culture to another, just as we cannot assume that cross-cultural perceptions and transactions would have happened in any framework we might now recognise, let alone share. We cannot really tell through what symbolic schemas, by what complex mythic transactions, the ancient peoples of the Mediterranean world saw themselves and others. We had best assume that all perceptions of people, space and time might have been predominantly emblematic rather than naturalistic, and not necessarily expressions of the geo-historical knowledge of the time; but rather metaphysical explanations: part-realistic, part-mythic understandings of how the world and its people had come to have the identities that they were thought to have (Finley, 1978; Hartog, 1996; Dougherty, 2001).

In his intriguing investigation of the complex semiotic code whereby Australian aborigines believed that they ‘sang’ their world into existence, Bruce Chatwin suggests that other pre-modern cultures may have had similar symbolic ways of encoding their physical world: ‘the whole of Classical mythology might represent the relics of a gigantic “song-map”…. [Classical legends] could all be interpreted in terms of totemic geography’ (1987, 130). To ask, then, what the Homeric poet(s) might have understood by the term ‘Ethiopia’, and how such an understanding might have come about, is not merely to invite enquiry into ancient geographic knowledge (although it is that, too), but rather to embark on mythography – a quest for the emblematic configurations of ancient worldviews. Various ancient Mediterranean peoples must have had diverse and extensive contacts with various parts of North Africa (to which we shall come), but the conceptual contexts in which such contact developed, and how it was understood, must first be examined.

If, for the ancient Mediterranean world, ‘Ethiopia’ was a floating signifier, a notional configuration of parts of the world to the south of Egypt, whatever initial definitions the term had were likely to have originated in Egypt itself. Ancient Egyptians must themselves have had an image of Africa – or of what they understood that landmass to be – and thus of ‘Ethiopia’. Such conceptions of Africa must have varied substantially over the three millennia of Dynastic Egyptian experience, given that Egyptian notions of cultural and political affiliations with the lands beyond Upper Egypt fluctuated constantly between hostility and alliance, between recognition of affinity and insistence on difference.

Deeply implicated in this process of image formation would have been the perceptions Egyptians might have had of themselves as belonging to and deriving from the same world as their southern neighbours – or not, as the case may be. This is a contentious issue – witness the fierce controversies that have surrounded Martin Bernal’s claims for the Afro-Asiatic origins of not only Egyptian but also Greek civilisation (1987; Lefkowitz and Rogers, 1996), and to which I shall return. The evidence suggests that a substantial homogeneity of culture between the pre-Dynastic peoples of Upper Egypt and the populations of Nubia and lands further south was gradually eroded (or increasingly less readily acknowledged) as the Dynasties unfolded, until by the time of the late New Kingdom, about 1200 BCE, the pharaonic elite saw themselves – and had themselves depicted on tomb and temple architecture – as markedly different from their southern neighbours. It is from this period (the late New Kingdom) that one of the most startling confirmations of Dynastic Egypt’s proto-racism dates, namely the ‘Hymn to Aten’, ascribed to the apostate pharaoh Akhenaten:

You made the earth as you wished…

You set every man in his place…

Their tongues differ in speech,

Their characters likewise;

Their skins are distinct,

For you distinguish the peoples (Lichtheim, 1976, 2: 131–2).

In other words, people from south of the First Cataract – Kushites, Nubians, Ethiopians (as they would variously come to be called) – with whom pre-Dynastic Egyptians may have had a great deal of affinity, were increasingly cast as tropes of difference in the developing Egyptian narrative of self-realisation over three millennia. It would be largely as such iconic ‘others’ in an evolving Egyptian symbology that Ethiopians would first have entered the cosmology and ethnography of Mediterranean peoples.

Modern visitors to the great rock-cut main temple at Abu Simbel, constructed early in the reign of Ramesses II (1290–1224 BCE; Baines and Málek, 1980, 184), are usually so overawed by the three surviving colossal external statues of its handsome patron that they tend to hurry on to see the images of the pharaoh repeated on every wall and column inside. Thus, they often miss the life-sized figures engraved on the base walls of the colossi that flank the entrance – two long lines of bound prisoners, Africans on the south side, Asians on the north. The features of the African prisoners could not be more startlingly different from those of the pharaoh above them – emaciated figures, exaggerated lips, bulbous noses, sloping foreheads and closely curled hair make up what to the modern viewer can only be a gross caricature of Negroid physiognomy, deliberately set up in contrast to the image that the Egyptian ruler and his elite wished to project of themselves.

Confronted with such a spectacle, a contemporary observer must have great difficulty agreeing with David O’Connor’s verdict that ‘Egyptians, like other ancient peoples, seem to have been free of racial prejudice as we understand it today’ (2003, 159). At what point, one must ask, does racial caricature become ‘racial prejudice as we understand it today’? The verdict of Edwin M. Yamauchi seems closer to the mark: ‘Egyptians were among the most ethnocentric of all peoples, and generally regarded black Africans of Nubia, as well as all other non-Egyptians, with contempt’ (2001, 1). This is a point to which I shall return.

When the temple was first cleared of sand in the early nineteenth century, the distinctions between pharaoh and captives were even more obvious. Charles Leonard Irby and James Mangles, who visited the temple in 1817, soon after Belzoni had re-opened it, exclaimed on the ethnographic diversity they at once discerned. They saw:

painted in glowing colours, the costumes of the various tribes of the interior of Africa, at a date so remote, that one knows nowhere else to look for any description either of their manners or their custom…. Some of the captives are perfectly black, and have all the characteristics of the tribes of the interior of Africa – such as woolly hair, thick lips, long sleek limbs, etc; others are of a lighter hue, not unlike the present race of Nubians (1823, 83).

Belzoni himself had been struck by these attempts at ethnographic naturalism when he had first seen the murals, and had read their fresh tints to indicate ‘the Egyptians to have been of the same hue as their successors, the Copts, some of whom are nearly as fair as Europeans’ (1820, 239).

The same spectacular and stylised contrasts between elite Egyptian, modest Nubian and exaggeratedly Negroid appearances may be found all over Egypt in tomb and temple art of the middle and late New Kingdom, perhaps most famously in many of the artefacts from the tomb of Tutankhamun (1333–1323 BCE) now in the Cairo Museum. Contrast, for instance, the delicately poised figures of the young pharaoh and his queen on the back of their gold and enamelled throne with the burlesqued and contorted images of bound African captives on the footstool in front of it. The recent careful yet controversial reconstruction of Tutankhamun’s face published in the National Geographic (Williams, 2005) has re-emphasised the entirely non-Negroid identity of the young king.

