Talk:Ancient Egyptian race controversy/Workpage

As now

The most recent specific conference on the race of the ancient Egyptians was at UNESCO’s international Cairo Symposium in 1974, where more than 20 recognised international scholars debated inter alia the race of the founders of ancient Egyptian civilization. The majority view was that the ancient Egyptians were neither black nor white as per current terminology.

Current scholarly consensus holds that the concept of "pure race" is incoherent and that applying modern notions of race to ancient Egypt is anachronistic; However the issue of the race of the ancient Egyptians continues to be debated in the public arena, with particular focus on the race of specific notable individuals from Dynastic times, including Tutankhamun, Cleopatra VII and also the model for the Great Sphinx of Giza.

The controversy surrounding the race of ancient Egyptians involves, among other things, a debate between two positions which some scholars describe as "Eurocentric" and "Afrocentric". Afrocentric historiography began in the 19th century, and tends to insist that Ancient Egypt was a "black civilization".

As far as skin colour is concerned, some modern scholars believe the ancient Egyptians were "Mediterranean peoples, neither Sub-Saharan blacks nor Caucasian white but peoples whose skin was adapted for life in a subtropical desert environment."

Origins of the controversy

The earliest incidences of disagreement in modern times regarding the race of the ancient Egyptians occurred in the work of Europeans and Americans early in the 19th century. For example, in an article published in the NEW-ENGLAND MAGAZINE of October 1833, the authors dispute a claim that the Ancient Egyptians “were adduced, affirmed to be Ethiopians”. Among other things they point out (at pg 275), with reference to tomb paintings: “It may be observed that the complexion of the men is invariably red, that of the women yellow; but neither of them can be said to have anything in their physiognomy at all resembling the Negro countenance.” And (at pg 276) they state, with reference to the Sphinx: “The features are Nubian, or what, from ancient representations, may be called Ancient Egyptian, which is quite different from the Negro features.”

However just a few years later, in 1839, Champollion states in his work "Egypte Ancienne" that the Egyptians and Nubians are represented in the same manner in tomb paintings, reliefs, and that "The first tribes that inhabited Egypt, that is, the Nile Valley between the Syene cataract and the sea, came from Abyssinia to Sennar. The Ancient Egyptians belonged to a race quite similar to the Kenous or Barabras, present inhabitants of Nubia. In the Copts of Egypt, we do not find any of the characteristic features of the Ancient Egyptian population. The Copts are the result of crossbreeding with all the nations that successfully dominated Egypt. It is wrong to seek in them the principal features of the old race."

Slavery in the USA

In the early 19th century slavery in the United States was still being justified in part on the assumption that black people were intellectually inferior, and pro-slavery advocates were thus unreceptive to any suggestion of advanced black civilizations. In 1844 Samuel George Morton, a proslavery supporter and one of the pioneers of scientific racism and polygenism, published his book Crania Aegyptica with the intention of “proving” that the Ancient Egyptians were not black. In 1855 George Gliddon and Josiah C. Nott published Types of Mankind with the same intention. All three authors concluded that the Egyptians were intermediate between the African and Asiatic races. They acknowledged that Negroes were present in ancient Egypt, but claimed they were either captives or servants.

Mesopotamian Origin theories

The Dynastic Race Theory was the earliest thesis to attempt to explain how predynastic Egypt developed into the Pharonic monarchy. In the early 20th century Sir William Matthew Flinders Petrie, one of the leading Egyptologists of his day, deduced that the skeletal remains found at pre-dynastic sites at Naqada (Upper Egypt) indicated the presence of two different races. He inferred that one of them was foreign to Egypt, and must have been an invader. Based on plentiful cultural evidence, such as architectural styles, pottery styles, cylinder seals and a few artworks, as well as numerous rock and tomb paintings, Petrie determined that the invader race had come from Mesopotamia, and had imposed themselves on the local Badarian (African) people and become their rulers. This came to be called the “Dynastic Race Theory”. The theory further argued that the Mesopotamians then conquered both Upper and Lower Egypt and founded the First Dynasty.

