Are they though? And how is it relevant? I'm not sure where you got the idea that Indians weren't considered 'white'. They are. What they were considered to be was Asian (which they also are), and not European - therefore they were obviously inferior. None of which has anything to do with science.
Indians were classified as Caucasian by anthropologists however in America the Supreme Court actually ruled that they were not White:
http://historymatters.gmu.edu/d/5076/
Not All Caucasians Are White: The Supreme Court Rejects Citizenship for Asian Indians
In its decision in the case of U.S.
v. Bhagat Singh Thind (1923), the Supreme Court deemed Asian Indians ineligible for citizenship because U.S. law allowed only free whites to become naturalized citizens. The court conceded that Indians were “Caucasians” and that anthropologists considered them to be of the same race as white Americans, but argued that “the average man knows perfectly well that there are unmistakable and profound differences.” The
Thind decision also led to successful efforts to denaturalize some who had previously become citizens. This represented a particular threat in California, where a 1913 law prohibited aliens ineligible for citizenship from owning or leasing land. Only in 1946 did Congress, which was beginning to recognize that India would soon be independent and a major world power, pass a new law that allowed Indians to become citizens and also established a small immigration quota. But major immigration to the United States from South Asia did not begin until after immigration laws were sharply revised in 1965.
Some of the lighter-skinned Indians might be able to "pass" as White but generally White Americans and Europeans do not consider Indians to be socially White. Arabs were also classified as Caucasian and not considered to be White by Western societies. They can actually experience racist discrimination from Whites based on skin color and culture.
You are saying two contradictory things. President Obama has told how, because of how people see him, he will always be considered as black - completely regardless of his skin tone and the fact that he has a white mother. That's racism, not 'racial identity'.
There is no contradiction on my end. What he said was that if the world sees him as Black that this is not something he needed to run away from but could embrace and that while he suffered an identity crisis when was younger he came to the realization that labels shouldn't matter and if people want to consider him to be African-American or Multiracial he was fine with either label. What matter is how we treat one another.
Personally I find this to be a very mature and positive outlook. Fighting over the racial identity of Obama or any other mixed race person is divisive and can be construed as racist in and of itself. I don't oppose Biracial people having an identity. Having parents that raised you in an interracial household affords you a unique experience that no one can really relate to but other people of mixed race. However the attitude of some mixed people is actually racist especially when they coin phrases like "Biracial not Black Dammit!"
Obama has moved beyond that. I read his book. It is very insightful. Obama is pro-equality. A true Egalitarian who does not let his ancestry or racial background define him.
Murals are not people. And any people that would have intermixed with Nubians would naturally gain melanin in their offspring. Given the fact that Egyptian contact with Nubia started very early, we would expect to see genetic traces of that from the earliest times. It doesn't follow from that that Egyptians were negroid; it follows form that that they at least had contact with negroid people. Which is confirmed by Egyptian records. What it allows is the conclusion that some Egyptians had negroid ancestry.
The mural is meant to be representative of what the different ethnic groups in the area actually looked like with distinctive clothing and skintones which are clearly meant to depict reality given our knowledge of the region. I find it interesting that the Ancient Egyptians depicted themselves as uniformly brown as well as their God which indicates that this skintone best represented them. That doesn't mean that there were not lighter or darker skinned Egyptians but this was probably a shade that best represented them.
I would like to know what you have to say about the scientific evidence from the Mekota study that confirms they were dark-skinned. The word Negroid is not important here and bare in mind that I have said all along that the ancient Egyptians were not the darkest population in Africa but probably medium brown on average like Iman vs. very dark brown like the Sudanese woman I posted or the tan and beige skinned Libyans and Asiatics like they depicted in their mural.
That depends on what you define as 'jet black', doesn't it.
It does. As black as Wesley Snipe's coat in the picture I posted is what I consider to be "jet black."
I don't think race is a concept that belongs in any scientific discipline except medical biology. There is, for example, a sickle cell disease that only occurs in people of negroid descent.
Sickle Cell Anemia actually occurs in populations who have the genetic variant related to resistance to malaria which also causes sickle cells. This occurs not only in certain parts of Sub-Saharan Africa but Southern Europe, the Middle East and India. So it is not a disease that indicates Black African ancestry although certainly most of the people who have are of Sub-Saharan African descent. There are biologists and geneticists who are very opposed to using race as a scientific tool in biomedical research because it leads to stereotyped thinking about human genetics and health disparities between ethnic groups many of which are not rooted in biology but rather caused by environmental differences.
If you want to learn more about that subject I recommend reading the following article and video about race and medicine:
Against racial medicine Patterns of Prejudice, Vol. 40, Nos 4/5, 2006
That is incorrect. By the time of the New Kingdom the use of hieroglyphs had already gone in disuse. Which is why Egyptians from that time period no longer new the original meaning of things like the Great Sphinx. Even hieratic at this time was beginning to be superseded by demotic. Of course Egyptians spoke Egyptian. But that was a spoken language; hierogplyphs, hieratic and demotic are all scripts.
As far as I know there are no hieroglyphs that discussed the origin of the Sphinx and the Ancient Egyptian text were used throughout the Dynastic period.
Here is a source on the subject:
http://history-world.org/hieroglyphics.htm
Hieroglyphs were very time consuming to create, so the Egyptians developed a cursive script called hieratic in the early years of hieroglyphic use. The characters of the hieratic script were based on the hieroglyphic symbols, but they were simplified and little resembled their hieroglyphic origins. Hieratic was used for the bulk of writing done with reed pens and ink on papyrus. In the 7th century BC the Egyptians began using a script called demotic, which was even more simplified than hieratic. After this point hieroglyphs continued to be used in carved inscriptions on buildings, jewelry, and furniture, but hieratic was used for religious writings, and demotic for business and literary texts.
