Hamitic facts for kids

Hamitic theory is a theory that claims that so called hamitic race is superior to the negroid races on the African continent. John Hanning Speke started the theory. Karl Richard Lepsius and Carl Meinhof extended the theory: they used languages to classify people into hamitic or non-hamitic; this is no longer done today.

Another way they classified people into hamitic or non-hamitic is by ethnic roots. Negroid people are perceived as Shemetic as opposed to the Hamitic Ethiopian, Sudanese, and some other West African ethnic groups as attested by the genealogy of ancient ethnic lineages. For example, a person who has ancestry from Rome would be considered closer to a Hamite than a person who's ancestry is in Africa. Ironically, the Hamites include some of the darkest sub-Saharan African groups like the Nilotes that were considered closest to Europeans as opposed to the Chadic sub saharan Africans who share a common RB1 lineage. This theory also included giving classes to those members of the negroid races of Africa upon colonization. This, in part, contributed to the Rwandan Genocide, which pinned the members of the Tutsi ethnicity or tribe against the members of the Hutu people, although the tension between them was over small differences.

Images for kids

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  Geographic identifications of Flavius Josephus, c. 100 AD; Japheth's sons shown in red, Ham's sons in blue, Shem's sons in green.

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  This T and O map, from the first printed version of Isidore's Etymologiae, identifies the three known continents as populated by descendants of Sem (Shem), Iafeth (Japheth) and Cham (Ham).

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  1889 ethnographic map of Africa, with "Hamites" shown in white.

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  Languages of pastoralist Bedouins such as the Beja were the model for the conflation of ethnic and linguistic evidence in the construction of Hamitic identity.

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  Egyptian woman with ovoid facial profile, from Giuseppe Sergi's The Mediterranean Race (1901).

See also

In Spanish: Lenguas camito-semíticas para niños