Here is a famous Sudanese joke for you. The last time I heard it was tonight at the local coffee shop on the corner. And yes, this is one of those jokes nobody seems to go tired of except you. Enjoy...
There was a Sudanese boy who had a rather well situated family. His family and especially his carrier focused father wanted his son to have a solid education. So english language was a must to master. But unfortunately the son was quite bad in this particular class and consantly fell behind the rest of the class.
His father was deeply worried and thought some drastic meassures had to be done to get english into to this boys head. In the area there was foreigner who spoke excellent english so he would have to help his son.
The father entered negotiations with the foreigner. And the result was an agreement where the two, his son and the foreigner, were to be locked into the boys house for three months. Provided that the foreigner got well paid salary and all the supplies needed to live there with out leaving. The agreement was agreed and so it happened. A part of the deal was also that noone would disturb the two in these three months. Just leave the supplies at the door and go away.
So after three months the father was anxious to speak to his son in english. So when the two came out of the house the whole family waited in anticipation.
The foreigner came out and spoke fluent arabic and the boy still did not know a word of english.
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Upgrade your Brain Today From DumbWidth To AfricanWidth Highest Level might help u understand life and who u are better so u wont look stupid on every post. BigMo u are full of follies
Posts: 410 | From: Al-Ard | Registered: Jun 2009
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quote:Originally posted by AswaniAswad: Upgrade your Brain Today From DumbWidth To AfricanWidth Highest Level might help u understand life and who u are better so u wont look stupid on every post. BigMo u are full of follies
يا ولد يا حمار -- عمرك ما حتفهم حاجة - كل سنة و أنت طيب Posts: 2462 | Registered: Apr 2009
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quote:Originally posted by Morpheus: So is BigMo a legit Egyptian?
Depends on what you mean by "legit". When BigHo made his first appearance on this forum years ago, he proved to Ausar that he is Egyptian with not only Arabic but whatever knowledge of what city he comes from. That said, after all the anti-black/anti-African rhetoric he spouted, Ausar pointed out how he is just another afrangi elite. In fact his original screen name 'Abaza' is a common family name of Egyptians who were Circassians (Caucasus people) who entered Egypt during the Ottoman Turkish days.
So is he a native Egyptian? Yes. But is he indigenous and a direct descendant of the pharaonic peoples? Obviously not!
Posts: 26239 | From: Atlanta, Georgia, USA | Registered: Feb 2005
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Wow BigMo told me in Arabic he was a Mukhtaba from Saudi Arabia and that he knew that the black africans were the innocent doves of ancient egypt.
How did U and Ausar come to the conclusion that BigMo is a Circassian what did u do a backround check and DNA test.
Posts: 410 | From: Al-Ard | Registered: Jun 2009
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Some background upon the Abaza surname. Most Egyptian peasants(fellahin) excluding the sa3eedi,donot have surnames. Most take the name of the grandfather because of paternal desent. In Egypt you sometimes can identify a non-indigenous person by factors like speech,dress,and even economic status. This is not to say that the lines are not slightly blured because some mixing ans assimuilation has trickled down to the ordinary modern Egyptian population. However, I am willing to bet that many of the more affluent Egyptian families in the west probably have some foreign origins. Even within Sa3eed there are Egyptians that claim Circassian or Arabic desent. Some claim Ashraf. That is a lineage that desends back to the prophet muhammed.
I cannot say what ethnicity Big Mo is except he has a a heavy bias against dark skinned people. Lots of Egyptians,even the dark ones, donot particulary like many sub-saharan groups but he takes it to the extreme.
The multi-layered ethnicity of modern Egypt is very complex and not easily undestood to those without knowledge of Egypt in all periods including the post-revolution.
Posts: 8675 | From: Tukuler al~Takruri as Ardo since OCT2014 | Registered: Feb 2003
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^ Ausar, what you say about Fellahin not having surnames might bear relevance here.
Posts: 26239 | From: Atlanta, Georgia, USA | Registered: Feb 2005
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Sounds much better in Arabic. Especially what the khawaja says in Arabic after trying to teach the son English.
Posts: 895 | Registered: Feb 2010
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quote:Originally posted by userman: [qb] Stanley Crouch
The Afrocentric Hustle
Though their claims have little intellectual substance, advocates of Afrocentrism press their agenda by appealing to resentment and guilt.
Our democracy is founded in tragic optimism, an acceptance of human frailty that is not defeatist. Like the blues singer, our American job is to address the universal limitations of life and the foibles of human character while asserting a lyrical but unsentimental high-mindedness. Like the doctor, our democracy must face the unavoidable varieties of disease, decay, and death, yet maintain commitment to birth, to health, to the infinite possibilities and freedoms that can result from successful research and experimentation.
It is, therefore, our democratic duty to cast a cold eye on the life of our policies. We have to weed out corruption whenever we encounter it and redeem ourselves from bad or naive policy, either by making fresh experiments or by returning to things that once worked but were set aside for new approaches that promised to do the job better. If we don’t accept these democratic duties, we will continue to allow intellectual con artists and quacks to raise their tents and hang their shingles on our campuses.
The emergence of Afrocentrism has revealed a continuing crisis in the intellectual assessment of race, history, and culture in our nation. It is another example of how quickly we will submit to visions that are at odds with the heroic imperative of uniting our society. Quite obviously, when it comes to skin tone and complaint, we remain ever gullible, willing to sponsor almost any set of conceptions that makes fresh accusations against our society. In that sense, Afrocentrism is also a commentary on the infinite career possibilities of our time. Just as almost anything can be sold as art, almost any idea capable of finding a constituency can make its way onto our campuses and into our discussions of policy.
In the interest of doing penance, we will accept a shaky system of thought if it makes use of the linguistic pressure points that allow us to experience the sadomasochistic rituals we accept in place of the hard study and responsible precision that should be brought to the continuing assessment of new claims and new ideas. Our desperate good will pushes us to pretend that these flagellation rituals have something to do with facing the facts about injustice in our country and in the history of the world. The refusal to accept the tragic fundamentals of human life has led to our bending before a politics of blame in which all evil can be traced to the devil’s address, which is, in some way, the address of the privileged and the successful. We have borrowed from the realm of therapy the idea that our parents are to blame for our problems, and projected it onto the larger society, absolving the so-called oppressed from responsibility for their actions. We don’t understand—as did the geniuses who shaped the Constitution—that we must always be so cynical about new ways of abusing power that we remain ever wary of intellectual and political pollution.
As a movement, Afrocentrism is another of the clever but essentially simple-minded hustles that have come about over the last 25 years, promoted by what was once called “the professional Negro”—a person whose “identity” and “struggle” constituted a commodity. James Baldwin was a master of the genre, as a writer, public speaker, and television guest, but he arrived before his brand of engagement by harangue was institutionalized. Now, as for most specious American ideas claiming to “get the story straight,” the best market for this commodity is our universities, where it sells like pancakes, buttered by the naive indignation of students and sweetened by gushes of pitying or self-pitying syrup.
Though at its core Afrocentrism has little intellectual substance, it has benefited from the overall decline of faith that has caused intellectuals to fumble the heroic demands of our time. The discontinuity of ideals and actions and the long list of atrocities committed in the name of God and country have convinced many Western intellectuals that the only sensible postures are those of the defeatist and the cynic. Like the tenured Marxist, the Afrocentrist will use the contradiction to define the whole; he or she asserts that Western civilization, for all its pretty ideas, is no more than the work of imperialists and racists who seek an invincible order of geopolitical domination, inextricably connected to profit and exploitation of white over black. The ideals of Western democracies that have struggled to push their policies closer to the universal humanism of the Enlightenment are scoffed at. Where the Marxist looks forward to a sentimental paradise of workers uber alles, the Afrocentrist speaks of a paradise lost and the possibility of a paradise regained—if only black people will rediscover the essentials of their African identity.
