The Skeptic's CircleThis comes in part from an email I was sent over a month back about the National Geographic cover with Tutankhamen on the front. The author was upset that Tutankhamen was white and asking me to take a stand. I wrote back that I wouldn’t on the grounds that the issue in question hadn’t been released in the UK, though it has in the past couple of weeks. Was she a crank? That’s the easy answer but there were a couple of comments that made me think we should think seriously about the issue of race and recontruction of ancient peoples.

Well, what do we expect from a people who still represent God as a Caucasian man and angels as obese Caucasoid children?

…Also check out the April, 2005, National Geographic Magazine where the Neanderthals are now Negroid but King Tut and of course God-Jesus, are Caucasoid.

Well I don’t think that Tutankhamen was negroid. The faces were reconstructed using methods that are good enough to be used in murder investigations. Further the evidence is that when the Nubians took control of the Egyptians and were deciding what would pass as art they did see a difference in skin color between them and the land they occupied.

I think there are two issues. It is true mistakes are made and I am wondering if the mistakes are tending to be towards one side. The other issue is why do some people feel they have to insist that the Egyptians were black?

According to the art in the Vatican, Adam was a white guy. I can’t be certain I wasn’t paying too much attention. I’m not a fan of Christian art and I can’t imagine there are many people who’ve jogged through the Sistine chapel without looking up*, but certainly in mainstream society Adam and Eve are white. A Black Jesus is seen as a PC gimmick. There are very few pictures I’ve seen of him where he looks Jewish, or as if he’s been working much outdoors. I don’t think his skin was as dark as Jackson 5 era Michael Jackson, but I don’t think he was as pallid as Invincible era Michael Jackson either. Yet the fictional ancient past we construct is white. What about the Romans on Hadrians Wall? They tend to be depicted as rather white English types, despite many of them coming from the Middle East. I’m told historical records suggest that in parts of London at the end of the nineteenth century Blacks made up 5% of the population. You wouldn’t know it from the reconstructions.

Similarly I was thinking we now recognise that Neanderthals were a lot more sophisticated than we realised. The reconstructions also seem to be getting whiter more often to me. I think in this case it’s not simply a case of “they’re more intelligent therefore they must be white”. I think its that modern illustrators are not working under the more subconsciously racist assumptions of the previous generation, and so don’t unthinkingly equate savage with Black. We tend to say these new reconstructions are different because we have more data and appreciate more subtlety in ancient peoples. There also has to be a recognition that they’re different because archaeologists are less racist in their assumptions than they used to be. Primitive ancients were modelled by analogy on the primitive of America and Africa. Now we recognise that American and African hunter-gatherers are actually intelligent human beings and our new analogical models are updated accordingly. I know the archaeologists of previous eras were working within a different social environment and so I probably would have made the same errors if I’d been working then. Nevertheless it might actually be helpful to say that archaeologists did get it wrong, and that’s there’s still a lot that cannot be said about race in ancient times.

I think we must accept there is a problem and something needs to be done because when people feel disenfranchised this happens.

…Legrand Clegg, a historian and prosecutor of the Los Angeles area city of Compton, is demanding that the bust of King Tut be removed from the show because its rendition of his face is a “distortion of reality.”
“They have depicted King Tut as white, but the ancient Egyptians were black people,” he told AFP.

The picture above shows the ancient Egyptians could recognise a black person when they saw one.

It saddens me to hear someone say something like this. It saddens me twice over. Once because it doesn’t solve the problem of misappropriation of history. It’s simply one group taking the past of another. What place for the Berbers in a Black Africa? Not only that, by taking Egyptian history as black, it rejects black history and the archaeology of sub-saharan Africa as being meaningful. It’s as if some black people have decided that they need a prestigious history and Great Zimbabwe or Sungbo just don’t cut it. It has to be a white-style history. It robs everyone, black people included of a chance to show there are other pasts to be valued than what was accepted by white elites of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. By rejecting the incredible past that does exist within Africa they risk losing their heritage for future generations. The result is so much is being lost because no-one values it. Take this report on illegal excavations of artefacts in Mali, to produce ‘art’ for western auction houses.

…45 per cent of the 834 sites registered in an inventory of archaeological sites bear witness to excavation by looters. 17 per cent of looted sites have been destroyed by large-scale excavations (2 per cent of these sites are irreparably damaged because of more than 70 per cent destruction) (Dembélé et al. 1993).

The destruction caused by the neglect of these sites is devastating. Wouldn’t it be wonderful if someone genuinely did treasure Africa’s place in humanity’s history?

Incidentally if anyone knows of a better website for Sungbo or Great Zimbabwe could they list it in the comments?

UPDATE: 7/4/2007 The photo was replaced by another. See here for details.

*I was in there to see the Museum of Profane Art. I found the Christian art quite dull. There were stacks of people being killed and looking glum about about. So I wanted to get out and found you can get a fair turn of speed through the Vatican. If you shout “Scusi! Scusi!” and flap your notes in your hand you’re waved through by the attendants.