White Egypt, Black Egypt: The Story of an American Quarrel

In XNUMXth-century America, Egyptomania was an important social and political issue, which divided society between proponents of slavery and supporters of abolition.

In 1845, in his fantastic short story A little chat with a mummy, Edgar Allan Poe depicts American scientists bringing a mummy back to life after unwrapping it. Through a discussion between Allamistakeo (the mummy) and the scholars, Poe mocks the ignorance of the scholars and "so-called" American Egyptologists of the XIX^e century.

Since the Napoleonic campaigns (1798-1801) and the enormous success of the Descriptions of Egypt (1809-1828), a wave of Egyptomania affected Western European and North American societies. Travelogues, the development of Egyptological studies and the importation of antiquities contributed to spreading in the imagination of the young American society an Egyptomania that was specific to it.

But at this same time, specialists wonder: were the Egyptians black? This simple hypothesis, put forward in particular by the Count of Volney, French philosopher and orientalist, casts a chill over an American society based on slavery.

This sentence, taken from Travel to Egypt and Syria (1797), marks the beginning of a long anthropological debate:

“To think that this race of black men, today our slave and the object of our contempt, is the very one to whom we owe our arts, our sciences and even the use of speech. »

Egyptomania then becomes a social and political issue: under the pretext of knowing what the skin color of the pharaohs really was, the partisans of slavery find new arguments to defend their racist society, while their detractors see in it material to challenge racial theories and slavery.

Undress the mummies to prove their "whiteness"

This debate is particularly exacerbated by certain “experts” such as George Robin Gliddon (1809-1857), self-proclaimed Egyptologist.

The latter gives many conferences marked by a key moment: the unwrapping of mummies, object of fascination for the public.

These sessions, open to an erudite public, aim not only to make known ancient Egypt but also to justify, by means of archaeological evidence, the “Caucasian” origin of the ancient Egyptians. Gliddon, in Otia Ægyptiaca (1849), writes thus:

"In the skull of this man we see one of our own, a Caucasian, a pure white man, despite the bitumen that has blackened his skin."

The objective of these conferences is to refute, through craniometric studies – of which we know today that they have no no scientific basis – any idea of ​​“blackness” of skin among the ancient Egyptians.

In other words, for a nineteenth-century white American^e century, ancient Egypt, by the grandeur of its monuments and its civilization, cannot have come from a population of black Africa. Follower of anthropologist's human origins theory Samuel George Morton, Gliddon will provide several skulls of mummies which will allow the publication in 1844 of Crania Ægyptiaca.

Faced with those who, like Volney, think that the Sphinx of Giza proves that the Egyptian populations were black, Gliddon writes in Otia Ægyptiaca (1849)

“The fashion has been to cite the sphinx as proof of the Negro tendencies of the Ancient Egyptians. They mistake his wig for curly hair and as the nose is removed it is of course flat… But even though the face (which I fully admit) has a strong African streak it is an almost solitary example, compared to 10 000 who are not African”.

Summon all possible arguments

In the 1850s, with the help of the Dr Josiah Clark Nott, Gliddon published two extremely popular works in the United States in 1854: Types of Mankind (Types of Humanities) and Indigenous Races of the Earth or New Chapters of Ethnological Inquiry (The Indigenous Races of the Earth or New Chapters of Ethnological Inquiry, not translated, Ed). By associating two scientific fields, Egyptology and ethnology, he wants to demonstrate that there were different races of men; that these "types of humanities" who lived in ancient Egypt are the same as in the XIX^e century and that, in fact, black people have been destined to be slaves for all eternity.

This fallacious theory reassures those who already saw the slave society and the privileges it granted called into question.

In addition to the use of archaeological, scientific and scholarly "evidence" from the XNUMX^e century still widely use the Bible to support their own conclusions about the origin of mankind, to explain racial differences and to legitimize slavery. Between abolitionists and fervent supporters of the institution of slavery, the debates on divine creation and on the book of Genesis are raging.

