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52-712: The term was originally used in contrast to the other two proposed divisions of mankind based on the story of Noah: Semites and Japhetites . The appellation Hamitic was applied to the Berber , Cushitic , and Egyptian branches of the Afroasiatic language family, which, together with the Semitic branch, was formerly labelled "Hamito-Semitic". Because the three Hamitic branches have not been shown to form an exclusive ( monophyletic ) phylogenetic unit of their own, separate from other Afroasiatic languages, linguists no longer use

104-664: A dolichocephalic to mesocephalic cranial index. According to Ashley Montagu "Among both the Northern and Eastern Hamites are to be found some of the most beautiful types of humanity." In the African Great Lakes region, Europeans based the various migration theories of Hamitic provenance in part on the long-held oral traditions of local populations such as the Tutsi and Hima (Bahima, Wahuma or Mhuma). These groups asserted that their founders were "white" migrants from

156-516: A barbaric "jungle life". Afrocentric writers considered the Hamitic hypothesis to be divisive since it asserted the inferiority of "Negroid" peoples. W. E. B. Du Bois (1868–1963) thus argued that "the term Hamite under which millions of Negroes have been characteristically transferred to the white race by some eager scientists" was a tool to create "false writing on Africa". According to Du Bois, " Livingstone , Stanley , and others were struck with

208-524: A circuitous route to refer more narrowly to anyone who was hostile or discriminatory towards Jews in particular. Anthropologists of the 19th century such as Ernest Renan readily aligned linguistic groupings with ethnicity and culture, appealing to anecdote, science and folklore in their efforts to define racial character. Moritz Steinschneider , in his periodical of Jewish letters Hamaskir (3 (Berlin 1860), 16), discusses an article by Heymann Steinthal criticising Renan's article "New Considerations on

260-479: A zoologist can recognise the character of an animal species or variety belonging to any region of the globe or any period of time, so also should an anthropologist if he follows the same method of investigating the morphological characters of the skull[...] This method has guided me in my investigations into the present problem and has given me unexpected results which were often afterwards confirmed by archaeology or history." The Hamitic hypothesis reached its apogee in

312-598: Is now largely unused outside the grouping " Semitic languages " in linguistics. First used in the 1770s by members of the Göttingen school of history , this biblical terminology for race was derived from Shem ( Hebrew : שֵׁם ), one of the three sons of Noah in the Book of Genesis , together with the parallel terms Hamites and Japhetites . In archaeology, the term is sometimes used informally as "a kind of shorthand" for ancient Semitic-speaking peoples . The use of

364-452: Is the Hamitic, which is Negroid rather than Negro. This is the division of African peoples to which the modern Somali and Gala belong, and of which the basis of the population of ancient Egypt consisted... Rather it would seem as though ancient Egypt traded and communicated directly with what is now Abyssinia and the Land of Punt (Somaliland), and that the Hamitic peoples of these countries facing

416-780: Is to be seen in the Masai [sic], the other in the Baganda, while an even more striking result is offered by the symbiosis of the Bahima of Ankole and the Bahiru [sic]. In his work The Uganda Protectorate (1902, Harry Johnston claims that the Hamites are "Negroid rather than Negro" and that Negroes learned "all the civilization they possessed |before the coming of the white man" from the Hamites: The fifth and last amongst these main stocks

468-708: The Ancient Egyptians . According to the Hamitic theory , this "Hamitic race" was superior to or more advanced than the " Negroid " populations of Sub-Saharan Africa . In its most extreme form, in the writings of C. G. Seligman , this theory asserted that virtually all significant achievements in African history were the work of "Hamites". Since the 1960s, the Hamitic hypothesis and Hamitic theory, along with other theories of "race science" , have been discredited in science. The term Hamitic originally referred to

520-587: The Eastern Hamites (or Ethiopids , comprising Ancient and Modern Egyptians (but not the Arabs in Egypt), Nubians , Beja , Abyssinians, Galla, Danakil, Somalis , Masai, Bahima and Watusi ). According to Coon, typical Hamitic physical traits included narrow facial features; an orthognathous visage; light brown to dark brown skin tone; wavy, curly or straight hair; thick to thin lips without eversion; and