Other well-known examples of such distinctions from the same period include the tribute scene in the Theban tomb of Huy, Viceroy of Kush in the reign of Tutankhamun, depicting various Nubian and Nilotic peoples carefully distinguished in dress and hairstyles, but emphatically Negroid in feature (Siliotti, 1998, 12–13, 244–5). Frank J. Yurco has reassessed the wall reliefs in the tombs of Seti I (1306–1290 BCE), father of Ramesses II, and of Ramesses III (1194–1163 BCE) at Thebes, which show distinctive ethnic types that had been obscured and misrepresented in the past to support arguments that ‘Egyptians and Kushites were shown alike with dark complexions and similar costumes’ (1996c, 110). In fact, Yurco argues, modern photography reveals that the figures in both tombs show four distinctly different physical types, labelled as follows: Egyptians (Rmt), Kushites (Nhsy), Libyans (Jjhnw) and Syro-Palestinians (‘Aamw), ‘each ethnic type … depicted with a distinctive complexion and in representative dress. Egyptians were regularly depicted as red-brown, distinctly lighter than the black Nhsy (Kushites)’ (109). These regular and careful ethnic differentiations in New Kingdom art are confirmed by O’Connor and Reid (2003, 13).

Indeed, Yurco is only one among many recent scholars whose re-examination of badly deteriorating sites confirms what C.K. Wilkinson and M. Hill’s seminal Egyptian Wall Paintings (1983) revealed long ago: the art ‘clearly demonstrates the different features of captive Bedouins, Nubians, Libyans, Cretans, and Babylonians’ (26–7, cited by Shavit, 2001, 150). Regine Schulz and Matthias Seidel have studied five surviving polychrome tiles from the mortuary temple of Ramesses III (1998, 396, figure 115; Egyptian Museum, Cairo, JE 36547) and have come to the same conclusion: the tattooed Libyan is cream-coloured, the Nubian black, the bearded Syrian yellowish, the Hittite deeper yellow, the Shashu Bedouin very light (for illustrations, see Shaw, 2000b). When Ippolito Rosellini visited the tombs of Seti I and Ramesses III with the Franco-Tuscan Expedition of 1828–1829, when the tomb decorations were still brilliantly vivid, he was able to record very similar distinctions in detail and to publish them in the nine volumes of his I Monumenti dell’ Egito e della Nubia (1832–1844). Timothy Kendall has looked at the way in which bodily scarification among Nilotic subjects is depicted in mid-New Kingdom tomb art as an indicator of ethnic differences, and has concluded that body art among contemporary Nuer, Shilluk and Dinka peoples can be closely matched with that ‘on faces of non-Egyptian Africans represented in Egyptian art from the fourteenth century BC’ (1996, 84). The artists and the masters of these tombs had clearly defined notions of the ethnic differences between themselves and other north-east-African peoples.

But perhaps the most definitive evidence that official art of the mid-New Kingdom wished, when it mattered, to make unambiguous distinctions between Egyptians and other peoples comes from where one would most expect such a political statement – from the heartland of conquered Nubia, out of the temple of Soleb on the Dongola stretch of the Middle Nile, built by Amenhotep III (1391–1353 BCE) – one of ‘the masterpieces of New Kingdom architecture’ (Leclant, 1978, 70). Here, around the bases of the columns of the hypostyle hall, over a hundred faience plaques were installed, carefully distinguishing the conquered peoples of Africa and Asia (we still do not know who they all were) by colour, features, dress and actual names. Jean Leclant calls it a ‘veritable ethnographic gallery’ (70), and the political – indeed, racial – import of this digest of conquest is surely obvious: an expression of what Shaw calls the New Kingdom’s ‘essentially xenophobic ideology … whereby stereotypical barbaric Nubians were portrayed in official art and literature as worthless representatives of chaos’ (2000b, 326). Thus David O’Connor, who elsewhere expresses doubts about Egyptian racism, has to concede that ‘ancient Egyptians distinguished sharply between themselves and foreigners’ (2003, 155), and worse: ‘the hostility expressed towards foreigners in Egyptian literature seems frequent, consistent, and, from a modern perspective, downright disquieting’ (156).

While it was in the New Kingdom that such distinctions seem to have acquired a paranoid urgency, the impulse was there from early times. An autobiographical inscription in the tomb of Weni, Sixth Dynasty (ca 2323–2150 BCE) governor of Upper Egypt, carefully distinguishes different Nubian tribes recruited to fight ‘the Asiatic Sand-dwellers’ – ‘Irtjet-Nubians, Medja-Nubians, Yam-Nubians, Wawat-Nubians, Kaan-Nubians, and [Nubians] from Tjemeh-land’ (Lichtheim, 1973, 1: 19). Such distinctions would continue to be made. As J.W.B. Barns has noted, late Dynastic ‘royal inscriptions witness their contempt for the Africans of the south’ in terms never used for the Aegeans, for instance (1973, 6).

Nevertheless, despite evidence that the Egyptian elite from an early era, and especially those of the last half of the New Kingdom, were prone to present themselves as very different from their southern and African neighbours, the depictions of ethnic differences and the meanings attached to them were at times ambiguous and variable over the three millennia of Dynastic history. Yurco’s claim that we can ‘regularly’ discern ‘distinctive complexion’ types in tomb art does not, for instance, hold for the tribute scenes in the late-New Kingdom tomb of Huy, already mentioned, where the Egyptian rulers are indeed coloured light brown, but the Nubian or Kushite tribute bearers, though clearly distinguished in feature, are alternately coloured light brown and black, the variation apparently introduced entirely for the aesthetic effect of contrast. The Huy tomb scene may be set beside a similar tribute scene from a century-and-a-half earlier, one from the tomb of the Nubian client prince Djehuty-hotep at Debeira East (ca 1480 BCE), which presents the Nubian elite as sharing Egyptian features, distinguished from their overlords only by slightly darker skin colour, dress and ornament, but differing sharply from their own subjects, the more pronounced prognathous African types that would become dominant in depictions of non-Nubian ‘Ethiopians’ in Ramesside art (Trigger, 1978, figures 12 and 13).

