50,000+ BCE–300 CE: (Chapter 5: The Africanity of Ancient Egypt — Ancient Egypt Was in Africa and More Importantly Was of Africa, Two Centuries of Western Sc…

50,000+ BCE–300 CE: (Chapter 5: The Africanity of Ancient Egypt — Ancient Egypt Was in Africa and More Importantly Was of Africa, Two Centuries of Western Scholarship Portraying Egypt as an Offshoot of Middle Eastern Developments or a Region of Intrusive Peoples from Outside Africa, the Self-Serving Racialist Presumptions of Nineteenth-Century Europeans Still Lingering as Unexamined Assumptions, and the Most Recent Generation of Scholars on Nubia and Egypt Casting Aside the Older Views and Following Where the Evidence Leads): Chapter 5 of Ancient Africa: A Global History opens with a declaration so simple it should not need stating, and so revolutionary it threatens the entire architecture of Western civilizational mythology: ancient Egypt was in Africa. More important, ancient Egypt was of Africa. That is not the way that the previous two centuries of Western scholarship have presented this history. For too long, ancient Egypt has been portrayed as if it were an offshoot of earlier Middle Eastern developments, as a region of somehow intrusive peoples coming from somewhere outside of Africa. Ehret insists it is long past time to discard these old notions, rooted as they are in the self-serving racialist presumptions of nineteenth-century Europeans — notions that too many people still today simply assume and never think to examine. The most recent generation of scholars and scholarship on Nubia and Egypt have been uncovering extensive new bodies of evidence, and they are casting aside the older assumptions and following where the evidence leads. The distinction between “in” and “of” is everything. Everyone acknowledges that Egypt is geographically located in Africa — the Nile flows through African soil. But to say Egypt was of Africa is to say that its culture, its institutions, its religion, its language, its founding populations were African in origin, not imports from the Levant or Mesopotamia. This is the claim that the discipline has spent two centuries refusing to make, and it is the claim that the evidence now compels.