posted
Some of you may remember that the author Runoko Rashidi passed away a couple of years ago. He was a contributor to "Afrocentric" historiography who advocated for an African presence in the pre-Columbian Americas as well as ancient Asia. Today I want to call attention to his works focusing on Asia:
I must admit that I haven't read either of these books, both of which appear to be available only in paperback at prohibitively high prices. Has anyone posting in this forum checked them out?
One concern I have is that Rashidi might be confusing the Negrito peoples of Asia with recent African immigrants. I note that the cover to the first book has a picture of a Khmer* relief where the subjects appear to have curly hair and so-called "Negroid" facial features, but we know those are common to Negrito groups who are nonetheless genetically closer to so-called "Mongoloid" Asians than to extant Africans.
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^ Yes, such racialism was a common problem among some Africanist scholars where black = African. Even Cheikh Anta Diop author of African Origins of Civilization who was correct about Egyptians being African was mistaken about Dravidians also being African.
Note what I pointed our here.
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some quotes from Godfrey Higgins and Gerald Massey, also. Text at far left can be copy and pasted also
If you don't sign up you can still flip through the table of contents Rashidi has some essays in it (a lot) but there are various authors doing chapters. Van Sertima is co-editor along with Rashidi
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ishnu Anantasayana panel from Dasavatara Vishnu temple, Deogarh, Bihar, India, ca. 6th century A.D.This celebrated panel from the south wall of the temple has Vishnu reclining on the serpent Ananta and floating on the waters of oblivion. Above him, seated on a lotus leaf, is the Hindu creator god Brahma. Lakshmi, the wife of Vishnu, massages his feet.
Same piece, enlargement, lower figures For some reason image is flipped but anyway figures correspond to previous in this Left to Right order : 6,5,4,3
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The Gommateshwara statue is a 57-foot (17 m) high monolithic statue on Vindhyagiri Hill in the town of Shravanbelagola in the Indian state of Karnataka. Carved of a single block of granite, it is one of the tallest monolithic statues in the ancient world.
The Gommateshwara statue is dedicated to the Jain figure Bahubali and symbolises the Jain precepts of peace, non-violence, sacrifice of worldly affairs, and simple living. Carved out of a single piece of granite. It was built around 983 AD during the Western Ganga dynasty and is one of the largest free-standing statues in the world.
Gommateshwara statue 683 AD
The Buddha Indian philosopher and the founder of Buddhism (623 or 563 BCE – 543 or 483 BCE)
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posted
I've looked through the essay on the "Ethiopian" presence in the Indus Valley after checking out lioness's link. Like I suspected, it has a tendency to conflate the Negrito peoples of Asia (whom it claims as the builders of the Harappan civilization) with the "Ethiopian" peoples of Africa. That's an aspect of the work that hasn't aged well.
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you should make some image clips from the book text or copy and paste the text that shows at the left
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posted
The essay is literally titled "The Jewel in the Lotus: The Ethiopian Presence in the Indus Valley Civilization". And the essay's author repeatedly labels Asian Negritos as "Ethiopian". I suppose they could be using it in the ancient Greek sense of those populations being "burnt faces", but given the book's title, I have a hard time thinking the author's not trying to connect them to African Ethiopia as well. Of course, the author is technically right that those people would have arrived to Asia from Africa, but that's because they were part of the initial Out-of-Africa migrations that peopled the world. They're no more African (or "Ethiopian") than other Eurasians.
Wayne B. Chandler MS, CPH, SCE, is an author, inspirational speaker, practitioner and healer.
Author of “Ancient Future: The Teachings and Prophetic Wisdom of the Seven Hermetic Laws of Ancient Egypt.” (introduction by Ivan Van Sertima) and “The Brighter Side of Darkness: A Light Warrior’s Guide to Inner Alchemy and Spiritual Transformation” (Projected Publication 2013) Chandler is an Anthropologist specializing in ancient African and Asian civilization, philosophy and culture.
Note in 'African presence in early Asia', word search for "Negritos" shows they are also mentioned in other chapters (although maybe not in association with Ethiopians) .
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Well recall that the word "Asia" originates in Greece and not Asia. Not to mention the word "Ethiopian" is Greek as well.
Basically all Runoko and others are saying is there were and are black populations in Asia and many of the ancient civilizations there included or were built by black skinned people.
BTW, check out the diversity of features in this video from Late Qing Dynasty China:
Basically all Runoko and others are saying is there were and are black populations in Asia and many of the ancient civilizations there included or were built by black skinned people.
quote:Originally posted by Doug M: Well recall that the word "Asia" originates in Greece and not Asia. Not to mention the word "Ethiopian" is Greek as well.
Basically all Runoko and others are saying is there were and are black populations in Asia and many of the ancient civilizations there included or were built by black skinned people.
I think the "African Presence" in the title implies those melanated populations in Asia have a particular African affinity that other Asians don't have. Of course, their origins do go back to Africa, but so do everyone else's.
quote:Originally posted by Doug M: Well recall that the word "Asia" originates in Greece and not Asia. Not to mention the word "Ethiopian" is Greek as well.
Basically all Runoko and others are saying is there were and are black populations in Asia and many of the ancient civilizations there included or were built by black skinned people.
I think the "African Presence" in the title implies those melanated populations in Asia have a particular African affinity that other Asians don't have. Of course, their origins do go back to Africa, but so do everyone else's.
