Die Archäologie Altägyptens und die Hamiten-Hypothese: Ausgewählte ethnologische Fallbeispiele aus der Zwischenkriegszeit Österreichs, in: Michaela Zavadil (Hg.), Archäologie und Republik. Reflexionen zur Archäologie in Österreich in der Ersten und in der Zweiten Republik (Oriental and European Archaeology 28). Wien: Verlag der OeAW 2023, pp. 539–561 (28.12.2023)
Abstract: This academic history study examines the significance of the Hamite hypothesis in the archaeology of Ancient Egypt on the basis of selected ethnological case studies from the inter-war period in Austria. Under the influence of racial anthropological research, Hermann Junker transferred the Hamitic hypothesis to the archaeology of Ancient Egypt. His lecture “The First Appearance of the Negroes in History”, held at the Academy of Sciences in Vienna in 1919, can be identified as the key text to introduce, disseminate, and sustainably consolidate the Hamitic hypothesis in the archaeology of Ancient Egypt. Junker’s core statement that Nubians 3500 years ago were not Africans but “lightskinned Hamites” had lasting consequences both in his own and in neighbouring historical disciplines. The case studies – concerning Crete, Punt and Libya – illustrate how the construct of the light-skinned Hamites was increasingly extended in space and time, driven by the imperial-colonialist idea that Africa was not originally inhabited by dark-skinned Africans but by “white races”. Egyptologists and anthropologists took this racial idea to the extreme, even linking the famous human fossils of Oldoway in East Africa to the Hamites. The history of its impact shows that Junker’s theory of the light-skinned Hamites affected not only Vienna, but also Egyptological chairs in Germany, Great Britain and the USA. The sources are not so much philological works, but more archaeological excavation reports and archaeological accounts based on such excavation documentation.
Keywords: Hamitic hypothesis, racial anthropology, Nubia, Punt, Libya, Oldoway, Knossos, prehistory of Egypt