Hamitic

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Hamitic is an obsolete ethno-linguistic classification of some ethnic groups within the Afroasiatic (previously termed "Semito-Hamitic") language family. These people were also termed the Hamitic race in the 19th century and during the first two-thirds of the 20th century.

Contents 1 Ham in the Bible 2 Use of Hamite after Napoleon's invasion of Egypt 3 Hamitic language group 4 Hamitic race 4.1 Hamitic League of the World 5 Within colonialism 5.1 Rwanda 6 Today 7 Genetics 8 References

[edit] Ham in the Bible

Further information: Curse of Ham

The term Hamitic originally referred to the peoples believed to have been descended from the biblical Ham, one of the Sons of Noah. Over history, there have been several separate, but interrelated, interpretations of the term. In the Bible, the sons of Ham include peoples who were traditionally enemies of the Jews, notably the Egyptians and the Canaanites. While the Canaanites competed with the Israelites for the same territory, Ham's sons were said to have fathered the peoples of Africa. Of Ham's four sons, Canaan, fathered the Canaanites, while Mizraim fathered the Egyptians, Cush the Kushites and Phut the "Libyans".^[1]

A literal interpretation of the Bible leads literalists to believe that all of humanity was descended from Noah. Chapters 9 and 10 of the Book of Genesis deal with the dispersing of Noah's sons into the world. The name of Cush, Ham's eldest son, means "black" in Hebrew, and "Caanan" means "trader", "trafficker", or "lowland".^{[citation needed]} The word "Ham" in Hebrew moreover means "hot" or "multitude", and is thus not necessarily a racial reference.^[2] Although using Hebrew to define these names will result in inaccurate translations due to the fact that Noah and his sons were not Hebrew. And in fact, according to Genesis 11:10-26, they lived thousands of years before Abram (later Abraham), who is the father of the Hebrew people.

According to Bernard Lewis, the sixth-century Babylonian Talmud states that "the descendants of Ham are cursed by being Black and are sinful with a degenerate progeny."^[3] However, an exhaustive online search of the Soncino translation of the Babylonian Talmud reveals no such statement, nor a similar statement. Instead the rabbis are found discussing what the nature of Ham's offense was, such that his fourth son was cursed. Nevertheless, slave holders, slavery defenders and racial theorists used similar formulations to justify African slavery in the Americas.^[4]

In the The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints, until 1978, people of black African descent were not allowed to hold the Mormon Priesthood because of the infamous Negro doctrine--they were deemed unworthy because they were regarded as having the curse of Ham.

[edit] Use of Hamite after Napoleon's invasion of Egypt

After Napoleon's invasion of Egypt, European interest in that country increased dramatically. With the translation of Egyptian hieroglyphics and the rapid increase in knowledge of Ancient Egyptian civilization, European academics became increasingly interested in the origin of the Egyptians and their connection to other groups nearby. The traditional Biblical genealogy associated the Egyptians with other descendants of Ham, notably the black-skinned Kushites in Sudan.

Non-religious and Darwinian writers also theorised that the Biblical stories contained an element of truth about the ancestry of some African populations, who may have migrated into Central Africa from the North. These peoples were assumed to be racially superior to other Africans.

[edit] Hamitic language group

During the Middle Ages and up until the early 19th century the term Hamitic was initially used by some Europeans to refer indiscriminately to Africans.

The term "Hamitic" was used for the first time in connection with languages by the German missionary Johann Ludwig Krapf (1810–1881), but with regard to all languages of Africa spoken by people deemed "black".

It was the Egyptologist Karl Richard Lepsius (1810–1884) who restricted it to the non-Semitic languages in Africa which are characterized by a grammatical gender system. This "Hamitic language group" was proposed to unite various, mainly North-African languages, including the Ancient Egyptian language, the Berber language, and the Cushitic language, and sometimes including also the Omotic language, the Beja language, and the Chadic language.

Friedrich Müller named the traditional Hamito-Semitic family in 1876 in his Grundriss der Sprachwissenschaft, and defined it as consisting of a Semitic group plus a "Hamitic" group containing Egyptian, Berber, and Cushitic; he excluded the Chadic group. These classifications relied in part on non-linguistic anthropological and racial arguments.

Leo Reinisch (1909) proposed to link Cushitic and Chadic, while urging a more distant affinity with Egyptian and Semitic, thus foreshadowing Greenberg; but his suggestion found little resonance. Marcel Cohen (1924) rejected the idea of a distinct "Hamitic" subgroup, and included Hausa (a Chadic language) in his comparative Hamito-Semitic vocabulary. Joseph Greenberg (1950) strongly confirmed Cohen's rejection of "Hamitic", added (and sub-classified) the Chadic languages, and proposed the new name Afro-Asiatic for the family; almost all scholars have accepted his classification.

[edit] Hamitic race

A "Hamitic race" was also identified, referring to those peoples (including Ancient Egyptians) speaking the "Hamitic languages". These people were regarded as intermediate between black Africans and Semites; Europeans considered these people "advanced" Africans, or most similar to themselves and Semitic peoples. The "Hamitic race" in the first two-thirds of the 20th century was considered one of the branches of the Caucasian race, along with the Indo-Europeans, Dravidians, Semites, and the Mediterranean race.

Some Afrocentric ethnographers today include the people historically called "Hamites" as part of the proposed Africoid race, along with the Congoids, Capoids, Australoids, and Dravidians.