For all its pretensions to expanding our vision, the Afrocentrist movement is not propelled by a desire to bring about any significant enrichment of our American culture. What Afrocentrists almost always want is power—the power to be the final arbiter of historical truth, no matter how flimsy their case might be. Like most conspiracy theorists, Afrocentrists accept only their own sources of argument and “proof”; all else is defined as either willfully flawed or brought to debate solely to maintain a vision of history and ideas in which Europe is preeminent. Thus, the worst insult is that critics are “Eurocentric.” Further, when charged with shoddy scholarship, the Afrocentrist retorts that his purportedly revolutionary work uses means of research and assessment outside “European methodology.” However superficial that defense might seem, an important tradition in our country’s history makes it seem at least plausible at first glance. Americans have, from the sciences to the arts, as often as not had to invent the forms that allowed for the purest expressions of our political imagination, national sensibility, and multiethnic history. The Gettysburg Address, the Second Inaugural of March 1865, the electric fight, the phonograph, the motion picture camera, the grammar of film, and the improvisational riches of jazz are the creations of homegrown geniuses such as Lincoln, Edison, Griffith, and Armstrong, who made it abundantly clear that the academy isn’t the only path to grand accomplishment.
Jazz is one of the most important examples of this. It is a perfectly democratic music that reached its peaks outside of “European methodology. “ It has both intuitive geniuses like Louis Armstrong and Billie Holiday and unarguable intellectuals like Duke Ellington and Dizzy Gillespie. Both were rejected by the academy once upon a twentieth-century time. Those with a simple explanation attribute it all to race, which can by no means be left out of the discussion. But we must remember that white jazz musicians were not embraced either, no matter how popular, and that most major aesthetic movements of this century were controversial worldwide. In short, the academic and critical resistance met by jazz musicians was also met by Picasso, Joyce, and Stravinsky.
Jazz musicians weren’t initially accepted in academic circles because, though they could hear harmonic structures perfectly, the intuitives didn’t use theoretical terminology. The intellectuals could, but it took both to make jazz. The intuitives and the intellectuals had one thing in common, however—the ability to achieve objective aesthetic logic. That is why the music grew with such speed and drew depth and breadth from every kind of talent.
So when Afrocentrists defend low-quality work with assertions about the limitations of “European methodology,” they arc drawing upon the American tradition of achievements in political thought, technology, cinema, and jazz that were developed outside the academy to defend themselves. They ignore, however, the objective quality of those achievements. As Gerald Early points out, Afrocentrists have bootlegged the deconstructionist idea that there is no such thing as objective value; a thing’s “value” is merely the reflection of a cultural consensus.
Afrocentrists also reject education as “Eurocentric indoctrination.” They maintain that Western history as written is an unrelenting cultural war that aims to justify and maintain the subjugation of African peoples, and, when literal subjugation is not the goal, to impose upon them a self-hating idolatry of all that is European or European-derived. Afrocentrism, then, presents itself as ethnic liberation, a circling of the wagons within the academy, a bringing down of Eurocentric authority by black intellectual rebellion.
At the same time, Afrocentrists—like those who promote other protest versions of study—want the respect given to traditional disciplines without having to measure up to the standards of traditional research. Though ever scoffing at the academy, they want the prestige and the benefits that come of being there. Thus, Afrocentrism is the career path of a purported radical who seeks tenure. Its proponents justify this on the grounds that the campaign is at least partially one of evangelizing black people about their African heritage. What better battlegrounds than the campuses of tenuring institutions?
A central tenet of Afrocentrism is that Egypt was black and that Greco-Roman civilization was the result of its influence. The foundation of Western civilization, therefore, is African. This is a relatively sophisticated version of Elijah Muhammad’s Yacub myth in which the white man is invented by a mad black scientist determined to destroy the world through an innately evil creature. Why this obsession with Egypt being African and black? Firstly, monuments. There is no significant African architecture capable of rivaling the grand wonders of the world, European or not. Secondly, Africa has no body of thought comparable to that upon which Western civilization has developed its morality, governmental structures, technology, economic systems, and its literary, dramatic, plastic, and musical arts. None of these facts bespeaks an innate black inferiority, but they were used to justify the barbaric treatment of subject peoples by colonial powers waging ruthless campaigns for chattel labor and natural resources.
In fact, the Afrocentrist argument is not with the Western tradition of inquiry, not with the democratic belief that greatness can arise from any point on the social spectrum, and not with the ideas of the Enlightenment that led to the abolition of slavery. Afrocentrism is a debate with the colonial vision of non-Europeans as inferior that has long been under attack from within Western democracies themselves. The Afrocentrist arguments, which are rooted in nationalism, pluralism, and cultural relativity, have their origins in the Western tradition of critical discourse. Afrocentrism is absolutely Western, despite the name changes and African costumes of its advocates.
Afrocentrism benefits from the obsession with “authenticity” of this mongrel nation of ours. More than a few of us yearn for an aristocratic pedigree. If family won’t do, then we might snatch the unwieldy crown of race to distinguish ourselves. This has been the appeal of both the Ku Klux Man and the Nation of Islam. Membership allows one to rise from the bottom and suddenly become part of an elite. Poor “white trash” become “real” white men when performing violent acts in defense of “white civilization.” Negro criminals, embracing a distorted version of Islam, come to understand that the white man is “the devil” and that the black race is the original parent of humankind. College students swallow Afrocentrism and conclude that all their problems are the result of not possessing an “African-centered” worldview.
These are also responses to humiliation. That humiliation is the source of the hysteria that gives such a terrible aspect to the desire to be done with all niceties, to utterly destroy the structure that has engendered the feeling of inferiority or of helplessly being had from the first encounter up to the present. Such response is an expression of having taken the insults of the opposition too seriously, a retreat from engagement, a dismissal of complexity in favor of the home team, a racial isolationist policy.
To justify the myopic vision that emerges requires a list of atrocities—real, exaggerated, and invented. The great tragedies of the white South were the loss of the Civil War and the humiliations of Reconstruction; for the black nationalist, the great tragedies were slavery, the colonial exploitation of Africa, and the European denial of the moral superiority of African culture and civilization, beginning with Egypt.
Our list of grievances may be specific to our particular ethnic or regional history, but the ideas that lie beneath our response evolved from the conflicts between the French and the Germans following the Thirty Years War. When Frederick the Great invited the French into Germany in the eighteenth century, French culture was the most admired in Europe, while Germany had contributed very little to the Renaissance. In today’s terminology, Germany was “underdeveloped.” Eventually, a whole school of rebellious German thought came into being, attacking the French worship of reason and the idea that there was one cultural standard by which all good, mediocrity, and baseness could be judged. When Isaiah Berlin describes outraged German thinking in The Crooked Timber of Humanity, he could be speaking as easily of Afrocentrism and the cultural relativism that has been absorbed by Western society in general from the discipline of anthropology:
The sages of Paris reduce both knowledge and life to systems of contrived rules, the pursuit of external goods, for which men prostitute themselves, and sell their inner freedom, their authenticity; men, Germans, should seek to be themselves, instead of imitating—aping—strangers who have no connection with their own real natures and memories and ways of life. A man’s powers of creation can only be exercised fully on his own native heath, living among men who are akin to him, physically and spiritually, those who speak his language, amongst whom he feels at home, with whom he feels that he belongs. Only so can true cultures be generated, each unique, each making its own peculiar contribution to human civilization, each pursuing its own values its own way, not to be submerged in some general cosmopolitan ocean which robs all native cultures of their particular substance and colour, of their national spirit and genius, which can only flourish on its own soil, from its own roots, stretching back into a common past.
