The First Ethiopians. Malvern van Wyk Smith

O’Connor, who elsewhere expresses doubts about Egyptian racism, has to concede that ‘ancient Egyptians distinguished sharply between themselves and foreigners’ (2003, 155), and worse: ‘the hostility expressed towards foreigners in Egyptian literature seems frequent, consistent, and, from a modern perspective, downright disquieting’ (156).

      While it was in the New Kingdom that such distinctions seem to have acquired a paranoid urgency, the impulse was there from early times. An autobiographical inscription in the tomb of Weni, Sixth Dynasty (ca 2323–2150 BCE) governor of Upper Egypt, carefully distinguishes different Nubian tribes recruited to fight ‘the Asiatic Sand-dwellers’ – ‘Irtjet-Nubians, Medja-Nubians, Yam-Nubians, Wawat-Nubians, Kaan-Nubians, and [Nubians] from Tjemeh-land’ (Lichtheim, 1973, 1: 19). Such distinctions would continue to be made. As J.W.B. Barns has noted, late Dynastic ‘royal inscriptions witness their contempt for the Africans of the south’ in terms never used for the Aegeans, for instance (1973, 6).

      Nevertheless, despite evidence that the Egyptian elite from an early era, and especially those of the last half of the New Kingdom, were prone to present themselves as very different from their southern and African neighbours, the depictions of ethnic differences and the meanings attached to them were at times ambiguous and variable over the three millennia of Dynastic history. Yurco’s claim that we can ‘regularly’ discern ‘distinctive complexion’ types in tomb art does not, for instance, hold for the tribute scenes in the late-New Kingdom tomb of Huy, already mentioned, where the Egyptian rulers are indeed coloured light brown, but the Nubian or Kushite tribute bearers, though clearly distinguished in feature, are alternately coloured light brown and black, the variation apparently introduced entirely for the aesthetic effect of contrast. The Huy tomb scene may be set beside a similar tribute scene from a century-and-a-half earlier, one from the tomb of the Nubian client prince Djehuty-hotep at Debeira East (ca 1480 BCE), which presents the Nubian elite as sharing Egyptian features, distinguished from their overlords only by slightly darker skin colour, dress and ornament, but differing sharply from their own subjects, the more pronounced prognathous African types that would become dominant in depictions of non-Nubian ‘Ethiopians’ in Ramesside art (Trigger, 1978, figures 12 and 13).

      The possibility that such elite Nubians were themselves responsible for what would become a canonical distinction between Nubian and non-Nubian Africans (between ‘noble Ethiopians’ and ‘other Ethiopians’ of later traditions) is one of the major theses of the present study, and one to which I shall return. In the meantime, the ambiguities may be multiplied. The king lists that Herodotus was shown by his priestly informants in the fifth century BCE contained among the names of 330 pharaohs those of ‘eighteen Ethiopian kings’ (2: 100). Since Manetho’s king list of about two centuries later gives the names of only three of the known Twenty-fifth Dynasty Nubian rulers, Herodotus’ priests’ list must have included the names of a dozen or more other Egyptian rulers spread through time who were regarded as ‘Nubian’, but of whom we have no clear record.

      Despite, then, the evident racial definitiveness propagated by depictions such as those in the Soleb temple or at Abu Simbel, Kathryn Bard’s caveat that ‘identifying race in Egyptian representative art … is difficult to do’ (1996, 108) is a wise one. Even in mid-New Kingdom monumental art, distinctions between Egyptian and Nubian, Kushite or Nilotic types are not always easy to make. Dietrich Wildung speaks of a recurrent Africoid pharaonic physiognomy in formal imagery, ‘with full lips and slightly protruding eyes’, that would become the basis of the more specifically ethnic idiom adopted by the Kushite pharaohs of the Twenty-fifth Dynasty, but would not be confined to them.