The Dynastic Race Theory is no longer the dominant thesis in the field of Predynastic Archaeology. In the aftermath of World War 2, as the world came to grips with the consequences of the Nazi “Master Race” philosophy, Invading Super Race theories became unpalatable. More modern technologies allowed the investigation of the DNA of the Egyptian peoples, and it was concluded that the Egyptian civilization has been a local indigenous development all along.

Some scholars still note that while the Dynastic Race Theory is probably flawed, the evidence upon which it was based does indicate significant predynastic Mesopotamian influence. More recent scholars such as David Rohl, Waddell, Rice and Walter Bryan Emery, a former Chair of Egyptology at University College London, have advanced reasons in support of a Mesopotamian origin for the ancient Dynastic Egyptians. In addition to the evidence available to Petrie et al., they also points out some similarities in the names of divinities and places in the religious beliefs of the two cultures, and in depictions of regalia. For example the primeval mound of the Egyptian first creation was called the Island of Nun, and was surrounded by the Waters of Nun, while the Sumerian name for the great temple in their original city of Eridu was Nun.ki – the 'Mighty Place' – and it was built on an island in the reed swamps. Several scholars have also noted that the name Osiris is a Greek pronunciation, and that the god would have been called Asar in Egyptian, while the Sumerian god of the Eridu area was also called Asar (the Babylonian Marduk.)

Afrocentrism

The roots of Afrocentrism lay in the repression of blacks throughout the Western world in the 19th century, most particularly in the United States. At the turn of the century, however, came a rise in black racial consciousness as a tool to overcome oppression. Part of this reaction involved a focus on black history, and counteracting what was perceived as white, eurocentric history in favour of a historical narrative of Europe (and what was viewed as its founding culture, ancient Greece) that gave blacks a more prominent role.

Specifically, this attempted rewriting of the historical narrative of Europe developed into two main forms: the claim that European civilization was founded not by the Greeks, but by the Egyptians, whose culture and learning the Greeks allegedly stole, and that the Egyptians themselves were not only African but also black. Often, Afrocentrists link the two claims, as the following quote (by Marcus Garvey) displays:

“ 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 thousands of Negro professors at that time taught in the universities in Alexandria, then the seat of learning; that ancient Egypt gave the world civilization and that Greece and Rome have robbed Egypt of her arts and letters, and taken all the credit to themselves. ”

Both themes were to survive Garvey and to continue throughout the 20th century and up to the present day, provoking debate both in academia and in more public spheres, such as mainstream media and the internet.

Although questions surrounding the race of the ancient Egyptians had occasionally arisen in 18th and 19th-century Western scholarship as part of the growing interest in attempted scientific classifications of race, in academia the idea was popularised and continued throughout the 20th century in the works of George James, Cheikh Anta Diop, and even, to a certain extent, in Martin Bernal's Black Athena. All three have used the terms "black", "African", and "Egyptian" interchangeably, despite what Snowden calls "copious ancient evidence to the contrary".

While at the University of Dakar, Diop tried to establish the skin colour of the Egyptian mummies by measuring the melanin content of the skin, stating: “In practice it is possible to determine directly the skin color and, hence, the ethnic affiliations of the ancient Egyptians by microscopic analysis in the laboratory; I doubt if the sagacity of the researchers who have studied the question has overlooked the possibility.”

Diop's work was well received by the political establishment in the post-colonial formative phase of the state of Senegal under Léopold Sédar Senghor, whose politics of African socialism was inspired by the Pan-Africanist Négritude movement. Diop further attempted to link Egypt to Senegal by arguing that the Ancient Egyptian language was related to his native Wolof. The University of Dakar was renamed in Diop's honour after his death, to Cheikh Anta Diop University. Diop participated in a UNESCO symposium in Cairo in 1974 and he wrote the chapter about the "origins of the Egyptians" in the UNESCO General History of Africa.

