#hamitic

Ancient Egyptians/Kemites and the idea of them being either Black or White would be something completely foreign to them,; they were neither. Those are societal and racial constructs that have only existed for the last few hundred years. If you were to ask an Ancient Egyptian/Kemite, Semite, Roman, Greek, Celt, Phoenician, or even Visigoth if they believed they were “White”, they would have no idea what you were talking about. The more important question to ask is whether Ancient Egyptians were ethnically African. Which I whole heartily believe in. Why is it that most people can believe Ancient Greeks were native to the Greek Peninsula and Romans were to the Italian Peninsula, yet Ancient Egyptians have to be from somewhere else other than the African continent?

The “melting pot” you are talking about didn’t occur until well into the Late Period of Ancient Egyptian history. While Ancient Egyptians were documented to be less hostile to foreigners than other peoples, there were no mass travels into the land which would have outnumbered and displaced the native Egyptians. Even the Hyksos people were severely outnumbered by the native Egyptians. And after their rulers were overthrown, the Egyptians kicked them out of the country; there was no whole scale miscegenation between the two people. Even Herodotus, the father of History, was on record saying that Ancient Egyptians had Black skin and woolly hair, and lived in the Late Period of Ancient Egypt, right before Alexander the Great and the Ptolemies took power.

It’s like the recent “evidence” that the scientists made about mummies they tested. I’m not surprised with the findings since all the 150 mummies they examined came from the latter part of Ancient Egyptian history, the New Kingdom to Roman Era. Into the Third Intermediate Period (which came right after NK) Egypt/Kemet was marked by divisions of the state for much of that time period and conquest and rule by foreigners from West Asia. So you have an influx of West Asian, Greek, and later Roman DNA coming into the area over the course of a thousand or so years…so I would be more aghast surprised if miscegenation did not occur. Now had they tested the genetics of some much older pharaonic mummies, like Khufu or Pepi II and it turned out they had Mediterranean or West Asian ancestry, I’d be more intrigued.

“Hamitic” a rather antiquated and altogether racist concept that began to be popular with academics in the 18th Century; which started out referring to language and NOT race. That Semitic and Caucasian peoples traveled from West Asia and settled in Northern Africa and are the true ancestors to the Ancient Egyptians, as well as the reason for their achievements in science and the arts. There is no historical evidence that supports that!  After the last Ice Age South Africa was the first place to melt and be livable for human existence. From there humans moved northward expanding into Sub-Saharan Africa, North Africa and eventually into Europe and Asia. Ancient Egypt is by the far the oldest recorded civilization in global history. If you look at their own artistic depiction of themselves, Egyptian skin tones ran the gamut of being a light golden to a very deep black. Scientists have tested the skin of mummies and have found large amounts of melanin in their bodies. Large amounts of Melanin means dark skin.

Today the Hamitic concepts have been widely discredited and are often referred to as the Hamitic Myth. The Hamitic term itself is considered to be pejorative. The Hamitic Myth stipulates that said people of European expats were intellectually and culturally superior to or more advanced than any of Sub-Saharan African descended peoples south of them. The Hamites came into Africa, taught the native Africans everything they knew, and that led to Ancient Egypt we know about today.

“Apart from relatively late Semitic influence…the civilizations of Africa are the civilizations of the Hamites, its history the record of these peoples and of their interaction with the two other African stocks, the Negro and the Bushman, whether this influence was exerted by highly civilized Egyptians or by such wider pastoralists as are represented at the present day by the Beja and Somali…The incoming Hamites were pastoral ‘Europeans’–arriving wave after wave–better armed, as well as quicker witted than the dark agricultural Negroes.“ - Charles Gabriel Seligman (1930)

The language group is no longer considered a useful concept, though the phrase Semito-Hamitic is a dated term for the Afro-Asiatic group. The notion of a Hamitic race is similarly problematic.

The Hamitic Myth was used as a justification for European colonial policy in Africa in the 19th and 20th centuries as well as the Trans-Atlantic Slave Trade. So no, I do not and will not consider Ancient Egypt Hamitic in origin.

REFERENCES

Methodology and African Prehistory edited by Joseph Ki-Zerbo

Africa from the Twelfth to the Sixteenth Century edited by Djibril Tamsir Niane

Methodology and African Prehistory, Volume 1 By Jacqueline Ki-Zerbo

The Forging of Races: Race and Scripture in the Protestant Atlantic World, 1600-2000 by Colin Kidd

    Trying to make African people and culture evil

                               Early Jewish interpretations

The Torah assigns no racial characteristics or rankings to Ham. Moses married a Cushite, one of the reputed descendants of Ham, according to the Book of Numbers, Chapter 12. Despite this, a number of early Jewish writers have interpreted the Biblical narrative of Ham in a racial way. The Babylonian Talmud, Sanhedrin 108b states, "Our Rabbis taught: Three copulated in the ark, and they were all punished—the dog, the raven, and Ham. The dog was doomed to be tied, the raven expectorates, and Ham was smitten in his skin" (Talmud Bavli, Sanhedrin 108b). The nature of Ham's "smitten" skin is unexplained, but later commentaries described this as a darkening of skin. 