The possibility that such elite Nubians were themselves responsible for what would become a canonical distinction between Nubian and non-Nubian Africans (between ‘noble Ethiopians’ and ‘other Ethiopians’ of later traditions) is one of the major theses of the present study, and one to which I shall return. In the meantime, the ambiguities may be multiplied. The king lists that Herodotus was shown by his priestly informants in the fifth century BCE contained among the names of 330 pharaohs those of ‘eighteen Ethiopian kings’ (2: 100). Since Manetho’s king list of about two centuries later gives the names of only three of the known Twenty-fifth Dynasty Nubian rulers, Herodotus’ priests’ list must have included the names of a dozen or more other Egyptian rulers spread through time who were regarded as ‘Nubian’, but of whom we have no clear record.

Despite, then, the evident racial definitiveness propagated by depictions such as those in the Soleb temple or at Abu Simbel, Kathryn Bard’s caveat that ‘identifying race in Egyptian representative art … is difficult to do’ (1996, 108) is a wise one. Even in mid-New Kingdom monumental art, distinctions between Egyptian and Nubian, Kushite or Nilotic types are not always easy to make. Dietrich Wildung speaks of a recurrent Africoid pharaonic physiognomy in formal imagery, ‘with full lips and slightly protruding eyes’, that would become the basis of the more specifically ethnic idiom adopted by the Kushite pharaohs of the Twenty-fifth Dynasty, but would not be confined to them.

While there can therefore be little doubt that most pharaohs were ‘African’ in a general sense, the more pertinent questions relate to how many of them could have been ‘Negroid’ or ‘black African’. There are intriguing indicators. Amenophis IV (1353–1335 BCE) was the son of the very creator of the ‘ethnographic gallery’ of the Soleb temple. As Akhenaten, he ruled until only two years before the reign of Tutankhamun (who in turn may have been his son), and is depicted on his tomb furniture as trampling his caricatured African enemies. Yet it was Akhenaten who inspired the so-called Amarna period of Egyptian state art, which depicted the ruler and his family in an exaggerated fluid style that makes their ethnic identity impossible to tell. The long face, high cheekbones, slanting eyes, full lips and slender nose could be extrapolated from a Nubian-Nilotic face as readily as from any other. To complicate matters further, the colossal bust in red granite of Akhenaten’s father, Amenophis III (1391–1353 BCE), now in the British Museum (BM EA 15), shows a figure with markedly ‘Negroid’ features – as does another statue of him now in the New York Metropolitan Museum (56.138) – yet close by is another royal bust, also from Amenophis III’s mortuary temple, but once again with ambivalently proto-Amarnan features. Prince Puckler Muskau, who saw this statue still in situ in the 1840s, thought that Amenophis III ‘appears to have been an Ethiopian’ (1845, 2.9), but Lorna Oakes has argued that the many statues of the king that once filled the temple were either in a conventional idiom or ‘in a budding Amarna style’ (2003, 66) – none were realistic portraits. For Martin Bernal there is little doubt that these pharaohs of the Eighteenth Dynasty were Nubian: ‘from their portraits they would seem to have been Blacks’ (1987, 384). The context and import of Bernal’s claim will be examined below, but for the moment one may speculate that if (some of) the pharaohs of the Eighteenth Dynasty were indeed Nubians, some may have been more conspicuously so than others. Furthermore, such differentiations may not only have manifested themselves in distinctive stylistic idioms such as the Amarnan, but may also have motivated immediately succeeding pharaohs, including Tutankhamun and certainly Ramesses II, a century later, to depict themselves as very definitely not Nubian.

The claim that the pharaohs of the Eighteenth Dynasty were Nubian must, however, face a harsher challenge. During the Second Intermediate Period (ca 1640–1550 BCE), northern or Lower Egypt was ruled by the non-indigenous (perhaps Palestinian) Hyksos of the Fifteenth Dynasty, based at the Delta city of Avaris, while the rulers of Upper Egypt, based at Thebes, were under considerable threat from the Nubian kingdom of Kush, then at its zenith and based at Kerma south of the Third Cataract (Lacovara, 1996, 92–3). An alliance existed between the Hyksos rulers of Avaris and the Nubian kings of Kerma, and it was the breaking up of this alliance by the last Theban king of the Seventeenth Dynasty, Kamose (ca 1555–1550 BCE), that made possible the reunification of Egypt and the founding of the Eighteenth Dynasty under his successor, Ahmose (1550–1525 BCE) (Baines and Málek, 1980, 42). Ahmose’s summing up of the dilemma facing Egypt at the time is succinct and speaks powerfully across the millennia: ‘A [Hyksos] chieftain is in Avaris and another in Kush, and I sit between an Asiatic and a Nubian, each man in possession of his slice of this Egypt, and I cannot pass by him as far as Memphis’ (cited by Emery, 1965, 169).

Not surprisingly, the conquest and control of Nubia became for successive New Kingdom rulers not only an ongoing practical and political necessity, but also an important part of symbolic state lore and the ritual of royal power. Every pharaoh would ceremoniously cite the total subjection of Nubia (‘perfidious Kush’) as not just a military accomplishment, but a totemic necessity. The ‘smiting’ of Nubians would become a pharaonic logo of power on temples and tombs throughout Egypt. Egyptian control of Nubian Kush and its successor states reached its greatest extent during the New Kingdom, and pharaonic inscriptions would endlessly assert this symbolic control from Abu Simbel in the north to Gebel Barkal, on the Fourth Cataract, in the south (Adams, 1977, 218–228).

In such a context it is very difficult to see how the rulers of the Eighteenth Dynasty who made these conquests, and conceived not only of the monuments but also the triumphant discourse of Nubian conquest that adorn their walls, could have thought of themselves as simply ‘Nubian’.

It is true that the relationship between Egypt and Nubia was always dynamic, as Robert G. Morkot (2000) has argued; so much so that when the Nubian rulers of the Twenty-fifth Dynasty came to power in Egypt, they were evidently not regarded as a gross aberration, but as the most recent manifestation of an ancient process of conflict and succession of power that had yielded both Nubian pharaohs and highly placed Nubian officials before, and to whom we shall come. It is also possible, as Stuart Tyson Smith (2003) has argued, deploying terms proposed by A. Loprieno (1988), that formal Egyptian totemic 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.