Founded in 1979, the Journal of African Civilizations has continually advocated that Egypt should be viewed as a black civilization. Figures attached to the group centering around the journal include Ivan van Sertima and J.H. Clarke (who has advanced further the "Cleopatra was black" theory). Other notable proponents of the meme include Chancellor Williams. Mainstream scholarship has generally been critical of the journal: J.D. Muhly describes it as "well-intentioned but quite unconvincing and lacking in the basic techniques of critical scholarship."

During the European colonial era on the African continent, the prevalent European attitude was that ancient Egyptians were 'white', as the French scholar Alain Froment shows on the basis of two encyclopaedias from the 1930s.

The British Africanist Basil Davidson summarized the issue as follows:

Whether the Ancient Egyptians were as black or as brown in skin color as other Africans may remain an issue of emotive dispute; probably, they were both. Their own artistic conventions painted them as pink, but pictures on their tombs show they often married queens shown as entirely black, being from the south (from what a later world knew as Nubia): while the Greek writers reported that they were much like all the other Africans whom the Greeks knew.

Specific controversies

Debate in the public sphere has tended to focus more on the race of specific notable individuals from the history of Egypt, particularly Tutankhamun, Cleopatra VII and also the Great Sphinx of Giza. Such claims by Afrocentrists have not been limited to Egyptians: Carthaginian general Hannibal and Roman Emperor Septimius Severus have also been claimed as black, despite disputed evidence, as well as the ancient Greek philosopher Socrates.

Tutankhamun

See also: Tutankhamun

Tutankhamun reconstruction, on the cover National Geographic Magazine - 2005.

Supporters of Afrocentrism have claimed that Tutankhamun was black, and have protested that attempted reconstructions of Tutankhamun's facial features (as depicted on the cover of National Geographic Magazine) have represented the king as “too white”.

Forensic artists and physical anthropologists from Egypt, France, and the United States independently created busts of Tutankhamun, using a CT-scan of the skull. Biological anthropologist Susan Anton, the leader of the American team, said that the race of the skull was “hard to call”. She stated that the shape of the cranial cavity indicated an African, while the nose opening suggested narrow nostrils, which is usually considered to be a European characteristic. The skull was thus concluded to be that of a North African. Other experts have pointed out that neither skull shapes nor nasal openings are a reliable indication of race.

Although modern technology can reconstruct Tutankhamun's facial structure with a high degree of accuracy based on CT data from his mummy, determining his skin tone and eye color is impossible. The clay model was therefore given a flesh coloring which according to the artist was based on an "average shade of modern Egyptians."

Terry Garcia, National Geographic's executive vice president for mission programs, said, in response to some protesters of the Tutankhamun reconstruction:

The big variable is skin tone. North Africans, we know today, had a range of skin tones, from light to dark. In this case, we selected a medium skin tone, and we say, quite up front, 'This is midrange.' We will never know for sure what his exact skin tone was or the color of his eyes with 100% certainty.  ... Maybe in the future, people will come to a different conclusion.

When pressed on the issue by American activists in September 2007, the current Secretary General of the Egyptian Supreme Council of Antiquities, Dr. Zahi Hawass stated that "Tutankhamun was not black, and the portrayal of ancient Egyptian civilization as black has no element of truth to it;" Hawass further observed that "[Ancient] Egyptians are not Arabs and are not Africans despite the fact that Egypt is in Africa."

In a November 2007 publication of "Ancient Egypt Magazine", Hawass asserted that none of the facial reconstructions resemble Tut, and that in his opinion, the most accurate representation of the boy king is the mask from his tomb. The Discovery Channel commissioned a facial reconstruction of Tutankhamun's golden mask back in 2002.