I am pointing out that this is partly an issue of labels, as the Greeks themselves were the ones who first identified "Eastern Ethiopians" in "Asia". Both terms originated with the Greeks and the usage of Ethiopian in this context was based on skin color.
quote: The so-called confusion between India and Ethiopia: the eastern and southern edges of the inhabited world from the Greco-Roman perspective In 1681 the celebrated German orientalist Hiob Ludolf published his Historia Aethiopica1. At the end of the first chapter, in which the various names given to Ethiopians in classical antiquity were quickly reviewed, the author concluded: quae nominum diversitas ... haud exiguam confusionem peperit. This is probably the first appearance of a term coined by Ludolf to define a phenomenon which occasionally raises difficulties for classicists and historians, for it may hinder our understanding of ancient texts: the confusion of India and Ethiopia.2 Here are some examples: “Caesarion, who was said to be Cleopatra's son (...), was sent by his mother, with much treasure, into India, by way of Ethiopia” (Plut. Ant. 81.2; transl. B. Perrin), but we do not know where to locate this “India”: in east Africa or in India proper? The spice called κιννάμωμον /cinnamomum remains partly mysterious, since ancient documents are unclear: according to Herodotus (III 107) it was obtained in Arabia, while other authorities attributed it to Ethiopia (Str. II 1.13) or India (Theophr. Hist. pl. IV 4.13). The reports of Semiramis’ feats are affected by a persistent confusion: did the queen defeat Indians (Ampelius, Liber memorialis XI.3), Ethiopians (Diod. Sic. III 3.1) or both of them (Diod. Sic. II 14.3-2)?
It is well known that in his lectures and books that he uses the term African for populations outside Africa with black skin. The book was written in 1988 and is very old, not sure how it is being treated like some new discovery. Especially when people here generally recognize the distinction between African and Asian DNA, no matter the phenotype.
The issue at the time in the 80s and early 90s is that many people assumed large parts of Asia were strictly light skinned based on the old racial labels which were still common and so this work introduced the diversity of populations there. And what he wanted to show that the phenotype commonly associated with Africa is not a mark of inferiority as pushed by those older models of race in anthropology.
quote: In some respects it would seem that anthropology has tended to neglect the Mongoloid, giving an impression of impotence as though a composite picture of this great race, the so-called Yellow Race, was too big for any canvas that could be made. Or it may be that the Mongoloid is considered to be more homogeneous, more of a oneness, than any other race and therefore not susceptible to any interesting dissection.
As we have said, the Amerind rose as a race in remote times from the main proto-Mongoloid racial core in N.E. Asia, but anthropology has not been able to point to any analogous phylogenic or evolutionary Mongoloid affinity with either the Caucasoids or the Negroids.
We have already observed that suppositions made as to the precise regions where the families and clans first congealed to evolve and form the distinctive racial strains are highly conjectural, rarely standing on firm grounds of known facts. No strictly continuous history can be traced connecting the earliest men known to have lived in China with the present population, and some authorities now seem to conelude that the ancestors of the Chinese of to-day came into the land from a spot nearer Central Asia, possibly west of the Gobi Desert, well before 2000 B.C. They were one branch of the main undefinable proto-human assemblage growing up in Asia from which millenia earlier family units had broken away to be transformed by natural selection into sub-races far removed from each other.
The modern Chinese, now forming nearly 25% of the population of the whole world and increasing at the rate of well over 12,000,000 (some estimate 15,000,000) a year, may be regarded as typical of the modern Mongoloid race, with features as specific and distinctive as those of the true Negro. Firstly there is the well-recognized yellowish colour of his skin, technically termed xanthodermous, varying according to the zone of habitation — those more northerly being generally a shade lighter in tone than those in the south. This unique yellowish tinge is due to the presence of the pigment phaeomelanin. Farther south, into Indo-China and Malaya, where for ages other Mongoloids, non-Chinese Mongoloids, have made their homes the skin colour becomes conspicuously darker and browner. In the north clothes had to be worn for protection against the cold, but in the south clothes were discarded because of the heat, and natural selection picked out for survival those whose darker skins were more resistant to injurious solar rays. This simple explanation of racial colour differentiation should not, of course, be regarded as comprehensive. Light skins are not evolved solely by wearing clothes, nor are dark skins evolved simply by going about naked. The evolutionary process is far more intricate than this.
And of course there is the larger issue of colonization and the expansion of Europeans erasing that diversity.
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quote:Originally posted by Doug M: I am pointing out that this is partly an issue of labels, as the Greeks themselves were the ones who first identified "Eastern Ethiopians" in "Asia". Both terms originated with the Greeks and the usage of Ethiopian in this context was based on skin color.
We are not Herodotus
and East Indians are not African
quote:Originally posted by Doug M:
It is well known that in his lectures and books that he uses the term African for populations outside Africa with black skin.
THAT'S THE PROBLEM !! he's calling populations African that are not African
quote:Originally posted by Doug M:
The book was written in 1988 and is very old, not
I posted earlier his presentation on Titans TV with the same bullshit from 2015
quote:Originally posted by Doug M:
And of course there is the larger issue of colonization and the expansion of Europeans erasing that diversity.
Erasing diversity is doing a lecture in 2015 saying these are Black Africans
You need to fairly be able discern bullshit even if it's not coming from Europeans
he also has this sculpture on the right with a lot of widening as I showed in the image from the video, I don't no why but it's further incompetence of some sort
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