Some Ancient Egyptian History - 25
Willie Martin
Euphrates river. The city of Carchemish on the Euphrates
river marked the eastern boundary of Egypt a good deal of
the time. Now during this period, at least the ruling class
and, as far as we know, all of the Egyptians were as white a
people as any that you can find any trace of, either in
early times or now.
We think mostly of sculpture as being the great work of the
Greeks, but as a matter of fact, the Greeks left us very few
portrait sculptures. The Greek sculptures, that we have,
were the artist's idea of what a handsome person should look
like, and were not a true likeness of any one person. In
fact, it is well known that many of their principal statues
were made with one person serving as a model for the head,
somebody else for the chest and arms, and somebody else for
the rest of the figure, and so on. And in fact, if you have
seen pictures of many of the famous Greek sculptures, you
will note that the face is a blank expression of total
stupidity. They didn't indicate the pupil of the eye, so
there is this blank, unseeing stare. Now, you find nothing
corresponding to that among the Egyptians, and for a good
reason.
Starting with their monotheistic religion in the early days,
and carrying the idea down through their paganism, the
Egyptians believed in resurrection. But there had to be
something to resurrect. That is why they mummified the
corpses of their people, at least those who could afford it,
so that there would still remain a body. They didn't know
how far in the future this day of resurrection would be, so
they mummified it in the hope they could keep the body still
intact and ready to be resurrected when the time came.
They realized that the best of their mummification processes
wouldn't keep the body intact forever, and they didn't know
how long it would have to be preserved; so, with an Egyptian
who was well-to-do enough to afford it, in his tomb there
was a portrait sculpture of the man. It didn't have to be
life sized, but it was a partial sculpture of him, so that
if the mummy disintegrated too badly, the soul could go into
the statue and live there until the time came for
resurrection.
There would be no use in putting a statue of somebody else
in the tomb; that wouldn't do the dead person any good. So
it was a portrait of the individual. Probably no time in
antiquity ever produced such remarkably fine portrait
sculptures as the early days in Egypt. If you met one of
those people walking down the street, after you had seen the
portrait sculpture, you would recognize the person without
any question.
They were such realists that they also painted these
statues, and where the status have remained sealed in a tomb
until opened, so that weather couldn't disintegrate the
paint, the paint on them was still good. They were just that
painstakingly accurate. The men of course would work out in
the fields, superintending their slaves working in the
fields, so the men naturally were suntanned to a degree, and
so the statutes of the men had a slightly darker suntan
complexion than the statutes of the women, who spent most of
their time in their houses and out of the hot Egyptian
sunlight. The features, the narrow-bridged noses, the think
lips, and the general cast of the faces, show that this was
very definitely a White Race; and the complexion of the
people, as indicated by the painting of the statues, also
indicates they were White.
Of course you will hear the no-sayers, who don't believe
anything, unless they see it, and then if it does not fit
with their predetermined idea they will deny even that. For
they are ignorant people, and there is little that can be
done to help them out of their illiterate fog.
In the days of Egypt's grandeur, of course the country was
in Africa, but don't ever think of it as Negroid, because in
that period of time there was the death penalty for any free
Negro found north of the first cataract of the Nile; that
is, within the boundaries of Egypt. Now they did have a
trading post established just slightly within the boundary
of Egypt, and they would let the Negroes come there with
their furs, and that sort of thing, to trade, but down in
Egypt proper, any Negro that wasn't a slave in chains was
simply summarily killed on sight. So don't let anybody ever
tell you that Egypt is an indication of a high Negroid
civilization; there never was one
What today we call the Sudan, the area lying between Egypt
and Ethiopia proper, in those days they called Nubia. In the
early days, of course, the Egyptian army repelled raids by
the Nubian Negroes; then, getting tired of that, they went
down and conquered Nubia and took a lot of the Nubian
Negroes as slaves.