The Origin of Egyptian Civilization

Fed by Africa's greatest lake, the Nile runs north for over 4,000 miles before reaching its outflow in the Mediterranean Sea. It's the longest river on Earth, and no river anywhere pushes on so relentlessly through mile after mile of vast and rainless desert regions, while tumbling down from the mountain plateau of Ethiopia. But the Nile is more than a great river. It's a whole library of the history we're looking for. From the earliest times of human settlement along the river, Some 10,000 years ago, the Nile was the giver of life to ancient communities who came to its banks and farmed on fertile soil that was enriched unfailingly, year by year, by the flood of silt. Those early people were among the ancestors of the Egyptians and the Sudanese of today. Others may have come from the Middle East, but the archaeological evidence combines to show that the main lines of incoming migration were from the southwest and the west, in other words from the African communities of the Sahara. 5,000 years ago, this homeland had already become the scene of a civilization in many ways unmatched anywhere else in the ancient world. This is where we have to begin, in the Egypt of the pharaohs, in the African land that was the gift of the god of the Nile. It's easy enough to believe, within these corridors, built to a gigantic scale and yet wonderfully proportioned, that you've entered a world sprung complete from the lap of the gods. Egypt of the pharaohs was the greatest and the oldest and the most inventive of all the high civilizations of antiquity, and it flourished for 3,000 years. It set a pattern, an example for peoples near and far. But where were its roots, its origins, its starting point? Most of us have believed or have been taught that the glories of the pharaohs could never have been created by African people or African ideas because, it's been said, Africans could never have built a high civilization. Here reigned, for dynasty after dynasty, the kings who wore the double crown, the combined crown of Upper Egypt and of the Delta. But what had they to do with Africa? how could this grand hierarchy of gods and spirits have anything in common with the superstitious mumblings of the black peoples of inner Africa? among the treasures of the Cairo Museum, it's easy to think of the Egypt of the pharaohs as a civilization complete within itself, owing little or nothing to outside influences from whatever source, entirely its own creation. And I imagine that most visitors conclude as they listen to their guides that a statue such as this of the young king Tutankhamen may have turned very black in the course of centuries but could not have been a black man in the first place. It's a view which is now increasingly under challenge, not least from African historians and archaeologists. One of the more outspoken of these is Professor Sheikh Anta Diop of Senegal, who has made a special study of the origins of the 19th century, here in the tomb of Ramses III, in the 12th century B.C., the four races known to the Egyptians were represented on the same plane. Here you have the Egyptian, the generic type of race, a black coal, if I may say so, with all its ethnic peculiarities. And on the same table, you have the Indo-European type, also represented, with all these differences in relation to the Egyptian type, from the point of view of the color of the skin and the point of view of the clothing. And here you have the other Africans who lived in the interior of the continent, represented in the same way as the Egyptians. Thank you. That particular painting, however, is a rare exception, the only one, as far as I know, that so clearly makes the professor's point. For the most part, the ancient Egyptians had themselves portrayed as reddish-pink. But, of course, they intermarried with Asians, and even more with other Africans. Many of their noble ladies were Nubians, and lovingly portrayed as such. This painting comes from the tomb of Hemaka. Clearly a black lady, with a handmaiden behind her, just as surely white. It followed that the royal children were often black as well, as was King Senusret, seen here wearing the white crown of Upper Egypt. or this pharaoh, of unknown name, but obviously of high prestige in his time, and just as clearly African.