The African Origin of Ancient Egyptian Civilization
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ParkCungHee
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Snipped right here, because already you're changing the definition of the term. I quoted you before, and I'll quote you again here.
Bolding mine.you said:
Which leads me to this:
I was pointing out the absurdity of YOUR definition. Which again, since you seem to have forgotten is:
Of course it's absurd standard of purity. That's why it's a useless concept.you said:
So, I want to hear this explanation of how the Egyptian population EXCLUSIVELY, developed in Egypt, despite receiving foreign influxes, or at least an admission that you either gave a wrong or dishonest answer when you defined "Biologically African" which seems to, like all racialist terminology, be absolutely useless and meaningless.
Actually, I really could care less what they actually looked like. My problem is that the very argument is conceptually flawed, and the racialist terms bandied about are of absolutely no use from a scholastic or heuristic approach.
And I ex;plained that such settlements are nowhere near enough to facilitate such a large-scale change in the Egyptian phenotype. The Greco-Roman colonists were almost solely confined to Alexandria, never settling anywhere else in large numbers - and even if they did, they'd still be vastly outnumbered by the locals. As for the Islamic period, most Egyptians converted to Islam. There was some migration, yes, but not in large enough numbers to cause such a change in phenotype. The native Egyptians would still have been there in far, far greater numbers than the migrants, and as such it would be far more likely for the migrants to be genetically assimilated than the locals.
And I'm not denying that they did. But they didn't occur in massive numbers, nor did they displace the previous inhabitants.
The problem with this argument is that in North and South America there was massive amounts of ethnic cleansing. This didn't happen in Egypt. The Egyptians weren't killed off by disease, they weren't forced from their land, they weren't murdered for refusing to convert to a new religion, etc.. There is absolutely no indication that the Ancient Egyptians were ever replaced by newcomers, except for their leadership.
I'm not disputing that the Greeks, Romans, Arabs and others migrated into Egypt. They did. But by that account Tunisians would also have undergone massive changes in appearance. After all, the natives migrated North from the Sahara at the same time as the Egyptians were migrating East from it. But when the Phoenicians, who were a Semitic people, settled in Tunisia, they discovered other Semitic peoples already there! This would seem to indicate that the Ancient Egyptians were as much a mixture of sub-Saharan archetypes and Semitic archetypes as their Northwest African neighbours. And we all know that the Phoenicians were isolated from the African interior, focusing primarily on the coastal areas. So if Tunisians look as they did 2000 years ago, why not the Egyptians, who haven't suffered greater than the Tunisians did?
That was essentially my concern as well, though I got sidetracked by his claim that Egyptians would somehow look like a man of West African descent like Eddie Murphy, when they were on the other side of the continent.
I'm still puzzled by this -
- because here he's referring to the image Masada posted of modern Egyptians. But the people in that image don't look anything like people of west African descent like Eddie Murphy in the picture he posted before as supposedly representative of ancient Egyptians. The people in Masada's picture don't look "black" at all, at least not to me. So there is surely some inconsistency here.
- because here he's referring to the image Masada posted of modern Egyptians. But the people in that image don't look anything like people of west African descent like Eddie Murphy in the picture he posted before as supposedly representative of ancient Egyptians. The people in Masada's picture don't look "black" at all, at least not to me. So there is surely some inconsistency here.
I missed that, it is indeed something of an inconsistency. Though it's also inconsistent to base one's argument on artwork - that is known to be symbolic - by arguing that the green guy doesn't count because he's only a symbolic representation, while the others are accurate representations.
Mentuhotep23 said:
Mentuhotep23 said:
Now keep in mind that the 'they' are Upper Egyptians and you will see we have a problem: (1) We have a modern population which looks biologically similar to an ancient population; (2) and we have population migrations in that area which are the suggested vector for wholesale phenotype change. These seem to be difficult to reconcile. I don't believe they are.
In answer to (2) I'll suggest that the populations probably didn't intermix much, as some of our evidence suggests. I also find it unlikely that these population were either large or uniform in origin since some of the identifiers like 'Roman' and 'Arab' are so broad as to be useless. (On the understanding that 'Roman' could include Gauls, Italians and Greeks for instance, while Arab could include a broad range of Semitic people's including Jews, Arabs and Arabinized Persians). This also neatly wraps up (1) if the population hasn't been subject to significant exposure to other groups genes then that goes someway to reconciling the two.
How then do we explain the widespread divergence in Lower Egypt? I'd suspect that the conditions (1) and (2) hold but under slightly difference circumstances. Despite having a larger native population and therefore a smaller relative elite population I can see mechanisms by which the smaller population could genetically have pulled significantly more weight that its raw numbers might indicate.
