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At the end of his scandalous discussion of sub-Saharan Africa, and before beginning his account of world history, Hegel announced in a well-known and yet usually unquestioned sentence that he would leave Africa behind, never to mention it again.1 This has perhaps led casual readers of the Lectures on the Philosophy of History to imagine Hegel’s ancient Egyptians as Caucasian, or at least anything but black.There is support for this image of Hegel’s Egyptians in the fact that he discussed Egypt within the section on Persia, which had begun with his announcement that the Caucasians were finally on the scene and that the account of world history proper could now begin.2 Employing Blumenbach’s racial categories, Hegel consigned the Chinese and the Hindus to “the strictly Asiatic, namely, the Mongolian race,” whereas the nations of the Middle East are said to belong to “the Caucasian, i.e., European stock.”3 However, I shall argue that Hegel’s text makes it impossible to ignore the fact that, with Egypt, Africa finds a place in his account of world history, and that its introduction is necessary for the transition from the Persian empire to Greece, precisely because of the role he accords to race in his understanding of history. I will introduce my reading by showing, on historical grounds, that Hegel’s auditors would not have doubted that the Egyptians were black. Hegel delivered his Lectures on the Philosophy of History during the height of Egyptomania. Interest in Egypt had grown in Northern Europe as a result of the studies made at the time of Napoleon’s invasion and had flourished further as the work of deciphering Egyptian hieroglyphs finally advanced. In consequence, the question of the racial identity of the ancient Egyptians had become a prominent issue.The 201 Chapter 9 The Return of Africa: Hegel and the Question of the Racial Identity of the Egyptians Robert Bernasconi overwhelmingly dominant view was that although they were not strictly Negro in the narrow sense, they belonged to the black race. At the end of the eighteenth century, Constantine de Volney and, following him, Henri Grégoire presented Egypt as a challenge to the growth of a theoretically articulated racial hierarchy; hence Egypt served as one of the foremost battlegrounds on which the debate about white racial superiority was fought. The problem this posed to white racists was eventually answered both by whitening the ancient Egyptians and by minimizing their contribution, but contrary to a widespread impression, this did not take place in any systematic way until the 1840s.4 My question here concerns how Hegel’s discussion of Egypt reflects the state of this debate in his time. In particular, there is the question of how this discussion relates to the much vexed issue of Hegel’s discussion of African identity. I argue in this chapter that Hegel’s discussion of Egypt in his Lectures on the Philosophy of History reads entirely differently once one recognizes the state of the question on the racial identity of the ancient Egyptians at the time he was delivering his lectures. Furthermore, Hegel’s discussion of Egyptian identity can be used to throw light on his conception of race. To understand Hegel’s contribution to nineteenth-century race thinking, one should not try to locate his account with reference to the arguments for and against monogenesis, which he dismissed as a fruitless debate, but with reference to world history. To that extent, Hegel’s discussion points forward more to the philosophy of history of Gobineau or Robert Knox than back to the natural history of race of Kant, albeit Kant set the framework for Hegel’s philosophy of history. The terms of the debate over the racial identity of the ancient Egyptians had already been established before Hegel entered it, although it should always be remembered that this was a relatively recent debate as the European obsession with racial classification had taken hold only in the last quarter of the eighteenth century. If the people of ancient Egypt were African in a way that attached them to the so-called Ethiopian , black, or Negro race, then the attempt to match the hierarchy of civilizations to the hierarchy of races, which Europeans had already defined in the late eighteenth century, could not be sustained. It was the test case for early nineteenth-century racism, and the stakes were particularly high as the Greeks had been explicit about their debt to...

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