The ethnic constitution of ancient Egypt is not a new issue in cultural debate. Robert Young has suggested that it was integral to the developing racism of mid-nineteenth-century European supremacism: ‘The racial identity of Egypt was … crucial: … it had to have been a white civilization’ (1995, 128). But the argument is much older, and goes back to laudable if unfounded attempts of Enlightenment and abolitionist campaigners of the late-eighteenth century to rescue Africa and Africans from the deplorably negative image that slavery had conferred on the whole continent and its people. A recuperative but nevertheless fanciful historiography resulted among Enlightenment abolitionists in an almost universal belief that Egyptian civilisation was Ethiopian in origin (Volney, 1787; Bruce, 1790; Belzoni, 1820; see Shavit, 2001, 7–8 and 276 n. 32 for extensive sources). One of the most powerful voices was that of the Abbé Henri Baptiste Grégoire, who in An Enquiry Concerning the Intellectual and Moral Faculties and Literature of Negroes (1808; translated 1810) set out ‘to prove that one race is not originally inferior to the other’ (125), argued that Egyptian civilisation was ‘Negro’ in origin, and demonstrated that ‘to the black race, now slaves, we are indebted for the arts, sciences, and even for speech’ (23).

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:

An influential and respectable thesis of African history continues to postulate a southward and westward movement of peoples or cultural influences from the regions of the upper Nile. In this construction of history the Nilotic peoples [are] sometimes given a key connecting role in the creation of a pan-African, or at least a Bantu, civilization that [is] held to display the same fundamental characteristics everywhere, deriving from the common base of an agricultural revolution, iron-age technology, pastoralism, and religio-political ideas first seen in the Nile Valley – for example ‘sacred kingship’ (2001, 301–302).

Unfortunately, there is virtually no evidence for this eminently reasonable ‘construction’. A recent collection of essays, Ancient Egypt in Africa (2003), edited by David O’Connor and Andrew Reid, is committed to re-orientating the questions and directions of research, but cannot come up with many new answers. The editors ask, reasonably:

[W]as Ancient Egypt to some, or even much, of Africa the source of sophisticated cultures as Greece was to much of Europe, or, did Egyptian civilization incorporate fundamental African concepts markedly different from those dominant in the ancient Near East and the Mediterranean lands? (1)

These are crucial questions that will occupy us repeatedly in the present study, but O’Connor and Reid are stymied both by the failure of most contributors to come up with startling answers and their own confession that there is ‘virtually no evidence for Ancient Egypt in the greater part of the African continent’ and, conversely, ‘no evidence of direct [African] contact with Ancient Egypt’ (5).

Other volumes in the laudable series Encounters with Ancient Egypt, of which the O’Connor and Reid collection is a part, are mostly totally silent on Egyptian-African synergies, despite general editor Peter Ucko’s explicit recognition that ‘the place and role of Ancient Egypt within African history … has rarely been considered jointly by Egyptologists and Africanists’ (Series Editor’s Foreword, all volumes). Yet, as we shall see, such recent attempts as have been made to explore putative connections have often been so fanciful and contentious that one is forced to sympathise with professional Egyptologists who have felt that they have no choice but to respond with ‘indifference, dismissal, or [only] cautious acceptance’, as two other editors in the series put it (MacDonald and Rice, 2003, 2). An exciting new departure is suggested by Toby Wilkinson’s work, mentioned above. His Genesis of the Pharaohs explores the implications of his re-examination of Eastern Desert rock art for our understanding of the African origins of Egyptian civilisation, and argues convincingly that the fertile wadis of the area between the Nile and the Red Sea were between 5000 and 4000 BCE home to the cultures that became the civilisation of ancient Egypt. We shall return to these findings.

Much has, of course, changed in our understanding of the millennia-long encounter between Egypt and Nubia. The 1960s campaign to save the archaeological remains of Nubia, precipitated by the rising waters of the Aswan High Dam, brought about a shift in the world’s curiosity about the ancient relationships between Egypt and the lands to its south, and initiated crucial archaeological work, which continues in the Middle Nile region, between the Second and Sixth Cataracts. In recent decades, these Nubian ventures have inspired a number of major international exhibitions, for example at the Brooklyn Museum (Hochfield, Riefstahl and Wenig, 1978), the Brockton Art Museum (Kendall, 1982), the British Museum (Davies, 1991; Welsby and Anderson, 2004), the Indianapolis Museum of Art (Celenko, 1996), the Institut du Monde Arabe (Wildung, 1997) and, perhaps most spectacularly, the 1995–1996 ‘Africa: The Art of a Continent’ exhibition shown in London, New York and Chicago (Phillips, 1995). All revealed a radical shift in our understanding of ‘Egypt in Africa’, as the Indianapolis exhibition was named. All made it clear that from Aswan to Meroë, throughout at least the three millennia of Dynastic Egyptian history, there existed at different times and along different stretches of the Nubian Nile, a series of powerful kingdoms that repeatedly challenged Egyptian superiority, and at all times both posed threats and offered synergies that would result in complex, fraught and dynamically changing relationships among the peoples of the greater Nile region.

But Lower Nubia is now drowned in Lake Nasser (or, as Nubians significantly insist on calling it, the Nubian Sea), with important information about settlement patterns and ethnic identities and affiliations ‘irretrievably lost’ (O’Connor, 1991, 153). Still next to nothing is known about Egypt’s non-Nubian desert neighbours, such as the Medjay and the people of Punt. Furthermore, as David Jeffreys has pointed out, the promise of greater co-operation between Egyptologists and Africanist archaeologists held out by the Nubian salvage campaign ‘failed signally to happen to any lasting extent’ (2003, 7).

In such a vacuum of proven connections, fanciful theories about the foundational relations between the beginnings of Egypt and the rest of north-east Africa, usually invoking simplistic diffusionist and ethnographic explanations, continue to thrive. As Augustine Holl (1990) has demonstrated, much Africanist response to these lacunae in hard history simply reverses the untenable and ahistorical naïveties of classic hyperdiffusionism: ‘Afrocentrism is Europeanism with a black face…. It has borrowed all its categories of thinking from a Western tradition’, as Yaacov Shavit puts it (2001, 14). In what amounts to a parodic reworking of rampant colonialist diffusionism, Egypt either becomes the cradle of a black, Negro ascendancy, the source of all African cultures and their achievements; or, alternatively, drawing on the heritage of the whole continent, Dynastic Egypt is deemed to have been the distillation of African religious, philosophical, socio-political and cultural systems, from which Mediterranean civilisation derives. In the words of Yaacov Shavit, was ‘Pharaonic Egypt the “child of Africa” or the “mother of Africa”?’ (2001, ix).

