For 75 years Nubian kings ruled over ancient Egypt, reunifying the country and building an empire. Until recently, theirs was a chapter of history lost in the shadows.
For 75 years Nubian kings ruled over ancient Egypt, reunifying the country and building an empire. Until recently, theirs was a chapter of history lost in the shadows.
In the year 730 B.C., a man by the name of Piye decided the only way to save Egypt from itself was to invade it. Things would get bloody before the salvation came.
“Harness the best steeds of your stable,” he ordered his commanders. The magnificent civilization that had built the great pyramids had lost its way, torn apart by petty warlords. For two decades Piye had ruled over his own kingdom in Nubia, a swath of Africa located mostly in present-day Sudan. But he considered himself the true ruler of Egypt as well, the rightful heir to the spiritual traditions practiced by pharaohs such as Ramses II and Thutmose III. Since Piye had probably never actually visited Lower Egypt, some did not take his boast seriously. Now Piye would witness the subjugation of decadent Egypt firsthand—“I shall let Lower Egypt taste the taste of my fingers,” he would later write.
North on the Nile River his soldiers sailed. At Thebes, the capital of Upper Egypt, they disembarked. Believing there was a proper way to wage holy wars, Piye instructed his soldiers to purify themselves before combat by bathing in the Nile, dressing themselves in fine linen, and sprinkling their bodies with water from the temple at Karnak, a site holy to the ram-headed sun god Amun, whom Piye identified as his own personal deity. Piye himself feasted and offered sacrifices to Amun. Thus sanctified, the commander and his men commenced to do battle with every army in their path.
By the end of a yearlong campaign, every leader in Egypt had capitulated—including the powerful delta warlord Tefnakht, who sent a messenger to tell Piye, “Be gracious! I cannot see your face in the days of shame; I cannot stand before your flame, I dread your grandeur.” In exchange for their lives, the vanquished urged Piye to worship at their temples, pocket their finest jewels, and claim their best horses. He obliged them. And then, with his vassals trembling before him, the newly anointed Lord of the Two Lands did something extraordinary: He loaded up his army and his war booty, and sailed southward to his home in Nubia, never to return to Egypt again.
When Piye died at the end of his 35-year reign in 715 B.C., his subjects honored his wishes by burying him in an Egyptian-style pyramid, with four of his beloved horses nearby. He was the first pharaoh to receive such entombment in more than 500 years. A pity, then, that the great Nubian who accomplished these feats is literally faceless to us. Images of Piye on the elaborate granite slabs, or stelae, memorializing his conquest of Egypt have long since been chiseled away. On a relief in the temple at the Nubian capital of Napata, only Piye’s legs remain. We are left with a single physical detail of the man—namely, that his skin was dark.
Piye was the first of the so-called black pharaohs—a series of Nubian kings who ruled over all of Egypt for three-quarters of a century as that country’s 25th dynasty. Through inscriptions carved on stelae by both the Nubians and their enemies, it is possible to map out these rulers’ vast footprint on the continent. The black pharaohs reunified a tattered Egypt and filled its landscape with glorious monuments, creating an empire that stretched from the southern border at present-day Khartoum all the way north to the Mediterranean Sea. They stood up to the bloodthirsty Assyrians, perhaps saving Jerusalem in the process.
Until recently, theirs was a chapter of history that largely went untold. Only in the past four decades have archaeologists resurrected their story—and come to recognize that the black pharaohs didn’t appear out of nowhere. They sprang from a robust African civilization that had flourished on the southern banks of the Nile for 2,500 years, going back at least as far as the first Egyptian dynasty.
Today Sudan’s pyramids—greater in number than all of Egypt’s—are haunting spectacles in the Nubian Desert. It is possible to wander among them unharassed, even alone, a world away from Sudan’s genocide and refugee crisis in Darfur or the aftermath of civil war in the south. While hundreds of miles north, at Cairo or Luxor, curiosity seekers arrive by the busload to jostle and crane for views of the Egyptian wonders, Sudan’s seldom-visited pyramids at El Kurru, Nuri, and Meroë stand serenely amid an arid landscape that scarcely hints of the thriving culture of ancient Nubia.
Now our understanding of this civilization is once again threatened with obscurity. The Sudanese government is building a hydroelectric dam along the Nile, 600 miles upstream from the Aswan High Dam, which Egypt constructed in the 1960s, consigning much of lower Nubia to the bottom of Lake Nasser (called Lake Nubia in Sudan). By 2009, the massive Merowe Dam should be complete, and a 106-mile-long lake will flood the terrain abutting the Nile’s Fourth Cataract, or rapid, including thousands of unexplored sites. For the past nine years, archaeologists have flocked to the region, furiously digging before another repository of Nubian history goes the way of Atlantis.
The ancient world was devoid of racism. At the time of Piye’s historic conquest, the fact that his skin was dark was irrelevant. Artwork from ancient Egypt, Greece, and Rome shows a clear awareness of racial features and skin tone, but there is little evidence that darker skin was seen as a sign of inferiority. Only after the European powers colonized Africa in the 19th century did Western scholars pay attention to the color of the Nubians’ skin, to uncharitable effect.
Explorers who arrived at the central stretch of the Nile River excitedly reported the discovery of elegant temples and pyramids—the ruins of an ancient civilization called Kush. Some, like the Italian doctor Giuseppe Ferlini—who lopped off the top of at least one Nubian pyramid, inspiring others to do the same—hoped to find treasure beneath. The Prussian archaeologist Richard Lepsius had more studious intentions, but he ended up doing damage of his own by concluding that the Kushites surely “belonged to the Caucasian race.”
Even famed Harvard Egyptologist George Reisner—whose discoveries between 1916 and 1919 offered the first archaeological evidence of Nubian kings who ruled over Egypt—besmirched his own findings by insisting that black Africans could not possibly have constructed the monuments he was excavating. He believed that Nubia’s leaders, including Piye, were light-skinned Egypto-Libyans who ruled over the primitive Africans. That their moment of greatness was so fleeting, he suggested, must be a consequence of the same leaders intermarrying with the “negroid elements.”
For decades, many historians flip-flopped: Either the Kushite pharaohs were actually “white,” or they were bumblers, their civilization a derivative offshoot of true Egyptian culture. In their 1942 history, When Egypt Ruled the East, highly regarded Egyptologists Keith Seele and George Steindorff summarized the Nubian pharaonic dynasty and Piye’s triumphs in all of three sentences—the last one reading: “But his dominion was not for long.”
The neglect of Nubian history reflected not only the bigoted worldview of the times, but also a cult-like fascination with Egypt’s achievements—and a complete ignorance of Africa’s past. “The first time I came to Sudan,” recalls Swiss archaeologist Charles Bonnet, “people said: ‘You’re mad! There’s no history there! It’s all in Egypt!’ ”
That was a mere 44 years ago. Artifacts uncovered during the archaeological salvage campaigns as the waters rose at Aswan in the 1960s began changing that view. In 2003, Charles Bonnet’s decades of digging near the Nile’s Third Cataract at the abandoned settlement of Kerma gained international recognition with the discovery of seven large stone statues of Nubian pharaohs. Well before then, however, Bonnet’s labors had revealed an older, densely occupied urban center that commanded rich fields and extensive herds, and had long profited from trade in gold, ebony, and ivory. “It was a kingdom completely free of Egypt and original, with its own construction and burial customs,” Bonnet says. This powerful dynasty rose just as Egypt’s Middle Kingdom declined around 1785 B.C. By 1500 B.C. the Nubian empire stretched between the Second and Fifth Cataracts.
Revisiting that golden age in the African desert does little to advance the case of Afrocentric Egyptologists, who argue that all ancient Egyptians, from King Tut to Cleopatra, were black Africans. Nonetheless, the saga of the Nubians proves that a civilization from deep in Africa not only thrived but briefly dominated in ancient times, intermingling and sometimes intermarrying with their Egyptian neighbors to the north. (King Tut’s own grandmother, the 18th-dynasty Queen Tiye, is claimed by some to be of Nubian heritage.)
The Egyptians didn’t like having such a powerful neighbor to the south, especially since they depended on Nubia’s gold mines to bankroll their dominance of western Asia. So the pharaohs of the 18th dynasty (1539-1292 B.C.) sent armies to conquer Nubia and built garrisons along the Nile. They installed Nubian chiefs as administrators and schooled the children of favored Nubians at Thebes. Subjugated, the elite Nubians began to embrace the cultural and spiritual customs of Egypt—venerating Egyptian gods, particularly Amun, using the Egyptian language, adopting Egyptian burial styles and, later, pyramid building. The Nubians were arguably the first people to be struck by “Egyptomania.”