Afrocentrism’s success is due to the fact that it reiterates those arguments, which have become central to the Western cultural debate. But we fail ourselves if we give in to the idea that because all human communities have equal access to greatness all cultures are equal. They are not, and the ignorance, squalor, and disease of the Third World make that quite obvious, just as the rise of the Third Reich and the recent slide into overt tribalism in Eastern Europe prove that no ideas or traditions make us forever invincible to the barbarian call of the wild. Yet if there were not something intrinsically superior about the way in which the West has gathered and ordered knowledge, other cultures wouldn’t so easily fall under the sway of what André Malraux called “The Temptation of the West.” The West has put together the largest and richest repository of human culture, primarily because the vision of universal humanism and the tradition of scientific inquiry have led to the most impressive investigations into human life and the natural world. It is Western curiosity and the conscience of democracy that have made so many inroads against barbarism within and without.
This is obvious to Afrocentrists, but it is not in their career interests to look with equal critical vision at the West and the rest of the world; it would make things less reducible to soap opera politics, to the maudlin elevation of simplistic good and evil. Then the real question of bringing together one’s ethnic heritage with one’s human heritage would need to be addressed. It wouldn’t be so easy to manipulate the emotions of administrators and insecure students. Embracing a circumscribed ethnic identity wouldn’t be seen as a form of therapy, a born-again experience enabling one to cease being an American shackled by feelings of inferiority and to become a confident, wise African.
The Afrocentrist goal is quite similar to that of the white South in the wake of Reconstruction. Having lost the shooting war, white racists won the policy war, establishing a segregated society in which racial interests took precedence over the national vision of democratic rights. The result was nearly a century of struggle before the Constitution—through blood, thunder, and jurisprudence—took its rightful place as the law of the land, with no states’ rights arguments accepted. Knowingly or not, the Afrocentrist responds to the fact that black nationalists and their “revolutionary” counterparts lost the struggle for the black community in the Sixties. In the wake of submission at a latter-day Appomattox—the dissolution of black nationalism and groups like the Black Panthers—the Afrocentrist wishes to replicate the success of white segregationists. Like the segregationist, the Afrocentrist wants to benefit from the power and prosperity of the country while holding at arm’s length anything incompatible with a vision of race as a social absolute. The Afrocentrist is waging a policy war through a curriculum that preaches perpetual alienation of black and white, no matter how far removed from the truth it may be. By attempting to win the souls of black college students and to fundamentally influence what is taught to black children in public schools, the Afrocentrist seeks a large enough constituency to bring about what white segregationists once promised—a society that is “separate but equal.”
Yet the central failure of Afrocentrism is that it doesn’t recognize what Afro-Americans have done, which is to realize over and over, and often against imposing obstacles, the possibilities inherent in democratic society. Lincoln recognized this when he told his secretary that, given his point of social origin, Frederick Douglass was probably the most meritorious man in the entire United States. Originating in tribes whose levels of sophistication were laughable compared to the best of Europe, black Americans have risen to the top of every profession in our society—as scientists, educators, aviators, politicians, artists, lawyers, judges, athletes, military leaders, and so on.
This achievement was hard-won. At its root was a cultural phenomenon. Instead of expressing their submission to white people by embracing Christianity, as black nationalists always claim, Afro-Americans recognized the extraordinary insights into human frailty that run throughout the Old Testament, and the fact that the New Testament contains perhaps the greatest blues line of all time—”Father, why hast thou forsaken me?” In essence, the harsh insights of the Bible were perfectly compatible with the cold-eyed affirmation of the blues, and from those spiritual and secular foundations an indelibly American sensibility evolved, one perfectly suited to the demands of this society. The result is an incredibly long line of achievements that predate the narrow black nationalism that would segregate the world and its culture into the Eurocentric or Afrocentric, and which are the very best arguments against all forms of prejudice.
We all deny that tradition of hard-won achievement whenever our conciliatory cowardice gets the best of us and we treat black people like spoiled children who shouldn’t be asked to meet the standards that the best of all Americans have met. When the records need to be set straight, set them straight. When there is new information that will enrich our understanding of human grandeur and human folly, make that information part of the ongoing dialogue that has shaped Western civilization’s conscience and will. But we can never forget that our fate as Americans is, finally, collective, and that we fail our mission as a democratic nation whenever we remake the rules or distort the truth in the interest of satisfying a constituency unwilling to assert the tragic optimism so intrinsic to the blues and to the Constitution.
The jealous, unintelligent, untalented and hateful dumb piece of sh*t above doesn't know that Abdul Rahman Ibrahim a Senegalese Prince, is actually the story by Alex Haley's book ROOTS.
He just criticizes anybody and everything as way to make money, aka a hustle. So he swings his arms left and right in hopes he may hit, something?looool
Here you can see him being destroyed by Jazz R&B composer James Mtume.
Composer James Mtume Destroys Jazz Critic Stanley Crouch in a Debate about Miles Davis
In other areas he, stanley crouch gets destroyed too. Like in history, anthropology, archaeology, egyptology, population genetics etc...
Posts: 22234 | From: האם אינכם כילדי הכרית אלי בני ישראל | Registered: Nov 2010
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The jealous, unintelligent and untalented stanley VS...
Augustin F.C. Holl et al.
Museum of Anthropology, The University of Michigan, 2009.
Coping with uncertainty: Neolithic life in the Dhar Tichitt-Walata, Mauritania, (ca. 4000–2300 BP)
Abstract
The sandstone escarpment of the Dhar Tichitt in South-Central Mauritania was inhabited by Neolithic agropastoral communities for approximately one and half millennium during the Late Holocene, from ca. 4000 to 2300 BP. The absence of prior evidence of human settlement points to the influx of mobile herders moving away from the “drying” Sahara towards more humid lower latitudes. These herders took advantage of the peculiarities of the local geology and environment and succeeded in domesticating bulrush millet – Pennisetum sp. The emerging agropastoral subsistence complex had conflicting and/or complementary requirements depending on circumstances. In the long run, the social adjustment to the new subsistence complex, shifting site location strategies, nested settlement patterns and the rise of more encompassing polities appear to have been used to cope with climatic hazards in this relatively circumscribed area. An intense arid spell in the middle of the first millennium BC triggered the collapse of the whole Neolithic agropastoral system and the abandonment of the areas. These regions, resettled by sparse oasis-dwellers populations and iron-using communities starting from the first half of the first millennium AD, became part of the famous Ghana “empire”, the earliest state in West African history.
For more, here is an excellent thread by Jari, elaborating on this particular aspect.
Anthropology Unit of the University of Geneva: Ounjougou
The Neolithic at Ounjougou is represented by three broad and distinct phases of settlement, marked by significant techno-economic and cultural changes.
Between 9,500 and 7,000 BC, the Early Neolithic saw the precocious emergence of pottery, which appeared at the same time as the development of a strategies for selective and intensive foraging for grains in a landscape of vast grassy plains. The Middle Neolithic is particularly known for a technological aspect – the specialized production of bifacial points on quartzitic sandstone, dated between the 6th and 4th millennia BC.
The Late Neolithic is associated with pronounced cultural and economic changes, with the influence around 2,500 BC of populations arriving from the Sahara, followed by the arrival after 1,800 BC of the first millet cultivators in the region (see the article "The Late Neolithic").
The Neolithic of the Dogon Plateau ended around 300 BC, with the onset of an extremely arid climatic episode.
Rice University Susan Keech McIntosh and Roderick J. McIntosh
Roderick and Susan McIntosh excavated at Jenne-jeno and neighboring sites in 1977 and 1981 and returned in 1994 for coring and more survey, with funding from the National Science Foundation of the United States, the American Association of University Women, and the National Geographic Society (1994). This research formed the basis of their Ph.D. dissertations at Cambridge University and the University of California at Santa Barbara, respectively. The McIntoshes have published two monographs and numerous articles on their archaeological research in the Middle Niger. They are professors of anthropology at Rice University in Houston, Texas, and they continue to collaborate with Malian colleagues from the Institut des Sciences Humaines on research along the Middle Niger.