R.L. Adams (1991) has dubbed this process ‘Nile-Valley Afrocentrism’, and it constitutes, ironically, a complete rehearsal of nineteenth-century racist diffusionist theories whereby all of African cultural achievement was thought to have originated in ancient Egypt (O’Connor and Reid, 2003, 7). There are further anomalies here. If Egypt was the source of all major African civilisations, where did its own pre-eminence derive from? If, on the other hand, pharaonic Egypt was the end-product of a solely African process, where in Africa were its antecedents? I shall show that this is not quite the way to pose these questions, and that there may be intriguing answers, but mainline Afrocentrist arguments tend to be readily undone on such simple binarist issues.

The project to recast world history as essentially an African or ‘black’ achievement has been extensively explored and dismantled by a number of historians, notably Yaacov Shavit, who succinctly sums up the Afrocentrist imperative:

Egypt, Nubia and Africa sprang from a common racial substratum, [and] shared the same philosophical concepts and customs, … the Egyptian language belongs to the family of African languages. For the Afrocentrists, this view or theory [has become] a scientific truth, an ideological faith, a political stand, a historical revelation and a redemption (2001, 206).

While Shavit is generous in his demonstration that ‘Afrocentrism was born as a result of disillusionment with political and social emancipation and with the non-fulfilment of [black] expectations’ (256) in America, his demolition of Afrocentrist versions of ancient African history excoriates ‘a jumble of fundamentalist naïveté, ignorance, and sophisticated manipulation’ (161), to which we shall return. Also implicated in the process of encouraging fundamentally flawed notions of an African Egyptian ascendancy have been genuine attempts by Western scholars who went to teach in African universities in the early flush of Africa’s post-independence period (during the 1960s and 1970s), and who sought to foster, often for the first time in the Western world, an appreciation of ancient African achievement. Their sometimes over-enthusiastic claims of African primacy became recruited in support of more questionable extrapolations. Two noticeable figures in this regard were Jean Vercouter and Jean Leclant, both centrally involved in valuable new ventures in Sudanese archaeology and both articulate spokespersons, as we have already seen, for a powerful Nubian presence in Dynastic origins, culture and identity. They have argued, along with many subsequent workers in Sudanese archaeology, for a much more even match and dynamic of power between Egypt and the Kushite kingdoms than has previously been acknowledged. Yet such insights have in many cases simply dwindled away in the sands of a rampant Afrocentrism that has failed to understand the processes involved.

Two key figures in the making of Afrocentrist Egyptology have been William Leo Hansberry and Cheikh Anta Diop. Hansberry, described as a ‘pioneer Africanist’ by his editor, Joseph E. Harris, between 1916 and 1954 developed early African Studies programmes which taught that the Greek pantheon was not just Egyptian, but, beyond Egypt, specifically Ethiopian in origin (1977, 81); that ‘Blacks from Africa had been domiciled in the Aegean lands hundreds of years before Homer’s day’ (23); and that ‘there was a relatively large black population in the Greek world throughout these ages’ (42).

Diop, a Senegalese academic educated in Paris, took these speculations into the realms of hard history in a work published in 1954, The African Origin of Civilization. To the by now familiar litany that ‘Ancient Egypt was a Negro civilization…. The Ancient Egyptians were Negroes’ (xiv–xv), and that ‘Greece borrowed from Egypt all the elements of her civilization’ (4), Diop added a few wild notions of his own: Egyptian priests ‘had the secret of gunpowder’ (24); all the pharaohs (sic, so presumably including the Hyksos) were ‘Negroid’ (53); ‘all the populations of the periphery of the Mediterranean … were Negroes or Negroid’ (113); pre-Dynastic north Africa had only two population groups, ‘Ethiopians’ (Negroes) and Libyans (whites – a claim that contradicts the previous assertion), the latter of whom were ‘half-starved pilferers living on the periphery of Egypt’ (97); while Herodotus, Diodorus Siculus and other classical authors were ‘eyewitnesses’ (2) to events that took place centuries before their time.

Sad and alarming in these statements, as well as in much of what Shavit calls ‘wild Afrocentrist’ discourse, is the pronounced and aggressive degree of racism: ‘The irony is that Afrocentrism appears to reject scientific dismissal of racial typology, and attempts to confirm a theory which gives deeply rooted prejudices scientific credibility’ (Shavit, 2001, 147). For this reason alone, it would seem justifiable to examine the exact relations and patterns of indebtedness between ancient Egypt and Africa yet again, because it was from these involutions that the European-Mediterranean world inherited its earliest images of Africa and Africans.

Diop has not been alone in propagating these or even more bizarre views. In 1920, Leo Wiener published his three-volume Africa and the Discovery of America, to prove (mainly by a bewildering display of eclectic linguistics) that large numbers of Negro traders had settled in Central and South America long before 1492, and were largely responsible for Mesoamerican civilisation. And in Stolen Legacy (1954), still being reprinted in 1992 as Greek Philosophy is Stolen Egyptian Philosophy, George G.M. James managed to prove that all of Western culture is the legacy of an ancient syndicated heist.

Yaacov Shavit reviews scores of works perpetuating such notions, which have apparently become the orthodoxy of African-American universities. So, for instance, the same Théophile Obenga whose regrets at the pronounced lack of an African dimension to much scholarly Egyptology we noted earlier, has subsequently in his own Ancient Egypt and Black Africa (subtitled ‘A Students’ Handbook’), sought to ‘correct’ the situation with claims as simplistic as the ones they seek to replace (1992). Greek philosophy here becomes a wholly African derivative, and the work subsumes a seamless Egyptian identity with Africa, the sole source of its 3 000 years of achievement. Opponents of such views often risk charges of racism, despite their ability to adduce overwhelming contrary evidence.

In 1961, Erik Iversen argued persuasively in The Myth of Egypt and its Hieroglyphs in European Traditions for a truly African origin of hieroglyphics in Nile desert rock art. He demonstrated, however, the vast difference between this script and the most ancient proto-Greek writing, and went on to extrapolate that these writing systems signified fundamentally different mindsets behind their creation. As to Greek ideology being a direct borrowing or ‘theft’ from Egypt, Iversen demonstrated the extreme unlikelihood of such a genealogy long before Martin Bernal rekindled the debate – as we shall see. He argued for a profound cultural-cognitive incompatibility between Egyptian and Greek thought systems, the former being mythic-mystic, the latter proto-rationalist. This meant that although Egyptian influences on Greek culture could be shown to be substantial, borrowings were usually fundamentally misinterpreted or radically revised (40–41). Such views evidently had little purchase in the world of Cheikh Anta Diop and his followers, ascendant at about the same time.

