– Kushites, Nubians, Ethiopians (as they would variously come to be called) – with whom pre-Dynastic Egyptians may have had a great deal of affinity, were increasingly cast as tropes of difference in the developing Egyptian narrative of self-realisation over three millennia. It would be largely as such iconic ‘others’ in an evolving Egyptian symbology that Ethiopians would first have entered the cosmology and ethnography of Mediterranean peoples.
Modern visitors to the great rock-cut main temple at Abu Simbel, constructed early in the reign of Ramesses II (1290–1224 BCE; Baines and Málek, 1980, 184), are usually so overawed by the three surviving colossal external statues of its handsome patron that they tend to hurry on to see the images of the pharaoh repeated on every wall and column inside. Thus, they often miss the life-sized figures engraved on the base walls of the colossi that flank the entrance – two long lines of bound prisoners, Africans on the south side, Asians on the north. The features of the African prisoners could not be more startlingly different from those of the pharaoh above them – emaciated figures, exaggerated lips, bulbous noses, sloping foreheads and closely curled hair make up what to the modern viewer can only be a gross caricature of Negroid physiognomy, deliberately set up in contrast to the image that the Egyptian ruler and his elite wished to project of themselves.
Confronted with such a spectacle, a contemporary observer must have great difficulty agreeing with David O’Connor’s verdict that ‘Egyptians, like other ancient peoples, seem to have been free of racial prejudice as we understand it today’ (2003, 159). At what point, one must ask, does racial caricature become ‘racial prejudice as we understand it today’? The verdict of Edwin M. Yamauchi seems closer to the mark: ‘Egyptians were among the most ethnocentric of all peoples, and generally regarded black Africans of Nubia, as well as all other non-Egyptians, with contempt’ (2001, 1). This is a point to which I shall return.
When the temple was first cleared of sand in the early nineteenth century, the distinctions between pharaoh and captives were even more obvious. Charles Leonard Irby and James Mangles, who visited the temple in 1817, soon after Belzoni had re-opened it, exclaimed on the ethnographic diversity they at once discerned. They saw:
painted in glowing colours, the costumes of the various tribes of the interior of Africa, at a date so remote, that one knows nowhere else to look for any description either of their manners or their custom…. Some of the captives are perfectly black, and have all the characteristics of the tribes of the interior of Africa – such as woolly hair, thick lips, long sleek limbs, etc; others are of a lighter hue, not unlike the present race of Nubians (1823, 83).
Belzoni himself had been struck by these attempts at ethnographic naturalism when he had first seen the murals, and had read their fresh tints to indicate ‘the Egyptians to have been of the same hue as their successors, the Copts, some of whom are nearly as fair as Europeans’ (1820, 239).
The same spectacular and stylised contrasts between elite Egyptian, modest Nubian and exaggeratedly Negroid appearances may be found all over Egypt in tomb and temple art of the middle and late New Kingdom, perhaps most famously in many of the artefacts from the tomb of Tutankhamun (1333–1323 BCE) now in the Cairo Museum. Contrast, for instance, the delicately poised figures of the young pharaoh and his queen on the back of their gold and enamelled throne with the burlesqued and contorted images of bound African captives on the footstool in front of it. The recent careful yet controversial reconstruction of Tutankhamun’s face published in the National Geographic (Williams, 2005) has re-emphasised the entirely non-Negroid identity of the young king.
Other well-known examples of such distinctions from the same period include the tribute scene in the Theban tomb of Huy, Viceroy of Kush in the reign of Tutankhamun, depicting various Nubian and Nilotic peoples carefully distinguished in dress and hairstyles, but emphatically Negroid in feature (Siliotti, 1998, 12–13, 244–5). Frank J. Yurco has reassessed the wall reliefs in the tombs of Seti I (1306–1290 BCE), father of Ramesses II, and of Ramesses III (1194–1163 BCE) at Thebes, which show distinctive ethnic types that had been obscured and misrepresented in the past to support arguments that ‘Egyptians and Kushites were shown alike with dark complexions and similar costumes’ (1996c, 110). In fact, Yurco argues, modern photography reveals that the figures in both tombs show four distinctly different physical types, labelled as follows: Egyptians (Rmt), Kushites (Nhsy), Libyans (Jjhnw) and Syro-Palestinians (‘Aamw), ‘each ethnic type … depicted with a distinctive complexion and in representative dress. Egyptians were regularly depicted as red-brown, distinctly lighter than the black Nhsy (Kushites)’ (109). These regular and careful ethnic differentiations in New Kingdom art are confirmed by O’Connor and Reid (2003, 13).
Indeed, Yurco is only one among many recent scholars whose re-examination of badly deteriorating sites confirms what C.K. Wilkinson and M. Hill’s seminal Egyptian Wall Paintings (1983) revealed long ago: the art ‘clearly demonstrates the different features of captive Bedouins, Nubians, Libyans, Cretans, and Babylonians’ (26–7, cited by Shavit, 2001, 150). Regine Schulz and Matthias Seidel have studied five surviving polychrome tiles from the mortuary temple of Ramesses III (1998, 396, figure 115; Egyptian Museum, Cairo, JE 36547) and have come to the same conclusion: the tattooed Libyan is cream-coloured, the Nubian black, the bearded Syrian yellowish, the Hittite deeper yellow, the Shashu Bedouin very light (for illustrations, see Shaw, 2000b). When Ippolito Rosellini visited the tombs of Seti I and Ramesses III with the Franco-Tuscan Expedition of 1828–1829, when the tomb decorations were still brilliantly vivid, he was able to record very similar distinctions in detail and to publish them in the nine volumes of his I Monumenti dell’ Egito e della Nubia (1832–1844). Timothy Kendall has looked at the way in which bodily scarification among Nilotic subjects is depicted in mid-New Kingdom tomb art as an indicator of ethnic differences, and has concluded that body art among contemporary Nuer, Shilluk and Dinka peoples can be closely matched with that ‘on faces of non-Egyptian Africans represented in Egyptian art from the fourteenth century BC’ (1996, 84). The artists and the masters of these tombs had clearly defined notions of the ethnic differences between themselves and other north-east-African peoples.
But perhaps the most definitive evidence that official art of the mid-New Kingdom wished, when it mattered, to make unambiguous distinctions between Egyptians and other peoples comes from where one would most expect such a political statement – from the heartland of conquered Nubia, out of the temple of Soleb on the Dongola stretch of the Middle Nile, built by Amenhotep III (1391–1353 BCE) – one of ‘the masterpieces of New Kingdom architecture’ (Leclant, 1978, 70). Here, around the bases of the columns of the hypostyle hall, over a hundred faience plaques were installed, carefully distinguishing the conquered peoples of Africa and Asia (we still do not know who they all were) by colour, features, dress and actual names. Jean Leclant calls it a ‘veritable ethnographic gallery’ (70), and the political – indeed, racial – import of this digest of conquest is surely obvious: an expression of what Shaw calls the New Kingdom’s ‘essentially xenophobic ideology … whereby stereotypical barbaric Nubians were portrayed in official art and literature as worthless representatives of chaos’ (2000b, 326). Thus David 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).
