Wonderful Ethiopians of the Ancient Cushite Empire

I picked up this book because it was in Ta-Nehisi Coates's book “Between the World and Me”, one of the many books he listed as having influenced and expanded his mind.

The book is clearly a product of its times (original publication: 1926), with lots of superlatives and generalizations and few concrete examples for many of the points. This created an interesting dilemma for me: I wanted to believe the book, but its old age and lack of substantiating facts held me back. For example:

“Their rulers were priest-kings and at death were deified. As the ages ensued this extended itself in ancestor worship, which was original with the Cushite [Ethiopian] race” (p. 39)

Regarding the domestication of animals and the development of agriculture: “The Cushite was the only race that could have performed this service, for the other races in historic times despised agriculture.” (p. 37)

“The marriage of the Pharaohs to black princesses was frequent and seemed to establish the legality of the claim of descent from the black god Amen-Ra, whom the ancients represented as Cush of Ethiopia. “ (p. 67)

What is true? What is wishful thinking? With so little knowledge of ancient African cultures it's hard for me to get a grasp on it all. Too much of the book seems to be pure boastfulness, and I have a hard time accepting the book's central idea that “many ancient peoples, who have been assigned to other races in the average historical books of modern times, were in reality Ethiopians” (p. 16).

So what is a reader to do with these radical and boastful claims? It's too easy to just dismiss the book out of hand since it doesn't jibe with our current perceptions of history; historians have been belittling and denying African history for hundreds of years, only for later generations to have to painstakingly correct these mistakes. My approach ended up being to mark down facts, ideas, and cultures from the book that I wanted to read about in more modern books, and to read the current book as a wonderful myth or legend in the same vein as Greek mythological stories. Reading it all as myths, especially at bedtime, was a remarkably effective bridge between belief and fantasy, and actually fit the 1920s language better than trying to read it as straight fact.

Bottom line: if you are doing a research paper, look to more modern sources. If you are looking for a dreamy view of ancient Ethiopia, this is your gem.