Diop repeated his views in numerous publications until they became enshrined in the second volume of the prestigious UNESCO General History of Africa (1981) in their most sweeping form: ‘The earliest men were ethnically homogeneous and Negroid … the facts prove that [the Negro element] was preponderant from the beginning to the end of Egyptian history’ (Mokhtar 1981, 15–6). It must have come as a surprise to the Egyptians to learn that their history had ended.

Elsewhere Diop and his disciples have variously claimed that the Yoruba, the Kara from southern Sudan and Upper Oubangui, the Kare-Kare from north-eastern Nigeria, the Peul or Fulani, the Tucolor, the Serer, the Wolof, the Songhai and the Amazulu and Basotho of southern Africa ‘all originated in the Nile Valley’ (Shavit, 2001, 208; MacDonald, 2003, 95; and see Ellenberger, 1912 and Folorunso, 2003). I shall return to the remarkable resilience and protean manifestations of this myth of the ubiquitous ‘Ethiopian’ in Africa in later chapters. The genocide and chaos in the eastern Congo, Rwanda and Burundi in recent years has in some part stemmed from just such fiction; in this tragic case, from nineteenth-century missionary claims that the Tutsi descended from ‘superior Ethiopians’ of the Nile region as against the ‘common Negroes’ or the Hutu (De Waal, 1994; Taylor, 1999; Chrétien, 2003; Reid, 2003; Wallis, 2006).

A generous critic might argue that the claims of Diop and others are intended to mean no more than, or are just confused with, the proposition now generally accepted: that all modern human beings descend from a strain of African Homo sapiens sapiens that left the continent some 100 000 years ago (Leakey and Lewin, 1992, 225; Dawkins, 1995, 53–55; Iliffe, 1995, 9; Sykes, 2001, 50), or, indeed, only 60 000 to 80 000 years ago (Oppenheimer, 2003; Wells, 2006). So, for instance, Legrand Clegg (1985) has argued that the first Europeans were proto-Khoisanoid ‘Grimaldis’ who invaded Europe about 40 000 years ago and were the ancestors of the Cro-Magnon. In the context of the currently unfolding map of human genetic profiling, which is revealing ever more fascinating information about the earliest human migrations, some of these considerations may indeed hold insights to which we shall have to return. The assertion, however, that all Mediterranean peoples were originally ‘Negroid’ usually has a far more specific and aggressive intent in Afrocentrist discourse, and would typically claim to describe human history since Neolithic rather than Palaeolithic times.

The canonical status of Diop’s views conferred by the UNESCO volume ensured their subsequent axiomatic weight and continuing embellishment in Afrocentrist discourse. For instance, Ivan van Sertima edited a volume of essays in 1985, The African Presence in Early Europe, which extended Diop’s insistence on the wholesale settlement of Neolithic Europe by Negroid people. At least one reviewer felt constrained to expose ‘the sheer sloppiness of the arguments’, the ‘elementary misreadings’, and the ‘persistent perversion of language’ that characterised the collection (Edwards, 1987). Yet the politically seductive attractions of such a rewriting of humankind’s earliest history remain compelling. As George G.M. James argues in Greek Philosophy is Stolen Egyptian Philosophy (1954), the theft of the African legacy by the Greeks lies at the root of Western race prejudice. One of the leading exponents of Afrocentricity in the United States, Molefi Kete Asante, formerly chair of African-American Studies at Temple University, has in a number of publications – such as Afrocentricity (1988) and Kemet, Afrocentricity and Knowledge (1990) – continued to promote and develop Diop’s advocacy of Negroid Africa as the source of Egyptian civilisation and hence of all Western achievement. Asante has further sought to mythologise this monolithic African-Egyptian model into a liberationist cult that can be compared to the rise of millenarian Ethiopianism at the end of the nineteenth century, or the emergence of Rastafarianism in the 1920s (inspired by Ras Tafari, later better known as Emperor Haile Selassie of Ethiopia). More recent exponents of ‘wild Afrocentrism’ have drawn much sustenance from the arguments espoused by Martin Bernal in Black Athena, and it is to this work that we turn next.

The peculiar and racist fantasies propounded by Diop, Van Sertima, Asante, Obenga and their colleagues might by now have died a natural death if Martin Bernal’s knowledgeable and persuasive work had not afforded them a new lease of life in the late 1980s. Since then, Bernal’s views have so often been promoted or opposed that I shall not attempt to outline the entire debate here. However, the essays collected by Mary R. Lefkowitz and Guy MacLean Rogers in Black Athena Revisited (1996) are an obvious point of reference. For my purposes, the pertinent part of Bernal’s thesis is that Greek civilisation is not only fundamentally and generally Egyptian and Semitic-Phoenician in origin and character, but specifically the product of a series of Egyptian invasions and settlements of the whole of the Eastern Mediterranean, starting in the Middle Kingdom (ca 2040–1700 BCE), coming to a peak under the Hyksos rulers of the Fifteenth and Sixteenth Dynasties (ca 1640–1530 BCE), and consolidated by the New Kingdom pharaohs of the early Eighteenth Dynasty (ca 1550–1300 BCE). In support of these claims, Bernal marshals a mass of archaeological, mythological, literary and linguistic evidence. Two linguists who have examined Bernal’s philological evidence, Jay H. Jasanoff and Alan Nusbaum, have no hesitation in rejecting it out of hand as ‘a farrago of hypotheses’ (1996, 178), as revealing a ‘thoroughgoing contempt for phonetic consistency’ (200), and as ‘simply false’ (201). Much the same may be said of Bernal’s arguments more pertinent to the topic at hand.

