When Napoleon embarked upon an army expedition into Egypt in 1798, he introduced with him a crew of students, scientists and artists. In combination, they produced the enormous “Description de l’Égypte,” a large, multivolume paintings about Egyptian geography, historical past and tradition.
The frontispiece of the second one version of ‘Description de l’Égypte.’
Wikimedia Commons
On the time, america used to be a tender country with giant aspirations, and American citizens frequently considered their nation as an inheritor to the good civilizations of the previous. The stories of historical Egypt that emerged from Napoleon’s travels changed into a supply of fascination to American citizens, regardless that in several techniques.
Within the slaveholding South, historical Egypt and its pharaohs changed into a method to justify slavery. For abolitionists and African American citizens, biblical Egypt served as a logo of bondage and liberation.
As a historian, I learn about how Nineteenth-century American citizens – from Southern intellectuals to Black abolitionists – used historical Egypt to discuss questions of race, civilization and nationwide id. My analysis strains how a distorted symbol of historical Egypt formed competing visions of freedom and hierarchy in a deeply divided country.
Egypt conjures up the pro-slavery South
In 1819, when legal professional John Overton, army officer James Winchester and long run president Andrew Jackson based a town in Tennessee alongside the Mississippi River, they christened it Memphis, after the traditional Egyptian capital.
Whilst selling the brand new town, Overton declared of the Mississippi River that ran along it: “This noble river may, with propriety, be denominated the American Nile.”
“Who can tell that she may not, in time, rival … her ancient namesake, of Egypt in classic elegance and art?” The Arkansas Banner excitedly reported.
Within the area’s fertile soil, Chancellor William Harper, a jurist and pro-slavery theorist from South Carolina, noticed the promise of an agricultural empire constructed on slavery, one “capable of being made a far greater Egypt.”
To them, Egypt represented the archetype of a really perfect hierarchical civilization. Older than Athens or Rome, Egypt conferred a distinct legitimacy. And identical to the pharaohs, the white elites of the South noticed themselves because the stewards of a wealthy society sustained via enslaved exertions.
The founders of Memphis named it after the traditional Egyptian capital, and so they was hoping the Mississippi River that ran along it might transform an ‘American Nile.’
The Print Collector/Getty Photographs
Main pro-slavery thinkers like Virginia social theorist George Fitzhugh, South Carolina legal professional and U.S. Senator Robert Barnwell Rhett and Georgia legal professional and flesh presser Thomas R.R. Cobb all invoked Egypt for instance to practice.
“These [Egyptian] monuments show negro slaves in Egypt at least 1,600 years before Christ,” Cobb wrote in 1858. “That they were the same happy negroes of this day is proven by their being represented in a dance 1,300 years before Christ.”
A distorted view of historical past
However their view of historical past didn’t precisely sq. with fact. Slavery did exist in historical Egypt, however maximum slaves were in the beginning captured as prisoners of struggle.
The rustic by no means advanced a gadget of slavery related to that of Greece or Rome, and servitude used to be neither race-based nor tied to a plantation financial system. The unsuitable perception that Egypt’s nice monuments had been constructed via slaves in large part stems from historical authors and the biblical account of the Hebrews. Later, pop culture – particularly Hollywood epics – would proceed to advance this false impression.
However, Nineteenth-century Southern intellectuals drew in this imagined Egypt to legitimize slavery as an historical and divinely sanctioned establishment.
Even after the Civil Struggle, which resulted in 1865, nostalgia for those myths of historical Egypt persevered. In 1877, former Accomplice officer Edward Fontaine famous how “Veritable specimens of black, woolyheaded negroes are represented by the old Egyptian artists in chains, as slaves, and even singing and dancing, as we have seen them on Southern plantations in the present century.”
Turning Egypt white
However to say their position a few of the international’s nice civilizations, Southerners needed to reconcile a troubling truth: Egypt used to be positioned in Africa, the ancestral land of the ones enslaved within the U.S.
