African Ancestors of Egypt and Nubia: From the Green Sahara to the Nile

Located in the Museum’s Egyptian galleries, this installation focuses on ancient Egypt and Nubia as African civilizations, challenging racist and colonial assumptions of early Western archaeologists. Examples of pottery and figurines, made more than five thousand years ago, reveal a common origin of the two civilizations on the African continent. Objects such as headrests and sistra further demonstrate close ties between Egypt and other African cultures. The display also highlights the important contributions of W. E. B. Du Bois, William Leo Hansberry, and Pauline Hopkins, three of the many African American scholars who recognized and published on Egypt and Nubia as African civilizations during the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, a period when the field of “mainstream” Egyptology rejected this notion.