Bernal makes much – as do his Afrocentrist acolytes – of Herodotus’ account (2: 102–110) of the military campaigns of an early Twelfth Dynasty pharaoh, ‘Sesostris’, in the Red Sea area, Asia Minor and as far as the Black Sea, where the Colchians who ‘are black-skinned and have woolly hair’ (2: 104) are purported to be the (black) Egyptian descendants of the armies of Sesostris. However, not only does Herodotus himself immediately dismiss this evidence of a ‘Negroid’ affinity as inconclusive (‘which certainly amounts to but little, since several other nations are so too’ – 2: 104), but more importantly, the identity and achievements of his ‘Sesostris’ are well known to be spurious. Herodotus’ Dynastic chronology is wholly inaccurate (he takes Dynastic history to cover ‘eleven thousand, three hundred and forty years’ – 2: 142 – and he places the Old Kingdom and the building of the pyramids after the New – 2: 124–136), while his creation of a legendary ‘Sesostris’ reflects no more than the near-fabulous status of Middle Kingdom rulers that obtained among his priestly informants more than a millennium later. ‘Sesostris’ seems to be Herodotus’ (or his priestly informers’) confused composite of the Middle Kingdom rulers Senwosret I (ca 1971–1926 BCE) and III (ca 1878–1841 BCE), and the much later Ramesses II, who usurped hundreds of his predecessors’ statues, thus encouraging recent scholarly confusion (Franke, 1995, 744; Schulz and Seidel, 1998, 135–7; Van Dijk, 2000, 299). As William Murnane puts it, ‘there is now a broad consensus against assuming that any Middle-Kingdom pharaoh governed even the most loosely organized empire in Asia’ (1995a, 700). Yet so politically attractive is the evidence Bernal offers for his thesis of a massive Egyptian settlement of the Aegean, and thus for broad claims about the ‘African’ origins of Mediterranean civilisation, that Afrocentrists have embraced his thesis wholesale to produce what Mary Lefkowitz calls ‘a fable for our time, an ingeniously documented work of historical fiction, engineered to help address one of society’s greatest problems [i.e., racism]’ (2001, 14).

Still, it is important to assess carefully what Bernal does say and what he does not. Firstly, his focus is primarily on the ‘Afro-Asiatic’ origins of Greek civilisation, not on the African roots of Egyptian culture, even though he does seem to subsume such an origin throughout. He claims that ‘Egyptian civilization was fundamentally African’ and that some ‘of the most powerful Egyptian dynasties which were based in Upper Egypt – the 1st, 11th, 12th and 18th – were made up of pharaohs whom one can usefully call black’ (242), but the very looseness of that last statement suggests that Bernal has little interest in, evidence for, or intention to develop the implications of such a claim. In a later attempt to confront his critics, Black Athena Writes Back (2001), Bernal reiterates his primary interest in the Hyksos and Semitic-Phoenician impact on Egypt, and admits that his reference to pharaohs ‘whom one can usefully call black’ had primarily had ‘a political purpose’ (209). Nevertheless, as the evidence of pharaonic sculpture surveyed earlier suggests, it is hard not to agree that some pharaohs may indeed have been ‘black’ in the sense of having Nubian or ‘Negroid’ features.

Indeed, much of what Bernal has to say about Egypt in Africa is unexceptionable and well established. His proposals that ‘Egyptian civilization is clearly based on the rich pre-Dynastic cultures of Upper Egypt and Nubia, whose African origin is uncontested’ (15), or, from Black Athena Writes Back, that ‘it is useful to see Ancient Egypt as an African civilization’ (376), have been uncontested since the publication of Michael A. Hoffman’s Egypt before the Pharaohs (1980), and we shall return to these. He also acknowledges, again in line with standard views, that ancient Egypt’s ‘African’ profile was always a perplexing one: ‘at least for the last 7 000 years, the population of Egypt has contained African, South-West Asian, and Mediterranean types’; and even though ‘the further south, or up the Nile, one goes, the blacker and more Negroid the population becomes’ (242), Egypt’s political determinants were never merely African: ‘the unification and establishment of Dynastic Egypt, around 3250 BCE, was in some way triggered by developments to the East’ (15).

Such cautions on Bernal’s part are not, however, the stuff upon which to found and nurture Afrocentrist Egyptology, and they have been ignored by both proponents and opponents of Bernal’s views. Yet a much bigger problem for the Afrocentrist paradigm lies at the very core of Bernal’s thesis. Though Mary R. Lefkowitz has quite rightly complained that Bernal ‘has contributed to the provision of an apparently respectable underpinning for Afrocentric fantasies’ (1996, 20), she does not expose the profound irony of this ‘underpinning’. For the truth is that Bernal’s thesis has been recruited by Afrocentric polemicists with little regard for the actual counter-African thrust of his theory. Simply put, while Bernal does posit a first wave of ‘pure’ Egyptian expansion into the Aegean during the Middle Kingdom under the Twelfth Dynasty pharaohs (ca 1990–1780 BCE) whom he regards as ‘black’ (18), his main focus is on a putative Hyksos-inspired Egyptian conquest and cultural colonisation of the Eastern Mediterranean of two centuries later; in other words, on an intervention which, if it took place at all, was not ‘African’ but Phoenician-Semitic. ‘I am convinced that the Hyksos played a major role in introducing West Semitic and Egyptian civilization to the Aegean,’ he reiterates in Black Athena Writes Back (48). Africa plays little part in this, except perhaps in providing the troops who did the fighting.

Bernal’s thesis of large-scale Hyksos conquests in the eastern Mediterranean remains controversial (see several contributions to Lefkowitz and Rogers, 1996), but its details need not concern us further. What must, however, is the extraordinary slippage that has occurred between Bernal’s focus on the activities of Egypt’s Phoenician Hyksos conquerors and the advocacy of those who wish to invoke these suppositions as argument for the fundamentally African origins of eastern Mediterranean – and hence classical Greek – culture.

Far from confirming any originating African core to Egyptian, let alone eastern Mediterranean civilisation, Black Athena is a sophisticated resurrection of a hoary Near-Eastern diffusionist hypothesis whereby major Egyptian achievements have always had their origin elsewhere – usually, as in this case, east of the Delta. Two thousand years ago, Josephus claimed, ‘[Abraham] introduced [the Egyptians] to arithmetic and transmitted to them the laws of astronomy. For before the coming of Abraham the Egyptians were ignorant of these sciences, which thus traveled from the Chaldeans into Egypt, whence they passed to the Greeks’ (66 AD/1989, 1. 2: 168). Variations of such surmises of origins have lurked in Western thinking ever since.

Perhaps for these reasons, an emeritus professor of Oriental Studies, James Muhly, referred to Black Athena as ‘a cruel hoax … foisted on black people in America’ (1991, 22), while the leading African-American classicist, Frank Snowden, lamented that ‘Black people have suffered enough lies’ (cited by Muhly). An otherwise feisty promoter of African-American studies, John H. McWhorter, warned that ‘Black America is currently embarked on a tragic detour’ (2000, xv) of an ‘Afrocentric History’ that is ‘a fragile assemblage of misreadings of classical texts to construct a scenario under which Ancient Egypt was a “black” civilization raped by the ancient Greeks’ (54).