Egyptologists of the latter 19th and early 20th centuries would interpret this as a sign of weakness. But they had it wrong: The Nubians had a gift for reading the geopolitical tea leaves. By the eighth century B.C., Egypt was riven by factions, the north ruled by Libyan chiefs who put on the trappings of pharaonic traditions to gain legitimacy. Once firmly in power, they toned down the theocratic devotion to Amun, and the priests at Karnak feared a godless outcome. Who was in a position to return Egypt to its former state of might and sanctity?
The Egyptian priests looked south and found their answer—a people who, without setting foot inside Egypt, had preserved Egypt’s spiritual traditions. As archaeologist Timothy Kendall of Northeastern University puts it, the Nubians “had become more Catholic than the pope.”
Under Nubian rule, Egypt became Egypt again. When Piye died in 715 B.C., his brother Shabaka solidified the 25th dynasty by taking up residence in the Egyptian capital of Memphis. Like his brother, Shabaka wed himself to the old pharaonic ways, adopting the throne name of the 6th-dynasty ruler Pepi II, just as Piye had claimed the old throne name of Thutmose III. Rather than execute his foes, Shabaka put them to work building dikes to seal off Egyptian villages from Nile floods.
Shabaka lavished Thebes and the Temple of Luxor with building projects. At Karnak he erected a pink granite statue depicting himself wearing the Kushite crown of the double uraeus—the two cobras signifying his legitimacy as Lord of the Two Lands. Through architecture as well as military might, Shabaka signaled to Egypt that the Nubians were here to stay.
To the east, the Assyrians were fast building their own empire. In 701 B.C., when they marched into Judah in present-day Israel, the Nubians decided to act. At the city of Eltekeh, the two armies met. And although the Assyrian emperor, Sennacherib, would brag lustily that he “inflicted defeat upon them,” a young Nubian prince, perhaps 20, son of the great pharaoh Piye, managed to survive. That the Assyrians, whose tastes ran to wholesale slaughter, failed to kill the prince suggests their victory was anything but total.
In any event, when the Assyrians left town and massed against the gates of Jerusalem, that city’s embattled leader, Hezekiah, hoped his Egyptian allies would come to the rescue. The Assyrians issued a taunting reply, immortalized in the Old Testament’s Book of II Kings: “Thou trustest upon the staff of this bruised reed [of] Egypt, on which if a man lean, it will go into his hand, and pierce it: So is Pharaoh king of Egypt unto all that trust on him.”
Then, according to the Scriptures and other accounts, a miracle occurred: The Assyrian army retreated. Were they struck by a plague? Or, as Henry Aubin’s provocative book, The Rescue of Jerusalem, suggests, was it actually the alarming news that the aforementioned Nubian prince was advancing on Jerusalem? All we know for sure is that Sennacherib abandoned the siege and galloped back in disgrace to his kingdom, where he was murdered 18 years later, apparently by his own sons.
The deliverance of Jerusalem is not just another of ancient history’s sidelights, Aubin asserts, but one of its pivotal events. It allowed Hebrew society and Judaism to strengthen for another crucial century—by which time the Babylonian king Nebuchadrezzar could banish the Hebrew people but not obliterate them or their faith. From Judaism, of course, would spring Christianity and Islam. Jerusalem would come to be recast, in all three major monotheistic religions, as a city of a godly significance.
It has been easy to overlook, amid these towering historical events, the dark-skinned figure at the edge of the landscape—the survivor of Eltekeh, the hard-charging prince later referred to by the Assyrians as “the one accursed by all the great gods”: Piye’s son Taharqa.
So sweeping was Taharqa’s influence on Egypt that even his enemies could not eradicate his imprint. During his rule, to travel down the Nile from Napata to Thebes was to navigate a panorama of architectural wonderment. All over Egypt, he built monuments with busts, statues, and cartouches bearing his image or name, many of which now sit in museums around the world. He is depicted as a supplicant to gods, or in the protective presence of the ram deity Amun, or as a sphinx himself, or in a warrior’s posture. Most statues were defaced by his rivals. His nose is often broken off, to foreclose him returning from the dead. Shattered as well is the uraeus on his forehead, to repudiate his claim as Lord of the Two Lands. But in each remaining image, the serene self-certainty in his eyes remains for all to see.
His father, Piye, had returned the true pharaonic customs to Egypt. His uncle Shabaka had established a Nubian presence in Memphis and Thebes. But their ambitions paled before those of the 31-year-old military commander who received the crown in Memphis in 690 B.C. and presided over the combined empires of Egypt and Nubia for the next 26 years.
Taharqa had ascended at a favorable moment for the 25th dynasty. The delta warlords had been laid low. The Assyrians, after failing to best him at Jerusalem, wanted no part of the Nubian ruler. Egypt was his and his alone. The gods granted him prosperity to go with the peace. During his sixth year on the throne, the Nile swelled from rains, inundating the valleys and yielding a spectacular harvest of grain without sweeping away any villages. As Taharqa would record in four separate stelae, the high waters even exterminated all rats and snakes. Clearly the revered Amun was smiling on his chosen one.
Taharqa did not intend to sit on his profits. He believed in spending his political capital. Thus he launched the most audacious building campaign of any pharaoh since the New Kingdom (around 1500 B.C.), when Egypt had been in a period of expansion. Inevitably the two holy capitals of Thebes and Napata received the bulk of Taharqa’s attention. Standing today amid the hallowed clutter of the Karnak temple complex near Thebes is a lone 62-foot-high column. That pillar had been one of ten, forming a gigantic kiosk that the Nubian pharaoh added to the Temple of Amun. He also constructed a number of chapels around the temple and erected massive statues of himself and of his beloved mother, Abar. Without defacing a single preexisting monument, Taharqa made Thebes his.
He did the same hundreds of miles upriver, in the Nubian city of Napata. Its holy mountain Jebel Barkal—known for its striking rock-face pinnacle that calls to mind a phallic symbol of fertility—had captivated even the Egyptian pharaohs of the New Kingdom, who believed the site to be the birthplace of Amun. Seeking to present himself as heir to the New Kingdom pharaohs, Taharqa erected two temples, set into the base of the mountain, honoring the goddess consorts of Amun. On Jebel Barkal’s pinnacle—partially covered in gold leaf to bedazzle wayfarers—the black pharaoh ordered his name inscribed.
Around the 15th year of his rule, amid the grandiosity of his empire-building, a touch of hubris was perhaps overtaking the Nubian ruler. “Taharqa had a very strong army and was one of the main international powers of this period,” says Charles Bonnet. “I think he thought he was the king of the world. He became a bit of a megalomaniac.”
The timber merchants along the coast of Lebanon had been feeding Taharqa’s architectural appetite with a steady supply of juniper and cedar. When the Assyrian king Esarhaddon sought to clamp down on this trade artery, Taharqa sent troops to the southern Levant to support a revolt against the Assyrian. Esarhaddon quashed the move and retaliated by crossing into Egypt in 674 B.C. But Taharqa’s army beat back its foes.
The victory clearly went to the Nubian’s head. Rebel states along the Mediterranean shared his giddiness and entered into an alliance against Esarhaddon. In 671 B.C. the Assyrians marched with their camels into the Sinai desert to quell the rebellion. Success was instant; now it was Esarhaddon who brimmed with bloodlust. He directed his troops toward the Nile Delta.
Taharqa and his army squared off against the Assyrians. For 15 days they fought pitched battles—“very bloody,” by Esarhaddon’s grudging admission. But the Nubians were pushed back all the way to Memphis. Wounded five times, Taharqa escaped with his life and abandoned Memphis. In typical Assyrian fashion, Esarhaddon slaughtered the villagers and “erected piles of their heads.” Then, as the Assyrian would later write, “His queen, his harem, Ushankhuru his heir, and the rest of his sons and daughters, his property and his goods, his horses, his cattle, his sheep, in countless numbers, I carried off to Assyria. The root of Kush I tore up out of Egypt.” To commemorate Taharqa’s humiliation, Esarhaddon commissioned a stela showing Taharqa’s son, Ushankhuru, kneeling before the Assyrian with a rope tied around his neck.
