senevilla's review
4.0
Fabulous book, a few minor arguments need much stronger explanations but I didn’t bookmark specifics since I was on audio. Great if you’re interested in Africana Studies historiography.
spacestationtrustfund's review
1.0
Myth or reality? Easy question to answer: myth.
Goodreads community guidelines state plainly that reviews can't be only for the purpose of "attacking" someone else's review, so instead this review is going to be half refutation of the actual book and half refutation of this review, which inspired me to write it. (In the interest of transparency I did link the full review, so, although I will be quoting at length from it, you can go and read the entire thing if so desired.)
First of all I'll start off by including a disclaimer that I am by no means an Egyptologist; this is not my field of specialisation, and my practical experience is primarily overlap from where my classics studies intersected with ancient Egypt. That said, I have extensive experience studying ancient Egypt, as well as history in general, specifically from an historiographic, ethnographic, and sociological perspective, so I can provide fact-checking and source-citing. Please do not take any of this at face value. I encourage you to do your own research and listen to experts.
Not quite a disclaimer, but providing a bit of context: Cheikh Anta Diop was a Senegalese academic who focused primarily on pre-colonial African culture(s). Although his work predates Afrocentrism, his beliefs were in line with an Afrocentric worldview, and his highly controversial work was frequently accused of cultural bias, particularly his work regarding ancient Egypt. He was also a politican as well as an historian, and had a vested political interest in African unity, which he supported with his scholarly works. He has been widely accused of promoting pseudohistory and historical revisionism. He was also involved with the Rassemblement Démocratique Africain, which promoted pan-Africanist and African nationalist beliefs as a "response" to French colonialism. His desire for a united Africa coloured (sorry) his academic research, and influenced his conclusions. His practical research has also been accused of presentist bias, particularly his melanin dosage tests performed on ancient Egyptian mummies in order to determine skin pigmentation (which, for the record, does not work). Criticism has typically contended that this sort of test is inappropriate to apply to these mummies, due to the effects of embalming and deterioration over such a long time; these sorts of tests are also notoriously fallible even on more recent deceased.
Another bit of background information I'd like to get out of the way is the objective historical fact that the concept of "race" is a relatively new one, dating back to only the 16th century, not to mention historically subject to fluidity (i.e., Jews as white or non-white; Irish as white or non-white; Spanish or Italians as white or non-white; etc.). Prior to the 1500s populations were primarily segregated by ethnic origin and cultural heritage, i.e., ethnic Siberians and Muskovites would both be equally "Russian." Certainly the concept of "race" as a phenotypical divide did not exist in ancient Egypt, the time of which Diop writes, nor did it exist in ancient Rome, nor ancient Greece, nor ancient Carthage.
Don't get me wrong, some ancient Egyptians were definitely what would now be considered black Africans, undeniably so. Here, for example, is a bust of Queen Tiye,¹ mother of Akhenaten and grandmother of Tutankhamun:
It's pretty obvious that the bust is depicting a dark-skinned woman with Afro-textured hair, okay? No serious historians or Egyptologists are denying that many ancient Egyptians were dark-skinned Africans. But that's not all of the story. Ancient Egypt was a multiethnic society throughout the vast majority of its millennia-long existence, with citizens ranging from pale-skinned Greeks (including Cleopatra VII!) to dark-skinned Nubians. But the concept of race did not exist at that time, nor did the concept of "Africa" as anything beyond an ethnicity, so retroactively claiming that all ancient Egyptians would have identified as black Africans is inane. North African societies such as Egypt not only intermingled with Mediterranean societies such as Greek, Roman, or Southern European (including Spanish and Germanic), but also Middle Eastern populations. If anything, there's more evidence showing that ancient Egyptians were predominantly Arab, not African. Here, for example, is a bust of Nefertiti (Nfr.t-jy.tj), one of the most famous pieces of Egyptian art:
She looks a hell of a lot like my aunt Hala.² Realistically speaking, there's so much overlap between these two groups that a clear-cut distinction is not only impossible but also inherently kind of silly. Ancient Egyptians identified as Egyptian.
