Egyptian People
Egypt lies between places where people have lighter skin, like Germany, and places where people have darker skin, like Kenya. Therefore Egyptians have, and had in antiquity, skin which was also medium in color. It is hard to say that they are really white or black; those are terms which have a lot of meaning in the United States, but not so much meaning in Egypt or the rest of North Africa. They were related to other Africans, and they spoke a Hamitic language, which means they spoke a language that was distantly related to the Semitic languages Hebrew and Arabic. This shows us that the Egyptians were also distantly related to their neighbors to the east, the Semitic Jews and Arabs.
Here are some photographs of modern people from West Asia and Africa:
Arafat, a Palestinian
from Western Asia
Saddam Hussein,
from Iraq
Nasser, from Egypt
A woman from Kenya
people from Western Asia |
man from Egypt |
Queen of Punt (Ethiopia) |
People from Nubia, south of Egypt, as the Egyptians drew them.
To find out about Egyptian families, schools, and slavery, click on the links.
To find out more about this debate, check out these books from Amazon.com or from your library:
Black Athena: The Afroasiatic Roots of Classical Civilization (The Fabrication of Ancient Greece 1785-1985), by Martin Bernal (1987). This is the book that started the debate, but it's too hard to read for most people. Some parts of it are probably right - that 19th and 20th c. classicists were racists - and other parts are probably wrong, like that Egypt had colonies in Greece. (He doesn't actually argue that the Egyptians were black).
Not Out of Africa: How Afrocentrism Became an Excuse to Teach Myth As History, by Mary Lefkowitz (1997). Lefkowitz answers Bernal, taking a very conservative position, basically saying how great the Greeks were and denying connections to Egypt. But it's easier to read.
Main people page
Main Egypt page
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