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Originally posted by Gedegbe:
Mustafino:

I understand your astonishment but your reasoning seems to seriously be biased by ethnocentrism. Most cultures have very different and often self-contradictory conceptions of color and of other realities which are expressed in their languages, and modern Western one with its sometimes is only one of them.

A more similar conception would be that of my ethnic people (Aja-Fon) from West Africa who call themselves (me-wi) "black-people" (cf Egyptians calling them black (people)), when referring to them along with their neighbors like the Yoruba, Bariba, Akan regardless as they are pitch-black skinned, brown skinned, light skinned, etc as opposed to Europeans.

Among these people, we consider different nuances of skin tone. If we talk about a specific me-wi as being "nya-wi" (male-black) or as "na-wi" (female-black), it will be a reference to their "very dark or pitch black complexion".

a "nya-wi"


If we talk about somebody as a "nya-vo(2)"(male-red), or "na-vo(3)" (female-red), it will be a reference to their lighter than average skin complexion.
(3)

(2)

a na-wi and a nya-wi

Only the intermediary brown/darkbrown usual complexion(4;5), won't require the use of a distinctive color adjective.


Two "regular" me-wi

Senegalese egyptologist Aboubacry Moussa LAM reported the case of two middle (?) kingdom brothers, one being called Pepi the Red, and the other, Pepi the Black. It could describe two brothers one with light, and the other with very dark skinned complexion.

I think that it is possible that Kemetians thought the same as above, and to see Kemetians referring as Nhsiw and themselves both as "blacks" (alTakruri once showed an occurrence of it) , we would need to see an occasion where they thought about Nhsiw as being part of their people by opposition to "non-blacks".

I know that this comparative explanation can be judged as being hypothetic, but what I wanted to show that color attribution to people is not as simple in human languages. I think that the most powerful demonstration of a similar use of Black/Red by the Kemetians would be a phonological and lexical comparison of Kemetic and a language related to it using related signifiers and similarly peculiar signifieds as Kemetian words for color when attributed to humans. I'm working on it.

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Originally posted by Mustafino:
According to this board Kmtyw were really confused. They called themselves Black, painted themselves Red, called foreigners Red but painted them Yellow or White.

I guess only Great Blacks were portrayed as Black and the lesser Blacks only got the perfunctory Red. Of course, when honoring foreign guests, they had to splurge a lot more, so they painted them Black or dark Brown, but someohow, most times forgot to honor them by calling them Black.

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Originally posted by Gedegbe:
Interestingly, The Aja-Fon also have a popular song entitled "vovo no baken" (the red stirs up jealousy) which is about a male who's in love with a red woman and is told to be careful about it because the red color stirs up danger and jealousy. This song reflects this double conception of the red woman: attractive and dangerous at the same time.

It may have been the same in Kemet since light-skinned women seem to have been preferred over other women in Kmt, at least by artists and feared at the same time:

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deshr.t (woman) - "the Red woman"; ie, 'evil woman'

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Originally posted by Gedegbe:
Maa' Kherew:


1)If you're saying that you're aware of this kind of contradictions in most world cultures, then why did you call Kemetians "confused" assuming they could have used a similar conception to the one many humans still use to this day and went ironic on people who believed so?

2)Do you believe that Kemetians weren't human enough to use a contradictory distribution of color adjectives for human skin color like most people do (cf.Sumerians,Ancient & modern Greeks, Igbo, Arabs, Japaneses, just to name a few)?

3)As I said, my comparison with Fon people was just HYPOTHETICAL and wasn't intended to prove a genetic relationship between the two conceptions just to show that human linguistic conceptions aren't as childish as you presented them in your previous post.


4)Well, again the Fon example I showed here isn't a proof of any genetic connection between the two conceptions, just an illustration of how humans can seem "illogical" to laymen about their semantic conceptions.

5)And yes, Kemetians could have started calling themselves "Blacks" collectively as opposed to light skinned foreigners like you seem to think Fon people did with Europeans.

6)And yes again, I can prove that many Black African people called themselves "Blacks" as far as centuries before the AD era.

My approach is the following: if you can find words etymologically related to AE "km" meaning "black" in several modern languages, and that this root is semantically associated with idiomatic uses of "black", such as the ones used by Kemetians, along with the collective designation of "black people", semantically related words with related signifiers (i.e. cognates of dshr "red" and its AE idiomatic uses, etc.), and several other striking contemporary clues of a common life of dynastic Egyptians and the ancestors of these other people,
then you can only conclude that those conceptions are the same as Kemetians'. Any objection to it?