Consider that the Arabic part of the Egyptian population formed an elite with a monopoly on many government jobs and held a disproportionate amount of the land under tillage. I'd suggest that in a famine or other exogenous shock to the system that the planter class probably suffered significantly less. If the native population reduces by some percentage and if the settler class was not similarly reduced then that may go someway to explaining the situation. I'd also suggest that the proportion of young who survived from the settler class outstripped the proportion I'd expect for the poor native population.
These surplus young would not been able to compete for the limited number of government jobs and likely would have intermarried with the wealthier elements of the native population as a means of ensuring continued economic security. There were a suspicious amount of Arab-Egyptian merchants plying the Spice Trade quite soon after the Arab conquest, something I've always tried to figure out. I'd suggest that they might well have been the result of these unions -- I'll tender as evidence the startling continuity between the 'Egyptian' phase and the 'Arab' phase of trade.
That's one attempt at sorting out part of the problem.
Lord Baal said:
The lady in that picture looks Semitic to me. Just saying'.
The woman looks pretty Semitic to me as well. In fact, most Ancient Egyptians depicted in art look Semitic to me. Unfortunately for Mentuhotep23, if we accept that they are merely symbolic representations, then his picture evidence doesn't hold up, since it's merely symbolic. If he wants to argue that they are in fact representative of what Ancient Egyptians look like, then they look pretty much exactly the same as the majority does now.
Your thesis seems pretty solid, by the way, specifically since most of the foreign population centres, like Alexandria, were in Lower Egypt.
Your thesis seems pretty solid, by the way, specifically since most of the foreign population centres, like Alexandria, were in Lower Egypt.
This, I think is a major problem of this thread. The fact is that you are much more familiar with this topic than we are, and from a quick google search, it seems the only laypeople interested in the topic are Afrocentrists and Nazis. For example, I know there were skin tests that came up with different results than the ones you chose to bring up, and problems were cited for the ones that concluded black skin. However, I'm not sufficiently well read in the field to accurately gauge which studies or criticisms are valid. Similarly, what exactly does the genetic evidence you provide say about Egyptian appearance? After all, we know people of roughly the same genotype can have widely differing phenotype, and none of the genes studied were related to skintone. A geneticist or genetic anthropologist would know, but I certainly don't.
This is why I've tried to focus on just how the skintone of ancient Egyptians matter. No matter the skintone, how can West Africans or West African descendants claim Egyptian heritage? Can they still do so if ancient Egyptians are indeed closely related to other East Africans, yet their skintone happens to be not black? Just what does bio-cultural kinship mean, and what relation does it have with bio-cultural origin?
Sadly, it seems that those questions have been ignored and we are back in the endless debate over just what Egyptians looked like. I do know that black Egypt is nearly as fringe in the historical and anthropological communities as black Athena. Why do most scholars reject your conclusions? I don't know, but they clearly have reasons, and I refuse to believe it's because most of them are racist.
Though this does bring up of the point of whether anyone else in the thread knows anyone in the field? This question could be settled so much easier if we can hear from an actual expert why they reject the black Egypt hypothesis.
TheLastOne36
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That has to be the worse argument ever.
The America's population was wiped out by plague (95% of the population!!!) brought by Europeans. Europeans came and bred like rabbits for 2 centuries, because they could. They weren't any indians left to eliminate incoming European populations.
And the Majority of Latin America is mixed with other races, Indians being one of those races. The population of North and South America hasn't changed drastically from Mexico down.
There are probably more People mixed with indians or blacks in the Americas than there are pure white people.
I have a friend who is an Egyptologist and I was going to ask her about this when I saw her last week - unfortunately, in the event Beatles: Rock Band proved much more important and I didn't get a chance.
tedros91
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I am an Ethiopian student who has studied the Ancient Egyptians for some time and I have found that the Egyptians of today possess Middle Eastern genetic markers on the paternal side but possess the mitochondrial DNA very close to (if not identical) to Northern Ethiopians (Tigray & Amhara). This shows that the Ancient Egyptians were both African and Asian, remember when studying African history there is a racial/linguistic group called Afro-Asians which include Berbers, Chadic peoples, Niger peoples, Ancient Egyptians, Ethiopians/Eritreans, Cuhorsehockeyes, Arabs and even Hebrews (contrary to the ones of today) who all possess similar mitochondrial DNA and similar genetic markers (the Middle Eastern marker, completely different to the European or even the West African markers). Furthermore the Afro-asian races I have mentioned above are in the racial group Caucasoid (based on facial features and skull shape, not skin tone) not Caucasian, the belief that Ancient Egyptians are "white" is a recent phenomenon which came about in the 19th century when European Egyptologists couldn't accept the existance of great ancient African civilisations which included Ancient Egypt, Aksumite Empire and Nubia, and were called "white" so as to reaffirm their racist attitudes to Africans. All the mentioned Afro-asians (except the Hebrews and the Asian Semites) did not see themselves as black nor white but as "red", red back then was used for what we would call brown since there was no word of brown in any of those languages back then. It's best to say that they were "red" or today "brown" (the European classification which applies to Arabs, Ethiopians/Eritreans and Indians). In conclusion the Egyptians are African and at the same time Middle Eastern just like the Aksumites.
