hamitic hypothesis debunked

• History in Africa

The "Hamitic Hypothesis" in Indigenous West African Historical Thought

• African Studies Association
• Volume 36, 2009
• pp. 293-314
• 10.1353/hia.2010.0004
• View Citation

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“Nordics” and “Hamites”: Joseph Deniker and the Rise (and Fall) of Scientific Racism

• First Online: 27 April 2017

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• Nigel Eltringham 4  

Part of the book series: Palgrave Critical Studies of Antisemitism and Racism ((PCSAR))

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The “Hamite” as “Caucasian” civilizers of Central Africa was central to colonial discourse in Rwanda-Urundi in the first half of the twentieth century and the notion of Rwandan Tutsi as “Hamitic invaders” was to return as a component in the 1994 Rwandan genocide. The idea of an exogenous, Hamitic aristocracy in East and Central Africa is pronounced in the writings (from 1913) of Charles Seligman (1873–1940) in which “race” infers biogenetic superiority. Seligman drew on the work of the Italian anthropologist Guisseppe Sergi (1841–1936) who, in turn, drew on the work of the French anthropologist Joseph Deniker (1852–1918). Another key racial theory of the early twentieth century implicated in genocide can also be traced to Deniker. In The Myth of the Twentieth Century (1930), the Nazi race theorist Alfred Rosenberg adopted “Nordic” (as Aryan) from Madison Grant’s The Passing of the Great Race (1916), who had, in turn adopted “Nordic Race” from William Z. Ripley’s The Races of Europe (1899). Ripley had adopted “Nordic” from Deniker. In other words, fantasies of both the “Hamite” and the “Aryan” as biogenetically superior races can both be traced to Deniker. And yet, notions of racial (biogenetic) superiority are entirely absent from Deniker who did not associate any intellectual or “cultural” superiority with any of his “races.” Contrary to the idea of a progression from early twentieth-century writings espousing “biogenetic” racial superiority to our contemporary rejection of racial determinism, there was, in reality, a regression from Deniker’s late nineteenth-century position.

A part of this chapter originally appeared in Nigel Eltringham, “‘Invaders who have stolen the country’: The Hamitic Hypothesis, Race and the Rwandan Genocide,” Social Identities 12 (2006): 425–444. See http://www.tandfonline.com .

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Eltringham, N. (2017). “Nordics” and “Hamites”: Joseph Deniker and the Rise (and Fall) of Scientific Racism. In: Morris-Reich, A., Rupnow, D. (eds) Ideas of 'Race' in the History of the Humanities. Palgrave Critical Studies of Antisemitism and Racism. Palgrave Macmillan, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-49953-6_10

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Charles Gabriel Seligman and the Hamitic Hypothesis

Charles Gabriel Seligman (1873 – 1940), image: William Rothsteinעברית: ויליאם רוטשטיין, CC BY 3.0, via Wikimedia Commons

On December 24 , 1873 ,  British physician and ethnologist Charles Gabriel Seligman was born. Seligman ‘s main ethnographic work described the culture of the Vedda people of Sri Lanka and the Shilluk people of the Sudan . He was a proponent of the Hamitic hypothesis , according to which, some civilizations of Africa were thought to have been founded by Caucasoid Hamitic peoples.

Charles Gabriel Seligman – Background

Seligman was born into a middle class Jewish family in London, UK, the only son of wine merchant Hermann Seligmann  and his wife Olivia (Charles shortened his name to Seligman after 1914). His interests in natural science became early manifest: while still at a preparatory school, he began to collect butterflies and, at the house of a boy friend, carried out chemical experiments.[3] He studied medicine at St Thomas’ Hospital.Charles Gabriel Seligman studied medicine at St Thomas’ Hospital. He later worked as a physician and pathologist and then served the 1898 Cambridge University expedition to the Torres Strait. Later expedition included New Guinea, Ceylon, and Sudan. Seligman served as chair of Ethnology at the London School of Economics from 1913 to 1934.

Ethnographic Work in Africa

Charles Seligman is probably best known for his ethnographic work on the races of Africa. He recognized four major distinct races of the African continent: Bushmanoids (Bushmen), Pygmies, Negroids, and Caucasoids (Hamites). Further, the Hottentots, according to Seligman are a mixture of Bushmanoid, Negroid and Hamitic. As a staunch proponent of the Hamitic theory, in his work Seligman asserts that Hamitic Caucasoid North and Northeast Africans were responsible for introducing non-Semitic Afro-Asiatic languages (Berber-Cushitic-Egyptian) into Africa, as well as civilization, technology and all significant cultural developments.