572-913: The Egyptians , Cush the Cushites, and Phut the Libyans . During the Middle Ages, Jews and Christians considered Ham to be the ancestor of all Africans. Noah's curse on Canaan as described in Genesis began to be interpreted by some theologians as having caused visible racial characteristics in all of Ham's offspring, notably black skin. In a passage unrelated to the curse on Canaan, the sixth-century Babylonian Talmud says that Ham and his descendants were cursed with black skin, which modern scholars have interpreted as an etiological myth for skin color. Later, Western and Islamic traders and slave owners used

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624-835: The Horn of Africa had mixed with local "Negro" women to produce several hybrid "Hamiticised Negro" populations. The "Hamiticised Negroes" were divided into three groups according to language and degree of Hamitic influence: the "Negro-Hamites" or "Half-Hamites" (such as the Maasai , Nandi and Turkana ), the Nilotes (such as the Shilluk and Nuer ), and the Bantus (such as the Hima and Tutsi ). Seligman would explain this Hamitic influence through both demic diffusion and cultural transmission: At first

676-466: The oasis of Siwa or Jupiter Ammon, and employed the remainder of the year in studying Arabic and in examining the ruins of Ancient Egypt . In the spring of 1793 he visited Sinai , and in May set out for Darfur , joining the great Darb El Arba'īn caravan which every year went by the desert route from Egypt to Sudan. Many historians and ethnologists claim that Browne was “the first European to set foot in

728-725: The 1960s. Hamitic hypotheses operated in West Africa as well, and they changed greatly over time. With the demise of the concept of Hamitic languages, the notion of a definable "Hamite" racial and linguistic entity was heavily criticised. In 1974, writing about the African Great Lakes region, Christopher Ehret described the Hamitic hypothesis as the view that "almost everything more un-'primitive', sophisticated or more elaborate in East Africa [was] brought by culturally and politically dominant Hamites, immigrants from

780-648: The East, proposing to penetrate to Samarkand and survey the most interesting regions of central Asia . He spent the winter in Smyrna , and in the spring of 1813 travelled through Asia Minor and Armenia , made a short stay at Erzurum , and arrived on the June 1 at Tabriz . About the end of the summer of 1813 he left Tabriz for Tehran, intending to proceed further eastwards, but was shortly afterwards murdered. Some bones, believed to be his, were afterwards found and interred near

832-587: The Egyptian features of many of the tribes of Africa, and this is true of many of the peoples between Central Africa and Egypt, so that some students have tried to invent a 'Hamitic' race to account for them—an entirely unnecessary hypothesis." Semites Semitic people or Semites is a term for an ethnic, cultural or racial group associated with people of the Middle East , including Arabs , Jews , Akkadians , and Phoenicians . The terminology

884-551: The Empire of Kitara in the African Great Lakes region may have been established by a Hamitic founding dynasty. These ideas, under the rubric of science, provided the basis for some Europeans asserting that the Tutsi were superior to the Hutu . In spite of both groups being Bantu -speaking, Speke thought that the Tutsi had experienced some "Hamitic" influence, partly based on their facial features being comparatively more narrow than those of

936-754: The General Character of the Semitic Peoples, In Particular Their Tendency to Monotheism". Renan had acknowledged the importance of the ancient civilisations of Mesopotamia, Israel etc. but called the Semitic races inferior to the Aryan for their monotheism , which he held to arise from their supposed lustful, violent, unscrupulous and selfish racial instincts. Steinthal summed up these predispositions as "Semitism", and so Steinschneider characterised Renan's ideas as "anti-Semitic prejudice". In 1879,

988-611: The German journalist Wilhelm Marr began the politicisation of the term by speaking of a struggle between Jews and Germans in a pamphlet called Der Weg zum Siege des Germanenthums über das Judenthum ("The Way to Victory of Germanism over Judaism"). He accused the Jews of being liberals, a people without roots who had Judaized Germans beyond salvation. In 1879, Marr's adherents founded the "League for Anti-Semitism", which concerned itself entirely with anti-Jewish political action. Objections to

1040-507: The Hamites, or at least their aristocracy, would endeavour to marry Hamitic women, but it cannot have been long before a series of peoples combining Negro and Hamitic blood arose; these, superior to the pure Negro, would be regarded as inferior to the next incoming wave of Hamites and be pushed further inland to play the part of an incoming aristocracy vis-a-vis the Negroes on whom they impinged... The end result of one series of such combinations