For centuries, the upper Inland Niger Delta of the Middle Niger between modern Mopti and Segou has been a vital crossroads for trade. Historical sources, such as the 1828 account of the French explorer Rene Caillié, as well as local Tarikhs (histories written in Arabic) detail for us the central role that Jenne played in the commercial activities of the Western Sudan during the last 500 years. The seventeenth century author of the Tarikh es-Sudan, al-Sadi, wrote that "it is because of this blessed town that camel caravans come to Timbuktu from all points of the horizon". In the famous "Golden Trade of the Moors", gold from mines far to the south was transported overland to Jenne, then trans-shipped on broad-bottom canoes (pirogues) to Timbuktu, and thence by camel to markets in North Africa and Europe. Leo Africanus reported in 1512 that the extensive boat trade on the Middle Niger involved massive amounts of cereals and dried fish shipped from Jenne to provision arid Timbuktu. Today, the stunning mud architecture of Jenne in distinctive Sudanic style is a legacy of its early trade ties with North Africa. Three kilometers to the southeast, the large mound called Jenne-jeno (ancient Jenne) or Djoboro (Pl. 1) is claimed by oral traditions as the original settlement of Jenne. Barren and carpeted by a thick layer of broken pottery, Jenne-jeno lay mute for decades, its history and significance totally unknown. Scientific excavations in the 1970's and 1980's revealed that the mound is composed of over five meters of debris accumulated during sixteen centuries of occupation that began c. 200 B.C.E. These excavations, in addition to more than doubling the period of known history for this region, provided some surprises regarding the local development of society. The results indicated that earlier assumptions about the emergence of complex social organization in urban settlements and the development of long-distance trade as innovations appearing only after the arrival of the Arabs in North Africa in the seventh and eighth centuries were incorrect. The archaeology of Jenne- jeno and the surrounding area clearly showed an early, indigenous growth of trade and social complexity. The importance of this discovery has resulted in the entry of Jenne- jeno, along with Jenne, on the list of UNESCO World Heritage sites.
The early settlement at Jenne-jeno.
It appears that permanent settlement first became possible in the upper Inland Niger Delta in about the third century B.C.E. Prior to that time, the flood regime of the Niger was apparently much more active, meaning that the annual floodwaters rose higher and perhaps stayed longer than they do today, such that there was no high land that regularly escaped inundation. Under these wetter circumstances, diseases carried by insects, especially tsetse fly, would have discouraged occupation. Between 200 B.C.E. and 100 C.E., the Sahel experienced significant dry episodes, that were part of the general drying trend seriously underway since 1000 B.C.E. Prior to that time, significant numbers of herders and farmers lived in what is today the southern Sahara desert, where they raised cattle, sheep and goat, grew millet, hunted, and fished in an environment of shallow lakes and grassy plains. As the environment became markedly drier after 1000 B.C.E., these populations moved southward with their stock in search of more reliable water sources. Oral traditions of groups from the Serer and Wolof of Senegal to the Soninke of Mali trace their origins back to regions of southern Mauritania that are now desert. As these stone-tool-using populations slowly moved along southward-draining river systems, they found various more congenial environments. One of these was the great interior floodplain of the Middle Niger, with its rich alluvial soil and a flood regime that was well-suited to the cultivation of rice. The earliest deposits, nearly six meters deep at Jenne- jeno (Pl. 2) have yielded the hulls of domesticated rice, sorghum, millet, and various wild swamp grasses. The population that settled at Jenne-jeno used and worked iron, fashioning the metal into both jewelry and tools. This is interesting , since there are no sources of iron ore in the floodplain. The earliest inhabitants of Jenne-jeno were already trading with areas outside the region. They also imported stone grinders and beads. The presence of two Roman or Hellenistic beads in the early levels suggests that a few very small trade goods were reaching West Africa, probably after changing hands through many intermediaries. We have not detected any evidence of influences from the Mediterranean world on the local societies at this time.
The original settlement appears to have occurred on a small patch of relatively high ground, and was probably restricted to a few circular huts of straw coated with mud daub. We find many pieces of burnt daub with mat impressions on them in the earliest levels. The pottery associated with this early material is from small, finely-made vessels with thin walls. Artifacts and housing material of this kind persist until c. 450 C.E., occurring over progressive larger area of Jenne-jeno. This indicates that the site was growing larger. In fact, by 450 C.E., the settlement had expanded to at least 25 hectares (over 60 acres).
Jenne-jeno's floruit: 450-1100 C.E.
In the deposits dated from the fifth century, there are definite indications that the organization of society is changing. We find organized cemeteries, with interments in large burial urns (Pl. 3) as well as inhumations outside of urns in simple pits, on the edge of the settlement. From an excavation unit on the western edge of Jenne-jeno, we found evidence that the site was enlarged by quarrying clay from the floodplain and mounding it at the edge of the site New trade items appear, such as copper, imported from sources a minimum of several hundred kilometers away, and gold from even more distance mines. A smithy was installed near one of our central excavation units around 800 C.E. to mold copper and bronze into ornaments, and to forge iron. Smithing continued in this locale for the next 600 years, suggesting that craftsmen had become organized in castes and operated in specific locales, much as we see in Jenne today.
The round houses at Jenne-jeno were constructed with tauf, or puddled mud, foundations, from the fifth to the ninth century. During this time, the settlement continued to grow, reaching its maximum area of 33 hectares by 850 C.E. We know that this is so because sherds of the distinctive painted pottery that was produced at Jenne-jeno only between 450-850 C.E. are present in all our excavation units, even those near the edge of the mound. And we find them at the neighboring mound of Hambarketolo, too, suggesting that these two connected sites totaling 41 hectares (100 acres) functioned as part of a single town complex (Pl. 4).
In the ninth century, two noticeable changes occur (Pl. 5): tauf house foundations are replaced by cylindrical brick architecture, and painted pottery is replaced by pottery with impressed and stamped decoration. The source of these novelties is unknown, although we can say that they did not involve any fundamental shift in the form or general layout of either houses or pottery. So it is unlikely that any major change in the ethnic composition of Jenne-jeno was associated with the changes. Change with continuity was the prevailing pattern. One of the earliest structures built using the new cylindrical brick technology (Pl. 6) was apparently the city wall, which was 3.7 meters wide at its base and ran almost two kilometers around the town. All these indications of increasingly complex social organization are particularly important in helping us understand the indigenous context of the Empire of Ghana, an influential confederation that consolidated power within large areas to the north and west of the Inland Niger Delta sometime after 500 C.E.. To date, Jenne-jeno provides our only insight into the nature of change and complexity in the Sahel prior to the establishment of the trans-Saharan trade. Although some excavations have been conducted at the presumed capital of Ghana, Kumbi Saleh (in southeastern Mauritania), these focused on the stone-built ruins dating to the period of the trans-Saharan trade.
As we currently understand the archaeology of the entire Jenne region, where over 60 archaeological sites rise from the floodplain within a 4 kilometer radius of the modern town (Pl. 7) , many of these sites were occupied at the time of Jenne-jeno's floruit between 800-1000 C.E.. We have suggested that this extraordinary settlement clustering resulted from a clumping of population around a rare conjunction of highly desirable features (Pl. 8) : excellent rice-growing soils, levees for pasture in the flood season, deep basin for pasture in the dry season and access to both major river channels and the entire inland system of secondary and tertiary marigots from communication and trade.