He did acknowledge varying degrees of Negroid admixture amongst the Hamitic groups, but emphasized throughout his major works the essential racial and cultural unity of the various Hamitic peoples. In his Some Aspects of the Hamitic Problem in the Anglo-Egyptian Sudan (1913), he wrote that the Northern and Eastern Hamitic “ groups shade into each other, and in many parts a Negro admixture has taken place, nevertheless, culturally if not always physically, either division stands apart from its fellow .”

The Hamites in general, and the Northern Hamites in particular, he asserted, have close “ kinship with the European representatives of the Mediterranean race “. Drawing from Coon, Seligman also discusses fairer features observed amongst a minority of Berbers or Northern Hamites, such as lighter skin, golden beards and blue eyes. Races of Africa, however, notably questions the belief held by some anthropologists in the early 20th century that these fairer traits, such as blondism, were introduced by a Nordic variety. Seligman’s most famous work Races of Africa is regarded the first major published work in English on the ethnography of Africa, widely regarded as an “ethnological classic”.

Selected works:

• Melanesians of British New Guinea   (1910)
• The Veddas   (1911) with   Brenda Seligman
• Some Aspects of the Hamitic Problem in the Anglo-Egyptian Sudan   (1913)
• Races of Africa   (1930, 1939,1957,1966)
• The Pagan Tribes of Nilotic Sudan   (London: Routledge, 1932) with Brenda Seligman

References and Further Reading:

• [1]  Charles Seligman Short Biographical and Works at Britannica
• [2]  Charles Seligman Biographical at the Royal Society
• [3] Myers, C. S.  (1941).  “ Charles Gabriel Seligman. 1873–1940 “ .  Obituary Notices of Fellows of the Royal Society .  3 (10): 627–646.
• [4]  Catalogue of the Seligman papers   at the   Archives Division   of the   London School of Economics.
• [5] C. G. Seligman, The Races of Africa , London, 1930
• [6] Charles Seligman at Wikidata
• [7]  A Theory You’ve Never Heard Of | Michael Robinson | TEDxUniversityofHartford , TEDx Talks @ youtube
• [8] Timeline of British Ethnologists , via Wikidata and DBpedia

Tabea Tietz

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THE H3O ART OF LIFE 

Brought to you by;

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and the Omni-U Team 

The H3O/Art of Life Blog

• Aug 3, 2022

The Falsification of History: The Hamite Hypothesis

By Dr. Josef Ben Levi

Presented by Omni-U Virtual University

Dr. Josef Ben Levi

In order to understand how the case for a non-African Egypt developed, it is important to understand what became known as the "Hamite Hypothesis".. The "Hamite Hypothesis" was developed in the middle of the nineteenth century by Charles Gabriel Seligman (1873-1940), who was an early British colonial physician and ethnologist. His hypothetical assumptions stated that everything of value ever found in Africa was brought there by the Hamites, allegedly a branch of the Caucasian race (Seligman, 2001 ). On closer examination of the history of the idea, there emerges a previous elaborate Hamitic theory, in which the Hamites are believed to be Black Africans or Kushites . But, all of that changed around the middle to the late nineteenth century. With the advent of racial taxonomies and the Western European colonial enterprise, there was a deliberate change in the old way of viewing the ancient people of Kemet, i.e., Africa as Africans or Black. Now they were either Caucasians, using the terminology of the times, or perhaps Asians.

The view that Blacks or Africans were the founders of ancient Egyptian civilization gradually changed, after 1850, with the advent of scientific, theological, and philosophical questions about the nature of man. Much of that debate centered on the questions of the monogenetic versus the polygenetic origins of humanity. Based on theological interpretations, particularly the curse of Ham myth; the idea that Blacks, as descendants of Ham, could be the founders of the greatest civilization in antiquity became anathema This argument was being made in spite of the fact that one of the earliest professors in the modern discipline of Egyptology, Adolf Erman, who was also the former Director of the Egyptian Museum in Berlin and the instructor of the earliest American Egyptologists, including James Henry Breasted (the founder of the Oriental Institute at the University of Chicago) stated :

". ..ethnologists assert that nothing exists in the physical structure of the Egyptian to distinguish him from the native African and that from the Egyptian to the negro population of tropical Africa, a series of links exist which do not admit of a break."

"The Western world's participation in the increasingly lucrative slave trade made it very difficult for White Western Europeans to see Africans as members of the human family. There seems to have been direct correlations between the deteriorating image of Africans in the Western mind and their value as commodities. This required the proudly rational and scientific White man to find some tentative proof that would allow him to exclude the Africans from the family of man and ultimate denial of common ancestry." (Davidson, 1980).

What made this possible, as a historical event, was the Napoleonic invasion of Egypt in 1798. With his double-edged army of scholars and the military, Napoleon was not only able to conquer the land; he was also able to conquer the monuments and, ultimately, construct a history of ancient Egypt and ancient Egyptians that would satisfy the Western mind (Reid, 2002). This was a hallmark of the Enlightenment and led to the creation of the field of Egyptology. It also led to what Dr. Cheikh Anta Diop (1967) called the "modern falsification of history" .

