THE ORIGIN OF AFRO COMBS
It is generally accepted now that ancient Egyptians were indigenous Africans. Seeing them with black African ancestry, however, seems to be tougher for people to acknowledge by both scholars and the general public alike.
Even Egyptologist Stuart Tyson Smith argues that “Egyptologists have been strangely reluctant to admit that the ancient Egyptians were rather dark-skinned Africans…” (191). Through a closer observation of ancient Egyptian art we can find that many ancient Egyptians shared physical traits to black Africans, not just in skin colors but in hair texture as well.
The ancient Greek historian, Herodotus, described the hair of the ancient Egyptians, as woolly using the term (οὐλότριχες), ulotrichous which means woolly or crisp hair. The root word, οὐλό, also has been used by Greeks to also describe the hair of Ethiopians, or black Africans.
Throughout their history, ancient Egyptians made tools and hairstyles that would have unlikely to come into existence if they did not anything in common with black Africans. Even to this day black Northeast Africans wear similar hairstyles to the Egyptians of long ago.
The number of correlations between the combs across centuries and across Africa is uncanny. The Kemetian culture has translated across regions on the continent. Or indeed as some evidence suggests that the Kemetian culture originated at the mouth of the Nile in present-day Uganda, Rwanda, Congo and travelled down river to Ancient Egypt and Ancient Sudan.
Combs had a cultural as well as practical significance. For example, among the Akan of Ghana they were traditionally given as a declaration of love or as a marriage gift, hence their depictions of feminine beauty or fertility.
An exhibition by the Cambridge University’s Fitzwilliam Museum in 2013 in Cambridge, England on the Origins of the Afro comb was an eye-opener to the real background of the comb.(Another stolen african artifact)