As it happened, Taharqa outlasted the victor. In 669 B.C. Esarhaddon died en route to Egypt, after learning that the Nubian had managed to retake Memphis. Under a new king, the Assyrians once again assaulted the city, this time with an army swollen with captured rebel troops. Taharqa stood no chance. He fled south to Napata and never saw Egypt again.
A measure of Taharqa’s status in Nubia is that he remained in power after being routed twice from Memphis. How he spent his final years is a mystery—with the exception of one final innovative act. Like his father, Piye, Taharqa chose to be buried in a pyramid. But he eschewed the royal cemetery at El Kurru, where all previous Kushite pharaohs had been laid to rest. Instead, he chose a site at Nuri, on the opposite bank of the Nile. Perhaps, as archaeologist Timothy Kendall has theorized, Taharqa selected the location because, from the vista of Jebel Barkal, his pyramid precisely aligns with the sunrise on ancient Egypt’s New Year’s Day, linking him in perpetuity with the Egyptian concept of rebirth.
Just as likely, the Nubian’s motive will remain obscure, like his people’s history.
posted
If it isn't obvious by now, can people start realizing that ANY book, article or discussion that includes BLACK in the title is not history it is PROPAGANDA. NO OTHER civilization gets prefaced with the SKIN COLOR of the people that ruled it. Therefore, there is no WHITE Kings of Rome or WHITE Kings of Greece or White Kings of France. It is redundant and unnecessary. Therefore, the ONLY reason to put the word BLACK into the title is to REINFORCE and MAINTAIN a FALSE distinction between Egyptian pharaohs and Kushite ones, based on skin color, which is BULLSH*T.
No matter WHAT the article, book or discussion contains, it STILL is a piece of BLATANT propaganda and distortion. The only title that is necessary to describe the rulers of the 25th dynasty of Egypt is Kushite Pharoahs and that would have been enough.
National Geographic is publishing a blatant nonsense article that intends to REINFORCE the EUROCENTRIC view of ancient Egypt using all the standard tricks of the trade.
They have a quiz which asks why KMT was called the "black land" and of course the right answer is supposedly "soil". The cover of the magazine shows Tarharqa as brown, but it says on the cover that these pharaohs were black. Therefore, it is a bunch of nonsense that deserves to get called out as what it is... bullsh*t.
However, this is a good example of how Eurocentrics are CONTINUING to push their agenda in 2008.
Posts: 8901 | Registered: May 2005
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^ Double ditto to Iamin and Doug. Which again leaves the question of what the point of this thread is. Glider, perhaps you should worry about the racism of your country than the usual nonsense of blacks' 'place' in the Nile Valley. Posts: 26356 | From: Atlanta, Georgia, USA | Registered: Feb 2005
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^^Cosign. One wonders why they seem to continuously come out with articles and expressing "awe" at the "lost black civilization of Nubia" as if it is some new discovery. I've seen tons of these stories floating around the internet and interestingly they all basically have the same theme.
Notice the language that is used. For example, it was somehow a "feat" for the kushites to successfully attack and rule egypt, as that implies that it was normally *beyond* their ability to do so. We can only presume that is because they were *black*.
Eurocentrism is indeed still a dominant worldview, a worldview largely pushed by inherent subtleties.
Posts: 426 | From: Cali-for-nia | Registered: Jan 2006
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quote:Originally posted by Djehuti: ^ Double ditto to Iamin and Doug. Which again leaves the question of what the point of this thread is. Glider, perhaps you should worry about the racism of your country than the usual nonsense of blacks' 'place' in the Nile Valley.
Glider?
Djehuti, obvious you have made a mistake/typo.
The purpose of this is to share information...you can either address it or leave it alone.
I think it is newsworthy, especially since it will be on the cover of National Geographic magazine Feb. 2008 issue.
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posted
On this I couldn't be in more agreement with you.
That question is a powerful teaching tool because by dialectic it imprints on the brain that (black) KM.t is wrong for 1 - Egyptians' skin colour 2 - it's heavily Sudani military 3 - the people's beloved god guaranteeing resurrection to them all
and that (black) KM.t is only correctly applicable to soil
And why? Only because Simon (Nat'l Geo) Says!
quote:Originally posted by Doug M:
National Geographic is publishing a blatant nonsense article that intends to REINFORCE the EUROCENTRIC view of ancient Egypt using all the standard tricks of the trade.
They have a quiz which asks why KMT was called the "black land" and of course the right answer is supposedly "soil".
...this is a good example of how Eurocentrics are CONTINUING to push their agenda in 2008.
Posts: 8014 | From: the Tekrur in the Western Sahel | Registered: Feb 2006
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posted
Not only that, but they are outright LYING. This is the most RIDICULOUS piece of nonsense white trash about Egypt I have seen in a long time. It really shows that Egyptology is STILL only there for one reason and one reason only: WHITE SUPREMACY. The article goes out of its way to spout nonsense on top of nonsense, first by OMITTING that there were MANY pharoahs in Egypt proper from the Old Kingdom to New Kingdom who hailed from the South. There were many queens who ALSO hailed from the South and Tiye was NOT one of them. They also OMIT the STRONG ties between Egypt and Kush that were CEMENTED during the 18th dynasty as a result of the establishment of the southern shrine of Amun at Gebel Barkal, which gave the Kushites of the 25th dynasty the LEGITIMACY to invade and claim the crown of the two lands and take the seat of power at Karnak. But of course such close connections between the "black" Kushites and the "polka dot" Egyptians have to be down played, which makes the whole 25th dynasty MEANINGLESS without the proper context of what took place in the 18th and prior.
And if they are going to put such stress on the BLACK Kushites then why not depict them as black, meaning dark black like various groups that inhabit central and southern Sudan.
Lol. The BLACK pharaohs of Egypt, as if BLACKS aren't the MAJORITY of Nile Valley Africans to begin with. I am still waiting for the WHITE kings of Europe to show up or the BROWN Kings of India, so we can REALLY learn something about world history.
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FOR HOW LONG CAN THESE BLACK MILITANTS HIDE FROM THE REST OF WORLD?
ROTFL @ "black militants". No one here is "militant" and some of us are not even black.
How long is an angry Afrangi like YOU going to hide from the FACTS??
quote:
NUBIANS PAY TRIBUTE TO EGYPT
Okay, and Nubians later conquered Egypt.
Here are Egyptian people below:
quote:
MODERN NUBIAN GIRLS: AMAZING HOW THEY STILL LOOK LIKE THEIR ANCIENT COUNTERPARTS!
Really? They look a little different from the tomb paintings.
MODERN (RURAL) EGYPTIAN PEOPLE: AMAZING HOW THEY STILL LOOK LIKE THEIR ANCIENT COUNTERPARTS!!
quote:
KING TUT'S PROFILE: WAS HE PART NUBIAN?
^ That is not a profile of Tut but of Yuya.
Here is Tut:
What exactly about Yuya or Tut is "part Nubian", anyway?? Can you explain?
quote:
MODERN NUBIAN GIRL: NUBIANS HAVE ALWAYS BEEN MULTI-RACIAL : NOT HARD TO NOTICE.
LMAO Okay, and what about that modern Nubian girl is "multiracial"?? What other ancestry does she have besides African? Better yet, how have Nubians "always" been multiracial?? Do you have evidence of other peoples besides Africans who comprised the ancient Nubians since they existed as I assume you mean by always??
Posts: 26356 | From: Atlanta, Georgia, USA | Registered: Feb 2005
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MODERN NUBIAN GIRL: NUBIANS HAVE ALWAYS BEEN MULTI-RACIAL : NOT HARD TO NOTICE.
no and most still are not.hill nubians in the nuba hills are not and most others outside in the nile valley are not in the sudan and most in the nile valley are not as well in the sudan. arabized nubians in the sudan are not multi-racial.so stop the lies.the nubians of the kingdom of alwa and makuria and other nubian kindgoms were black not mult-racial.
some are in lower classes in more recent nubian history have intermarried but most have not.the area where most nubians are a mixture is in egypt but even most of the still remain black even if most have some form of mixture in egypt. arabized nubians in the sudan wanted to protect themselves from arab raids and not interrmarry with arabs so they took on more of the arab culture but still remain nubian and still have nubian culture but at a lesser degree than the average nubian speaker.so arabized nubians in the sudan are not multi-racial except maybe the more arabized blacks of the sudan who just call themselves arabs.now do the research,i have.