A later note to the text states that the "smitten" skin referred to the blackness of descendants, and a later comment by rabbis in the Bereshit Rabbah asserts that Ham himself emerged from the ark black-skinned. The Zohar states that Ham's son Canaan "darkened the faces of mankind."

Some Biblical scholars see the "curse of Ham" story as an early Hebrew rationalization for Israel's conquest and enslavement of the Canaanites, who were presumed to descend from Canaan.

Many pre-modern Christian sources discussed the curse of Ham in connection with race and slavery:

For the Egyptians are prone to a degenerate life and quickly sink to every slavery of the vices. Look at the origin of the race and you will discover that their father Cham, who had laughed at his father’s nakedness, deserved a judgment of this kind, that his son Chanaan should be a servant to his brothers, in which case the condition of bondage would prove the wickedness of his conduct. Not without merit, therefore, does the discolored posterity imitate the ignobility of the race [Non ergo immerito ignobilitatem decolor posteritas imitatur] (Homilies on Genesis 16.1).

The Eastern Christian work, the Cave of Treasures (fourth century), explicitly connects slavery with dark-skinned people:

When Noah awoke…he cursed him and said: "Cursed be Ham and may he be slave to his brothers" … and he became a slave, he and his lineage, namely the Egyptians, the Abyssinians, and the Indians. Indeed, Ham lost all sense of shame and he became black and was called shameless all the days of his life, forever.

Ishodad of Merv (Syrian Christian bishop of Hedhatha, ninth century):

When Noah cursed Canaan, “instantly, by the force of the curse… his face and entire body became black [ukmotha]. This is the black color which has persisted in his descendents.”

Eutychius, Alexandrian Melkite patriarch (d. 940): “Cursed be Ham and may he be a servant to his brothers… He himself and his descendants, who are the Egyptians, the Negroes, the Ethiopians and (it is said) the Barbari.”

Ibn al-Tayyib (Arabic Christian scholar, Baghdad, d. 1043): “The curse of Noah affected the posterity of Canaan who were killed by Joshua son of Nun. At the moment of the curse, Canaan’s body became black and the blackness spread out among them.”

The Syrian Christian scholar Bar Hebraeus (1226-86) writes: “‘And Ham, the father of Canaan, saw the nakedness of his father and showed [it] to his two brothers.’ That is…that Canaan was cursed and not Ham, and with the very curse he became black and the blackness was transmitted to his descendents…. And he said, ‘Cursed be Canaan! A servant of servants shall he be to his brothers.’”

According to Catholic mystic Anne Catherine Emmerich, "I saw the curse pronounced by Noah upon Ham moving toward the latter like a black cloud and obscuring him. His skin lost its whiteness, he grew darker. His sin was the sin of sacrilege, the sin of one who would forcibly enter the Ark of the Covenant. I saw a most corrupt race descend from Ham and sink deeper and deeper in darkness. I see that the black, idolatrous, stupid nations are the descendants of Ham. Their color is due, not to the rays of the sun, but to the dark source whence those degraded races sprang."

Pre-modern European interpretations

In the Middle Ages, European scholars of the Bible picked up on the Jewish Talmud idea of viewing the "sons of Ham" or Hamites as cursed, possibly "blackened" by their sins. Though early arguments to this effect were sporadic, they became increasingly common during the slave trade of the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries.[6] The justification of slavery itself through the sins of Ham was well suited to the ideological interests of the elite; with the emergence of the slave trade, its racialized version justified the exploitation of a ready supply of African labour. This interpretation of Scripture was never adopted by the African Coptic Churches.

The curse of Ham in the Latter-day Saint Movement (Mormon)

The first recorded indication of Joseph Smith's adoption of the doctrine of the curse of Ham is found in a parenthetical reference as early as 1831.

After the death of Joseph Smith, Brigham Young, the church's second president, taught that people of African ancestry were under the curse of Ham. Young also taught that the day would come when the curse would be nullified through the saving powers of Jesus Christ.

In addition, based on his interpretation of the Book of Abraham, Young also believed that as a result of this curse, modern people of African descent were banned from receiving the Priesthood (although they were allowed to join the Church). Young believed the curse remained in people with even a single black ancestor.

