Product Details

• Amazon Sales Rank: #456495 in Books
• Published on: 1991-07
• Original language: English
• Number of items: 1
• Binding: Paperback
• 814 pages

Customer Reviews

Although sketchy in some areas Bernal gives good references.
Adolf Erman is one of Bernal's sources which sums up the quality and legitimatcy of his book. This quote shows how true his facts really are. "The question of the race-origin of the Egyptians has long been a matter of dispute between ethnologists and philologists, the former maintaining the African theory of descent, the latter the Asiatic. Ethnologists assert that nothing exits 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 egyptians, they maintain, cannot be separated from the Berbers, nor the latter from the Kelowi or Tibbu, nor these again from the inhabitants round Lake Tsad; all form one race in the mind of the ethnologist, differentiated only by the influence of a dissimilar manner of life and climate. Therefore, they say, many old customs of the ancient Egyptians are now found amongst the people of the Upper Nile. I will only instance the curious head-rest still used in the east of the Sudan to protect the wig, and the peculiar sickle-shaped sword, still carried by the Monbuttu princes with the same dignity as it was of old by the Pharaohs. On the other side philologists maintain that the language of ancient Egyptians has distinct kinship with that of the so-called Semitic nations.

Spread over anterior Asia, and the east and north of Africa, is found a great root-language, which has been called after its chief representatives, the Egypto-Semitic. The Semitic languages of Arabia, Syria, and Mesopotamia belong to this group, as well as the allied Ethiopian dialects of east Africa, the languages of Beharis, Gallas, and Somalis. Further removed is the Libyan, spoken by the people of Berber in north Africa as far as the Atlantic; and still more perculiarly constituted is the ancient Egyptian. Nothing certain has been or probably will be ascertain, for the Libyan and Ethiopian languages are only known to us in their present much-changed forms. But the fact remains that philologists consider that the people who speak these languages belong to one and the same race. Other reasons tend to show us that the Semitic races migrated from one part of Asia to the districts in which they afterwards settled, and therefore the theory has been accepted that the Ethiopian, Libyan, and Egyptian people all forsook their Asiatic homes during the dim ages of the past, and seized possession of north and east africa. This theory is directly opposed to that of the ethnologists, according to whom these races are purely African. If we free ourselves, however, from the prejudices which have long held sway over this domain of science, we shall be able to reconcile these two theories. It seems a very doubtful hypothesis that ancient races should dwell quietly in one inhospitable region until the idea should suddenly seize them to forsake their homes and, with their children and their goods, to seek a better country. Such migrations have certainly taken place amongst the hordes of barbarians (e.g. the old migrations of the Teuton or Scythian races), but they never had much effect. After a few generations all traces of them disappeared in the countries they conquered, and no one would imagine from the appearance of the inhabitants of modern Italy, Spain, or Tunis, that whole tribes of Germanic race had overrun those countries. Neither the language nor the race of the subject nation suffers permanent change from such violent incursions.

On the other hand, if but a few adventurers, conquer a country and thus make it possible for their kindred to settle there, the constant influx of immigrants even in small numbers has an immense influence on the people. In the first place, conquerors succeed in introducing their language to be used officially; the upper classes of the subject race, desiring to belong to the ruling class, then begin ostentatiously to use foreign idioms; at last perhaps only after a thousand years, the lower classes begin also to adopt the new language. Thus in our own days we have seen nations extend their nationality, e.g. a few Spaniards and Portugese in south America, a few Arabs amongst the Copts and Berbers, a few Anglo-Saxons amongst the Celts in England. In each case we see that in this process the language only of the subject people changed, the race itself remains unaltered. In like manner probably ancient nations underwent transformations. The inhabitants of Libya, Egypt, and Ethiopia have probably belonged to the same race since prehistoric times; in physical structure they are still Africans, though in later times they used kindred dialects."

Reference:

Erman, Adolf: Life in Ancient Egypt, Dover Publications, Inc. 1971

pedestrian propaganda
Although all avenues of historical research should be investigated (where reasonable leads exist), this is truely an endeavor in historical revisionism, hence unmatched except by the late Soviet scholasticship of claiming every invention from flight to democracy.