Posts: 2688 | Registered: Jul 2004
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Glider speaks of people being "carpetbaggers", well what about manure sellers like him? How much manure will put out before he realizes no one is buying it?? LOLPosts: 26356 | From: Atlanta, Georgia, USA | Registered: Feb 2005
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posted
Kenndo, dude, your mailbox is too full again so I can't reply to your PM.
Posts: 26356 | From: Atlanta, Georgia, USA | Registered: Feb 2005
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Mentuhotep, King of Black Kemet, wearing the Red Crown.....
Glider, Pawn of white racism, with is head in the sand:
^ Of course, Glider can't see the Black Pharoah above. He can't see anything from that embarrassing position. Posts: 15202 | Registered: Jun 2004
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RaMin loves Serqet: Do try to use better pictures in your posts, that one of Narmer is pitiful. This site has thousands, I'm sure they won't mind if you use them. I do, and so far, no one has complained.
posted
^^Indeed, rasol. Incase some deranged fool actually thinks picture spamming will help him:
And before the said acting 'pawn' [PERFECT description] decides to have issues with my posting of Ramses, who many trolls allege is mixed, because of the following picture, let me clarify with one word under the pic:
quote:Originally posted by Djehuti: [QUOTE]Originally posted by Glider: [qb] MODERN (RURAL) EGYPTIAN PEOPLE: AMAZING HOW THEY STILL LOOK LIKE THEIR ANCIENT COUNTERPARTS!!
It seems all this dude is hyped up on is all this emotion he seemingly has little control over, which prohibits him/them from seeing that they/he truly is a pawn.
Posts: 5555 | From: Tha 5th Dimension. | Registered: Apr 2006
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quote:Originally posted by SEEKING: By Robert Draper
Photographs by Kenneth Garrett
For 75 years Nubian kings ruled over ancient Egypt, reunifying the country and building an empire. Until recently, theirs was a chapter of history lost in the shadows.
For 75 years Nubian kings ruled over ancient Egypt, reunifying the country and building an empire. Until recently, theirs was a chapter of history lost in the shadows.
In the year 730 B.C., a man by the name of Piye decided the only way to save Egypt from itself was to invade it. Things would get bloody before the salvation came.
“Harness the best steeds of your stable,” he ordered his commanders. The magnificent civilization that had built the great pyramids had lost its way, torn apart by petty warlords. For two decades Piye had ruled over his own kingdom in Nubia, a swath of Africa located mostly in present-day Sudan. But he considered himself the true ruler of Egypt as well, the rightful heir to the spiritual traditions practiced by pharaohs such as Ramses II and Thutmose III. Since Piye had probably never actually visited Lower Egypt, some did not take his boast seriously. Now Piye would witness the subjugation of decadent Egypt firsthand—“I shall let Lower Egypt taste the taste of my fingers,” he would later write.
North on the Nile River his soldiers sailed. At Thebes, the capital of Upper Egypt, they disembarked. Believing there was a proper way to wage holy wars, Piye instructed his soldiers to purify themselves before combat by bathing in the Nile, dressing themselves in fine linen, and sprinkling their bodies with water from the temple at Karnak, a site holy to the ram-headed sun god Amun, whom Piye identified as his own personal deity. Piye himself feasted and offered sacrifices to Amun. Thus sanctified, the commander and his men commenced to do battle with every army in their path.
By the end of a yearlong campaign, every leader in Egypt had capitulated—including the powerful delta warlord Tefnakht, who sent a messenger to tell Piye, “Be gracious! I cannot see your face in the days of shame; I cannot stand before your flame, I dread your grandeur.” In exchange for their lives, the vanquished urged Piye to worship at their temples, pocket their finest jewels, and claim their best horses. He obliged them. And then, with his vassals trembling before him, the newly anointed Lord of the Two Lands did something extraordinary: He loaded up his army and his war booty, and sailed southward to his home in Nubia, never to return to Egypt again.
When Piye died at the end of his 35-year reign in 715 B.C., his subjects honored his wishes by burying him in an Egyptian-style pyramid, with four of his beloved horses nearby. He was the first pharaoh to receive such entombment in more than 500 years. A pity, then, that the great Nubian who accomplished these feats is literally faceless to us. Images of Piye on the elaborate granite slabs, or stelae, memorializing his conquest of Egypt have long since been chiseled away. On a relief in the temple at the Nubian capital of Napata, only Piye’s legs remain. We are left with a single physical detail of the man—namely, that his skin was dark.
Piye was the first of the so-called black pharaohs—a series of Nubian kings who ruled over all of Egypt for three-quarters of a century as that country’s 25th dynasty. Through inscriptions carved on stelae by both the Nubians and their enemies, it is possible to map out these rulers’ vast footprint on the continent. The black pharaohs reunified a tattered Egypt and filled its landscape with glorious monuments, creating an empire that stretched from the southern border at present-day Khartoum all the way north to the Mediterranean Sea. They stood up to the bloodthirsty Assyrians, perhaps saving Jerusalem in the process.
Until recently, theirs was a chapter of history that largely went untold. Only in the past four decades have archaeologists resurrected their story—and come to recognize that the black pharaohs didn’t appear out of nowhere. They sprang from a robust African civilization that had flourished on the southern banks of the Nile for 2,500 years, going back at least as far as the first Egyptian dynasty.
Today Sudan’s pyramids—greater in number than all of Egypt’s—are haunting spectacles in the Nubian Desert. It is possible to wander among them unharassed, even alone, a world away from Sudan’s genocide and refugee crisis in Darfur or the aftermath of civil war in the south. While hundreds of miles north, at Cairo or Luxor, curiosity seekers arrive by the busload to jostle and crane for views of the Egyptian wonders, Sudan’s seldom-visited pyramids at El Kurru, Nuri, and Meroë stand serenely amid an arid landscape that scarcely hints of the thriving culture of ancient Nubia.
Now our understanding of this civilization is once again threatened with obscurity. The Sudanese government is building a hydroelectric dam along the Nile, 600 miles upstream from the Aswan High Dam, which Egypt constructed in the 1960s, consigning much of lower Nubia to the bottom of Lake Nasser (called Lake Nubia in Sudan). By 2009, the massive Merowe Dam should be complete, and a 106-mile-long lake will flood the terrain abutting the Nile’s Fourth Cataract, or rapid, including thousands of unexplored sites. For the past nine years, archaeologists have flocked to the region, furiously digging before another repository of Nubian history goes the way of Atlantis.
The ancient world was devoid of racism. At the time of Piye’s historic conquest, the fact that his skin was dark was irrelevant. Artwork from ancient Egypt, Greece, and Rome shows a clear awareness of racial features and skin tone, but there is little evidence that darker skin was seen as a sign of inferiority. Only after the European powers colonized Africa in the 19th century did Western scholars pay attention to the color of the Nubians’ skin, to uncharitable effect.
Explorers who arrived at the central stretch of the Nile River excitedly reported the discovery of elegant temples and pyramids—the ruins of an ancient civilization called Kush. Some, like the Italian doctor Giuseppe Ferlini—who lopped off the top of at least one Nubian pyramid, inspiring others to do the same—hoped to find treasure beneath. The Prussian archaeologist Richard Lepsius had more studious intentions, but he ended up doing damage of his own by concluding that the Kushites surely “belonged to the Caucasian race.”
Even famed Harvard Egyptologist George Reisner—whose discoveries between 1916 and 1919 offered the first archaeological evidence of Nubian kings who ruled over Egypt—besmirched his own findings by insisting that black Africans could not possibly have constructed the monuments he was excavating. He believed that Nubia’s leaders, including Piye, were light-skinned Egypto-Libyans who ruled over the primitive Africans. That their moment of greatness was so fleeting, he suggested, must be a consequence of the same leaders intermarrying with the “negroid elements.”
For decades, many historians flip-flopped: Either the Kushite pharaohs were actually “white,” or they were bumblers, their civilization a derivative offshoot of true Egyptian culture. In their 1942 history, When Egypt Ruled the East, highly regarded Egyptologists Keith Seele and George Steindorff summarized the Nubian pharaonic dynasty and Piye’s triumphs in all of three sentences—the last one reading: “But his dominion was not for long.”