Decline: C.E. 1200-1400
In the eleventh and twelfth centuries, the first unambiguous evidence of North African or Islamic influences appears at Jenne-jeno in the form of brass, spindle whorls, and rectilinear houses. This occurs within a century of the traditional date of 1180 C.E. for the conversion of Jenne's king (Koi) Konboro to Islam, according to the Tarikh es-Sudan. After this point, Jenne-jeno begins a 200-year long period of decline and gradual abandonment, before it becomes a ghost town by 1400. We can speculate that Jenne-jeno declined at the expense of Jenne, perhaps related to the ascendancy of the new religion, Islam, over traditional practice. The continued practice of urn burial at Jenne-jeno through the fourteenth century tells us that many of the site's occupants did not convert to Islam. The production of terracotta statuettes in great numbers throughout the period and even into the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries elsewhere in the Inland Niger Delta may mark loci of resistance, within the context of traditional religious practice, to Islam or the leaders who practiced it. Whatever the cause of Jenne-jeno's abandonment, it was part of a larger process whereby most of the settlements occupied around Jenne in 1000 C.E. lay deserted by 1400. What caused such a realignment of the local population? Again, we can only speculate. Some people likely converted to Islam and moved to Jenne, where wealth and commercial opportunities were increasingly concentrated. But there is also the fact that the climate grew increasingly dry from 1200 C.E., causing tremendous political upheavals further north, and prompting virtual abandonment of whole regions (e.g., the Mema, studied by Malian archaeologist Tereba Togola) that could no longer sustain herds and agriculture. Some, if not all, of these factors were probably implicated in the decline of Jenne-jeno.
Jenne-jeno is easy to reach from Jenne, and its surface traces of ancient houses and pottery are evocative of its rich history. Peering into the deep erosion gullies that scar the surface, one literally looks backward in time over 1000 years.
The phase of pre-Dogon settlement began close to the beginning of the Common Era, several centuries after the end of the Late Neolithic. The populations used objects made of iron and, probably in the second half of the 1st mill. AD, began to master its production. As a whole, the technological and stylistic characteristics of pottery at pre-Dogon sites dated between the 2nd and the 13th centuries is clearly differentiated from that of the Late Neolithic. Such differences include the appearance of new décors made by several kinds of rollers and by woven impressions. This new cultural context places the Dogon Country at the intersection of three different ethnolinguistic spheres – Mande, Gur and Soghay -, for which the influences vary according to region and period.
Oral sources place Dogon settlement in an interval between the 13th and 15th centuries. Within this same period, archaeological research has demonstrated a new cultural break, evidence by the important amount of pottery made by pounding the clay on a baobab mat, typical of one of the five modern ceramic traditions (tradition A, associated with farming women). Oral traditions reveal a very complex history of Dogon settlement, due to frequent relocations of villages associated with a history of climatic and political instability: discovery of water spots, drying of rivers, famines, and land conflicts, but also withdrawal after raids by the neighboring Peul, Bambara and Mossi.
Paleometallurgy
Fieldwork at the Fiko reduction site in 2005. Photo C. Robion-Brunner
Beginning in 2002, a paleometallurgy axis was added with the aim of studying the development of siderurgy in the Dogon Country, from its origins to modern day. One of the principal objectives is to determine the moment when the structure and capacity of production of the industry allowed the widespread use of farming tools and weapons made of iron. Such use of iron corresponds to a change in the technological system within society, with significant effects on its structure and on the environment in the broad sense.
To meet this goal, a multidisciplinary approach was developed. The ethnographic approach aimed at collecting oral traditions related to siderurgy. As a result of a memory still quite alive, much information was recovered concerning the last two or three centuries. These surveys informed on historical, social and economic aspects that would be impossible to demonstrate solely by the study of the material record. They also give access to the spiritual and symbolic world in which production and ironworking were integrated. Finally, practical knowledge of modern craftspeople helped to understand and reconstruct the actions of the earlier groups.
At the same time, the archaeological approach aimed to inventory, describe and understand the material evidence of siderurgy: ancient pits from iron mines, furnaces that allowed iron extraction and forges where objects were made. These sites were systematically located across the landscape, visited and documented by descriptions, photographs and topographic designs. Characteristic sites were selected and studied in greater detail with test pits or larger excavations carried out. This work made it possible to discover furnaces and study their functioning, as well as to collect charcoal samples that could be dated by 14C and slag that could be analyzed in the laboratory to clarify technical aspects, the different modes of production and their development. The construction of a detailed topographic map was done in the aim of demonstrating the spatial organization and to estimate the quantity of debris and thus the level of production. Anthracological analysis additionally yielded important data on the vegetal cover and the model of exploitation of wood resources.
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The jealous, unintelligent and untalented stanley VS...
quote: Northern Egypt near the Mediterranean shows the same pattern- limb length data puts its peoples closer to tropically adapted Africans that cold climate Europeans
"...sample populations available from northern Egypt from before the 1st Dynasty (Merimda, Maadi and Wadi Digla) turn out to be significantly different from sample populations from early Palestine and Byblos, suggesting a lack of common ancestors over a long time. If there was a south-north cline variation along the Nile valley it did not, from this limited evidence, continue smoothly on into southern Palestine.
The limb-length proportions of males from the Egyptian sites group them with Africans rather than with Europeans."
Barry Kemp, "Ancient Egypt Anatomy of a Civilisation. (2005) Routledge. p. 52-60
quote:"When the Elephantine results were added to a broader pooling of the physical characteristics drawn from a wide geographic region which includes Africa, the Mediterranean and the Near East quite strong affinities emerge between Elephantine and populations from Nubia, supporting a strong south-north cline."
Barry Kemp. (2006) Ancient Egypt: Anatomy of a Civilization. p. 54
quote: "From the Mesolithic to the early Neolithic period different lines of evidence support an out-of-Africa Mesolithic migration to the Levant by northeastern African groups that had biological affinities with sub-Saharan populations. From a genetic point of view, several recent genetic studies have shown that sub-Sabaran genetic lineages (affiliated with the Y-chromosome PN2 clade; Underhill et al. 2001) have spread through Egypt into the Near East, the Mediterranean area, and, for some lineages, as far north as Turkey (E3b-M35 Y lineage; Cinniogclu et al. 2004; Luis et al. 2004), probably during several dispersal episodes since the Mesolithic (Cinniogelu et al. 2004; King et al. 2008; Lucotte and Mercier 2003; Luis et al. 2004; Quintana-Murci et al. 1999; Semino et al. 2004; Underhill et al. 2001). This finding is in agreement with morphological data that suggest that populations with sub-Saharan morphological elements were present in northeastern Africa, from the Paleolithic to at least the early Holocene, and diffused northward to the Levant and Anatolia beginning in the Mesolithic.
Indeed, the rare and incomplete Paleolithic to early Neolithic skeletal specimens found in Egypt - such as the 33,000-year-old Nazlet Khater specimen (Pinhasi and Semai 2000), the Wadi Kubbaniya skeleton from the late Paleolithic site in the upper Nile valley (Wendorf et al. 1986), the Qarunian (Faiyum) early Neolithic crania (Henneberg et al. 1989; Midant-Reynes 2000), and the Nabta specimen from the Neolithic Nabta Playa site in the western desert of Egypt (Henneberg et al. 1980) - show, with regard to the great African biological diversity, similarities with some of the sub-Saharan middle Paleolithic and modern sub-Saharan specimens.
This affinity pattern between ancient Egyptians and sub-Saharans has also been noticed by several other investigators (Angel 1972; Berry and Berry 1967, 1972; Keita 1995) and has been recently reinforced by the study of Brace et al. (2005), which clearly shows that the cranial morphology of prehistoric and recent northeast African populations is linked to sub-Saharan populations (Niger-Congo populations). These results support the hypothesis that some of the Paleolithic-early Holocene populations from northeast Africa were probably descendents of sub-Saharan ancestral populations...... This northward migration of northeastern African populations carrying sub-Saharan biological elements is concordant with the morphological homogeneity of the Natufian populations (Bocquentin 2003), which present morphological affinity with sub-Saharan populations (Angel 1972; Brace et al. 2005).