From the review:
The Egyptians also did not "[bring] writing, geometry, religion and science to the Greeks (and others)," I have genuinely no idea where that idea would come from. It is true that the current most accurate belief as to the origin of the human species is from Africa, and from there spread globally, but this does not mean that the ancient Egyptians were the same as the much-more-ancient Africans responsible for the evolutionary shift from ape to human. That would be an absurd notion to entertain. The ancient Greeks (and others) had developed their own writing, geometry, religion, and science long before contact with Egyptian civilisation.
The word "semitic" here is also an odd choice. It makes me very uncomfortable. The Egyptians were (and are!) Arabs. They are also African, which does not make them dark-skinned; similarly, it's possible to be both Polish and European—and also not light-skinned.
Diop doesn't end with claiming ancient Egyptians were black Africans; he applies the same treatment to other societies such as ancient Carthage. This is, similarly, nonsense: while there is little doubt that some Punic Carthaginians were dark-skinned, most of the representations we have of them show people who look a lot more like Greeks and Romans than anything else. They were, in fact, Phoenicians who had migrated from Canaan to North Africa, i.e., Semitic peoples speaking a dialect of the Phoenician language.⁴ When I say we have very few contemporary representations of Carthaginians (or other Punic peoples), I mean it; a handful of coins and some unconfirmed statues make up the majority. It's not a lot of archaeological evidence. Here, for example, is a Punic coin believed to depict Hannibal Barca as Melqart (Heracles):
And another coin believed to depict his brother Hasdrubal:
My point is that we don't know enough. Limited genetic testing is possible, and some studies support the idea that the Punic peoples were genetically similar to Northern Africans, but that means basically nothing regarding either their outward appearance or personal ethnic identity. The whole situation is fundamentally pointless, and also ridiculous, and unhelpful. There are plenty of actual dark-skinned Africans whose lives and accomplishments deserve recognition; you don't have to stretch paper-thin data to retrofit information we simply do not actually know. Yes, the human species almost certainly began in Africa, but that doesn't mean that "African" is equivalent with "black," because sometimes people are more than one thing at once. And also it's pretty stupid to retroactively classify ancient peoples who aren't around to give their own opinions on how they would identify. Ancient Egyptians were Egyptian, and ancient Phoenicians were Punic, and that's pretty much the extent of what we can definitively say.
"Egyptians could not be enslaved" is also an incredibly ahistoric take. Crucially, the concept of slavery has been very different throughout history. Slaves in ancient Greece or Rome were nothing at all like more modern African slaves in America and Europe. A better modern comparison would be actors who sign film contracts, honestly. Or K-Pop idols, but I digress. This is not to excuse the practice of "owning" another human being or otherwise treating them as property, but it's important to understand the distinction between absolute ownership over every aspect of an individual's life (American chattel slavery) as opposed to something more similar to indetured servitude, where slaves were frequently able to earn or buy their freedom, and many in fact were more like tutors, private chefs, personal maids, babysitters, etc. (ancient Greek slavery).
"Royal harem" is also a ludicrous idea. That was not a thing, either in the Western misconception of the word "harem" (sexy polygamy) or the actual definition (secluded women's living quarters).
The reviewer also mentions in the comments that whitewashing is the reason why the role of Cleopatra VII (a Greek woman) "can be [played by] white actresses" in film. I think that speaks for itself, honestly.
//
1 Some scholars, including Joyce A. Tyldesley, have argued that Tiye's family was foreign, and she was only Egyptian by recent ancestry and/or marriage, but this is similarly impossible to determine. Regardless of her family's origin, Tiye was Egyptian enough to rule alongside Amenhotep III as his principal wife (ḥmt nswt wrt).
2 Not her real name. None of the names I use to identify family members or friends are their actual names.
3 This is particularly ironic to me because the Bible makes up a bunch of shit about ancient Egypt (like the whole slaves-building-the-pyramids nonsense)... and so does Herodotus (like the whole cat-worshiping and eyebrow-shaving nonsense).