The neglect of Nubian history reflected not only the bigoted worldview of the times, but also a cult-like fascination with Egypt’s achievements—and a complete ignorance of Africa’s past. “The first time I came to Sudan,” recalls Swiss archaeologist Charles Bonnet, “people said: ‘You’re mad! There’s no history there! It’s all in Egypt!’ ”
That was a mere 44 years ago. Artifacts uncovered during the archaeological salvage campaigns as the waters rose at Aswan in the 1960s began changing that view. In 2003, Charles Bonnet’s decades of digging near the Nile’s Third Cataract at the abandoned settlement of Kerma gained international recognition with the discovery of seven large stone statues of Nubian pharaohs. Well before then, however, Bonnet’s labors had revealed an older, densely occupied urban center that commanded rich fields and extensive herds, and had long profited from trade in gold, ebony, and ivory. “It was a kingdom completely free of Egypt and original, with its own construction and burial customs,” Bonnet says. This powerful dynasty rose just as Egypt’s Middle Kingdom declined around 1785 B.C. By 1500 B.C. the Nubian empire stretched between the Second and Fifth Cataracts.
Revisiting that golden age in the African desert does little to advance the case of Afrocentric Egyptologists, who argue that all ancient Egyptians, from King Tut to Cleopatra, were black Africans. Nonetheless, the saga of the Nubians proves that a civilization from deep in Africa not only thrived but briefly dominated in ancient times, intermingling and sometimes intermarrying with their Egyptian neighbors to the north. (King Tut’s own grandmother, the 18th-dynasty Queen Tiye, is claimed by some to be of Nubian heritage.)
The Egyptians didn’t like having such a powerful neighbor to the south, especially since they depended on Nubia’s gold mines to bankroll their dominance of western Asia. So the pharaohs of the 18th dynasty (1539-1292 B.C.) sent armies to conquer Nubia and built garrisons along the Nile. They installed Nubian chiefs as administrators and schooled the children of favored Nubians at Thebes. Subjugated, the elite Nubians began to embrace the cultural and spiritual customs of Egypt—venerating Egyptian gods, particularly Amun, using the Egyptian language, adopting Egyptian burial styles and, later, pyramid building. The Nubians were arguably the first people to be struck by “Egyptomania.”
Egyptologists of the latter 19th and early 20th centuries would interpret this as a sign of weakness. But they had it wrong: The Nubians had a gift for reading the geopolitical tea leaves. By the eighth century B.C., Egypt was riven by factions, the north ruled by Libyan chiefs who put on the trappings of pharaonic traditions to gain legitimacy. Once firmly in power, they toned down the theocratic devotion to Amun, and the priests at Karnak feared a godless outcome. Who was in a position to return Egypt to its former state of might and sanctity?
The Egyptian priests looked south and found their answer—a people who, without setting foot inside Egypt, had preserved Egypt’s spiritual traditions. As archaeologist Timothy Kendall of Northeastern University puts it, the Nubians “had become more Catholic than the pope.”
Under Nubian rule, Egypt became Egypt again. When Piye died in 715 B.C., his brother Shabaka solidified the 25th dynasty by taking up residence in the Egyptian capital of Memphis. Like his brother, Shabaka wed himself to the old pharaonic ways, adopting the throne name of the 6th-dynasty ruler Pepi II, just as Piye had claimed the old throne name of Thutmose III. Rather than execute his foes, Shabaka put them to work building dikes to seal off Egyptian villages from Nile floods.
Shabaka lavished Thebes and the Temple of Luxor with building projects. At Karnak he erected a pink granite statue depicting himself wearing the Kushite crown of the double uraeus—the two cobras signifying his legitimacy as Lord of the Two Lands. Through architecture as well as military might, Shabaka signaled to Egypt that the Nubians were here to stay.
To the east, the Assyrians were fast building their own empire. In 701 B.C., when they marched into Judah in present-day Israel, the Nubians decided to act. At the city of Eltekeh, the two armies met. And although the Assyrian emperor, Sennacherib, would brag lustily that he “inflicted defeat upon them,” a young Nubian prince, perhaps 20, son of the great pharaoh Piye, managed to survive. That the Assyrians, whose tastes ran to wholesale slaughter, failed to kill the prince suggests their victory was anything but total.
In any event, when the Assyrians left town and massed against the gates of Jerusalem, that city’s embattled leader, Hezekiah, hoped his Egyptian allies would come to the rescue. The Assyrians issued a taunting reply, immortalized in the Old Testament’s Book of II Kings: “Thou trustest upon the staff of this bruised reed [of] Egypt, on which if a man lean, it will go into his hand, and pierce it: So is Pharaoh king of Egypt unto all that trust on him.”
Then, according to the Scriptures and other accounts, a miracle occurred: The Assyrian army retreated. Were they struck by a plague? Or, as Henry Aubin’s provocative book, The Rescue of Jerusalem, suggests, was it actually the alarming news that the aforementioned Nubian prince was advancing on Jerusalem? All we know for sure is that Sennacherib abandoned the siege and galloped back in disgrace to his kingdom, where he was murdered 18 years later, apparently by his own sons.
The deliverance of Jerusalem is not just another of ancient history’s sidelights, Aubin asserts, but one of its pivotal events. It allowed Hebrew society and Judaism to strengthen for another crucial century—by which time the Babylonian king Nebuchadrezzar could banish the Hebrew people but not obliterate them or their faith. From Judaism, of course, would spring Christianity and Islam. Jerusalem would come to be recast, in all three major monotheistic religions, as a city of a godly significance.
It has been easy to overlook, amid these towering historical events, the dark-skinned figure at the edge of the landscape—the survivor of Eltekeh, the hard-charging prince later referred to by the Assyrians as “the one accursed by all the great gods”: Piye’s son Taharqa.
So sweeping was Taharqa’s influence on Egypt that even his enemies could not eradicate his imprint. During his rule, to travel down the Nile from Napata to Thebes was to navigate a panorama of architectural wonderment. All over Egypt, he built monuments with busts, statues, and cartouches bearing his image or name, many of which now sit in museums around the world. He is depicted as a supplicant to gods, or in the protective presence of the ram deity Amun, or as a sphinx himself, or in a warrior’s posture. Most statues were defaced by his rivals. His nose is often broken off, to foreclose him returning from the dead. Shattered as well is the uraeus on his forehead, to repudiate his claim as Lord of the Two Lands. But in each remaining image, the serene self-certainty in his eyes remains for all to see.
His father, Piye, had returned the true pharaonic customs to Egypt. His uncle Shabaka had established a Nubian presence in Memphis and Thebes. But their ambitions paled before those of the 31-year-old military commander who received the crown in Memphis in 690 B.C. and presided over the combined empires of Egypt and Nubia for the next 26 years.
Taharqa had ascended at a favorable moment for the 25th dynasty. The delta warlords had been laid low. The Assyrians, after failing to best him at Jerusalem, wanted no part of the Nubian ruler. Egypt was his and his alone. The gods granted him prosperity to go with the peace. During his sixth year on the throne, the Nile swelled from rains, inundating the valleys and yielding a spectacular harvest of grain without sweeping away any villages. As Taharqa would record in four separate stelae, the high waters even exterminated all rats and snakes. Clearly the revered Amun was smiling on his chosen one.
Taharqa did not intend to sit on his profits. He believed in spending his political capital. Thus he launched the most audacious building campaign of any pharaoh since the New Kingdom (around 1500 B.C.), when Egypt had been in a period of expansion. Inevitably the two holy capitals of Thebes and Napata received the bulk of Taharqa’s attention. Standing today amid the hallowed clutter of the Karnak temple complex near Thebes is a lone 62-foot-high column. That pillar had been one of ten, forming a gigantic kiosk that the Nubian pharaoh added to the Temple of Amun. He also constructed a number of chapels around the temple and erected massive statues of himself and of his beloved mother, Abar. Without defacing a single preexisting monument, Taharqa made Thebes his.
He did the same hundreds of miles upriver, in the Nubian city of Napata. Its holy mountain Jebel Barkal—known for its striking rock-face pinnacle that calls to mind a phallic symbol of fertility—had captivated even the Egyptian pharaohs of the New Kingdom, who believed the site to be the birthplace of Amun. Seeking to present himself as heir to the New Kingdom pharaohs, Taharqa erected two temples, set into the base of the mountain, honoring the goddess consorts of Amun. On Jebel Barkal’s pinnacle—partially covered in gold leaf to bedazzle wayfarers—the black pharaoh ordered his name inscribed.