In addition, the Neolithic revolution was assumed to arise in the late Pleistocene Natufians and subsequently spread into Anatolia and Europe (Bar-Yosef 2002), and the first Anatolian farmers, Neolithic to Bronze Age Mediterraneans and to some degree other Neolithic-Bronze Age Europeans, show morphological affinities with the Natufians (and indirectly with sub-Saharan populations; Angel 1972; Brace et al. 2005), in concordance with a process of demie diffusion accompanying the extension of the Neolithic revolution (Cavalli-Sforza et al. 1994)."
---Cranial Discrete Traits in a Byzantine Population and Eastern Mediterranean Population Movements F. X. Ricaut, M. Waelkens. Human Biology, Volume 80, Number 5, October 2008, pp. 535-564
quote:The Upper Palaeolithic Lithic Industry of Nazlet Khater 4 (Egypt): Implications for the Stone Age/Palaeolithic of Northeastern Africa
Abstract:
Between Marine Isotope Stage (MIS) 4 and 2, Northeast Africa witnessed migrations of Homo sapiens into Eurasia. Within the context of the aridification of the Sahara, the Nile Valley probably offered a very attractive corridor into Eurasia. This region and this period are therefore central for the (pre)history of the out-of-Africa peopling of modern humans. However, there are very few sites from the beginning of the Upper Palaeolithic that document these migration events. In Egypt, the site of Nazlet Khater 4 (NK4), which is related to ancient H. sapiens quarrying activities, is one of them. Its lithic assemblage shows an important laminar component, and this, associated with its chronological position (ca. 33 ka), means that the site is the most ancient Upper Palaeolithic sites of this region. The detailed study of the Nazlet Khater 4 lithic material shows that blade production (volumetric reduction) is also associated with flake production (surface reduction). This technological duality addresses the issue of direct attribution of NK4 to the Upper Palaeolithic.
Authors: Leplongeon, Alice1; Pleurdeau, David2 Source: African Archaeological Review, Volume 28, Number 3, September 2011, pp. 213-236(24)Posts: 22234 | From: האם אינכם כילדי הכרית אלי בני ישראל | Registered: Nov 2010
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Some of the most important evidence of early man in Nubia was discovered recently by an expedition of the Royal Ontario Museum, Toronto, under the direction of Dr. Kryzstof Grzymski, on the east bank of the Nile, about 70 miles (116 km) south of Dongola, Sudan. During the early 1990's, this team discovered several sites containing hundreds of Paleolithic hand axes. At one site, however, the team identified an apparent stone tool workshop, where thousands of sandstone hand axes and flakes lay on the ground around a row of large stones set in a line, suggesting the remains of a shelter. This seems to be the earliest "habitation" site yet discovered in the Nile Valley and may be up to 70,000 years old.
What the Nubian environment was like throughout these distant times, we cannot know with certainty, but it must have changed many times. For many thousands of years it was probably far different than what it is today. Between about 50,000 to 25,000 years ago, the hand axe gradually disappeared and was replaced with numerous distinctive chipped stone industries that varied from region to region, suggesting the presence in Nubia of many different peoples or tribal groups dwelling in close proximity to each other. When we first encounter skeletal remains in Nubia, they are those of modern man: homo sapiens*.
Nubia's Oldest Battle?
From about 25,000 to 8,000 years ago, the environment gradually evolved to its present state. From this phase several very early settlement sites have been identified at the Second Cataract, near the Egypt-Sudan border. These appear to have been used seasonally by people leading a semi-nomadic existence. The people hunted, fished, and ground wild grain. The first cemeteries also appear, suggesting that people may have been living at least partly sedentary lives. One cemetery site at Jebel Sahaba, near Wadi Halfa, Sudan, contained a number of bodies that had suffered violent deaths and were buried in a mass grave. This suggests that people, even 10,000 years ago, had begun to compete with each other for resources and were willing to kill each other to control them.
Busharia reveals the precocious appearance of pottery on the African continent around the 9th millennium B.C.
The site of Busharia is located near the desert, at the edge of the alluvial plain and near an old Nile channel. It reveals the remains of human occupation at the onset of the Holocene. The settlement is rather eroded, only a few artefacts, ostrich egg fragments and extremely old ceramic sherds remain. These sherds date to circa 8200 B.C. The ceramic assemblage is homogenous, which suggests the existence of a single occupation phase. The decorations and the use of the return technique, common in the central Sahara around the 6th millennium B.C., are unique in this Nubian context for such an early period.
Remains discovered on site suggest the existence of a semi-sedentary population living from hunting, fishing, and the gathering of wild plants. A trial trench and a small-scale excavation were conducted on this Mesolithic site; however, it is impossible to obtain at present a better understanding of the context related to the first ceramics in the region. As this site is located near cultivated zones, it is thus threatened with short-term destruction.
Three scale models—of the Mesolithic hut of el-Barga ( 7500 B.C. ), the proto-urban agglomeration of the Pre-Kerma (3000 B.C.) and the ancient city of Kerma (2500-1500 B.C.)—give a glimpse of the world of the living. They show the evolution of settlements for each of the key periods in Nubian history. Huts indicate the birth of a sedentary way of life, the agglomeration confirms the settling of populations on a territory and the capital of the Kingdom of Kerma marks the culmination of the complexification of Nubian architecture with its ever more monumental constructions. The three models were created in Switzerland by Hugo Lienhard and were installed in the museum in January 2009.
Wadi el-Arab reveals an almost continuous series of settlement remains spanning two millennia as well as the first Neolithic burials known in Africa.
This site is located today in a desert region. Discovered in 2005, it has been under excavation since 2006. This is an open-air site occupied on several occasions during a period between 8300 and 6600 B.C. Its inhabitants then lived in a rather wooded environment, living on fishing, hunting and gathering.
The site reveals numerous flint tools and flakes, grinding stone fragments, ceramic sherds, ostrich eggshell beads, shells and mollusc remains, fish vertebrae and faunal remains. Rare domesticated ox bones were discovered and dated to circa 7000 B.C. This discovery is important for the question regarding the origin of animal domestication in Africa because it reinforces the idea of a local domestication of African oxen from aurochs living in the Nile Valley.
During the 2006-2007 campaign, six burial pits were excavated in three different areas. Dated to between 7000 and 6600, these burials are the first known Neolithic burials on the African continent.
The Upper Palaeolithic Lithic Industry of Nazlet Khater 4 (Egypt): Implications for the Stone Age/Palaeolithic of Northeastern Africa
Authors: Leplongeon, Alice1; Pleurdeau, David2 Source: African Archaeological Review, Volume 28, Number 3, September 2011, pp. 213-236(24)
Abstract:
Between Marine Isotope Stage (MIS) 4 and 2, Northeast Africa witnessed migrations of Homo sapiens into Eurasia. Within the context of the aridification of the Sahara, the Nile Valley probably offered a very attractive corridor into Eurasia. This region and this period are therefore central for the (pre)history of the out-of-Africa peopling of modern humans. However, there are very few sites from the beginning of the Upper Palaeolithic that document these migration events. In Egypt, the site of Nazlet Khater 4 (NK4), which is related to ancient H. sapiens quarrying activities, is one of them. Its lithic assemblage shows an important laminar component, and this, associated with its chronological position (ca. 33 ka), means that the site is the most ancient Upper Palaeolithic sites of this region. The detailed study of the Nazlet Khater 4 lithic material shows that blade production (volumetric reduction) is also associated with flake production (surface reduction). This technological duality addresses the issue of direct attribution of NK4 to the Upper Palaeolithic.
Wadi Kubbaniya (ca. 17,000–15,000 B.C.)