A collectible tobacco card depicts actors Claudette Colbert and Henry Wilcoxon in a nonetheless from the 1934 movie ‘Cleopatra.’
Nextrecord Archives/Getty Photographs
In reaction, an highbrow motion referred to as the American College of Ethnology – which promoted the concept that races had separate, unequal origins to justify Black inferiority and slavery – got down to “whiten” Egypt.
In a chain of texts and lectures, they portrayed Egypt as a slaveholding civilization ruled via whites. They pointed to Egyptian monuments as evidence of the greatness {that a} slave society may just reach. And so they additionally promoted a scientifically discredited idea referred to as “polygenesis,” which argued that Black folks didn’t descend from the Bible’s Adam, however from another supply.
Richard Colfax, the creator of the 1833 pamphlet “Evidence Against the Views of the Abolitionists,” insisted that “the Egyptians were decidedly of the Caucasian variety of men.” Maximum mummies, he added, “bear not the most distant resemblance to the negro race.”
Doctor Samuel George Morton cited “Crania Aegyptiaca,” an 1822 German learn about of Egyptian skulls, to give a boost to this view. Writing within the Charleston Clinical Magazine in 1851, he defined how the German learn about had concluded that the skulls reflected the ones of Europeans in dimension and form. In doing so, it established “the negro his true position as an inferior race.”
Professional-slavery activists like John H. Van Evrie took nice pains to ‘prove’ the inherent inferiority of Black folks.
Harvard Countway Library Heart for the Historical past of Medication
Doctor Josiah C. Nott, Egyptologist George Gliddon and doctor and propagandist John H. Van Evrie shaped an efficient triumvirate: Via press releases and public lectures that includes the skulls of mummies, they became Egyptology into a device of pro-slavery propaganda.
“The Negro question was the one I wished to bring out,” Nott wrote, including that he “embalmed it in Egyptian ethnography.”
Nott and Gliddon’s 1854 bestseller “Types of Mankind” fused pseudoscience with Egyptology to each “prove” Black inferiority and advance the concept that their cherished African civilization used to be populated via a white Egyptian elite.
“Negroes were numerous in Egypt,” they write, “but their social position in ancient times was the same that it now is, that of servants and slaves.”
Denouncing The united states’s pharaohs
This distorted imaginative and prescient of Egypt, alternatively, wasn’t the one one to take grasp within the U.S., and abolitionists noticed this historical past via a decidedly other lens.
Within the Bible, Egypt occupies a central position, discussed many times as a land of shelter – significantly for Joseph – but additionally as a country of idolatry and because the cradle of slavery.
The episode of the Exodus is most likely essentially the most well-known reference. The Hebrews, enslaved beneath an oppressive pharaoh, are freed via Moses, who leads them to the Promised Land, Canaan. This biblical symbol of Egypt as a land of bondage deeply formed Nineteenth-century ethical and political debates: For plenty of abolitionists, it represented without equal image of tyranny and human oppression.
When the Emancipation Proclamation went into impact on Jan. 1, 1863, Black folks might be heard making a song in entrance of the White Area, “Go down Moses, way down in Egypt Land … Tell Jeff Davis to let my people go.”
Black American citizens seized upon this biblical parallel. Accomplice President Jefferson Davis used to be a modern pharaoh, with Moses nonetheless the prophet of liberation.
A map titled ‘Historical Geography,’ created via John F. Smith, presentations how faith and the Bible had been wielded via abolitionists.
Library of Congress
African American writers and activists like Phillis Wheatley and Sojourner Fact additionally invoked Egypt as a device of emancipation.
“God has implanted in every human heart a principle which we call the love of liberty,” Wheatley wrote in a 1774 letter. “It is impatient with oppression and longs for deliverance; and with the permission of our modern Egyptians, I will assert that this same principle lives in us.”
But the South’s infatuation with Egypt presentations how antiquity can at all times be recast to serve the robust. And it’s a reminder that the previous is a ways from impartial terrain – that there’s hardly, if ever, a ceasefire in wars over historical past and reminiscence.