Around the 15th year of his rule, amid the grandiosity of his empire-building, a touch of hubris was perhaps overtaking the Nubian ruler. “Taharqa had a very strong army and was one of the main international powers of this period,” says Charles Bonnet. “I think he thought he was the king of the world. He became a bit of a megalomaniac.”
The timber merchants along the coast of Lebanon had been feeding Taharqa’s architectural appetite with a steady supply of juniper and cedar. When the Assyrian king Esarhaddon sought to clamp down on this trade artery, Taharqa sent troops to the southern Levant to support a revolt against the Assyrian. Esarhaddon quashed the move and retaliated by crossing into Egypt in 674 B.C. But Taharqa’s army beat back its foes.
The victory clearly went to the Nubian’s head. Rebel states along the Mediterranean shared his giddiness and entered into an alliance against Esarhaddon. In 671 B.C. the Assyrians marched with their camels into the Sinai desert to quell the rebellion. Success was instant; now it was Esarhaddon who brimmed with bloodlust. He directed his troops toward the Nile Delta.
Taharqa and his army squared off against the Assyrians. For 15 days they fought pitched battles—“very bloody,” by Esarhaddon’s grudging admission. But the Nubians were pushed back all the way to Memphis. Wounded five times, Taharqa escaped with his life and abandoned Memphis. In typical Assyrian fashion, Esarhaddon slaughtered the villagers and “erected piles of their heads.” Then, as the Assyrian would later write, “His queen, his harem, Ushankhuru his heir, and the rest of his sons and daughters, his property and his goods, his horses, his cattle, his sheep, in countless numbers, I carried off to Assyria. The root of Kush I tore up out of Egypt.” To commemorate Taharqa’s humiliation, Esarhaddon commissioned a stela showing Taharqa’s son, Ushankhuru, kneeling before the Assyrian with a rope tied around his neck.
As it happened, Taharqa outlasted the victor. In 669 B.C. Esarhaddon died en route to Egypt, after learning that the Nubian had managed to retake Memphis. Under a new king, the Assyrians once again assaulted the city, this time with an army swollen with captured rebel troops. Taharqa stood no chance. He fled south to Napata and never saw Egypt again.
A measure of Taharqa’s status in Nubia is that he remained in power after being routed twice from Memphis. How he spent his final years is a mystery—with the exception of one final innovative act. Like his father, Piye, Taharqa chose to be buried in a pyramid. But he eschewed the royal cemetery at El Kurru, where all previous Kushite pharaohs had been laid to rest. Instead, he chose a site at Nuri, on the opposite bank of the Nile. Perhaps, as archaeologist Timothy Kendall has theorized, Taharqa selected the location because, from the vista of Jebel Barkal, his pyramid precisely aligns with the sunrise on ancient Egypt’s New Year’s Day, linking him in perpetuity with the Egyptian concept of rebirth.
Just as likely, the Nubian’s motive will remain obscure, like his people’s history.
FOR HOW LONG CAN THESE BLACK MILITANTS HIDE FROM THE REST OF WORLD?
ROTFL @ "black militants". No one here is "militant" and some of us are not even black.
How long is an angry Afrangi like YOU going to hide from the FACTS??
quote:
NUBIANS PAY TRIBUTE TO EGYPT
Okay, and Nubians later conquered Egypt.
Here are Egyptian people below:
quote:
MODERN NUBIAN GIRLS: AMAZING HOW THEY STILL LOOK LIKE THEIR ANCIENT COUNTERPARTS!
Really? They look a little different from the tomb paintings.
MODERN (RURAL) EGYPTIAN PEOPLE: AMAZING HOW THEY STILL LOOK LIKE THEIR ANCIENT COUNTERPARTS!!
Millitants, what a revealing term, as to Glider's possible agendas, modus operundi, and psyche.
"Millitant[i/]" - perhaps coming from someone who sees our questioning of racist faulty nomenclature as mere, ungrateful disagreements with the premise that Egypt was "mixed". Ok.
More interesting is "[i]millitant" - implying possible hostility.
He sees there being possible emnity and hostillity between him and we.
A pawn indeed.
quote:Originaly posted by Glider:
HOW LONG WILL BLACK MILLITANTS HIKE FROM THE REST OF THE WORLD
Egyptian Head of Antiquities rebukes American black supremacists.
CofCC.org News Team
Photo Above: Actually surviving statue of Tutankhamun. Photo Middle-Right: King Ramesses smites his foes. Depiction of different racial types in ancient Egyptian art.
Photo Middle-Left: Depiction of Negroes in Egyptian art. Photo Bottom: Recreation of Tutankhamun’s face by leading forensic scientists who examined the remains. (Click “Continue Reading” below to view.)
More information on race in ancient Egypt.
There is a growing list of famous people, whom American black supremacists now claim were actually black or part black. In some cases elements of the mainstream media have reported some of these claims as fact. Groups like the NOI, the New Black Panthers, and even the all-black church which Barack Obama and Oprah Winfrey attend make these claims. Examples include Cleopatra (a Greek), Hannibal (a Carthaginian of Phoenician origin), Beethoven, the Olmecs (DNA tests show they are most closely related to the Chinese and have no Negro DNA), and many more.
Now the head of Egyptian Antiquities has directly rebuked one of their silly claims–that the Egyptian King Tutankhamun was black. In fact, militant groups such as the New Black Panther Party, have actually staged protests in front of museums to demand that images of Tutankhamun be painted black. Several different teams of forensic scientists from multiple countries have studied the remains of Tutankhamun and have all independently classified him as “North African Caucasoid.”
From AFP…
Egyptian antiquities supremo Zahi Hawass insisted Tuesday that Tutankhamun was not black despite calls by US black activists to recognise the boy king’s dark skin colour.
“Tutankhamun was not black, and the portrayal of ancient Egyptian civilisation as black has no element of truth to it,” Hawass told reporters.
“Egyptians are not Arabs and are not Africans despite the fact that Egypt is in Africa,” he said, quoted by the official MENA news agency.
Hawass said he was responding to several demonstrations in Philadelphia after a lecture he gave there on September 6 where he defended his theory.
Posts: 315 | From: Deep Earth | Registered: Feb 2007
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While Dickerson's rhetoric exhibits echoes of black nationalism, she turns an unforgiving eye to that philosophy's more recent manifestations. "Carpetbagging Afrocentrists," as she terms them, are at least as much to blame for the predicament of black America as approval- seeking blacks. "Instead of carrying out substantive studies of African history," writes Dickerson. "These charlatans imagine glorious achievements, such as the Bronze Age of African development, airplanes or routinized surgery." Dickerson dismisses today's nationalist community roughly as "Afrocentric hustlers" who are invoking "mytho-ancestors, so far outside the past, as to be in fables."
Posts: 315 | From: Deep Earth | Registered: Feb 2007
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quote:Originally posted by Wally: I apologize to the veterans on this forum for posting information that they're already familiar with, but I feel it's necessary for the newbies who come here frequently and with confused or distorted notions regarding the Ancient Egyptians, and who come with the following delusions:
Self-delusion A recent post started out with "Some claim that Kemet means black people". The key word in this first statement is "claim" which is a synonym for "believe", which seeks to place a human language in the same category as religion. You can believe in or not believe in God, that's one thing; but you don't believe that "veni" in Latin means "I came"; you either KNOW or you don't. However, this delusion leads to one that has been fabricated by the distorters of Egyptology.
Assisted delusion "The Egyptians called their country "Kmt" or "Kemet" which means "Black" after the color of the soil." This is simply an absolute lie. There is nothing in the grammar, even if one were to use an electron microscope to search for an example that the soil or earth had any connection with the use of this word. The only references to the soil in the names of Ancient Egypt were the names "TaMeri and TaMere"; "Ta" meaning "earth, land, etc." This mantra is almost always repeated to "inform" the reader of why the word "Black" for Egypt and Egyptians was used, and probably using the age old philosophy that if you repeat a lie often enough, and long enough, it soon becomes accepted as the truth. NOT if one knows better...