PS: I won't answer your copy-paste from other boards so at least please summarize it with your own words and make other peoples believe that you actually understand what u're pasting and not just parroting them if you want me to deal with it.

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Originally posted by Gedegbe:

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Read my post again. I stated that the color claims do not match the paintings. People can call themselves by a variety of descriptions but there is going to be a consistency in the visual and the verbal. If they saw themselves as Black why would they paint themselves as lighter than others farther south on average and why would they not call the ones farther south black? In your language do you not also refer to you neighbors as Black?"

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Same goes for your theory, dude. If you claim that Egyptians derived ethnonym Kmt (rmt) from toponym Kmt (Niw.t) , then why didn't Egyptians called Southerners "Kmt (rmt)" while they sometimes called their countries "Kmt (Niw.t)" (cf. Book of the Gates)? In other words, whatever it is our theory or yours that is correct, Kemetians should have called Southerners "Kmt" (Rmt) but according to written evidence, they didn't.

They actually probably did but we can't check it only relying on Mdw Ntr because of the lack of written evidence. Indeed, papyri are far from having recorded every aspect of Kemetian civilization. Historical/Comparative linguistics are a good approach to realize it. So ironically, your argument of Kmt (rmt) not being found as a designation for Southerners is irrelevant in regard to your theory, but does support the un-exhaustivity of Egyptian written traditions as a description of their civilization.

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But Egypt was called Black way before that and so did contact with lighter Africans and Near Asians. So that claim is shallow. Plus the claim here is that they called themselves Black way before foreign influence.

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As I said papyri are far from having recorded every aspect of Kemetian civilization, but even taking them into account that is definitely not what I concluded from my readings. Could you please tell me what this claim is based upon?

By the way, the "black designation for whole populations" is often used by Africans to describe people with complexions from light brown to pitch black and thus matches as much with Egyptian self-depictions as with Egyptian depictions of Southerners.

So why couldn't they have called themselves "Blacks (People) (in complexion) "(but not their southern neighbors) when they called themselves Rmt "men" (in opposition to their Southern Neighbors)?

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6)And yes again, I can prove that many Black African people called themselves "Blacks" as far as centuries before the AD era.

SO go ahead and prove it. Not individuals, mind you. Whole populations.

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Well, I exposed my method above, and that is the one I applied to several modern languages/ethnic groups. I won't put it in here because it will be the subject of my second article (the first will be published in the next issue of Ankh, an African Civilizations journal). But If you don't have any objection to the method I succesfully applied to several languages, I take it that you agree with it and then with the fact that Kemetians at some point of their history used the ethnonym "Blacks" to refer to their complexion.

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Originally posted by Please call me MIDOGBE:

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But you are missing something, the irony here is that NiankhPepi is depicted NO DIFFERENTLY from other Egyptians, even with the appendage "the black", if that is indeed the correct translation. If HE is called black, but portrayed no differently than other Egyptians, then what are the others? Black as well is the point.

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No, I took that into account, and as I said, some of these color epithets were used to distinguish people sharing features or from a same environment(cf. homonyms like the two brothers both named Hapi and only distinguished by the color epithet (dshr & km).

What I guess from the evidence presented so far is that both epithets, when used in microsociological contexts (as opposed to macrosociological i.e. national or "ethnic" contexts) had the semantic value of "fair" and "dark" that could be "translated" in different ways.

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We must be careful about following this translation as "the black" and look at the original heiroglyphs ourselves. It may be just another Eurocentric ruse to try and isolate this OBVIOUSLY black African image as being NOT NORMAL for ancient Egypt. This is a blatantly obviously false point of view, but nevertheless that is what is intended by such a translation.

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I don't know what you assume the epithets "dshr" and "km" would have actually meant, but I don't think there is an actual way to distinguish the Md Ntr for "complete" from the one for "black" from a graphic standpoint.

But since it seems pretty clear to me that the colors "km" and "dSr" were antonyms in Kemetic (cf. dshr.t/km.t), that the two epithets applied to the Hapi's were as well, while the two homonyms of the colors "complete" & "evil", were not to my knowledge.

Hapi dSr "Evil Hapi" or the occurrences of highly ranked Kemetian officials nicknamed "red" translated by "evil" cited by LAM wouldn't make much sense IMO.

I haven't the book at hand right now, but LAM 1993 cited several examples of indigenous Black African names meaning "the black" as reference to their complexions. Nothing "Eurocentric" there.

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