Medieval racial classification from Noah’s sons seeded later European denials of African achievement

Evidence

The invention of the Hagarenes was due in part to the medieval racial classifications expounded by Isidore of Seville, who divided the people of the world into 72 types, all originating from Noah’s sons, Ham, Shem, and Japheth. The offspring of Ham also played a role in racial constructions of Muslims through the identification of Saracens with Africans, who were classified as Hamitic. These powerful ideas are later seen in the efforts of Europeans to explain away the “high civilization” of the Egyptians, arguing that they must have been “Caucasian, far removed from the inferior Negro.” According to this logic, only a light-skinned race could have built the pyramids and other great monuments of Egypt. — Sophia Rose Arjana, Muslims in the Western Imagination, 158

Categorization

Category: Causal Relationships

• SEED: Worth writing: tracing the direct lineage from Isidore of Seville’s Hamitic classifications to 19th-century Egyptology’s denial that Black Africans built the pyramids — a throughline of racial science.
• XREF: Connects to curatorial and anthropological debates about race and civilization, and to the broader story of how taxonomic schemes become racial hierarchies.

Related

• Medieval racial theology forced later Europeans to deny Egyptian achievements (similarity 0.93)
• Colonial scholars systematically reclassified Egypt as non-African to sever black achievement (similarity 0.81)
• European racism predates African enslavement and originated as intra-European domination (similarity 0.78)
• Egyptian racial thought blended medieval stereotypes with European civilizational concepts (similarity 0.78)

Broader Connections

• The Negro and whiteness were invented in Europe through scholarly effort #corroborates (0.65)
• Medieval Christians classed non-Egyptian Africans with Saracens as monstrous races #expands (0.60) — Sophia Rose Arjana, Muslims in the Western Imagination, 160
• Enlightenment antislavery coexisted with racist assumptions about Africans #corroborates (0.50) — Dubois, Laurent, Avengers of the New World_ The Story of…, 253