In Egypt, the earliest evidence of humans can be recognized only from tools found scattered over an ancient surface, sometimes with hearths nearby. In Wadi Kubbaniya, a dried-up streambed cutting through the Western Desert to the floodplain northwest of Aswan in Upper Egypt, some interesting sites of the kind described above have been recorded. A cluster of Late Paleolithic camps was located in two different topographic zones: on the tops of dunes and the floor of the wadi (streambed) where it enters the valley. Although no signs of houses were found, diverse and sophisticated stone implements for hunting, fishing, and collecting and processing plants were discovered around hearths. Most tools were bladelets made from a local stone called chert that is widely used in tool fabrication. The bones of wild cattle, hartebeest, many types of fish and birds, as well as the occasional hippopotamus have been identified in the occupation layers. Charred remains of plants that the inhabitants consumed, especially tubers, have also been found.
It appears from the zoological and botanical remains at the various sites in this wadi that the two environmental zones were exploited at different times. We know that the dune sites were occupied when the Nile River flooded the wadi because large numbers of fish and migratory bird bones were found at this location. When the water receded, people then moved down onto the silt left behind on the wadi floor and the floodplain, probably following large animals that looked for water there in the dry season. Paleolithic peoples lived at Wadi Kubbaniya for about 2,000 years, exploiting the different environments as the seasons changed. Other ancient camps have been discovered along the Nile from Sudan to the Mediterranean, yielding similar tools and food remains. These sites demonstrate that the early inhabitants of the Nile valley and its nearby deserts had learned how to exploit local environments, developing economic strategies that were maintained in later cultural traditions of pharaonic Egypt.
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The jealous, unintelligent and untalented stanley VS...
DNA analysis shows that Egyptians group with African peoples from the Sudan, Ethiopia, East Africa and parts of Cameroon, not with Europe or the Middle East.
*Notes on E-M78 and Rosa DNA study linking Egyptians with East and Central Africans.[/b] DNA study (Rosa et al. 2007) groups Egyptians with East and Central Africans. Other DNA studies link these peoples together. Quote:“the majority of Y chromosomes found in populations in Egypt, Sudan, Ethiopia and Oromos in Somalia and North Kenya (Boranas) belong to haplogroup E3b1 defined by the Y chromosome marker M78“(Sanchez 2005). Codes: Egy=Egypt. Or= Oromo, Ethiopia. Am=Amahara, Ethiopia. Sud=Sudan. FCA=Cameroon. Maa= Massai, Kenya. Note: Eighty (80)% or more of the haplotypes in Cameroon are of West African origin (Rosa et al. 2007, Cerny et al. 2006). Ethiopia, Cameroon and most of the Sudan is located below the Sahara, and thus sub-Saharan.-- Rosa, et al.(2007) Y-chromosomal diversity in the population of Guinea-Bissau. BMC Evolutionary Biology. 7:124
Comparisons of linear body proportions of Old Kingdom and non-Old Kingdom period individuals, and workers and high officials in our sample found no statistically significant differences among them. Zakrzewski (2003) also found little evidence for differences in linear body proportions of Egyptians over a wider temporal range. In general, recent studies of skeletal variation among ancient Egyptians support scenarios of biological continuity through time. Irish (2006) analyzed quantitative and qualitative dental traits of 996 Egyptians from Neolithic through Roman periods, reporting the presence of a few outliers but concluding that the dental samples appear to be largely homogeneous and that the affinities observed indicate overall biological uniformity and continuity from Predynastic through Dynastic and Postdynastic periods.
Zakrzewski (2007) provided a comprehensive summary of previous Egyptian craniometric studies and examined Egyptian crania from six time periods. She found that the earlier samples were relatively more homogeneous in comparison to the later groups. However, overall results indicated genetic continuity over the Egyptian Predynastic and Early Dynastic periods, albeit with a high level of genetic diversity within the population, suggesting an indigenous process of state formation. She also concluded that while the biological patterning of the Egyptian population varied across time, no consistent temporal or spatial trends are apparent. Thus, the stature estimation formulae developed here may be broadly applicable to all ancient Egyptian populations..".
("Stature estimation in ancient Egyptians: A new technique based on anatomical reconstruction of stature." Michelle H. Raxter, Christopher B. Ruff, Ayman Azab, Moushira Erfan, Muhammad Soliman, Aly El-Sawaf,(Am J Phys Anthropol. 2008, Jun;136(2):147-55
AMERICAN JOURNAL OF PHYSICAL ANTHROPOLOGY 121:219–229 (2003)
Variation in Ancient Egyptian Stature and Body Proportions Sonia R. Zakrzewski* Department of Archaeology, University of Southampton, Southampton SO17 1BF, UK
'The ancient Egyptians have been described as having a “ Negroid” body plan (Robins, 1983).
Variations in the proximal to distal segments of each limb were therefore examined. Of the ratios considered, only maximum humerus length to maximum ulna length (XLH/XLU) showed statistically significant change through time.
This change was a relative decrease in the length of the humerus as compared with the ulna, suggesting the development of an increasingly African body plan with time.
This may also be the result of Nubian mercenaries being included in the sample from Gebelein.
The nature of the body plan was also investigated by comparing the intermembral, brachial, and crural indices for these samples with values obtained from the literature. No significant differences were found in either index through time for either sex. The raw values in Table 6 suggest that Egyptians had the “ super-Negroid ” body plan described by Robins (1983). The values for the brachial and crural indices show that the distal segments of each limb are longer relative to the proximal segments than in many “African” populations (data from Aiello and Dean, 1990). This pattern is supported by Figure 7 (a plot of population mean femoral and tibial lengths; data from Ruff, 1994), which indicates that the Egyptians generally have tropical body plans. Of the Egyptian samples, only the Badarian and Early Dynastic period populations have shorter tibiae than predicted from femoral length. Despite these differences, all samples lie relatively clustered together as compared to the other populations.'
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The jealous, unintelligent and untalented stanley VS...
More on the people who match the Ancient Egyptians in a continues model. From where the Egyptian culture arose.
The nubian mesolithic: A consideration of the Wadi Halfa remains
References and further reading may be available for this article. To view references and further reading you must purchase this article.
Meredith F. Small* et al.
Morphological variation of the skeletal remains of ancient Nubia has been traditionally explained as a product of multiple migrations into the Nile Valley.
In contrast, various researchers have noted a continuity in craniofacial variation from Mesolithic through Neolithic times.
This apparent continuity could be explained by in situ cultural evolution producing shifts in selective pressures which may act on teeth, the facial complex, and the cranial vault.
A series of 13 Mesolithic skulls from Wadi Halfa, Sudan, are compared to Nubian Neolithic remains by means of extended canonical analysis.
Results support recent research which suggests consistent trends of facial reduction and cranial vault expansion from Mesolithic through Neolithic times.
From about 20,000 BCE, there are further refinements in stone technology. Very specialized tools appeared, including arrowheads, fishhooks, grindstones, and awls. These most refined of stone implements have the generic name 'microlithic.' This era of the late Paleolithic also saw the development of complex composite tools such as bows and arrows. As well, fishing equipment, including boats, and even pottery appeared in some environmental niches. As tools became more specialized and finely made, local variations, including stylistic ones, became more and more the rule...
From the standpoint of African history the most important development of the late Stone Age was the emergence of more settled ('sedentary') societies. These probably developed first along the banks of the Upper Nile in the Cataracts region, in modern day southern Egypt and northern Sudan (ancient Nubia). Evidence of barley harvesting there dates from as early as 16,000 BCE. The ability to make greater use of abundant wild grains, probably coupled with greater exploitation of aquatic resources, led to a more settled existence for some people. These more sedentary peoples were a part of what is now known collectively as the African Aquatic Culture/ Tradition. This way of life spread from the Upper Nile into a much larger area of Africa during the last great wet phase of African climate history, which began about 9,000 and peaked about 7,000 BCE. The higher rainfall levels of the period created numerous very large shallow lakes across what are now the arid southern borderlands of the Sahara desert. Inhabitants of shore communities crafted microlithic tools to exploit a marine environment: fishing and trapping aquatic animals. This provided abundant food supplies, particularly high in protein and supported the earliest known permanent settlements. Culturally and linguistically related peoples ancestral to modern Black Africans established settlements throughout this vast, ancient great lakes area. It is theorized that they spoke the mother Nilo-Saharan tongue. Sophisticated water-related technologies supported not only the development of settled communities, but also the invention of things like pottery, which were formerly thought to be associated exclusively with the Food Production Revolution of the later New Stone Age, or Neolithic. While the African aquatic tradition itself lasted only until the beginning of the modern drier period, around 3,000 BCE, its legacy has been felt ever since.
