That Egypt has sub-Saharan roots is largely overlooked, said a leading Egyptologist Nov. 24 at Cornell's Africana Studies and Research Center.

"Egypt always has its face away from the continent of Africa; it's either facing the Orient or the Mediterranean, western Asia, or it's facing the biblical winds," said Mario Beatty, chair of the African American Studies Department at Chicago State University.

But his research, he said, shows that many scholarly works are flawed because of the oversight that Egyptians have African roots. His work aims to uncover the origins of a racial perception by scholars that Egyptians are different from other Africans. These origins, he said, stem from inaccurate interpretations of ancient Egyptian hieroglyphics and culture.

"From the very beginning of Egyptology, the translation [has been] the anchor of many of their [scholars'] racial views," he told the audience. "There is a lot of mischaracterization and misreading of the Nile Valley civilization, and a lot of this has gone on in the realm of Egyptology because a large number of African Americans and African American scholars have not had the real ability, until contemporary times, to get inside the language and to actually know what's going on."

The word "kust" for example, is often associated with a wretched, barbaric and perverse race in translation and used to describe the Nubians, a people from sub-Saharan Africa who were historically enemies of Egyptians. Scholars justified the separation of Egyptians from their sub-Saharan roots because of the pejorative way in which 'kust' was used by Egyptians, allowing them a precedent to satisfy their own racial views.

"[Kust was] first introduced to America in 1843, [and] scholars began to see the portrayal of Africans and Egyptians in a distorted, convoluted way," Beatty said. This laid the groundwork for falsified perceptions that emerging scholarly work is successfully refuting, he added. Beatty also urged Africana studies students to challenge themselves and submit their scholarly work for review.

"We're in real academic and intellectual environments; we should be able to have these very vibrant conversations and put all of our evidence on the table and be able to take that information anywhere in the world and defend your intellectual work," Beatty said.

The program was sponsored by Cornell's Africana Student Association.

Brandon Chiazza '09 is a writer intern at the Cornell Chronicle.