Race and Identity in the Nile Valley: Ancient and Modern Perspectives
ISBN: 9781569021798
$29.95
This volume pioneers the examination of issues of race and racism, ethnicity and identity in the major Nile Valley countries of Sudan and Egypt from ancient times to the present. Two major events have forced the issue. The study of the ancient Nile Valley was challenged to confront the issue of race in antiquity with the publication of Martin Bernals two-volume work, "Black Athena" (1987; 1991) asserting the Afro-Asiatic roots of Western civilization, and its most famous rebuttal "Not Out of Africa" (1996). In the aftermath of these earlier works, the question of whether ancient Egypt was black or white became the most simplistic rendering of this not so collegial debate. In this tome, a new generation of critical archaeologists and anthropologists, freed from old Orientalist and Egyptological racialist and racist ideas, have written with greater objectivity about race and representation than their predecessors.