4 There's plenty of academic hullabaloo regarding whether—and, if so, when—Punic diverged from Phoenician as its own language rather than a dialect, but so little of either Punic or Phoenician has survived that reconstruction is impossible, and it's highly unlikely that the question will ever be settled. At the very least Phoenician was a pluricentric language if not a macrolanguage; it's probable that speakers of Punic could communicate with speakers of Phoenician in the same way that speakers of Attic and Doric Greek could, which is to say, we don't actually know much of anything.
Goodreads community guidelines state plainly that reviews can't be only for the purpose of "attacking" someone else's review, so instead this review is going to be half refutation of the actual book and half refutation of this review, which inspired me to write it. (In the interest of transparency I did link the full review, so, although I will be quoting at length from it, you can go and read the entire thing if so desired.)
First of all I'll start off by including a disclaimer that I am by no means an Egyptologist; this is not my field of specialisation, and my practical experience is primarily overlap from where my classics studies intersected with ancient Egypt. That said, I have extensive experience studying ancient Egypt, as well as history in general, specifically from an historiographic, ethnographic, and sociological perspective, so I can provide fact-checking and source-citing. Please do not take any of this at face value. I encourage you to do your own research and listen to experts.
Not quite a disclaimer, but providing a bit of context: Cheikh Anta Diop was a Senegalese academic who focused primarily on pre-colonial African culture(s). Although his work predates Afrocentrism, his beliefs were in line with an Afrocentric worldview, and his highly controversial work was frequently accused of cultural bias, particularly his work regarding ancient Egypt. He was also a politican as well as an historian, and had a vested political interest in African unity, which he supported with his scholarly works. He has been widely accused of promoting pseudohistory and historical revisionism. He was also involved with the Rassemblement Démocratique Africain, which promoted pan-Africanist and African nationalist beliefs as a "response" to French colonialism. His desire for a united Africa coloured (sorry) his academic research, and influenced his conclusions. His practical research has also been accused of presentist bias, particularly his melanin dosage tests performed on ancient Egyptian mummies in order to determine skin pigmentation (which, for the record, does not work). Criticism has typically contended that this sort of test is inappropriate to apply to these mummies, due to the effects of embalming and deterioration over such a long time; these sorts of tests are also notoriously fallible even on more recent deceased.
Another bit of background information I'd like to get out of the way is the objective historical fact that the concept of "race" is a relatively new one, dating back to only the 16th century, not to mention historically subject to fluidity (i.e., Jews as white or non-white; Irish as white or non-white; Spanish or Italians as white or non-white; etc.). Prior to the 1500s populations were primarily segregated by ethnic origin and cultural heritage, i.e., ethnic Siberians and Muskovites would both be equally "Russian." Certainly the concept of "race" as a phenotypical divide did not exist in ancient Egypt, the time of which Diop writes, nor did it exist in ancient Rome, nor ancient Greece, nor ancient Carthage.
Don't get me wrong, some ancient Egyptians were definitely what would now be considered black Africans, undeniably so. Here, for example, is a bust of Queen Tiye,¹ mother of Akhenaten and grandmother of Tutankhamun:
It's pretty obvious that the bust is depicting a dark-skinned woman with Afro-textured hair, okay? No serious historians or Egyptologists are denying that many ancient Egyptians were dark-skinned Africans. But that's not all of the story. Ancient Egypt was a multiethnic society throughout the vast majority of its millennia-long existence, with citizens ranging from pale-skinned Greeks (including Cleopatra VII!) to dark-skinned Nubians. But the concept of race did not exist at that time, nor did the concept of "Africa" as anything beyond an ethnicity, so retroactively claiming that all ancient Egyptians would have identified as black Africans is inane. North African societies such as Egypt not only intermingled with Mediterranean societies such as Greek, Roman, or Southern European (including Spanish and Germanic), but also Middle Eastern populations. If anything, there's more evidence showing that ancient Egyptians were predominantly Arab, not African. Here, for example, is a bust of Nefertiti (Nfr.t-jy.tj), one of the most famous pieces of Egyptian art:
She looks a hell of a lot like my aunt Hala.² Realistically speaking, there's so much overlap between these two groups that a clear-cut distinction is not only impossible but also inherently kind of silly. Ancient Egyptians identified as Egyptian.