Cleopatra VII

Further information: Cleopatra VII

Cleopatra's race and skin colour have also caused frequent debate as described in an article from The Baltimore Sun. There is also an article titled: Was Cleopatra Black? from Ebony magazine, and an article about Afrocentrism from the St. Louis Post-Dispatch that mentions the question, too. Scholars generally suggest a light olive skin colour for Cleopatra, based on the facts that her Macedonian family had intermingled with the Persian aristocracy of the time, that her mother is not absolutely known for certain, and that her paternal grandmother may have been African (or indeed from anywhere at all) which is possible but not provable. Afrocentric assertions of Cleopatra's blackness have, however, continued. The question was the subject of an heated exchange between Mary Lefkowitz, who has referred in her articles a debate she had with one of her students about the question whether Cleopatra was black, and Molefi Kete Asante, Professor of African American Studies at Temple University. As a response to Not Out of Africa by Lefkowitz, Asante wrote an article: Race in Antiquity: Truly Out of Africa, in which he emphasizes that he "can say without a doubt that Afrocentrists do not spend time arguing that either Socrates or Cleopatra were black."

Great Sphinx of Giza

Some Afrocentrist writers, including W.E.B. Du Bois, have claimed that the Sphinx is a statue of a black person. This is based in part on the personal observations of writers such as Constantin-François Chassebœuf and Gustave Flaubert.

More recently, American geologist Robert M. Schoch has written that the "Sphinx has a distinctive 'African,' 'Nubian,' or 'Negroid' aspect which is lacking in the face of Khafre." An American orthodontist named Sheldon Peck once wrote a letter to the editor of the New York Times, in which he noted that the Sphinx has “an anatomical condition of forward development in both jaws, more frequently found in people of African ancestry than in those of Asian or Indo-European stock."

The exact identity of the model for the Sphinx is unknown as there are no known written records that proclaim its identity. Almost all Egyptologists and scholars currently believe that the face of the Sphinx represents the likeness of the Pharaoh Khafra, although a few Egyptologists and interested amateurs have proposed several conflicting hypotheses.

The meaning of 'Kemet'

km in Egyptian hieroglyphs

km biliteral	km.t (place)	km.t (people)

One of the many names for Egypt in ancient Egyptian is km.t (read Kemet), meaning 'the black land' or 'the black one'. Generally, 'Kemet' is taken to be a reference to the fertile black soil which was washed down from Central Africa by the annual Nile inundation, and which made Egypt habitable and successful in contrast to the barren desert or 'red land' outside the narrow confines of the Nile watercourse. The use of the word kmt when referring to people is thought to be derived from the name of the land, meaning literally "those people who live in the black, fertile country." Raymond Faulkner's Concise Dictionary of Middle Egyptian translates it into "Egyptians", as do most sources.

The claim that Kemite referred to the fact that the people of the land had black skins, as argued by Cheikh Anta Diop, William Leo Hansberry, or Aboubacry Moussa Lam has become a cornerstone of Afrocentric historiography. This view is rejected by most Egyptologists.

Ancient Egyptian art

The ancient Egyptian tombs and temples contained thousands of works of writing, painting and sculpture, which reveal a lot about the people of that time. However their depictions of themselves in their surviving art and artifacts are rendered in sometimes symbolic, rather than realistic, pigments. As a result, ancient Egyptian artifacts provide sometimes conflicting and inconclusive evidence of the ethnicity of the people who lived in Egypt during dynastic times.

Professor Manu Ampim is an historian and researcher specializing in African and African American history and culture. He has taught at Morgan State University in Baltimore, San Francisco State University, and Merritt College in Oakland, California. He has been published extensively, including a six-part essay on “The Vanishing Evidence of Classical African Civilizations.” He has also produced a book called Modern Fraud: The Forged Ancient Egyptian Statues of Ra-Hotep and Nofret, in which he makes the claim that many ancient Egyptian statues and artworks are modern frauds that have been created specifically to hide the “fact” that the ancient Egyptians were black, while authentic artworks which demonstrate black characteristics are systematically defaced or even "modified". Professor Ampim repeatedly makes the accusation that the Egyptian authorities are systematically destroying evidence that “proves” that the ancient Egyptians were black, under the guise of renovating and conserving the applicable temples and structures. He further accuses “European” scholars of wittingly participating in and abetting this process.