1092-593: The Hamitic race into the black race, and the resemblance it draws between the different branches of black forms in Asia and Africa." In response, historians published in the Journal of Negro History stressed the cross-fertilization of cultures between Africa and Europe: for instance, George Wells Parker adopted Sergi's view that the "civilizing" race had originated in Africa itself. Similarly, black pride groups appropriated

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1144-503: The Hutu. Later writers followed Speke in arguing that the Tutsis had originally migrated into the lacustrine region as pastoralists and had established themselves as the dominant group, having lost their language as they assimilated to Bantu culture. Seligman and other early scholars believed that, in the African Great Lakes and parts of Central Africa, invading Hamites from North Africa and

1196-495: The North into East Africa, who were at least part Caucasoid in physical ancestry". He called this a "monothematic" model, which was "romantic, but unlikely" and "[had] been all but discarded, and rightly so". He further argued that there were a "multiplicity and variety" of contacts and influences passing between various peoples in Africa over time, something that he suggested the "one-directional" Hamitic model obscured. Sergi outlined

1248-555: The Red Sea and Indian Ocean carried a small measure of Egyptian culture into the lands about the Nile Lakes. In this way, and through Uganda as a half-way house, the totally savage Negro received his knowledge of smelting and working iron, all his domestic animals and cultivated plants (except those, of course, subsequently introduced by Arabs from Asia and Portuguese from America), all his musical instruments higher in development than

1300-568: The Semitic peoples in the Caucasian race, as similar in appearance to the Indo-European , Northwest Caucasian , and Kartvelian -speaking peoples. Due to the interweaving of language studies and cultural studies , the term also came to be applied to the religions ( ancient Semitic and Abrahamic ) and ethnicities of various cultures associated by geographic and linguistic distribution. The terms "anti-Semite" or "antisemitism" came by

1352-573: The anthropologist Giuseppe Sergi argued that the Mediterranean race had likely originated from a common ancestral stock that evolved in the Sahara region in Africa, and which later spread from there to populate North Africa, the Horn of Africa, and the circum-Mediterranean region. According to Sergi, the Hamites themselves constituted a Mediterranean variety, and one situated close to the cradle of

1404-570: The appellation Hamitic to denote the languages which are now seen as belonging to the Berber , Cushitic and Egyptian branches of the Afroasiatic family. "Perhaps because slavery was both still legal and profitable in the United States ... there arose an American school of anthropology which attempted to prove scientifically that the Egyptian was a Caucasian, far removed from the inferior Negro". Through craniometry conducted on thousands of human skulls, Samuel George Morton argued that

1456-692: The concept of Hamitic identity for their own purposes. Parker founded the Hamitic League of the World in 1917 to "inspire the Negro with new hopes; to make him openly proud of his race and of its great contributions to the religious development and civilization of mankind." He argued that "fifty years ago one would not have dreamed that science would defend the fact that Asia was the home of the black races as well as Africa, yet it has done just that thing." Timothy Drew and Elijah Muhammad developed from this

1508-606: The concept of the "Asiatic Blackman." Many other authors followed the argument that civilization had originated in Hamitic Ethiopia, a view that became intermingled with biblical imagery. The Universal Negro Improvement Association (UNIA) (1920) believed that Ethiopians were the "mother race". The Nation of Islam asserted that the superior black race originated with the lost tribe of Shabazz , which originally possessed "fine features and straight hair", but which migrated into Central Africa, lost its religion, and declined into

1560-489: The concept of the "Curse of Ham" to justify the enslaving of Africans. A significant change in Western views on Africans came about when Napoleon 's 1798 invasion of Egypt drew attention to the impressive achievements of Ancient Egypt , which could hardly be reconciled with the theory of Africans being inferior or cursed. In consequence, some 19th century theologians emphasized that the biblical Noah restricted his curse to