The fact that ancient Egyptians and Nubians came from one essential African genus was completely unthinkable to most Europeans, then as well as now. The discovery of Nubian culture in 1907, so close on the heels of the development of Egyptology and the period of the European colonial and imperialist enterprise, made it impossible for Western Europeans to even fathom a civilization in the Nile Valley that was the genius of ancient African people. Consideration was never even given to this possibility. How on earth were they to justify the enslavement and colonization of millions of Africans they considered to be wretched and savages? C. F. Volney stated the primary issue very well when he wrote the following:

"That an imaginative and superstitious race of black men should have invented and founded, in the dim obscurity of past ages, a system of religious belief that still enthralls the minds and clouds the intellects of the leading representatives of modern theology, - that still clings to the thoughts, and tinges with its potential influences, literature, and faith of the civilized and cultured nations of Europe and America, is indeed a strange illustration of the mad caprice of destiny. Of the insignificant and apparently trivial causes that often produce the gravest and momentous results. "

The fact that the old Hamite hypothesis maintained the African origin of ancient Kemet was not news to most African American scholars of the nineteenth century . It was common knowledge among the educated classes that the classical writers had given much praise to the African inhabitants of the Nile Valley whose accomplishments the Greeks and Romans acknowledged. These African American scholars also took up their pens and started writing histories and protest materials to remind their people of a glorious past which was not the same as the wretched circumstances they found themselves in at that time.

(To be continued).

Recommended Viewing "Ancient KeMeT: The Light of the World", An Art of Life Show Featuring: Dr. Josef Ben Levi; Prof. Charles A. Grantham; and Hunter Havlin Adams III

Recommended Reading

McCray, Rev. Walter Arthur McCray. The Black Presence in the Bible: Discovering The Black and African Identity of Biblical Persons and Nations

McCray, Rev. Walter A. The Black Presence in the Bible and the Table of Nations Genesis 10:1-32 With emphasis on the Hamitic Genealogical Line from a Black Perspective

Baldwin, J.D. (1869/2005). Pre-historic nations or inquiries concerning some of the great peoples and civilizations of antiquity. New York: Elibron Classics.

Budge, E.A.W. (1926/1977). The dwellers on the Nile: The life, history, religion and literature of the ancient Egyptians. New York: Dover Publications.

Davidson, B. (1980). The African slave trade: 1450-1850. New York: Little, Brown and Company.

Diop, C.A. (1967/1974). The African Origin of Civilization: Myth or Reality. Westport: Lawrence Hill and Company.

Erman, A. (1894/1971). Life in ancient Egypt. New York: Dover Publications.

Goldenberg, D.M. (2003). The curse of ham: race and slavery in early Judaism, Christianity, and Islam. Princeton: Princeton University Press.

Lenormant, F. (1893). The beginnings of history according to the Bible and the traditions of oriental people. New York: Charles Scribner's Sons.

Massey, G. (1881/1974). A book of the beginnings: Containing an attempt to recover and reconstitute the lost origins of the myths and mysteries, types and symbols, religion and language, with Egypt for the mouthpiece and Africa as the birthplace. Secaucus: University Books.

Pieterse, J.N. (1992). White on black: Images of Africa and blacks in Western popular culture. New Haven: Yale University Press.

Ragozin, Z.A. (1889). The story of Chaldea from the earliest times to the rise of Assyria. New York: G.P. Putnam's Sons.

Rawlinson, G. (1870). The seven great monarchies of the ancient eastern world; or the history, geography, and antiquities of Chaldea, Assyria, Babylonia, Media, Persia, Parthia, and Sassanian, or new Persian empire. New York: Belford, Clarke, & Company.

Reid, D.M. (2002). Whose pharaohs? Archaeology, museums, and Egyptian national identity from napoleon to world war I. Berkeley: University of California Press.

Sanders, E. (1969). The Hamitic hypothesis: Its origin and function in time perspective. The Journal of African History, 10 (4), 521-532.

Schure, E. (1889/1961). The great initiates: A study of the secret history of religions. Blauvelt: Multimedia Publishing.

Seligman, C.G. (2001). Egypt and negro Africa. In Robert O. Collins, Ed. (2001). Problems in African history: The precolonial centuries. Princeton: Markus Weiner Publishers.

Volney, C.F. (1890/1950). The ruins or meditations on the revolutions of empire and the laws of nature. New York: Truth Seekers Company.

Ward, J.K., Lott, T.L. (2002). Philosophers on race: Critical essays. Oxford: Blackwell Publishing.

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