Professor Ampim has a specific concern about the painting of the "Table of Nations" in the Tomb of Ramses III (KV11). The “Table of Nations” is a standard painting which appears in a number of tombs, and they were usually provided for the guidance of the soul of the deceased. Among other things they described the "four races of men", as follows: (translation by E.A. Wallis Budge:

The first are RETH, the second are AAMU, the third are NEHESU, and the fourth are THEMEHU. The RETH are Egyptians, the AAMU are dwellers in the deserts to the east and north-east of Egypt, the NEHESU are the black races, and the THEMEHU are the fair-skinned Libyans.

The archaeologist Richard Lepsius documented many ancient Egyptian tomb paintings in his work Denkmaler aus Aegypten und Aethiopien. In 1913, after the death of Lepsius, an updated reprint of the work was produced, edited by Kurt Sethe. This printing included an additional section, called the “Erganzungsband” in German, which incorporated many illustrations that did not appear in Lepsius’ original work. One of them, plate 48, illustrated one example of each of the four “nations” as depicted in KV11, and shows the "Egyptian nation" and the "Nubian nation" as identical to each other in skin color and dress. Professor Ampim has declared that plate 48 is a true reflection of the original painting, and that it “proves” that the ancient Egyptians were identical in appearance to the Nubians, even though he admits no other examples of the "Table of Nations" show this similarity. He has further accused “Euro-American writers” of attempting to mislead the public on this issue. The late Egyptologist Dr. Frank Yurco visited the tomb of Ramses III (KV11), and in a 1996 article on the Ramses III tomb reliefs he pointed out that the depiction of plate 48 in the Erganzungsband section is not a correct depiction of what is actually painted on the walls of the tomb. Dr Yurco notes instead that plate 48 is a “pastische” of samples of what is on the tomb walls, arranged from Lepsius' notes after his death, and that a picture of a Nubian person has erroneously been labeled in the pastiche as an Egyptian person. Yurco points also to the much-more-recent photographs of Dr. Erik Hornung as a correct depiction of the actual paintings. (Erik Hornung, “The Valley of the Kings: Horizon of Eternity”, 1990). Ampim nonetheless continues to claim that plate 48 shows accurately the images which stand on the walls of KV11, and he categorically accuses both Yurco and Hornung of perpetrating a deliberate deception for the purposes of misleading the public about the true race of the Ancient Egyptians.

The Land of Punt

The ancient Egyptians viewed the Land of Punt (Pun.t; Pwenet; Pwene) as their ancestral homeland. In his book “The Making of Egypt” (1939), W. M. Flinders Petrie stated that the Land of Punt was “sacred to the Egyptians as the source of their race.” E.A. Wallis Budge stated that “Egyptian tradition of the Dynastic Period held that the aboriginal home of the Egyptians was Punt…”

The consensus view among the majority of Egyptologists is summed up by Ian Shaw in the Oxford History of Ancient Egypt:

“ There is still some debate regarding the precise location of Punt, which was once identified with the region of modern Somalia. A strong argument has now been made for its location in either southern Sudan or the Eritrean region of Ethiopia, where the indigenous plants and animals equate most closely with those depicted in the Egyptian reliefs and paintings. ”

The placement of Punt in eastern Africa is based on the fact that the products of Punt were abundantly found in East Africa but were less common or absent in Arabia. These products included gold, aromatic resins such as myrrh, ebony and elephant tusks. The wild animals depicted in Punt include giraffes, baboons, hippopotami and leopards. Says Richard Pankhurst, in his book “The Ethiopians”: “[Punt] has been identified with territory on both the Arabian and African coasts. Consideration of the articles which the Egyptians obtained from Punt, notably gold and ivory, suggests, however, that these were primarily of African origin. … This leads us to suppose that the term Punt probably applied more to African than Arabian territory.”