Sorry to gravedig, I can't help it, however I saw this as an intriguing thread.
When the issue of the "race of the Ancient Egyptians" is brought up, we always look to skin color first and foremost. As someone who has studied this issue extensively, let me say that skin color is the worst way to examine the lineage of an ancient people. It is based on qualitative data, and quite frankly makes no sense in tying a people to another people.
With that, my issue with Mentuhotep's argument is he's using that very same principle. He's using the "one drop rule" thing used by Americans. But does he also realize that if you have one ounce of other blood in Africa you are considered white? This principle is a European-racial construct and the fact many use it is quite redundant.
Mentuhotep admits that the ancient Egyptians had heterogeneity, which is good and it's also true. But he uses odd methods in his argument. He shows pictures from Remember the Time and uses a black colored medium to express how he thought the Ancient Egyptians looked like. This seems hypocritical. How can a society be heterogeneic yet look a certain way? This is.. odd. Again, skin color is not a good indication of how a people look like.
For example, look at these two pictures:
Mohammed Zidan of Egypt.
Imhotep.
You cannot deny that the modern Egyptians are descendants of the ancients. This picture is both uncanny and good proof that color is an awful indication and probably the worst when relating people now to people of before.
When the issue of the "race of the Ancient Egyptians" is brought up, we always look to skin color first and foremost. As someone who has studied this issue extensively, let me say that skin color is the worst way to examine the lineage of an ancient people. It is based on qualitative data, and quite frankly makes no sense in tying a people to another people.
With that, my issue with Mentuhotep's argument is he's using that very same principle. He's using the "one drop rule" thing used by Americans. But does he also realize that if you have one ounce of other blood in Africa you are considered white? This principle is a European-racial construct and the fact many use it is quite redundant.
Mentuhotep admits that the ancient Egyptians had heterogeneity, which is good and it's also true. But he uses odd methods in his argument. He shows pictures from Remember the Time and uses a black colored medium to express how he thought the Ancient Egyptians looked like. This seems hypocritical. How can a society be heterogeneic yet look a certain way? This is.. odd. Again, skin color is not a good indication of how a people look like.
For example, look at these two pictures:
Mohammed Zidan of Egypt.
Imhotep.
You cannot deny that the modern Egyptians are descendants of the ancients. This picture is both uncanny and good proof that color is an awful indication and probably the worst when relating people now to people of before.
Cynovolans
Not in my dimension.
How does comparing a modern Egyptian to a statue of an ancient Egyptian make it proof that the two are related?
It shows a clear cranial link to the two. Craniology tells you a lot about a person; though this was mostly to show Mentuhotep that if you're going to show how the ancient Egyptians looked then it's very easy to use a modern Egyptian subject.
Cynovolans
Not in my dimension.
It has already been proven that determining race based on Craniometry is unreliable.
And this example proves that just because they look alike doesn't mean they are related.
And this example proves that just because they look alike doesn't mean they are related.
Spoiler :
It doesn't. Also, it has been established already that modern Egyptians are quite different from ancient Egyptians. More relevant depictions are in post2 # 82, 81, 3 and 2. Not to mention there's been an influx of blacks/Africans into Egypt from ancient times on(originally as slaves/servants, but there was a truly Nubian dynasty in the late era) and a host of peoples in between.
Sorry but this is a very ignorant statement. One does not need to go far from a bus ride from Egypt to Luxor to see the faces of Ancient Egypt. To say they are not linked is devoid of facts and logic, not to mention a denial of history.
Cynovolans
Not in my dimension.
Again, you show a complete ignorance of genetics.
Genetics does not change or become displaced, it becomes injected by other genetic markers from other migrants. The Germanics migrated to Britain, but do you realize the Britons themselves still hold the oldest genetic marker in the region? The Turks migrated to Anatolia, do you realize there is a distinct genetic imprint of Hittites and others who can trace their ancestry back to ancient Anatolia?
Egypt, the oldest marker shows a mixture of Mediterraneans and East Africans. The present migrations show only a fraction of the genetic make up of Egypt. Did you know that Arab genetics in Egypt account for less than 10% of the genetic makeup of Egypt? The genetics and phenotypes do not dramatically alter or magically disappear, they are still there to this day.
Edit: tedros91 gives a good explanation in his above post.
Cynovolans
Not in my dimension.
Did you know that studies of genetics done by the Macedonians determined that Greeks and Turks are similar in the fact that most of their genes are similar to genes found in Central Asian people?
Did you know that studies of genetics done by the Turks have determined that they shares genes identical to everyone of the Mediterranean?
Did you know that a lot of studies of genetics end with biased results?
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