This has had a baleful effect on Egyptology, too; in the words of Sarah P. Morris, ‘it has become impossible for professional Egyptologists to address the truth without abuse, and Bernal’s arguments have only contributed to an avalanche of radical propaganda without basis in fact’ (1996, 174). In a letter to the Times Literary Supplement, Keith Windschuttle lays a heavy burden at Bernal’s door: ‘Although he now wants to distance himself from those Afrocentrists who claim that black Africans invented quantum physics, practised aeronautics, ruled Egypt and discovered America, Bernal was the main academic figure who created the intellectual environment in which such beliefs could flourish’ (2001). An outspoken proponent of the African-American cause, V.Y. Mudimbe has reflected that ‘the respectability of an African history reconquered by Africanism from the margins of primitiveness into which colonial science had inscribed it, today authorizes shaky accounts of the pharaohs’ (1994, 43). Bernal has himself conceded the point, citing Tony Martin: ‘If any of Bernal’s Afrocentric followers had slowed down in their speed reading of Black Athena, they would have noticed that he was as much or more concerned with a “Semitic” origin for Greek civilization as for African influence over Greece’ (Bernal, 2001, 16). Furthermore, Bernal protests, ‘I have never suggested that the Ancient Egyptian population as a whole looked like stereotypical West Africans’ (23). We shall return to this point.

There is thus very little that Bernal’s work can contribute to our understanding of either the African sources and composition of the ancient Egyptian world, or, more pertinently for my purposes, the shifting perceptions that Egyptians may have had of themselves as ‘African’, of their African neighbours, or of their own situatedness in the continent that they themselves did not yet know as an ‘African’ whole. As Guy MacLean Rogers has put it: ‘In tracing the allegedly Afro-Asiatic roots of classical civilization, Bernal has almost nothing to say about the entire continent of Africa and its many diverse ancient civilizations. In short, Black Athena is not about ancient Africa at all’ (1996b, 449).

It would not be flippant to add that Afrocentrism itself is not about Africa either. American Afrocentrists have created a mythic Africa, ‘The Africa That Never Was’, to satisfy the recuperative dynamics of North American theorists of race. Furthermore, if it is indeed as Shavit avers – that the ‘concept of race and of a homogeneous [i.e., genetically separate] black race is the cornerstone of the radical Afrocentric world view’ (24) – then any South African who has lived through the nightmare of apartheid must find this American Afrocentric aberration not only tragically ironic, but also wholly abhorrent. In the words of Peter Mitchell, ‘such arguments merely buy into Africa’s historical definition by Europeans as a single landmass equated with an arbitrarily colour-defined racial group and understood through overly simplistic correlations of “race” and “culture”’ (2005, 5). True Africanists, among whom I should wish to count myself, want to explore the more exciting and truly surprising dynamics of their continent’s actual history. For perhaps the greatest irony suffusing Bernal’s enterprise and the polemics surrounding it is that if one knows where to look, ancient African elements do indeed run like a watermark through the fabric of much of ancient Egypt’s symbolic and representational art and cultural praxis, as I hope to show.

The charge that Bernal’s thesis ‘is not about Africa at all’ may be pressed further, as we attend to other elements of Bernal’s ‘underpinning’ of Afrocentrist arguments that persistently misrepresent African realities. Although, as we have seen, Bernal does allow for the demographic heterogeneity of Egypt ‘at least for the last 7 000 years’ (242), his generally loose description of ancient Egyptians as ‘black’ and ‘Nubian’ legitimates reductivist Afrocentrist conceptions of both Egyptian and Nubian populations as simply ‘Negroid’. Such conceptions, seemingly authorised by Bernal’s scholarship, have served to marginalise other African peoples whose own cultural achievements and possible contributions to the making of ancient Egyptian culture need much fuller exploration and acknowledgment. In particular, two other major phyla of African peoples – those that constitute what Stephen Oppenheimer calls the ‘Berber motif’ of North Africa (whom the Greeks and Romans called ‘Libyans’ and who were not ‘Negroid’ but Afro-Asiatic), and, secondly, the huge assembly of African peoples who in the early Holocene Era (about 10000 BP) populated Africa from the Red Sea coast to the Cape of Good Hope, and of whom the Khoisan of southern Africa are among the last survivors – are not only habitually overlooked by Africanist discourses inspired by Black Athena, but remain insufficiently considered in speculations on the making of ancient Egypt.

Kevin C. MacDonald, challenging Diop’s surmise that Egypt at the end of the Pleistocene Era (ca 12000 BP) was inhabited by ‘tall Black Africans’, suggests that instead we should turn our attention to the ‘little peoples’ of the ‘distinctive early Holocene sub-Saharan hunter-gatherer complexes … attested archaeologically’ throughout the eastern half of the continent, and who were not Negroid, but who emerge persistently in the continent’s folklore, including ‘West African oral traditions [that] still do speak of autochthonous “little peoples” who were displaced or replaced’ (2003, 97). These ‘little peoples’, of whom the Central African pygmies and the southern African Khoisan are surviving instances, occupied vast swathes of the southern, central and eastern parts of the continent before the great Bantu pan-African migrations of the last two millennia. Over the last few decades, explorations of the human genome and the distribution of human genetic families have revealed these ‘little peoples’ to harbour the oldest phyla of human genetic lineages in the world (Soodyall, 2006; Wells, 2006). According to Spencer Wells, ‘fossil evidence suggests that 10 000 years ago people similar in appearance to the modern San Bushmen were found as far north as Ethiopia, indicating that their present distribution is the remnant of a once widespread people’ (2006, 145).

We need, in other words, to reconsider the evidence we have as to who the earliest Egyptians might have been, and where their culture might have come from. The ‘Hamitic hypothesis’ is now dead and buried; Diop’s ‘Negroid hypothesis’ can be shown to be no less racist, naïve and exclusivist, while various other versions of an ‘Afrocentrist hypothesis’ fare no better. But what about the possibility that Holocene, pre-Dynastic north-east African culture may owe at least some of its defining features to the ‘little people’ who so often crop up in descriptions of ancient Africa (even in Diop’s), who once inhabited eastern Africa from north to south, who were responsible for virtually all of Africa’s rock art, and whose symbolic world prefigures or resonates with that of the Egyptians in intriguing ways? What about a ‘Khoisanoid hypothesis’?