However some scholars disagree with this view and point to a range of ancient Egyptian inscriptions which unambiguously locate Punt in Arabia. Dimitri Meeks has written that “Texts locating Punt beyond doubt to the south are in the minority, but they are the only ones cited in the current consensus about the location of the country. Punt, we are told by the Egyptians, is situated – in relation to the Nile Valley – both to the north, in contact with the countries of the Near East of the Mediterranean area, and also to the east or south-east, while its furthest borders are far away to the south. Only the Arabian Peninsula satisfies all these indications.”

See also

• Dynastic race theory
• Race in the United States
• Négritude
• Demographics of modern Egypt

References

• Mary R. Lefkowitz: "Ancient History, Modern Myths", originally printed in The New Republic, 1992. Reprinted with revisions as part of the essay collection Black Athena Revisited, 1996.
• Kathryn A. Bard: "Ancient Egyptians and the issue of Race", Bostonia Magazine, 1992: later part of Black Athena Revisited, 1996.
• Frank M. Snowden, Jr.: "Bernal's "Blacks" and the Afrocentrists", Black Athena Revisited, 1996.
• Joyce Tyldesley: "Cleopatra, Last Queen of Egypt", Profile Books Ltd, 2008.
• Alain Froment, 1994. "Race et Histoire: La recomposition ideologique de l'image des Egyptiens anciens." Journal des Africanistes 64:37-64. available online: Race et Histoire (in French)
• Yaacov Shavit, 2001: History in Black. African-Americans in Search of an Ancient Past, Frank Cass Publishers

As then

Controversy surrounding the race of ancient Egyptians has been a persistent meme in Afrocentrism since the early years of the 20th century.

Today, the debate largely takes place outside the field of Egyptology. Scholarly consensus is that the concept of "pure race" is incoherent; that applying modern notions of race to ancient Egypt is anachronistic; and that as far as skin colour is concerned, the ancient Egyptians were neither "black" nor "white" (as such terms are usually applied today).

Origins

The roots of Afrocentrism lay in the repression of blacks throughout the Western world in the 19th century, most particularly in the United States. At the turn of the century, however, came a rise in black racial consciousness as a tool to overcome oppression. Part of this reaction involved a focus on black history, and counteracting what was perceived as white, eurocentric history in favour of a historical narrative of Europe (and what was viewed as its founding culture, ancient Greece) that gave blacks a more prominent role. To a certain extent Afrocentrism also arose as a backlash against scientific racism (broadly speaking, a 19th-century phenomenon) which tended to attribute any advanced civilization to the immigration of Indo-Europeans.

Specifically, this attempted rewriting of the historical narrative of Europe developed into two main forms: the claim that European civilization was founded not by the Greeks, but by the Egyptians, whose culture and learning the Greeks allegedly stole or extensively borrowed (see Ancient Egypt and Greece), and that the Egyptians themselves were not only African but also black. Often, Afrocentrists link the two claims, as the following quote (by Marcus Garvey) displays:

“ 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 thousands of Negro professors at that time taught in the universities in Alexandria, then the seat of learning; that ancient Egypt gave the world civilization and that Greece and Rome have robbed Egypt of her arts and letters, and taken all the credit to themselves. ”

Both memes were to survive Garvey and to continue throughout the 20th century and up to the present day, provoking debate both in academia and in more public spheres, such as mainstream media and the internet. The claims surrounding the intellectual primacy of Egypt seems to have fed into Afrocentrism via American black Freemasonry (which has a long tradition of linking itself to ancient Egypt by means of the Hermeticist thought from which it draws heavily): Howe suggests that George James was a Mason, as his important sources for Stolen Legacy include both Masonic and Rosicrucian works, and Albert Churchward, an early 20th century English Mason who wrote extensively on Egypt as the source of all human civilization, is cited by Asante, Henry Olela, and Yosef Ben-Jochannen.