From the review:
The Ancient Egyptians, the founders of the civilisation that built the pyramids and brought writing, geometry, religion and science to the Greeks (and others), were Black, as in 'Negro' as in, they looked more like the Yoruba or the Kikuyu or the Xhosa than any group of Semitic people.None of this is accurate. The Egyptians built some pyramids, but I certainly hope the insinuation here is not that they invented the triangular prism, which is a building technique in use for thousands of years and subject to convergent evolution, so to speak, everywhere from China to Egypt to South America (ziggurats, Machu Picchu, etc.). The Egyptians were responsible for the most lasting pyramids in terms of Western pop culture, yes, but that does not mean they invented the shape. They did not even invent the concept of a triangle-shaped burial mound; cairns have been in use since before agriculture.
The Egyptians also did not "[bring] writing, geometry, religion and science to the Greeks (and others)," I have genuinely no idea where that idea would come from. It is true that the current most accurate belief as to the origin of the human species is from Africa, and from there spread globally, but this does not mean that the ancient Egyptians were the same as the much-more-ancient Africans responsible for the evolutionary shift from ape to human. That would be an absurd notion to entertain. The ancient Greeks (and others) had developed their own writing, geometry, religion, and science long before contact with Egyptian civilisation.
The word "semitic" here is also an odd choice. It makes me very uncomfortable. The Egyptians were (and are!) Arabs. They are also African, which does not make them dark-skinned; similarly, it's possible to be both Polish and European—and also not light-skinned.
They came from the interior, from Nubia (Sudan) or the drying Western Sahara. Their sacred sites were in Upper Egypt, their true homeland. Their gods were there, and the heads of those gods were painted coal black.Their sacred sites were all over the fertile land next to the Nile, actually. Their gods were all over the place, and were certainly not all "painted coal black"—maybe Anapa ("Anubis"), but certainly not Set (red) or Osiris (green). The gods were also not representative of the Egyptian people's actual physiognomy, which is a good thing, given that the gods frequently had animal heads.
The Egyptians made no distinction of colour between themselves and the Nubians or other Black Africans.This is because the concept of race, or really discrimination based on skin colour, was not yet prominent. The Egyptians also did distinguish between themselves and Nubians: there are very clearly tomb or temple paintings showing dark-skinned Nubians presenting gifts to the brown-skinned Pharaoh, alongside other brown-skinned Egyptians.
Herodotus says they were black and had woolly hair. The Bible says it.WELL IF HERODOTUS AND THE BIBLE, TWO OF THE MOST NOTORIOUSLY HISTORICALLY ACCURATE SOURCES REGARDING ANCIENT EGYPT, SAY IT.³
The Canaanites, the Phoenicians, the Carthagianians [sic] were Black.None of this is correct. We do in fact have contemporary depictions of members of all of these cultures; obviously these must be taken with a grain of salt, since clearly no photographic evidence could have existed, but there are coins depicting Canaanites, Phoenicians, and Carthaginians, all of whom look Southern European: Greek, Mediterranean, Middle Eastern.
