We call it Egypt; the Greeks called it Aigyptos; but the ancient civilization in the northeast corner of Africa preferred a word with pretty clear roots. Kemet, the name that emerged at the height of the Middle Kingdom, means “the black land,” a reference to the nutrient-rich soil along the banks of the Nile. Every year, after the annual flooding, the black earth nourished an empire.
The soil was rich in other ways: rich in dreams, rich in fantasies. And later there were other ways in which ancient Egypt became understood as a black (or Black) land. “You know, I have long been interested in the Science of races,” Frederick Douglass wrote to his son on a trip to Cairo in 1887, “and especially anxious to know something about the colors and features of Egyptians. It has been the fashion of American writers, to deny that Egyptians were Negroes, and claim that they are of the same race as themselves.”
Douglass, born into slavery, saw ancient Egypt as a self-evidently African civilization. Its pyramids and parchments were therefore a legacy for Black Americans to claim. To say otherwise, he wrote to his son, was to give up “the moral support of Ancient Greatness and to appropriate the same to the white race.”
Who writes the past, and who rewrites it? “Flight Into Egypt: Black Artists and Ancient Egypt, 1876 — Now,” an unusual and audacious exhibition opening Sunday at the Metropolitan Museum of Art, spotlights a propensity in American culture hiding in plain sight: the attachment, among Black artists, musicians and intellectuals, to ancient Egyptian culture, myth and spirituality. Rambling across a century and a half, with nearly 200 artworks, it explores the colonial roots of modern Egyptology, the Pharaonic motifs of the Harlem Renaissance, the Egyptian iconography of Black Power and other movements of the 1960s and ’70s, and sphinxes and pyramids in the work of everyone from Kara Walker to Richard Pryor.
November 15, 2024