[edit] Hamitic League of the World

In 1917 George Wells Parker founded the Hamitic League of the World. Its aims were:

"To inspire the Negro with new hopes; to make him openly proud of his race and of its great contributions to the religious development and civilization of mankind and to place in the hands of every race man and woman and child the facts which support the League's claim that the Negro Race is the greatest race the world has ever known."

[edit] Within colonialism

Further information: Second European colonization wave (19th century–20th century)

The Hamitic Myth was used as a justification for European colonial policy in Africa in the 19th and 20th centuries, as well as the slave trade in earlier times.^[5][6]

As a result of this reevaluation, the term "Hamitic" took on a new, more positive connotation for Europeans. During the 19th century Europeans explored more and more of Africa. In their travels, they found many different physical types, and they valued those that appeared most like themselves or had a redeeming cultural characteristic.

Soon the Hamitic theory became an important ideological instrument of colonialism, especially in German politics.

As racial theories became increasingly complex and convoluted, the term Hamitic was used in different ways by different writers and was applied to many different groups, mainly comprising Ethiopians, Eritreans, Somalis, Berbers and Nubians.

Racial theory was very hierarchical; Europeans saw these peoples as leaders within Africa, "teaching" lesser peoples the ways of civilization, just as they saw themselves teaching the Hamitic peoples. This was illustrated, for instance, in Rudyard Kipling's poem The White Man's Burden.^[clarify]

However, the allegedly Hamitic peoples themselves were often deemed to have failed as rulers, a failing that was sometimes explained by interbreeding with non-Hamites. For example, in the mid-20th century the German scholar Carl Meinhof claimed that the "Bantu race" was formed by a merger of Hamitic and "Negro races",^{[citation needed]} and that the Hottentots (Nama or Khoi) were formed by the union of Hamitic and Bushmen (San) races. Such theories are now completely outdated. (In modern anthropology, the Khoi and San are grouped together as Khoisan.)

[edit] Rwanda

In Rwanda, the Hamitic hypothesis was a racialist hypothesis created by John Hanning Speke which stated that the supposedly "Hamitic" Tutsi people were superior to the "Bantu" Hutus because they were deemed to be more "White" in their facial features, and thus destined to rule over the Hutus.^[7]

Although the actual origin of the Tutsis is disputed, if they had once been a ruling-class of invaders, they had long since lost that social position.

This hypothesis is believed by many to be a significant factor in the Rwandan genocide. Because of the wide-spread tribalism in the area, and the belief among Tutsis that they were superior to the Hutus, the Hutus began to see the Tutsis as an outside invader to their land.

[edit] Today

These ideas were still in wide circulation until the last third of the 20th century. The Hamitic hypothesis is rejected by most scholars today on a multitude of grounds. Most "scientific" observations of the time were heavily culturally biased and generally returned results that suited Europeans. Many observations of the time have been corrected since then to reveal a much more complex picture of ethnic groups than was initially conceived.

Nonetheless, the term Hamitic is still used in some anthropological and historical academic settings.

The term's linguistic use was effectively terminated by Joseph Greenberg (The Languages of Africa) in the 1950s, who introduced the use of geographical rather than racial terms for Africa's language families.

Today the Hamitic concepts have been widely discredited, and are often referred to as the Hamitic Myth.^[8]

The Hamitic language group is no longer considered by most scholars to be a useful concept, though the phrase Semito-Hamitic is a dated term for the Afro-Asiatic linguistic group. The notion of a "Hamitic race" is similarly widely abandoned.

[edit] Genetics

A population genetics study from 1994 by the geneticist Luigi Luca Cavalli-Sforza has identified a group of people somewhat equivalent to what many have termed the Hamitic race. While this group was restricted to ethnic groups who speak Afro-Asiatic languages, some ethnic groups that do speak Afro-Asiatic languages were not included.^[9]

In his book The History and Geography of Human Genes published in 1994, Cavalli-Sforza suggested that the East African genetic cluster consisted of Algerians (not including the Berbers), the Beja, the Tuareg, the non-Black African Sudanese, the Cushitics, the Tigray, the Barya, and the Amhara. Three of the eight, the Beja, Tuareg, and Cushitics speak Hamitic (non-Semitic Afro-Asiatic) languages.^[10]

Although Somalis speak a Cushitic language, Cavalli-Sforza found them to be most closely related to the Khoi and San ethnic groups (also called the Capoid race). However, on page 169 of The History and Geography of Human Genes, Cavalli-Sforza himself concedes that this finding "may be an error",^[11] and indeed, it contradicts every major modern genetic study on the Somali population, all of which clearly show the Somali people to be most closely related to their fellow Ethiopian and Eritrean Northeast African groups.^[12][13] Recent research studies by the geneticists Sarah Tishkoff, Juan J. Sanchez, Fulvio Cruciani, and Neil Risch have all shown Somalis to carry high frequencies of the E1b1b genetic haplogroup that characterizes Northeast and North African groups, and to harbor little to no paternal DNA in common with Khoisan groups (even less than their fellow Northeast African groups).^[14][15] The History and Geography of Human Genes is also the only study of its kind to ever cluster Somalis with Khoisans before their Horn African neighbors.

By Cavalli-Sforza's 1994 estimate, the East African genetic cluster has been estimated to be approximately 60% of Black African ancestry and 40% of Caucasoid ancestry.^[16]

[edit] References

v • d • e Descendants of Noah in Genesis 10 Shem and Semitic Elam · Ashur · Aram · Arpachshad · Lud Ham and Hamitic Cush · Mizraim · Phut · Canaan Japheth and Japhetic Gomer · Magog · Madai · Javan · Tubal · Meshech · Tiras