KEMET
A comprehensive list of the structure and usages of perhaps the most significant word in the Ancient Egyptian language. All of these words can be found in "An Egyptian Hieroglyphic Dictionary" by E. A. Wallis Budge, Dover, NY
Used as an adjective
kem;kemem;kemom - black kemu - black (m) keme.t - black (f) hime.t keme.t - "black woman" (woman of Black) himu.t keme.t - "black women" (women of Black)
Used as a noun
keme.t - any black person, place, or thing
A determinative is then used to be more specific:
keme.t (woman) - "the Black woman"; ie, 'divine woman' keme.t (cow) - "a Black cow" - ie, a 'sacred cow' Keme.t (nation) - "the Black nation"
kem - a black one (m) keme.t - a black one (f) kemu - black ones (m) kemu.t - black ones (f) kemeti - two black ones
Used for Nationality
Sa Kemet - a man of Black (an Egyptian male) Sa.t Kemet - a woman of Black (an Egyptian female) Rome.t Kemet - the people of Black (Egyptians) Kemetou - Blacks (ie, 'citizens') Kememou - Black people (of the Black nation)
Other usages
Sa Kem - "Black man", a god, and son of Sa.t Kem.t - "Black woman", a goddess (page 589b) kem (papyrus) - to end, complete kem.t (papyrus) - the end, completion kemi - finished products kem khet (stick) - jet black ... kemwer - any Egyptian person, place or thing ('to be black' + 'to be great')
Kemwer - "The Great Black" - a title of Osiris - the Ancestor of the race
Kemwer (body of water) - "the Great Black sea" - the Red sea Kemwer (body of water + river bank) - a lake in the Duat (the OtherWorld) Kemwer Nteri - "the sacred great Black bulls" kemwer (fortress) - a fort or town Kemwer (water) - the god of the great Black lake
Kem Amut - a black animal goddess Kemi.t-Weri.t - "the great Black woman", a goddess Kem-Neb-Mesen.t - a lion god Kem ho - "black face", a title of the crocodile Rerek kem; kemu (shield) - buckler, shield kem (wood) - black wood kem.t (stone) - black stone or powder kem.tt (plant) - a plant kemu (seed) - seeds or fruit of the kem plant kemti - "black image", sacred image or statue
Using the causative "S"
S_kemi - white haired, grey-headed man (ie, to have lost blackness) S_kemkem - to destroy, overthrow, annihilate S_kemem - to blacken, to defile
Antonyms
S_desher - to redden, make ruddy S_desheru - red things, bloody wounds
Some interesting Homonyms (pages 770 > )
qem - to behave in a seemly manner Qemi - the south, Upper Egypt qem.t - reed, papyrus qemaa - to throw a boomerang qem_au - to overthrow qemam.t - mother, parent qemamu - workers (in metal, wood) qemqem - tambourines qemd - to weep qemati - statue, image - same as kemti qema - to create qemaiu - created beings Qemau;Qemamu - The Creator
Deshret - the opposite of Kemet
deshr.t - any red (ie, non-Black) person, place, or thing ... deshr.t (woman) - "the Red woman"; ie, 'evil woman' deshr.t (cow) - "a Red cow" - ie, the 'devil's cow' deshr - a red one (m) deshr.t - a red one (f) deshru - red ones (m) deshru.t - red ones (f) -- White or light-skinned people; devils deshreti - two red ones
posted
I think this February issue of National Geographic should be swamped by emails & letters from members of Egyptseach. I would love to see Doug M. & Djehuti give natinal Geographic a Real History Lession on Kush & Egypt ! In fact I will write one myself ! Posts: 135 | From: Bay Area | Registered: Jun 2007
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quote:Originally posted by Djehuti: ^ Double ditto to Iamin and Doug. Which again leaves the question of what the point of this thread is. Glider, perhaps you should worry about the racism of your country than the usual nonsense of blacks' 'place' in the Nile Valley.
lol Glider is not Egyptian, his behaviour is characteristically of the English racist man. Posts: 3423 | From: the jungle - when y'all stop playing games, call me. | Registered: Jul 2006
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quote:Dickerson dismisses today's nationalist community roughly as "Afrocentric hustlers" who are invoking "mytho-ancestors, so far outside the past, as to be in fables."
I think she's referring to the types of Marc Washington, Clyde Winters and Kemsonreloaded.
"Carpetbagging Afrocentrists," as she terms them, are at least as much to blame for the predicament of black America as approval- seeking blacks.Posts: 1554 | Registered: Jul 2006
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posted
The only hustlers and carpetbaggers are those Europeans and mixed Arab/European Elites in Egypt who want to push Egypt as white in order to get money from white tourists. Everyone knows that ancient Egypt was created by black Africans, even whites, but the establishment MUST push Egypt as some sort of white ancient civilization IN AFRICA, in order to nurture the bullsh*t that is white supremacy.
And the absolute absurdity of Eurocentric logic is seen where they pretend that the Kushites were the only pharoahs sculpted in black granite, when ALL pharoahs were sculpted in black granite, going back to the old kingdom. Then they talk that trash about Kmt meaning black land and then say that the brown of the men in Egyptian art was symbolic of soil, but you just said soil means black though.... Duh.
The whole point being that only a retard would believe that jet black Nile Valley Africans magically stopped at the border of Egypt and the rest of the Nile was populated by extremely light skinned Nile Valley people who were TOTALLY different from those right across the border to the south....
Posts: 8901 | Registered: May 2005
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quote:Originally posted by Nebsen: I think this February issue of National Geographic should be swamped by emails & letters from members of Egyptseach. I would love to see Doug M. & Djehuti give natinal Geographic a Real History Lession on Kush & Egypt ! In fact I will write one myself !
They would never publish their letters, you have to give your real name. The troll Clarence (aka Djehuti) is too cowardly to do this.
While Dickerson's rhetoric exhibits echoes of black nationalism, she turns an unforgiving eye to that philosophy's more recent manifestations. "Carpetbagging Afrocentrists," as she terms them, are at least as much to blame for the predicament of black America as approval- seeking blacks. "Instead of carrying out substantive studies of African history," writes Dickerson. "These charlatans imagine glorious achievements, such as the Bronze Age of African development, airplanes or routinized surgery." Dickerson dismisses today's nationalist community roughly as "Afrocentric hustlers" who are invoking "mytho-ancestors, so far outside the past, as to be in fables."
quote:
At some points in her treatise, Dickerson journeys into interesting, and gutsy, terrain. Her critique of the Condoleezza Rice predicament is illuminating and saddening. I've written about my crush on the National Security Advisor and her counter-intuitive allure. But I suspect that Dickerson's opinion, even in its overstated form, is closer to the truth. "To white men, [Rice] is not a woman. To black men, she's not a fuckable woman; even the vaunted black penis cannot bridge the chasm between them ... Her having thrived is somehow an affront to the black man. What black masculinity does to white men, black female competence does to black men."
For almost anyone identified with any sort of political ideology, Dickerson's analysis is a bitter pill to swallow. Unfortunately, the book tops out at just that. For all her flame-throwing, caustic denunciations and grenade lobbing, Dickerson does almost nothing to realize her essential thesis--the assertion that "black" is somehow a woefully inadequate way of describing African-Americans. That's because, for all its bluster and vitriol, Blackness never emerges as much more than a directionless rant.
And not even a credible rant. Its targets are often strawmen conveniently substituted for less vulnerable objects. In the section of Blackness that attacks Afrocentricity, Dickerson ignores the legion of authors who've written on the subject, instead electing to attack Iyanla Vanzant. But Vanzant, a self-help guru, is only vaguely informed by Afrocentricity and certainly has never presented herself as any sort of intellectual. Furthermore, at this point, Vanzant's franchise has extended beyond black people--she had a talk show produced by Barbara Waiters. Afrocentricity, is surely responsible for producing its share of crackpots. But Dickerson at once ducks the jokers (Leonard Jeffries) and the more serious scholars (Temple University professor Molefi Asante, for instance, who basically invented Afrocentricity). Instead she picks on Vanzant, thus substituting a bait and switch for a valid critique.
When a strawman Strawman - The first of the series of DoD requirements that led to Ada (Woodenman, Tinman, Ironman, Steelman). Strawman was produced by the HOLWG in Apr 1975. slides beyond her grip, Dickerson just makes a generalization and states it as an unassailable truth. "Blacks often ask what their country can do for them, but never the converse," writes Dickerson. This would come as news to the thousands of African Americans in the armed services (puzzlingly, Dickerson once numbered among them) and African Americans who've died in every major American war, even without the basic guarantees of citizenship.
Even when veering into the realm of history, Dickerson can't resist the temptation to take extremely complex problems and reduce them to two dimensions. She claims that Africa was the source of the slave trade because it was "the least urbanized continent" and was "defenseless." There are reams of scholarship dedicated to discerning why one of Africa's chief exports turned out to be slaves. Dickerson has, evidently, consulted none of it. That's because she has no need of scholars or scholarship, and the lion's share of her sources are authors (Du Bois, Booker T. Washington, Carter G. Woodson, James Baldwin) who are dead. The result is that Blackness feels extremely dated.