A major change in hieroglyphs took place under the Ptolemaic Dynasty (305-30 BC), when Egypt was ruled by a Greek dynasty. During this time the Egyptians created many new glyphs. Priests were especially interested in writing religious texts in more mysterious and complex manners. The priests often used new glyphs to form specialized codes and puns understood only by a group of religious initiates.
After the Romans conquered Egypt in 30 BC, the use of hieroglyphs declined, and eventually their use died out. The last firmly datable hieroglyphic inscription was written in AD 394.
DECIPHERING HIEROGLYPHS
After the fall of ancient Egyptian civilization in 30 BC, the meaning of hieroglyphs remained a mystery for about 1,800 years. Then, during the French occupation of Egypt from 1798 to 1801, a group of French soldiers and engineers uncovered a large stone now known as the Rosetta Stone. This stone bore an ancient inscription containing the same text written three different ways—in hieroglyphs, in the demotic script, and in ancient Greek. The stone was taken to Europe, where scholars translated the ancient Greek and used the information to decipher the other two texts.
So according to this source the Ancient Egyptian use of hieroglyphics ceased to be used after the Roman conquest long after the New Kingdom period.
I'm not sure if that follows. But as I'm unfamilar with his work, I can't really comment.
You should look in to it. While during his time (August 27, 1865 – December 2, 1935) James Henry Breasted was one of the most recognized scholars in American Egyptology but during his adult life America was of course very racist and there was a concerted effort in Western Egyptology to prove that the Ancient Egyptians were not Black in order to justify racist beliefs of Black inferiority.
Here is an excerpt from some of his writing with notes from a modern author critiquing his ideas:
On the south of the Northwest Quadrant lay the teeming [interesting choice of words: it literally means swarming microorganisms or sexually prolific] black world of Africa, separated from the Great White Race by an impassable desert barrier [not only is the separation of black Africa and the Mediterranean a myth, but the suggestion that the Sahara separates Egypt from Africa supports the idea that "Africa" is a matter of skin color, not geography]. . . and unfitted by ages of tropical life for any effective intrusion among the White Race, the negro and negroid peoples remained without any influence on the development of early civilization [Enlightenment geographers had assumed that tropical life makes one lethargic, but Breasted subtly converts this into a more explicitly racist assumption that a tropical environment eventually alters one's genes to result in less boyancy of spirit than the Great White Race]. We may then exclude both of these external races [i.e., the great bulk of the world's population] from any share in the origins or subsequent development [n.b.] of civilization [in a note Breasted qualifies this by noting that the Chinese have been significant for modern European history.] The Great White Race. . .includes a considerable range of types [to which belonged] the Egyptians (not withstanding their tanned [sic] skins), doubtless also the Semitics, and of course the [Mediterranean peoples] long loosely called "Aryan" because of their speech, which of course has no necessary connection with race (p. 113). [Notice how Egyptians and Semitic people in general are incorporated into a White (Caucasian) race, and that the concept "Near East" tends to distance Egypt from being essentially African].
Source: : Eva March Tappan, ed., Egypt, Africa, and Arabia, Vol. III in The World's Story: A History of the World in Story, Song, and Art, (Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1914), pp. 393-398.
In case you were curious about some of his translations of Ancient Egyptian text this one is especially interesting:
James Henry Breasted said:
III. THE FIRST SEMNEH STELA
Southern boundary, made in the year 8, under the majesty of the King of Upper and Lower Egypt, Khekure (Sesostris III), who is given life forever and ever; in order to prevent that any Negro should cross it, by water or by land, with a ship, (or) any herds of the Negroes; except a Negro who shall come to do trading in Ikene, or with a commission. Every good thinga shall be done with them, but without allowing 6a ship of the Negroes to pass by Heh, going downstream, forever.
Source: Ancient Record of Egypt: The Conquest of Nubia pg. 293
This quote clearly gives the impression that the Ancient Egyptians not only thought of the Nubians as Black but didn't want them in their land. The use of the word Negro is one that was common when Breasted wrote this and more than likely took the place in his translation of a word that had nothing to do with the skin color of the Nubians. When you take the other quote in to consideration this is why I believe that some of these translations of Egyptian text are tainted by racist bias on the part of the translator.
'Cultural revivalism' si a concept that a Nubian would have frowned at. What they were doing was legitimizing their rule in Egyptian terms. That's basically what very foreign dynasty has been doing in Egypt.
"There is also evidence that the culture of ancient Egypt derived from areas to the south of Egypt in Nubia and other parts of Northeast Africa". I have no idea what that even is supposed to mean. But, "that the culture of ancient Egypt derived from areas to the south of Egypt" is nonsensical. Egypt was a settled civilization from the pre-dynastic era on. To the south of Egypt there were pastoralists. So I'm not sure how that relates to 'Egyptian culture' to begin with.
The Wengrow article provides evidence that Pre-Dynastic Egyptian culture had its roots in the cultures of people who came from the south and settled in the Nile Valley. You should read the article.
So basically he is professing a belief. That's interesting, but not much to do with science. We have no way of knowing if present day souther Egyptians are more representative of ancient Egyptians than present day northern Egyptians. That doesn't contradict what I said: I believe his research is sound, but his conclusions aren't.
His conclusion is based on scientific evidence. That was the whole point of the paper which established that Ancient Egyptian culture was fundamentally African, the Ancient Egyptians were biologically and culturally related to African ethnic groups living to the South of Egypt and the invasions and immigration during the Greco-Roman and Islamic periods had a cultural and genetic impact on Egypt.
Anyway, I fear we are taking up a thread that's meant for discussing of the mod, and I don't see us reaching an agreement, so I will leave it at this.
If this is your last post then thank you for the debate.