1612-625: The constituent Hamitic physical types, which would form the basis for the work of later writers such as Carleton Coon and C. G. Seligman. In his book The Mediterranean Race (1901), he wrote that there was a distinct Hamitic ancestral stock, which could be divided into two subgroups: the Western Hamites (or Northern Hamites , comprising the Berbers of the Mediterranean, Atlantic and Sahara, Tibbu, Fula, and extinct Guanches ), and

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1664-658: The differences between the races were too broad to have stemmed from a single common ancestor, but were instead consistent with separate racial origins. In his Crania Aegyptiaca (1844), Morton analyzed over a hundred intact crania gathered from the Nile Valley, and concluded that the ancient Egyptians were racially akin to Europeans. His conclusions would establish the foundation for the American School of anthropology, and would also influence proponents of polygenism . In his influential The Mediterranean Race (1901),

1716-458: The enslavement of Africans. In this context, many of the works published on Egypt after Napoleon's expedition "seemed to have had as their main purpose an attempt to prove in some way that the Egyptians were not Negroes", thus separating the high civilization of Ancient Egypt from what they wanted to see as an inferior race. Authors such as W. G. Browne , whose Travels in Africa, Egypt and Syria

1768-608: The grave of Jean de Thévenot , the French traveller. In 1799 Browne published his Travels in Africa, Egypt and Syria, from the years 1792 to 1798 . While informative, the dry style of his book prevented it from becoming popular. His accounts were “unusual because he compared the customs of the people he visited favorably with those of Europe, a verdict that was not fashionable for this area and period.” Robert Walpole published, from papers left by Browne, an account of Browne's journey in 1802 through Asia Minor to Antioch and Cyprus in

1820-530: The link between "civilized" North Africa and "primitive" central Africa. Describing the Ugandan Kingdom of Buganda , he argued that its "barbaric civilization" had arisen from a nomadic pastoralist race who had migrated from the north and was related to the Hamitic Oromo (Galla) of Ethiopia. In his Theory of Conquest of Inferior by Superior Races (1863), Speke would also attempt to outline how

1872-766: The north (interpreted as the Horn of Africa and/or North Africa), who subsequently "lost" their original language, culture, and much of their physiognomy as they intermarried with the local Bantus . Explorer J.H. Speke recorded one such account from a Wahuma governor in his book, Journal of the Discovery of the Source of the Nile . According to Augustus Henry Keane , the Hima King Mutesa I also claimed Oromo (Galla) ancestors and still reportedly spoke an Oromo idiom, though that language had long since died out elsewhere in

1924-471: The offspring of Ham's youngest son Canaan, while Ham's son Mizraim , the ancestor of the Egyptians, was not cursed. Following the Age of Enlightenment , many Western scholars were no longer satisfied with the biblical account of the early history of mankind, but started to develop faith-independent theories. These theories were developed in a historical situation where most Western nations were still profiting from

1976-561: The peoples said to be descended from Ham , one of the Sons of Noah according to the Bible . According to the Book of Genesis , after Noah became drunk and Ham dishonored his father, upon awakening Noah pronounced a curse on Ham's youngest son, Canaan , stating that his offspring would be the "servants of servants". Of Ham's four sons, Canaan fathered the Canaanites , while Mizraim fathered

2028-600: The present day by the Beja and Somali... The incoming Hamites were pastoral Caucasians – arriving wave after wave – better armed as well as quicker witted than the dark agricultural Negroes." Seligman asserted that the Negro race was essentially static and agricultural, and that the wandering "pastoral Hamitic" had introduced most of the advanced features found in central African cultures, including metal working, irrigation and complex social structures. Despite criticism, Seligman kept his thesis unchanged in new editions of his book into

2080-427: The region and the first to systematically collect material about it.” Browne became “the first European to travel the whole length of the caravan route in 1793.” He accompanied a camel caravan that traded jewellery, glass, silver and brass, sword-blades, fire-arms, carpets, cotton and cloth to Sudan. According to W. B. K. Shaw , this voyage as passing through "over a thousand of the most barren miles in Africa.” This

2132-528: The region. The missionary R. W. Felkin , who had met the ruler, remarked that Mutesa "had lost the pure Hamitic features through admixture of Negro blood, but still retained sufficient characteristics to prevent all doubt as to his origin". Thus, Keane would suggest that the original Hamitic migrants to the Great Lakes had "gradually blended with the aborigines in a new and superior nationality of Bantu speech ". Speke believed that his explorations uncovered

