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Excerpted from African Civilization Revisited:
From Antiquity to Modern Times
by Basil Davidson
Copyright © 1990. Reprinted by permission. All rights reserved
The Records of Ancient Africa begin with Egypt, yet the Egyptian contribution has
been little studied on its African side. A familiar has considered old Egypt merely and
strictly in her relationship to the civilizations of Asia and the Mediterranean. We have
had, in consequence, a lopsided view of the true position. Egypt's connections with
the Middle East have been lit with brilliant clarity; those with the rest of Africa have
remained in darkness, rather as though they had never been.
In this aspect, too, a new approach to African history has lately begun to right the
balance. The pendulum swings the other way. Egypt's influence on old Africa, and
Africa's on old Egypt, are seen to have had a fertile past, even a crucial one: a past,
moreover, in which continental Africa's part was certainly the earlier, and Egypt, as
part of Africa, the receiver as well as the giver. "Egyptian art," in the words of a
famous Egyptologist, "is the product of the soil of Africa, like the rest of Egyptian
civilization." If the history of early Africa is unthinkable without Egypt, so too is the
history of early Egypt inexplicable without Africa. Ancient Egypt was essentially an
African civilization.
It follows that the Ancient Egyptians were Africans even if immigrants also trickled in
from Asia and southern Europe. Whether the Ancient Egyptians were as black or as
brown in skin color as other Africans may remain an issue of emotive dispute;
probably they were both. Their own artistic convention painted them as pink, but
pictures on their tombs show that they often married queens shown as entirely black,
being from the south (from what a later world knew as Nubia): while the Greek
writers reported that they were much like all the other Africans whom the Greeks
knew.
None of this rather fruitless argument, as to the skin color of the Ancient Egyptians
before the arrival of the Arabs in the seventh century A.D., would have arisen without
the eruption of modern European racism during the 1830s. It became important to the
racists, then and since, to deny Egypt's African identity, Egypt's black identity, so that
they could deny to Africans any capacity to build a great civilization. We should
dismiss all that.
What one needs to hold in mind is the enormous value and direct relevance of the
Pharaonic records. In this I follow as eminent Egyptologist, Professor Jean Leclant, in
holding that "African studies may draw to their great advantage on the immense
documentation comprised of five thousand years of history; and that perhaps the
greatest service Egyptology can offer is to furnish points of departure for the ancient
history of Africa."
Four early journeys to the southward are recorded on the tomb of a nobleman of
Aswan in the Sixth Dynasty (conjectural opening date: 2340 B.C.); three made under
the Pharaoh Mernere and a fourth under Pepi II. "These caravans," writes A.J. Arkell
in his History of the Sudan "must have left the Nile at Aswan by the Elephantine road,
and one route is likely to have been via the oases of Dunqul and Selima, and so by the
Derib al Arba'in to Darfur," the forty Days' Road which a hardy traveller may still use
from Asyut on the Middle Nile to El Fasher in the far west of the modern Republic of
Sudan. "Harkhuf brought back ebony, ivory and frankincense from Yam. All of these
could have been obtained in Darfur; and even if the intervening country was as desert
as it is now-and it probably was not-it would be possible to travel today by the
donkeys-one hundred carrying goods, one hundred good donkeys-one hundred
carrying goods, one hundred forage and one hundred water." Breasted placed Harkhuf
among "the earliest known explorers of inner Africa," and Harkhuf's bare descriptions
may still be read with the excitement that attends a good report of hidden places and
legendary peoples.
Having discovered, the Pharaohs conquered. Here one must imagine a process of two
thousand years of enterprise and effort, failure and success. Under many Pharaohs,
through many years, expeditions pushed stubbornly to the interior. Settlements were
made. Commerce became systematic. And after the traders and raiders there came the
armies. Castles were raised, some of them as formidable as any the world has seen.
Much of the country of the Middle Nile became vassal to the Pharaohs.
It is not until the eight century B.C. that we begin to hear the voice of those whom the
Pharaohs had placed in tribute. Then the tide of conquest turns upon itself for a while,
and sweeps up from the southward. The early kings of Kush, a state whose capital was
at Napata (towards the region that had once been Irthet or Wawat for the great
Imperial Pharaohs of an already distant past), seized and held the land of Egypt for
nearly a century. Kashta began this northern enterprise. After his death in about 751,
piankhi continued it. Taharqa completed it.
Kush became a world power and Taharqa, by way of the Old Testament, briefly
entered the European idea of history. One startling document survives from the
Kushite side, though others may yet appear. In the twenty-first year of his reign
(conjecturally 731 B.C.), Piankhi put up a granite stela or tablet of stone at Jebel
Barkal, not far from his capital, on which the details of his conquest are inscribed.
Some two hundred years later the rulers of Kush moved their capital southward to
Meroe, whose ruins lie about a hundred miles to the north of modern Khartoum. Here
they presided over a distinctive civilization which flourished for seven hundred years.
The Greeks called it Ethiopian. This has confused later understanding of the matter.
The Kushites were entirely different from the ancestors of those called Ethiopians
today: "Ethiopian," in the Greek texts, simply meant "black," and Ethiopia "the
countries of the black peoples." Not much detailed is at present known of this
Meroitic civilization. To begin with it used Egyptian hieroglyphics, and later a
pictographic form of writing that was partly hieroglyphic; but later still-at the zenith
of its power in about 200 B.C.- the Meroites invented an alphabet of their own.
Archaeologists have so far collected nearly one thousand fragmentary texts in this
Meroitic script, but nobody has yet succeeded in understanding many of its words. As
the mystery of Cretan Linear B was to Mediterranean history until Ventris read it, so
now is Meroitic to the story of the ancient Nile.
Early in the fifth century B.C., a memorable Greek of Asia Minor travelled to Upper
Egypt, and heard news of Meroe. One of the sorrows of African historiography that
this Greek, who was Herodotus, never managed to go any further. Even so, he had a
little to say on the subject, and this is still worth repeating. He was profoundly
interested in Egypt-and by extension in Kush-because he shared the then universal
Greek belief that their own civilization owed many of its origins to Egyptian
civilization, especially in religion and mathematics. He also thought, striking once
again a very modern note, that continental Africa's influence on Egypt was both wide
and deep. On circumcision, for example, "as between the Egyptians and the
Ethiopians [that is, the Kushites], I should not like to say which learned from the
other..." As to the skin color of the Egyptians, he recalls the story of a dove connected
with the Egyptians oracle at Dodona. This bird was said to have been black. Why
black?
"As to the bird being black," says Herodotus, "they merely signify by this that the
woman was an Egyptian."
Explaining why the Colchians "are of Egyptian descent," he suggests that they may
have descended from Egyptian soldiers who had served under Sesostris, a Pharaoh
whose armies had invaded the Near East. But "my own idea on the subject