Oh tut tut!

Earlier this week, the sci-fi writer Steven Barnes had a nice piece in The Philadelphia Inquirer, “Why King Tut’s ethnicity is such a complex issue.”

The article offers his take on the currently-raging debate over King Tut’s complexion, which is taken as a signifier of his (and therefore Egypt’s) links to Sub-Saharan Africa and is also taken as bearing on the matter of whether Egypt should be understood as “African” or “Middle Eastern.”

(Whatever. Everyone who has ever seen a Hollywood film knows that the ancient Egyptians were white, just like Jesus! You can click the head for a pictorial history of Tut, and if you haven’t heard this story, background reports are at the end of this post.)

This week’s hoopla actually started in 2005, when a major museum exhibit was accused of whitewashing Tut’s image. The exhibit featured “new” images of Tut popularized by Zahi Hawass, secretary general of Egypt’s Supreme Council of Antiquities, who in 2005 led a team of anthropologists and forensics experts France, Egypt, and the United States. Just this week, Hawass declared:

“Tutankhamun was not black, and the portrayal of ancient Egyptian civilisation as black has no element of truth to it,” Hawass told reporters.

“Egyptians are not Arabs and are not Africans despite the fact that Egypt is in Africa,” he said, quoted by the official MENA news agency.

As you can imagine, that one didn’t go over too well.

There is plenty to say on all of this, for instance how we pick and choose when and what race signifies, or how even what counts as racial is subject to similar ebbs and flows and desires.

This new Tut-tutting also points to a fundamental ambivalence in the African-American cultural tradition. Before the rise of Afrocentrism, our main relationship to ancient Egypt was in the allegorical essence we distilled from the book of Exodus. In that story, my friends, Egypt was on the wrong side of righteousness. (I am reminded here of Black Woman’s take on this week’s events: “I’m actually kind of relieved about this news. I always feel a bit guilty around Passover time like my people had something to do with the oppression of Jews. Looks like Black folks are off the hook!”) Further, if indeed Egyptians are some kind of hybrid people (and I know that technically almost everyone is some kind of hybrid and blah blah blah, but please bear with me), but if they’re hybrid people historically located at a geographical crossroads, do they still count as “black,” in the 90s kente-cloth sense that the protesters mean it? After all, if Barack Obama isn’t “black enough,” what does that mean for ol’ King Tut?

But I am being silly, for I really do get it. Something about Hawass’ comments, in their focus and intensity, went right under my skin. And that is why I am so appreciative of this Stephen Barnes piece, which really elicits a deeper sense of what is at stake. I can’t quite reproduce its overall tone in a quote, so I really recommend reading it and its comments, here.

Here is the gist of it:

If you don’t think Tut was black, fine. But don’t think black intellectuals who claim he was are doing anything other than what people have done since the beginning of time. The hunger of blacks to see themselves in history is not a radical revisionism but a core human need.

In a Jules Feiffer cartoon, two intellectuals, one white, one black, sit across the table from each other. The black man says: “You have your history. White history. Written by white men, to promote white power. We want our history. Black history. Written by black men, to promote black power. Our demand is separate but equal lies.”

I’ve never forgotten that cartoon. It contains a basic truth: Everyone wants to think the world revolves around him. Many indigenous peoples have a name for themselves that means, simply, “the people,” and the mythology of many groups in the world suggests that God created them first, loves them best, and created everyone else later . . . and less.

Indeed.

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