A. J. Arkell
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Anthony John Arkell (July 29, 1898–February 26, 1980) was a British scholar noted for his work in the Sudan and Egypt.
Arkell was born in Hinxhill, Kent, England. He saw service with the Royal Flying Corps and Royal Air Force in World War I before joining the Sudan Political Service in 1920. A former official of the British colonial government, Arkell conducted several surveys, documenting among other things: the existence of massive iron works in Meroe, which he dubbed "the Birmingham of Africa", and the extensive pre-dynastic culture of Egypt, notably the Badarians. Arkell was instrumental in ending the slave trade between the Sudan and Ethiopia, and in establishing villages for the freed slaves, who named themselves "the Sons of Arkell". In 1938, he was appointed commissioner for archaeology and anthropology and undertook a series of digs that revealed information about Sudanese prehistory for the first time. In 1948, he became the curator of the Flinders Petrie Collection of Egyptian Antiquities and professor of Egyptology at University College, University of London, where he catalogued the collection and wrote his History of the Sudan (1955).
Arkell's work has received recent attention as a result of the controversy over Afrocentrism. Arkell's work has received both positive and negative commentary in this regard. Some have criticised Arkell's conclusions, alleging that he divided Sudanic areas into vaguely defined populations including a superior "Brown" race (Arab or Semitic) and "Negro" races, and that he held that progress among the Negro aborigines was due to Egyptianisation, rather than to independent development. Others point, however, to Arkell's surveys as proof against what they consider to be racist assumptions about Africa, namely that any significant cultural or technological development is due to the outside influence of Caucasoid invaders or migrants.
Such "outsider development" theories, most notably the "Hamitic myth" have been since ababdoned by modern scholarship. Arkell's work in the Sudan shows that several important cultural elements such as cattle herding, were already in place and in use by indigenous Negroid peoples, prior to the arrival of mysterious Causacoid or "Hamitic" migrants who supposedly ushered in an era of progress. His work on Meroe also shows iron-works in operation by Negroid peoples and this has been used as a basis for the idea that Meroitic cultures were responsible for the spread of iron-making to other parts of the African continent as opposed to theories of vague Caucasoid outsiders. His research on the Pre-dynastic Badarians, shows their culture to share some similarities with the Negroid peoples of the Sudan, bolstering various Afrocentric claims of a black presence in Egypt.
Arkell retired in 1963 and was ordained a minister. He died in Chelmsford at the age of eighty-one.