      While there can therefore be little doubt that most pharaohs were ‘African’ in a general sense, the more pertinent questions relate to how many of them could have been ‘Negroid’ or ‘black African’. There are intriguing indicators. Amenophis IV (1353–1335 BCE) was the son of the very creator of the ‘ethnographic gallery’ of the Soleb temple. As Akhenaten, he ruled until only two years before the reign of Tutankhamun (who in turn may have been his son), and is depicted on his tomb furniture as trampling his caricatured African enemies. Yet it was Akhenaten who inspired the so-called Amarna period of Egyptian state art, which depicted the ruler and his family in an exaggerated fluid style that makes their ethnic identity impossible to tell. The long face, high cheekbones, slanting eyes, full lips and slender nose could be extrapolated from a Nubian-Nilotic face as readily as from any other. To complicate matters further, the colossal bust in red granite of Akhenaten’s father, Amenophis III (1391–1353 BCE), now in the British Museum (BM EA 15), shows a figure with markedly ‘Negroid’ features – as does another statue of him now in the New York Metropolitan Museum (56.138) – yet close by is another royal bust, also from Amenophis III’s mortuary temple, but once again with ambivalently proto-Amarnan features. Prince Puckler Muskau, who saw this statue still in situ in the 1840s, thought that Amenophis III ‘appears to have been an Ethiopian’ (1845, 2.9), but Lorna Oakes has argued that the many statues of the king that once filled the temple were either in a conventional idiom or ‘in a budding Amarna style’ (2003, 66) – none were realistic portraits. For Martin Bernal there is little doubt that these pharaohs of the Eighteenth Dynasty were Nubian: ‘from their portraits they would seem to have been Blacks’ (1987, 384). The context and import of Bernal’s claim will be examined below, but for the moment one may speculate that if (some of) the pharaohs of the Eighteenth Dynasty were indeed Nubians, some may have been more conspicuously so than others. Furthermore, such differentiations may not only have manifested themselves in distinctive stylistic idioms such as the Amarnan, but may also have motivated immediately succeeding pharaohs, including Tutankhamun and certainly Ramesses II, a century later, to depict themselves as very definitely not Nubian.

      The claim that the pharaohs of the Eighteenth Dynasty were Nubian must, however, face a harsher challenge. During the Second Intermediate Period (ca 1640–1550 BCE), northern or Lower Egypt was ruled by the non-indigenous (perhaps Palestinian) Hyksos of the Fifteenth Dynasty, based at the Delta city of Avaris, while the rulers of Upper Egypt, based at Thebes, were under considerable threat from the Nubian kingdom of Kush, then at its zenith and based at Kerma south of the Third Cataract (Lacovara, 1996, 92–3). An alliance existed between the Hyksos rulers of Avaris and the Nubian kings of Kerma, and it was the breaking up of this alliance by the last Theban king of the Seventeenth Dynasty, Kamose (ca 1555–1550 BCE), that made possible the reunification of Egypt and the founding of the Eighteenth Dynasty under his successor, Ahmose (1550–1525 BCE) (Baines and Málek, 1980, 42). Ahmose’s summing up of the dilemma facing Egypt at the time is succinct and speaks powerfully across the millennia: ‘A [Hyksos] chieftain is in Avaris and another in Kush, and I sit between an Asiatic and a Nubian, each man in possession of his slice of this Egypt, and I cannot pass by him as far as Memphis’ (cited by Emery, 1965, 169).

      Not surprisingly, the conquest and control of Nubia became for successive New Kingdom rulers not only an ongoing practical and political necessity, but also an important part of symbolic state lore and the ritual of royal power. Every pharaoh would ceremoniously cite the total subjection of Nubia (‘perfidious Kush’) as not just a military accomplishment, but a totemic necessity. The ‘smiting’ of Nubians would become a pharaonic logo of power on temples and tombs throughout Egypt. Egyptian control of Nubian Kush and its successor states reached its greatest extent during the New Kingdom, and pharaonic inscriptions would endlessly assert this symbolic control from Abu Simbel in the north to Gebel Barkal, on the Fourth Cataract, in the south (Adams, 1977, 218–228).

      In such a context it is very difficult to see how the rulers of the Eighteenth Dynasty who made these conquests, and conceived not only of the monuments but also the triumphant discourse of Nubian conquest that adorn their walls, could have thought of themselves as simply ‘Nubian’.

      It is true that the relationship between Egypt and Nubia was always dynamic, as Robert G. Morkot (2000) has argued; so much so that when the Nubian rulers of the Twenty-fifth Dynasty came to power in Egypt, they were evidently not regarded as a gross aberration, but as the most recent manifestation of an ancient process of conflict and succession of power that had yielded both Nubian pharaohs and highly placed Nubian officials before, and to whom we shall