>The Ancient Egyptians as Blacks and as the Founders of Western Civilization>At the end of the 18th century, a third vision began to be advocated. According to this the Ancient Egyptians were both African and the founders of Western Civilization. The probable beginning of this intellectual trend came from the works of the intrepid Scottish traveller James Bruce. In the 1760s and 1770s Bruce went through Egypt and spent several years in Ethiopia. He saw connections between the civilizations of Ethiopia and Egypt, and believed that the Ethiopian form was the older. For Bruce, the source of the (Blue) Nile was the source of civilization>Charles François Dupuis was an erudite scholar of antiquity and a brilliant scientific inventer. He was also a supporter of the Revolution and an organizer of the anti-Christian "Religion of Reason" promoted by Jacobin leaders of the Revolution, which incidentally used many Egyptian symbols. Dupuis argued that Egyptian astronomy, which he believed to be the fundamental science, came to Egypt from the south>His friend Constantine Chasseboeuf de Volney made the link between "Negroes" and the origin of Western civilization explicit. His work provided a powerful weapon for Abolitionists. In France the great abolitionist the Abbé Grégoire, in his book An Enquiry Concerning the Intellectual and Moral Faculties , and Literature of Negroes, devoted the first chapter to Volney's arguments emphasising that the Ancient Egyptians were "negroes" and concludes:>"Without ascribing to Egypt the greatest degree of human knowledge, all antiquity decides in favour of those who consider it as a celebrated school, from which proceeded many of the venerable and learned men of Greece."
>Grégoire's work was translated in to English in Brooklyn in 1810 and, it was soon giving more confidence to educated African Americans. The theme that Black Egyptians had founded civilization was taken up in two powerful pamphlets published in 1829, The Ethiopian Manifesto, Issued in Defense of the Black Man's Rights in the Scale of Universal Freedom was by R. A. Young, and David Walker's Appeal to the Coloured Citizens of the World which was much more influential>There is no reason to suppose that the European scholars who created the new field of Altertumswissenschaft /Classics knew of such writings. They were acutely aware, however, of Bruce, Dupuis, Volney and Grégoire>The idea that the Egyptians were Black and therefore that Blacks had been the originators of Western Civilizationwas not only distressing but for "progressive" European intellectuals it was unscientific. In the 19th century, racial "science" made it clear not merely that "Whites" were now better than "Blacks" but, according to the idea of permanent racial essences, they had always been so. Thus the Greek historians must have been mistaken and suffering from the mysterious diseases of "barbarophilia" or "Egyptomania" when they stated that "Semitic" Phoenicians and African Egyptians had civilized Greece>The first attack on the Ancient Model was made in 1820 by Karl Otfried Müller, one of the first products of Humboldt's new educational system. Müller argued that the legends upon which the model was based were inconsistent and that there was no proof that any Egyptian or Phoenician colonisations had taken place>It is sometimes argued that the great 19th century advances in knowledge of ancient languages and archaeology led to the change
>However, the Egyptian half of the Ancient Model was destroyed before the languages of Mesopotamia, written in Cuneiform were understood and well before Heinrich Schliemann had discovered Mycenaean material culture. While it is true that Champollion deciphered hieroglyphics in the 1820s, his results were not accepted by German classicists for another 30 years>By contrast, there was one important "internalist" cause behind the establishment of the Aryan Model. This was the working out of the Indo-European language family and the establishment of Greek as a member of it. If, as seems reasonable, one supposes that the Proto-Indo-European speaking people lived somewhere to the north and east of the Balkans, one must postulate that the Aegean basin received some substantial influence from the north. This could have taken a number of different forms, but given the ethnic predispositions of the mid 19th century, it was immediately seen as a conquest by a "master race" of Hellenes, whose vigour had been steeled by ethnic formation in the cold of Central Asia or the Steppe>For several decades, the new image of Greek origins co-existed uneasily with the traditional belief that Phoenicians - though not the Egyptians - had played a significant role. This view was attacked in the 1890s but survived until the 1920s. I associate this historiographic down-playing of the Phoenicians - "the Jews of Antiquity" - with the rise of racial as opposed to religious anti-Semitism at the end of the 19th century. I also link the revival of interest in the Phoenicians after 1950 to increasing Jewish self confidence after the foundation of Israel. The restoration of the Egyptian facet of the Ancient Model has been slower. The leading champions of the Ancient Egyptians have been Black Americans, who have been much further from the academic establishment than the Jewish professionals
>To return to the impact of Dupuis, Volney and Grégoire, both Black and White Abolitionists continued to use their arguments after academics were abandoning the Ancient Model. For instance, the famous philosopher and logician John Stuart Mill wrote in 1849:>"It is curious withal, that the earliest known civilization was, we have the strongest reason to believe, a negro civilization. The original Egyptians are inferred, from the evidence of their sculptures, to have been a negro race: it was from negroes, therefore, that the Greeks learnt their first lessons in civilization; and to the records and traditions of these negroes did the Greek philosophers to the very end of their career resort (I do not say with much fruit) as a treasury of mysterious wisdom.">Such views faded among Euro-Americans after the abolition of slavery in 1865. They continued however, among African Americans. Intellectuals such as Frederick Douglas and scholars like W.E.B. Dubois and St. Clair Drake, were uncertain about the "Blackness" or "negro physiognomy" of the Ancient Egyptians but they had no doubts about the "Africanity" of Ancient Egypt or the size of the Egyptian contribution to Greek civilization>Among the group now known as "Afrocentrists" there is little or no doubt about Black African origins of European civilization. In this respect, it is the academic establishment and European champions of the Aryan Model, not the Afrocentrists, who have made a fundamental break with tradition. Until recently, the ideas of the Black Scholars have been unknown to non-Blacks. Even today, their views tend to be seen as "special pleading" or "therapy rather than history". It is not helpful to view Afrocentric writers on these topics merely in terms of socio-pathology. The Aryan Model itself serves a similar therapeutic function for European racists
>Even though describing the Aryan Model as "conceived in sin or even error." I do not believe that this in itself invalidates it as a useful historical tool. I propose a "Revised Ancient Model" maintaining that Greece has received repeated outside influences both from the East Mediterranean and from the Balkans and that it is this extravagant mixture that has produced this attractive and fruitful culture and the glory that is GreeceSource:https://www.inst.at/trans/15Nr/plenum/bernal15EN.htm
>>18279909We Wuz Kangs was floated around over 150 years ago by abolitionists and was thoroughly refuted back then too, look up an 1851 book called Negromania.