Two theories stand out concerning the genesis of humanity, with the proponents of monogenesis advocating the unity of human beings (all races descend from Adam and Eve) and, on the other hand, the proponents of the polygenist theory supporting the idea of ​​a multiple origin of the races and a complete separation of the Caucasian and African races.

A black nationalist counter-offensive

A movement of counter-offensive to the development of this Egyptology exploited for racist purposes then emerged during the 1830s.

This tendency is intended to be counter-ethnological, anti-Egyptological and anti-slavery with the appearance of Societies like the American Anti-Slavery Society (1833) by William Lloyd Garrison against the "enlightened negrophobes of America", to use the expression of the abolitionist Wilson Armistead.

Relying largely on the writings of Volney and encouraged by readings such as that of Abbé Grégoire (Of the literature of the Negroes or research on their intellectual faculties, 1808), or that of Alexander Hill Everett (America: Or a General Survey of the Political Situation of the Several of the Wester Continent, America: or a general overview of the political situation of several countries of the Western continent, untranslated, 1827), African Americans supported by white abolitionist organizations would produce their own writings on ancient Egypt.

Mainly supported by African-American thinkers, the movement claims a link with Egypt, African land and therefore ancestral land for the descendants of slaves.

By affirming this glorious ancestry, African-Americans produce arguments against slavery, denouncing in passing white supremacy against the backdrop of the institution of slavery. Theodore Holly, Episcopal Bishop of Haiti, thus proclaims :

“Let them prove, if they can, to the full satisfaction of their narrow souls and their gangrenous hearts, that the Egyptians of ancient times, with black faces, woolly hair, thick lips and flat noses, 'did not belong to the same branch of the human family as these Negroes, victims of the African slave trade for four centuries'.

The Afro-American theses defended by David Walker, Henry Highland Garnet or even William WellsBrown even claim the civilizational primacy of ancient Black Egypt and the dissemination of its knowledge to Western civilizations such as Greece and then ancient Rome.

They thus reverse the white supremacist thesis by demonstrating that African-Americans descend from a superior civilization and that nothing then comes to justify the slavery thesis.

This fight against the racial prejudices of "darker races" will be accentuated with the pan-Africanist movement of Martin Delany then WEB Du Bois the XX^e century, taken up later by Cheikh Anta Diop. These theories are now highly controversial among Egyptologists.

The Africanized Cleopatra from William Wetmore Story

The knowledge of ancient Egypt also passes through the rediscovery of emblematic figures of this civilization such as that of the last queen of Egypt. Cleopatra.

Because of his uncertain ancestry, the figure of Cleopatra led the abolitionist movement to recognize her and appropriate her as a black woman, from an African civilization.

The sculptor William Wetmore Story is the first to make an idealized Cleopatra of the African type. White supporter of abolitionist movement, it creates several versions of The death of Cleopatra of which that of 1858 will remain the most emblematic. In 1860, John Sullivan Dwight wrote in Dwight's Journal of Music :

"She's not Greek, you see that with a single glance at the bold arch over which quiver nostrils that breathe revenge… She's not Roman either." »

Popularized by nathaniel hawthorne who pays homage to him in his novel The Marble Faun, Story's Cleopatra is a symbol of Africa. He writes thus:

“The face was a miraculous achievement. The sculptor did not hesitate to give the full lips of Nubia, and other characteristics of the Egyptian physiognomy. »

In addition to the African traits he lent to the Queen, the sculptor also invited reflection with this work: Cleopatra's suicide can be interpreted as a metaphor for the fate of African slaves at the dawn of the American Civil War.

Key to XNUMXth century Egyptological interest^e century, the question of the races and the color of the ancient Egyptians through Story's Cleopatra open the way to the development of an Afro-American Egyptomania: afrocentrism. Devoting his life to black equality, WEB Du Bois will strive through works like The Negro (1915) or The World and Africa and Color and Democracy (1947) to recognize the legitimate place of Africa and Africans in the history of the world, erased according to him by a white culture.

Charles Vanthournout, Professor of History-Geography and Doctoral Student in American Egyptomania, University of Lorraine

This article is republished from The Conversation under Creative Commons license. Read theoriginal article.