Akhenaten полностью

By the end of the nineteenth century, Blyden's arguments about the racial identity of the ancient Egyptians had filtered down and become well established for some African Americans, including the novelist and journalist Pauline Hop­kins (1859-1930). She developed Blyden's pan-African ideals in her novel Of One Blood. Or, the Hidden Face, published serially in the Colored American Magazine (of which she was editor) in 1902-3. Hopkins' reading of Blyden is evident, because in Of One Blood she quotes directly from his 'The Negro in Ancicnt History'.⁹ She also develops an anecdote Blyden mentions, from the first-century bce historian Diodorus Siculus, recounting how Ergamenes, a black man who had received a Greek education and studied philosophy, successfully siezed the throne of Meroe and maintained its independence from Egypt (Diodorus Siculus, Histories III 6). Meroe was a city which controlled Lower Nubia, the area corresponding to southern Egypt-northern Sudan; it had a long tradition of rebellion against Egypt, which constantly sought to annex it.

Of One Blood's ccntrcpiccc is an archaeological expedition to Meroe under­taken by its Harvard-educated hero, Reuel Briggs. At first, Hopkins deliberately keeps Briggs' racial origins vague - all she does is hint that he can pass as white, as her subtitle The Hidden Face implies. In the Egyptian setting his first name is significant, for the biblical Reuel recognises Moses as an Egyptian and later becomcs his father-in-law (Exodus 2:18). Is Hopkins suggesting the possibility of a black Moses? Once among the ancient monuments of Egypt, Briggs has a stunning revelation: that the Egyptians and their civilisation have managed to live on secretly, waiting for the coming of the king who shall restore them to their former glory and rightful place in world history. Briggs is to be that king. He is recognised as the new Ergamenes, the educated black hero of the classical histor­ian's anecdote. Reuel thus acknowledges his own, previously ambiguous, family heritage as well as the cultural riches of that heritage, and Hopkins makes Briggs' expedition to Egypt into a metaphor for the return home after the black diaspora.

It is a curious coincidence that Hopkins called the prime minister of her ancient Egyptians-in-waiting 'Ai', the same name as Akhenaten's son-in-law and eventual successor of Tutankhamun as pharaoh. But once Akhenaten's life and times became better known, it was inevitable that he would be co-opted to help relocate the pharaohs in black Africa, because particular aspects of his story are uniquely suitable to the project. First, there is Akhenaten's physical appearance, especially in the Karnak statues from the early part of his reign, in which his features can be seen as (stereo)typically African: thick-lipped, broad-nostrilled (see

Plate 2.1). The Karnak statues have often been called hideous, grotesque, deformed and so on, and these negative judgements of Akhenaten's appearance could seem to prove the racist conspiracy by white historians to deny and degrade the blackness of the Egyptians. The labels in the Brooklyn exhibition of Amarna art which mentioned Akhenaten's ugliness according to white canons of beauty were frequently criticised by African American visitors. The dark wooden head from Medinet el-Gurob, supposed to be Akhenaten's mother Tiye, is an import­ant icon here. It gives him a mother whose face is unequivocally dark-skinned. In Afroccntrist books, sculptures of Akhenaten, his mother and daughters are juxta­posed with photographs of contemporary Africans or people of African descent to illustrate the facial similarities between them.¹" The political prominence of the royal women during Akhenaten's reign can be presented as evidence for the theory of an ancient African matriarchy in which power is inherited through the female line. This theory was popularised by the doyen of Afrocentrist historians, Chcikh Anta Diop, and is still widely believed in some quarters, though not by most Egyptologists.