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2184-497: The single bowstring and the resonant hollow log, and, in short, all the civilization he possessed before the coming of the white man" European colonial powers in Africa were influenced by the Hamitic hypothesis in their policies during the twentieth century. For instance, in Rwanda, German and Belgian officials in the colonial period displayed preferential attitudes toward the Tutsis over the Hutu. Some scholars argued that this bias

2236-472: The stock. He added that the Mediterranean race "in its external characters is a brown human variety, neither white nor negroid, but pure in its elements, that is to say not a product of the mixture of Whites with Negroes or negroid peoples." Sergi explained this taxonomy as inspired by an understanding of "the morphology of the skull as revealing those internal physical characters of human stocks which remain constant through long ages and at far remote spots[...] As

2288-457: The superiority of the white Nordic race . The latter "Nordic" concept was promoted by certain writers, such as eugenicist Madison Grant . According to Yaacov Shavit, this generated "radical Afrocentric theory, which followed the path of European racial doctrines". Writers who insisted that the Nordics were the purest representatives of the Aryan race indirectly encouraged "the transformation of

2340-508: The term as a racial category is considered obsolete. The term Semitic in a racial sense was coined by members of the Göttingen school of history in the early 1770s. Other members of the Göttingen school of history coined the separate term Caucasian in the 1780s. These terms were used and developed by numerous other scholars over the next century. In the early 20th century, the pseudo-scientific classifications of Carleton S. Coon included

2392-463: The term in this sense. Each of these branches is instead now regarded as an independent subgroup of the larger Afroasiatic family. Beginning in the late 19th century, scholars generally classified the Hamitic race as a subgroup of the Caucasian race , alongside the Aryan race and the Semitic – thus grouping the non-Semitic populations native to North Africa and the Horn of Africa , including

2444-434: The usage of the term, such as the obsolete nature of the term "Semitic" as a racial term, have been raised since at least the 1930s. William George Browne William George Browne (25 July 1768 – 1813) was an English traveller, whose journey took him through Egypt and parts of south-west Asia. He published a book of his travels in 1799. Browne was murdered while attempting to reach Tehran . Browne

2496-560: The work of C. G. Seligman , who argued in his book The Races of Africa (1930) that: Apart from relatively late Semitic influence... the civilizations of Africa are the civilizations of the Hamites, its history is the record of these peoples and of their interaction with the two other African stocks, the Negro and the Bushmen , whether this influence was exerted by highly civilized Egyptians or by such wider pastoralists as are represented at

2548-461: Was a significant factor that contributed to the 1994 Rwandan genocide of the Tutsis by the Hutus. African-American scholars were initially ambivalent about the Hamitic hypothesis. Because Sergi's theory proposed that the superior Mediterranean race had originated in Africa, some African-American writers believed that they could appropriate the Hamitic hypothesis to challenge Nordicist claims about

2600-644: Was born at Great Tower Hill, London . At seventeen he was sent to Oriel College, Oxford . Having had a moderate inheritance left him by his father, on quitting the university he applied himself entirely to literary pursuits. But the fame of James Bruce 's travels, and of the first discoveries made by the African Association, made him determined to become an explorer of Central Africa . He went first to Egypt , arriving at Alexandria in January 1792, where he studied Arabic. He spent some time in visiting

2652-594: Was his most important journey, in which he acquired a great variety of original information. He was forcibly detained by the sultan of Darfur and endured much hardship, being unable to effect his purpose of returning by Ethiopia (then known as Abyssinia). In 1796 he was, however, allowed to return to Egypt with a slave caravan consisting of about 500 camels. In September 1798, he returned to England through Syria and Constantinople. In 1800 Browne again left England, and spent three years in visiting Greece, some parts of Asia Minor and Sicily. In 1812 he once more set out for

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2704-402: Was published in 1799, laid the "seeds for the new Hamitic myth that was to emerge in the very near future", insisting that the Egyptians were white. In the mid-19th century, the term Hamitic acquired a new anthropological meaning, as scholars asserted that they could discern a "Hamitic race" that was distinct from the " Negroid " populations of Sub-Saharan Africa . Richard Lepsius would coin

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