In academia

In academia, the meme continued throughout the 20th century in the works of George James, Cheikh Anta Diop, and even, to a certain extent, in Martin Bernal's Black Athena. All three have used the terms "black", "African", and "Egyptian" interchangeably, despite what Snowden calls "copious ancient evidence to the contrary".

Founded in 1979, the Journal of African Civilizations has continually advocated that Egypt should be viewed as a black civilization. Figures attached to the group centering around the journal include Ivan van Sertima and J.H Clarke (who has advanced further the "Cleopatra was black" meme). Other notable proponents of the meme include Chancellor Williams. Mainstream scholarship has generally been critical of the journal: J.D. Muhly describes it as "well-intentioned but quite unconvincing and lacking in the basic techniques of critical scholarship." Molefi Asante, based at Temple University, (who Howe identifies as the "most influential, widely quoted Afrocentric writer today") and other frequent contributors to the Journal of Black Studies are also strong proponents of the "black Egyptians" thesis: further, Asante proposes Egypt as the basis for virtually all other African civilizations as well as European civilizations (via Greece). The strong diffusionism found in Asante (Asante, following Williams, believes that an Arab influx into Egypt led to the mass flight of Egyptian priests across the continent, bearing their cultural knowledge with them) is also a feature of Martin Bernal's work.

Diop was particularly attached to the "black Egyptians" idea. His thesis dedicated to the topic had been rejected by the University of Paris in 1951, but after it had been published in the popular press as a book titled Nations nègres et culture (Negro Nations and Culture) in 1955, he successfully defended it in 1960. At the University of Dakar, he tried to establish the skin colour by measuring the melanin content of the Egyptian mummies, stating

“In practice it is possible to determine directly the skin color and, hence, the ethnic affiliations of the ancient Egyptians by microscopic analysis in the laboratory; I doubt if the sagacity of the researchers who have studied the question has overlooked the possibility.”

Diop's work was well received by the political establishment in the post-colonial formative phase of the state of Senegal under Léopold Sédar Senghor, whose politics of African socialism was inspired by the Pan-Africanist Négritude movement. Diop further attempted to link Egypt to Senegal by arguing that the Ancient Egyptian language was related to his native Wolof. The University of Dakar was renamed in Diop's honour after his death, to Cheikh Anta Diop University. Diop participated in a UNESCO symposium in Cairo in 1974 and he wrote the chapter about the "origins of the Egyptians" in the UNESCO General History of Africa.

In the public sphere

Debate in the public sphere has tended to focus more on the race of specific notable individuals from the history of Egypt, particularly Tutankhamun and Cleopatra VII. Attempted reconstructions of Tutankhamun's facial features have encountered much Afrocentric protest over concerns that he has been represented as too white.

Cleopatra's race and skin colour have also caused frequent debate. Scholars generally suggest a light olive skin colour for Cleopatra, based on the facts that her Macedonian family had intermingled with the Persian aristocracy of the time, that her mother is not absolutely known for certain, and that her paternal grandmother may have been African (or indeed from anywhere at all) which is possible but not provable. Afrocentric assertions of Cleopatra's blackness have, however, continued.

Such claims by Afrocentrists have not been limited to Egyptians: Carthaginian general Hannibal and Roman Emperor Septimius Severus have also been claimed as black, despite limited or non-existent evidence.

References

• Stephen Howe: Afrocentrism, Verso, 1998.
• Mary R. Lefkowitz: "Ancient History, Modern Myths", originally printed in The New Republic, 1992. Reprinted with revisions as part of the essay collection Black Athena Revisited, 1996.
• Kathryn A. Bard: "Ancient Egyptians and the issue of Race", Bostonia Magazine, 1992: later part of Black Athena Revisited, 1996.
• Frank M. Snowden, Jr.: "Bernal's "Blacks" and the Afrocentrists", Black Athena Revisited, 1996.
• Joyce Tyldesley: "Cleopatra, Last Queen of Egypt", Profile Books Ltd, 2008.