Certainly it's admirable that Dickerson is not beholden to any particular ideology. But in her efforts to not be pinned down, Dickerson mounts an intellectual scorched earth campaign and never settles down to stake out any ground of her own. web page
quote:Originally posted by Nebsen: I think this February issue of National Geographic should be swamped by emails & letters from members of Egyptseach. I would love to see Doug M. & Djehuti give natinal Geographic a Real History Lession on Kush & Egypt ! In fact I will write one myself !
They would never publish their letters, you have to give your real name. The troll Clarence (aka Djehuti) is too cowardly to do this.
.
And I guess Mr. Clyde, Mr. Afrocentric, that you SUPPORT this nonsense from National Geographic?
Hmmm......
It sure sounds like you do.
Posts: 8901 | Registered: May 2005
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quote:Originally posted by Nebsen: I think this February issue of National Geographic should be swamped by emails & letters from members of Egyptseach. I would love to see Doug M. & Djehuti give natinal Geographic a Real History Lession on Kush & Egypt ! In fact I will write one myself !
They would never publish their letters, you have to give your real name. The troll Clarence (aka Djehuti) is too cowardly to do this.
.
And I guess Mr. Clyde, Mr. Afrocentric, that you SUPPORT this nonsense from National Geographic?
Hmmm......
It sure sounds like you do.
I look forward to reading the article. I am excited that such a piece is being published in Nat Geo.
It's just an article. We all know that Egypt is presented as a "white" civilization.
Granted all the rulers of Egypt were Blacks--the fact that they even discuss Kush is welcome because it will allow people less informed then yourself, to learn that another great civilization existed along the Nile in addition to Egypt. Moreover it lends credibility to you guys. You see many Blacks like yourself, don't believe something is true unless it is validated by Europeans, for example Kittle and Keita are right because some journal published by Europeans published their article--while Diop and others "may" be wrong because many Europeans dispute their scholarship. As a result, once some Blacks see something supported by the status quo, they feel that when Blacks say the same thing they must be right cause the European said it first.
I see nothing wrong with this article. I live in the hood and I have taught in the hood for years. The average Afro-American believes the Egyptians were Blacks. It's only people like us , College trained who don't interact with the average AA, who feel we have to argue the fact.
I have known this reality since I was 10 years old when the Moorish Scientists and Black Muslims spread the word on 47th street. Moreover, a guy now dead, named Hamurabi, made some great newspapers discussing ancient Black History themes.
The article is great news. Thank's again Seeking for giving us this piece.
Remember, Abaza! Egyptians are in white! We're not Afrocentric time-travelors, we just state the reality!
Interesting photo selection by Abaza. I was going to respond to her posting of the sphinx's steping on the Kememou and Levantine by telling her that the Egyptian spinx was an imposing figure even in Greek mythology, incase s\he was getting any white ideas.
I also thought of posting that picture of Nehesy, all painted in a brown/red lighter/as light as Egyptians, but
as the afrangi's psychological projection shows, he's /she's already in alot of SHOCK as it is!
Posts: 5555 | From: Tha 5th Dimension. | Registered: Apr 2006
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^^A poster here once asked something to the affect of:
Why does the dark soilgotta be black but nottha people?
quote:Originally posted by alTakruri: On this I couldn't be in more agreement with you.
That question is a powerful teaching tool because by dialectic it imprints on the brain that (black) KM.t is wrong for 1 - Egyptians' skin colour 2 - it's heavily Sudani military 3 - the people's beloved god guaranteeing resurrection to them all
and that (black) KM.t is only correctly applicable to soil
And why? Only because Simon (Nat'l Geo) Says!
quote:Originally posted by Doug M:
National Geographic is publishing a blatant nonsense article that intends to REINFORCE the EUROCENTRIC view of ancient Egypt using all the standard tricks of the trade.
They have a quiz which asks why KMT was called the "black land" and of course the right answer is supposedly "soil".
...this is a good example of how Eurocentrics are CONTINUING to push their agenda in 2008.
KM.t in Egyptian life * Egyptian's skin colour * The Egyptian military * The colour of the major deity Osiris
NHHSY * southern * barbarian
AE concept of race * The ancient Egyptians had no concept of race
Coverup comment on "Nubian" soldier Mahirper * ... portrayed as Egyptian in every way except skin color
Color associated with "Nubia" * black * gold
Coverup comment on color of sacred animals * The color white was used to denote purity and sacredness
Posts: 8014 | From: the Tekrur in the Western Sahel | Registered: Feb 2006
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quote:Originally posted by Nebsen: I think this February issue of National Geographic should be swamped by emails & letters from members of Egyptseach. I would love to see Doug M. & Djehuti give natinal Geographic a Real History Lession on Kush & Egypt ! In fact I will write one myself !
They would never publish their letters, you have to give your real name. The troll Clarence (aka Djehuti) is too cowardly to do this.
.
And I guess Mr. Clyde, Mr. Afrocentric, that you SUPPORT this nonsense from National Geographic?
Hmmm......
It sure sounds like you do.
I look forward to reading the article. I am excited that such a piece is being published in Nat Geo.
It's just an article. We all know that Egypt is presented as a "white" civilization.
Granted all the rulers of Egypt were Blacks--the fact that they even discuss Kush is welcome because it will allow people less informed then yourself, to learn that another great civilization existed along the Nile in addition to Egypt. Moreover it lends credibility to you guys. You see many Blacks like yourself, don't believe something is true unless it is validated by Europeans, for example Kittle and Keita are right because some journal published by Europeans published their article--while Diop and others "may" be wrong because many Europeans dispute their scholarship. As a result, once some Blacks see something supported by the status quo, they feel that when Blacks say the same thing they must be right cause the European said it first.
I see nothing wrong with this article. I live in the hood and I have taught in the hood for years. The average Afro-American believes the Egyptians were Blacks. It's only people like us , College trained who don't interact with the average AA, who feel we have to argue the fact.
I have known this reality since I was 10 years old when the Moorish Scientists and Black Muslims spread the word on 47th street. Moreover, a guy now dead, named Hamurabi, made some great newspapers discussing ancient Black History themes.
The article is great news. Thank's again Seeking for giving us this piece.
.
Well, thanks for showing us how some of the so-called defenders of Afrocentrism are selling out the cause that they created.
If you think for one second this is the first time Nat. Geo. has discussed Kush, you are sadly mistaken. It isn't and it certainly isn't as if nobody knows who the Kushites were or how powerful. That was known known even before the French expedition to Egypt, as many European travelers along the had Nile noted. So, this is pure nonsense from beginning to end.
It sounds like you are HAPPY that some whites threw you a crumb by claiming Kush was black, which is EXACTLY what they want. They want to use Kush as a TOKEN black kingdom on the Nile to appease blacks so that they can pretend Egypt was white....
Dude. If you are going to tell your history and promote it then do so, but don't talk Bullsh*t.
Posts: 8901 | Registered: May 2005
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quote:You see many Blacks, don't believe something is true unless it is validated by Europeans
I agree, but in the context of this discussion your position seems odd.
You are the one celebrating the article simply because you feel it offers some backhanded acknolwedgement from whites, rather than strictly due to it's merits or lack of same.
So, it seems to be duplicitous to claim that you aprove of the article 'on behalf' of people less sophisticated than yourself.
quote:Kittle and Keita are right because some journal published by Europeans published their article
Keita and Kittles are *right* because they are experts in Genetics and Bioanthropology, whose works are submitted for peer review - and *UNREFUTED*. To disagree, one has to refute them in peer review.
quote:--while Diop and others "may" be wrong because many Europeans dispute their scholarship.
Diop is right also on his essential premises of the African Origin of Nile Valley Civilisation. Most attempts of Eurocentrists to dispute his fundamental thesis fail, such as Yurco's disastrous attempt to dispute the authenticity of Tomb of Ramses III shown above.
This backfired on Yurco, exposed his latent Eurocentrism, and the dishonest methods he was willing to utilize to further it, see....
Anyway, this is off point. Doug is right that the Black Pharaoh's appears to be a pretty weak effort, and nothing to get excited about.
Posts: 15202 | Registered: Jun 2004
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