Hamitic

Hamites (from the biblical Ham) is a historical term in 19th and early 20th century ethnology and linguistics for a division of the Caucasian race and the group of related languages these populations spoke. The appellation Hamitic was applied to the Berber, Cushitic, and Egyptian branches of the Afroasiatic language family, which, together with the Semitic branch, was thus formally labelled 'Hamito-Semitic'. However, since 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 the term in this sense. Each of these branches is instead now regarded as an independent subgroup of the larger Afroasiatic family.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 the present day by the Beja and Somali... The incoming Hamites were pastoral 'Europeans' – arriving wave after wave – better armed as well as quicker witted than the dark agricultural Negroes.'At first 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 is to be seen in the Masai , the other in the Baganda, while an even more striking result is offered by the symbiosis of the Bahima of Ankole and the Bahiru .By some authorities the Masai are included in the Hamitic group, but we have only to compare the features of a member of this tribe with those of a Galla... to realise the predominance of the negro element in the former. The aspect of the pure Hamite differs altogether from those of the Bantu and Negroid races. The... portrait of a Galla presents no correspondence with the conception usually formed of an African native. The forehead is high and square instead of low and receding; the nose is narrow, with the nostrils straight and not transverse; the chin is small and slightly pointed instead of massive and protruding; the hair is long and not woolly; the lips are thinner than those of the negro and not everted; Indeed, except for the colour, it could hardly be distinguished from the face of a European. These characteristics prepare us for the fact that the Galla are not African, but immigrants from Asia.In my opinion it is time to arrest a quarter of a century of excessive anti-Hamitism in African studies By , of course, was meant Caucasoid, but not just any Caucasoid. Hamitic as a catchall category always seems to presuppose biological resemblance to the ancient Egyptians, modern Berbers, or the better known Ethiopid types such as Beja, highland Abyssinians, Galla, or Somali But anti-racism has not all been beneficial. A generation grew up drawing strange inferences from it. Since racism is 'bad' politically and scientifically, and pro-Hamitic historical theories usually have been associated with racism, Hamites themselves are 'bad' or unsavory or one should oppose any hypothesis which credits them with an important role in anything. Such an inference is a non sequitur and one which Greenberg never intended or supported. Is this prejudice immediately ascertainable; can its presence be easily shown, particularly among younger scholars? I believe this point is true but hard to test, particularly because I think it lies among the deep-seated attitudes an Africanist acquires in general training Anti-racism, which has led to silly anti-Hamitism, finally led to falsehood when Ehret set out to restrict the role of the Cushites in eastern African history because they were a kind of Hamite. Hamites (from the biblical Ham) is a historical term in 19th and early 20th century ethnology and linguistics for a division of the Caucasian race and the group of related languages these populations spoke. The appellation Hamitic was applied to the Berber, Cushitic, and Egyptian branches of the Afroasiatic language family, which, together with the Semitic branch, was thus formally labelled 'Hamito-Semitic'. However, since 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 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 19th century, scholars generally classified the Hamitic race as a subgroup of the Caucasian race, along with the Semitic race – thus grouping the non-Semitic populations native to North Africa and the Horn of Africa, including the Ancient Egyptians. According to the Hamitic theory, this 'Hamitic race' was superior to or more advanced than 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' who had migrated into central Africa as pastoralists, bringing new customs, languages, technologies and administrative skills with them. In the early 20th century, theoretical models of Hamitic languages and of Hamitic races were intertwined. This nomenclature gradually fell out of favor between the 1960s and 1980s, in large part due to its perceived association with colonial paternalism. The populations of Hamitic ancestral stock are now more commonly known as 'Caucasoid'. The term Hamitic originally referred to 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 the Egyptians, Cush the Cushites, and Phut the Libyans. During the Middle Ages, believing Jews, Christians, and Muslims incorrectly considered Ham to be the ancestor of all Africans. Noah's curse on Canaan as described in Genesis began to be misinterpreted by some scholars in Europe as having caused visible racial characteristics in all of Ham's offspring, notably black skin. According to Edith Sanders, the sixth-century Babylonian Talmud says that 'the descendants of Ham are cursed by being Black and depicts Ham as a sinful man and his progeny as degenerates.' Some Arab slave traders used the account of Noah and Ham in the Bible to justify Negro (Zanj) slavery, and later European and American Christian traders and slave owners adopted a similar argument. However, the Bible itself indicates that Noah restricted his curse to the offspring of Ham's youngest son Canaan, whose descendants occupied the Levant, and it was not extended to Ham's other sons, who had migrated into Africa. According to Sanders, 18th-century theologians increasingly emphasized this narrow restriction and accurate interpretation of the passage as applying to Canaan's offspring. They rejected the curse as a justification for slavery. Many versions of this perspective on African history have been proposed and applied to different parts of the continent. The essays below focus on the development of these ideas regarding the peoples of North Africa, the Horn of Africa, and the African Great Lakes. However, Hamitic hypotheses operated in West Africa as well, and they changed greatly over time. 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. The theory arose from early anthropological writers, who linked the stories in the Bible of Noah's sons to documented ancient migrations of peoples from the Middle East into Africa. Richard Lepsius would coin the appellation Hamitic to denote the languages spoken by these early settlers, which comprised the Berber, Cushitic and Egyptian branches of the Afroasiatic family. Through examination of thousands of human skulls, Samuel George Morton argued that 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 the second half of the 19th century, the British explorer John Hanning Speke would further popularize the ancient Hamitic peregrinations in his publications on his search for the source of the Nile River. Speke believed that his explorations uncovered 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 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 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.