However, every President of the Church from Joseph Smith Jr. to Spencer W. Kimball stated that the day would come when the Priesthood would be available to all men. In 1978, after much prayer and fasting on the matter, President Spencer W. Kimball of the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints received a revelation which officially extended the Priesthood to all worthy males.

The curse of Ham in Black Hebrew Israelite and Nuwaubian teachings

The Nuwaubians, and certain Black Hebrew Israelite sects such as Yahweh Ben Yahweh, reversed the typical racial slant of the curse of Ham. In their teaching the curse was leprosy, which in its extreme form whitened the skins of the Canaanites.

Islamic interpretations

Prophets of Islam are generally considered by hadith to have kept Islamic law, even before Islam existed; the belief is that God's universal will guided them in the same way as Muhammad, and their habits simply were not accepted by others nor written down. As Islam discourages the consumption of alcohol, this means that the story could not have happened as described in the Torah, as Noah would never be drunk. Instead the story of Noah's nakedness is sometimes explained as the result of the wind blowing off his cloak. Nevertheless, the story of the curse is not part of Islamic scripture.

Early Islamic scholars debated whether or not there was a curse on Ham's descendants. Some accepted that there was, and some argued that it was visible in dark skin. According to David Goldenberg,

Just as in Jewish and Christian sources, so too in Islamic sources do we find that it was not Canaan who was cursed with slavery, but Ham instead of or in addition to Canaan. So, for example, Tabari (d. 923), quoting Ibn Isaq (d. 768), Masudi (tenth century) and Dimashqui (thirteenth century). Ham appears as the recipient of the curse so regularly that the only Arabic author Gerhard Rotter could find who specifically limits the curse to Canaan is Yaqubi (d. ca 900). In all others the descendants of Ham were enslaved.

Goldenberg argues that the "exegetical tie between Ham and servitude is commonly found in works composed in the Near East whether in Arabic by Muslims or in Syraic by Christians." He suggests that the compilation known as the Cave of Miracles (Abrégé des merveilles) may be the source. This text states that "Noah cursed Ham, praying to God that Ham's sons may be cursed and black and that they be subjected as slaves to those of Shem."

                    General Uses of the Hamitic Myth

The Hamitic Myth has been liberally applied whenever historical circumstances required the aggressive re-assertion of white supremacy. It can be shown to be at the root in the justification of the slave trade and the displacement and murder of the American Indians. It was used to attack the Civil Rights Movement, to undermine abolitionism, to buttress the proslavery Confederacy, and was used as the instrument of control in Jim Crow. Many people have adopted the mantle of "Chosen People" via the Hamitic Myth including the Puritans, the Jews, the Boers, the Afrikaners, and the Nazis, among many others. Even the Cherokees used it to justify their enslavement of the African (interestingly, it was "mixed-blood" Cherokees who engaged in this practice, just as it was mulatto "Africans" who held African slaves). Southern Christians then used the same Hamitic Myth to justify the extermination of the Cherokees. Christians further employed the "Chosen People" myth of the slaveholding ancient Hebrews to justify their own slaveholding. Whites have even gone so far as to say that the snake in the Garden of Eden was the African Man.

The slave trade to the Islamic world put the Myth to full use, and Islamic clerics expounded on the curse of Africanness (Brackman also reveals [p. 96] that many of the "camel-riding" slave traders were Jewish). Colonial missionaries like Cotton Mather of Massachusetts adopted the Myth as did the Boers of South Africa. It was roared from hundreds of American pulpits--North and South. Belgian colonizers appropriated it when they installed Tutsi overlords over former Hutu kingdoms, leading to the horrifying violence in Rawanda and Burundi. It is also said to be the basis of the Plessy v. Ferguson ruling. The founder of Mormons, Joseph Smith, and high official Brigham Young both used the Myth to condemn the African man and exclude his participation in their cult. The Jehovah's Witnesses readily printed it as fact in the Watchtower.

In various translations of the rabbinical texts, we find themes of bestiality, sodomy, castration, homosexuality, drunkenness, and promiscuity, all applied to the vary nature of Ham and by extension to the race he presumably fathered. The rabbi's deviant sexual elaborations may have played a role in the feverish and overtly sexual violence against Africans in the form of rapes and lynchings.

Brief presentation by Prof. Muhammad Shamsaddin Megalommatis

Table of Contents

I. Berbers

II. The Fallacy of Pan-Arabism

III. Hamitic-Cushitic Historical Heritage Usurped

IV. Hamites & Cushites systematically targeted

V. Anti-Hamitic Hysteria of Western Academics

VI. The Embarrassing History of the Berbers

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Read and download the 2400-word text here:

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