Diop doesn't end with claiming ancient Egyptians were black Africans; he applies the same treatment to other societies such as ancient Carthage. This is, similarly, nonsense: while there is little doubt that some Punic Carthaginians were dark-skinned, most of the representations we have of them show people who look a lot more like Greeks and Romans than anything else. They were, in fact, Phoenicians who had migrated from Canaan to North Africa, i.e., Semitic peoples speaking a dialect of the Phoenician language.⁴ When I say we have very few contemporary representations of Carthaginians (or other Punic peoples), I mean it; a handful of coins and some unconfirmed statues make up the majority. It's not a lot of archaeological evidence. Here, for example, is a Punic coin believed to depict Hannibal Barca as Melqart (Heracles):
And another coin believed to depict his brother Hasdrubal:
My point is that we don't know enough. Limited genetic testing is possible, and some studies support the idea that the Punic peoples were genetically similar to Northern Africans, but that means basically nothing regarding either their outward appearance or personal ethnic identity. The whole situation is fundamentally pointless, and also ridiculous, and unhelpful. There are plenty of actual dark-skinned Africans whose lives and accomplishments deserve recognition; you don't have to stretch paper-thin data to retrofit information we simply do not actually know. Yes, the human species almost certainly began in Africa, but that doesn't mean that "African" is equivalent with "black," because sometimes people are more than one thing at once. And also it's pretty stupid to retroactively classify ancient peoples who aren't around to give their own opinions on how they would identify. Ancient Egyptians were Egyptian, and ancient Phoenicians were Punic, and that's pretty much the extent of what we can definitively say.
Why am I struggling to make myself clear? Well, race isn't a thing is it? It's just junk in the mind of the racist, as one friend objected when I started talking about this book. The trouble is, we (as in everyone) are all racist, and the junk in racist minds is exactly what Cheikh Anta Diop (can I call him CAD? Thanks.) is writing back to here.If race isn't a thing (which it isn't, scientifically speaking: on a genetic level there's no more significant difference between two individuals with different skin colour than one with blue eyes and one with brown), then why are you so determined to prove that the Egyptians were black (which is a race)?
In fact, Egyptology up to 1954 had been part and parcel of the ideology of scientific racism. While CAD is able to cite some 'scholars of good faith' going all the way back to de Volney circa 1785 [...](That would be Constantin François de Chassebœuf, comte de Volney, who owned a plantation, pioneered Orientalist beliefs in France, and advocated for combining all world religions into a single über-religion? I can see why Diop would like him.)
who observes the (much lightened by mixing) Egyptians and recalls the words of Herodotus, concluding “the ancient Egyptians were true Negroes of the same type as all native-born Africans.”Again, "African" and "black" (or, as Diop phrases it "Negro"—although, in French, the word is nègre here) are not mutually inclusive. Herodotus was notoriously prone to exaggeration and flat-out lying when something didn't align with his political agenda... oddly like Diop.
[...] the majority of the Egyptologists he cites are clearly so deeply sunk in their white-supremacy that they will allow themselves any amount of contradiction, denial and extravagant misinterpretation, and think up any crackpot theory, to avoid accepting the obvious conclusion that THE EGYPTIANS WERE BLACK.I happen to know several very accomplished Egyptologists, who have studied the discipline for many years and published many peer-reviewed studies, and not one of them believes that the ancient Egyptians were anything but Egyptian. Only one of my Egyptologist friends is white; the majority of the rest are themselves Egyptian. "Contradiction, denial, and extravagant misinterpretation" could be the byline for this entire book.
Some of these theories propose that the Egyptians came from the North, which is ridiculous, and others create White races with dark skin.It's like neither Diop nor this reviewer knows that Arabs exist.
Hence such designations as 'Hamite' 'Nilotic' and so on, proliferate as the white Egyptologists scramble to avoid the belief that the despised and enslaved Negro could be the antecedent and teacher of European culture.Even if we're taking as fact that the Egyptians were black, how is ancient Egypt predominantly responsible for "European culture"? Europe is a very large place with a multitude of different diverse cultures.
CAD believes that there are only three 'races', 'white, black and yellow' and suspects that even the 'yellow' is really just a mix of black and white, like the Semites and other 'Mediterranean' people, and the Egyptians today.This is just absolute racist nonsense. Why would you agree with Diop on this?!
Egyptologists had suggested that Indo-Europeans civilized the Egyptians and lightened them, but Egyptian civilisation pre-dates anything in Europe and Mesopotamia,...what? No it doesn't.
