Hamitic

Hamitic is an obsolete ethno-linguistic classification of some ethnic groups within the Afro-Asiatic (previously termed "Hamito-Semitic") language family. These populations were also termed the Hamitic race throughout the 19th century and most of the 20th century.

Ham in the Bible

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 Cushites and Phut the "Libyans".

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 "Canaan" means "trader", "trafficker", or "lowland". The word "Ham" in Hebrew moreover means "hot" or "multitude", and is thus not necessarily a racial reference. However, using Hebrew to define these names will result in inaccurate translations because Noah and his sons were not, technically speaking, "Hebrew", since, 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. Rabbis discuss 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.

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.

Non-religious and Darwinian writers theorised that the Biblical stories contained an element of truth about the ancestry of some populations in Africa, who may have migrated into Central Africa from the North. [Seligman, Races of Africa 1930: 19] These peoples were assumed to be racially superior to Black Africans. [Seligman 1930: 158]

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 languages, the Cushitic languages, the Beja language, and the Chadic languages.

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.

Hamitic race

The Hamitic race refers to various populations living in Africa (including Ancient Egyptians) that speak one of the so-called Hamitic languages (any of various groupings of non-Semitic Afro-Asiatic languages). Hamites were regarded as a Caucasoid people who probably originated in either Arabia or Asia on the basis of their cultural, physical and linguistic similarities with the peoples of those areas. Europeans considered Hamites to be more civilized than Black Africans, and more akin to themselves and Semitic peoples. In the first two-thirds of the 20th century, the Hamitic race was, in fact, considered one of the branches of the Caucasian race, along with the Indo-Europeans, Dravidians, Semites, and the Mediterranean race.

Within colonialism

The so-called 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.

As a result of this re-evaluation, 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 Hamites as leaders within Africa, instructing lesser peoples in the ways of civilization, just as they saw themselves teaching the Hamitic peoples.

However, the Hamitic peoples themselves were sometimes deemed to have failed as rulers, a failing that was usually ascribed to interbreeding with Negroes. 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, and that the Hottentots (Nama or Khoi) were formed by the union of Hamitic and Bushmen (San) races.

Rwanda

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

While the Hutu majority ruled in Rwanda from independence in 1962 until their ouster in 1994 by a Tutsi rebel group, Tutsis in neighboring Burundi did, in fact, enjoy 400 hundred years of unmitigated minority rule over that country's largely Hutu populace.

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.

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 the various language families spoken in Africa.

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

The Hamitic language group is no longer considered by most scholars to be a useful concept, though the phrase "Hamito-Semitic" is a dated term for the Afro-Asiatic linguistic group.

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