[...] and mixing was very gradual due to the small numbers of whiter peoples coming to Africa, while all the elements of the Egyptian civilisation were in place in the undeniably Black Old Kingdom. The pale folks who came to Egypt before it fell were usually prisoners of war who became slaves (Egyptians could not be enslaved. The country was never a slave economy – numbers were small) or brought into the royal harem.Plenty of pale-skinned cultures interacted with Egyptian civilisation (Greeks, Romans, Phoenicians, Carthaginians, etc., the list goes on), just as many dark-skinned cultures (Nubians, other Africans) did.
"Egyptians could not be enslaved" is also an incredibly ahistoric take. Crucially, the concept of slavery has been very different throughout history. Slaves in ancient Greece or Rome were nothing at all like more modern African slaves in America and Europe. A better modern comparison would be actors who sign film contracts, honestly. Or K-Pop idols, but I digress. This is not to excuse the practice of "owning" another human being or otherwise treating them as property, but it's important to understand the distinction between absolute ownership over every aspect of an individual's life (American chattel slavery) as opposed to something more similar to indetured servitude, where slaves were frequently able to earn or buy their freedom, and many in fact were more like tutors, private chefs, personal maids, babysitters, etc. (ancient Greek slavery).
"Royal harem" is also a ludicrous idea. That was not a thing, either in the Western misconception of the word "harem" (sexy polygamy) or the actual definition (secluded women's living quarters).
This isn't a theory of racial superiority of course;Cool. Except that it very much is. If you're going to say that Diop was right, at least understand what he was actually saying, please.
The reviewer also mentions in the comments that whitewashing is the reason why the role of Cleopatra VII (a Greek woman) "can be [played by] white actresses" in film. I think that speaks for itself, honestly.
//
1 Some scholars, including Joyce A. Tyldesley, have argued that Tiye's family was foreign, and she was only Egyptian by recent ancestry and/or marriage, but this is similarly impossible to determine. Regardless of her family's origin, Tiye was Egyptian enough to rule alongside Amenhotep III as his principal wife (ḥmt nswt wrt).
2 Not her real name. None of the names I use to identify family members or friends are their actual names.
3 This is particularly ironic to me because the Bible makes up a bunch of shit about ancient Egypt (like the whole slaves-building-the-pyramids nonsense)... and so does Herodotus (like the whole cat-worshiping and eyebrow-shaving nonsense).
4 There's plenty of academic hullabaloo regarding whether—and, if so, when—Punic diverged from Phoenician as its own language rather than a dialect, but so little of either Punic or Phoenician has survived that reconstruction is impossible, and it's highly unlikely that the question will ever be settled. At the very least Phoenician was a pluricentric language if not a macrolanguage; it's probable that speakers of Punic could communicate with speakers of Phoenician in the same way that speakers of Attic and Doric Greek could, which is to say, we don't actually know much of anything.
andrewfontenelle's review
5.0
Cheikh Anta Diop has to be one of the great African Thinkers of the twentieth century. From the time he published his thesis in 1954, he has consistently challenged western ideas on Africa and its relationship to Ancient Egypt.
“The African Origin of Civilization: Myth or Reality” represents his definitive work on early African Civilization and the origins of the Ancient Egyptians.
Definitely a must read for anyone interested in African History.
“The African Origin of Civilization: Myth or Reality” represents his definitive work on early African Civilization and the origins of the Ancient Egyptians.
Definitely a must read for anyone interested in African History.
traceyfromkc's review
4.0
this is one of the textbooks for an Intro to African American Studies class i'm taking. it's a little tough to read at times, but i think that's because i was overwhelmed at the amount of information Diop provided to counter claims made by historians. i'm looking forward to checking out some of the sources Diop cited in his arguments. there's so much history that we don't know...so much that has been denied, disrespected, and removed in relation to Africa. this book serves as a good foundation to begin to question myths about the real roles of African cultures, including Egypt, in the development of civilization.
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