Basil Davidson, Africa in History (1975)Posts: 22234 | From: האם אינכם כילדי הכרית אלי בני ישראל | Registered: Nov 2010
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^^ that is video from a Nubian from Egypt saying they were black who is a actual Egyptologist, not some copt who fancies herself a scholar because she doesn't want to be a Arab because their muslim. Besides copts don't have tropical body plans nor a african skull cavity
Here is a woman from North Egypt, Cairo who happens to be a trained tour guide in Egyptology.
Trotter and Gleser's (Trotter and Gleser: Am J Phys Anthropol 10 (1952) 469–514; Trotter and Gleser: Am J Phys Anthropol 16 (1958) 79–123) long bone formulae for US Blacks or derivations thereof (Robins and Shute: Hum Evol 1 (1986) 313–324) have been previously used to estimate the stature of ancient Egyptians. However, limb length to stature proportions differ between human populations; consequently, the most accurate mathematical stature estimates will be obtained when the population being examined is as similar as possible in proportions to the population used to create the equations. The purpose of this study was to create new stature regression formulae based on direct reconstructions of stature in ancient Egyptians and assess their accuracy in comparison to other stature estimation methods. We also compare Egyptian body proportions to those of modern American Blacks and Whites. Living stature estimates were derived using a revised Fully anatomical method (Raxter et al.: Am J Phys Anthropol 130 (2006) 374–384). Long bone stature regression equations were then derived for each sex. Our results confirm that, although ancient Egyptians are closer in body proportion to modern American Blacks than they are to American Whites, proportions in Blacks and Egyptians are not identical. The newly generated Egyptian-based stature regression formulae have standard errors of estimate of 1.9–4.2 cm. All mean directional differences are less than 0.4% compared to anatomically estimated stature, while results using previous formulae are more variable, with mean directional biases varying between 0.2% and 1.1%, tibial and radial estimates being the most biased. There is no evidence for significant variation in proportions among temporal or social groupings; thus, the new formulae may be broadly applicable to ancient Egyptian remains.
An examination of Nubian and Egyptian biological distances: Support for biological diffusion or in situ development?
K. Goddea, b, Corresponding Author Contact Information
a Department of Anthropology, University of Tennessee
b Department of Science, South College
Abstract
Many authors have speculated on Nubian biological evolution. Because of the contact Nubians had with other peoples, migration and/or invasion (biological diffusion) were originally thought to be the biological mechanism for skeletal changes in Nubians. Later, a new hypothesis was put forth, the in situ hypothesis. The new hypothesis postulated that Nubians evolved in situ, without much genetic influence from foreign populations. This study examined 12 Egyptian and Nubian groups in an effort to explore the relationship between the two populations and to test the in situ hypothesis. Data from nine cranial nonmetric traits were assessed for an estimate of biological distance, using Mahalanobis D2 with a tetrachoric matrix. The distance scores were then input into principal coordinates analysis (PCO) to depict the relationships between the two populations. PCO detected 60% of the variation in the first two principal coordinates. A plot of the distance scores revealed only one cluster; the Nubian and Egyptian groups clustered together. The grouping of the Nubians and Egyptians indicates there may have been some sort of gene flow between these groups of Nubians and Egyptians. However, common adaptation to similar environments may also be responsible for this pattern. Although the predominant results in this study appear to support the biological diffusion hypothesis, the in situ hypothesis was not completely negated.
Analysis of Hair Samples of Mummies from Semna South, American Journal of Physical Anthropology, (1978) 49: 277-262
As Brothwell and Spearman (‘63) point out, reddish-brown ancient hair is usually the result of partial oxidation of the melanin pigment. This color was seen in a large proportion of the Semna sample, and also noted by Titlbachova and Titlbach (‘77) on Egyptian material, where it also may have resulted from the mummification process. However, the large number of blond hairs that are not associated with the cuticular damage that bleaching produces, probably points to a significantly lighter-haired population than is now present in the Nubian region. Brothwell and Spearman (’63) noted genuinely blond ancient Egyptian samples using reflectance spectrophotometry. Blondism, especially in young children, is common in many darkhaired populations (e.g., Australian, Melanesian), and is still found in some Nubian villages (J. Zabkar, personal communication).
Only one sample (M197) showed cuticular damage and irregularities definitely consistent with bleaching, although bleaching could not be ruled out in some of the blond samples.
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SETTLEMENT ARCHAEOLOGY IN NIGERIA: A SHORT NOTE
Oluwole Ogundele Department of Archaeology and Anthropology, University of Ibadan, Nigeria
INTRODUCTION The history of scientific archaeological research in Nigeria, is a relatively recent development. This dates back to the 1940's when a rock-shelter named "Rop" was investigated, in addition to the limited excavations embarked upon by Bernard Fagg, in the Nok Valley area of Central Nigeria. Similarly, rescue excavations were carried out in Igbo-Ukwu located in the eastern part of the country by Thurstan Shaw and his team in the latter part of the 1950's. Since then, several archaeological efforts have been made in few locations such as Ile-Ife, Old-Oyo, Benin and Daima all situated in the western and northern parts of Nigeria respectively.
In all these archaeological excavations, the objectives were mainly to retrieve artifacts and describe them with a view to reconstructing the cultural history of the region in question. Archaeological researches during this period, were basically artifact-oriented, and not unexpectedly, classifications based on stratigraphic evidence, occupied a central position in the scheme of things. This research orientation is with a view to gaining some insights about sequences of events and chronologies. It is important to note that apart from the fact that these archaeological works were scattered (i.e. few and far between), there were no well formulated strategies and/or research designs aimed at clarifying our understanding of the spatial dimension of the culture(s) being studied, both at the intra- and inter-site levels. Indeed, lateral-oriented activities involving mapping and excavations were not considered vital to the operationalization of research works until in the 1980's. Some of the concomitant effects of this development are as follows:
1. Artifacts retrieved from excavations appear to remain isolated, without any significant connections between them and a given geographical configuration, thus making it impossible to recreate the extent to which a people had exploited the resources within their environment. 2. Establishment of the nature and pattern(s) of inter-group relations among the peoples in different parts of the country in prehistoric and proto-historic or historic periods remains a far cry.
PROBLEMS AND PERSPECTIVES Since the archaeologist is concerned with the reconstruction of palaeo-cultures, space or environment is one of the indispensable variables (Ogundele 1989; 1990; 1994). However, in having an over-view of the works of pioneers of archaeology in Nigeria and to some extent the present crop of experts in the field, efforts should be made to take into consideration several problems that faced them or are still facing some of them. Given this situation, my assessonent of their works is done here with great respect and caution. Indeed one major objective of this piece of work, is to attempts to promote a new appreciation of available or potential archaeological data especially settlement finds and features, with a view to broadening our horizon of archaeological scholarship in Nigeria and West Africa as a whole.
Until very recently, all the archaeologists working in Nigeria were mainly Europeans and they did not often stay long enough to embark upon systematic and long-term archaeological surveys. In other words, Nigerian archaeologists are still disappointingly few and largely as a result, some systematic archaeological investigations of the entire country is still a far cry. Closely related to the problem listed above, is the fact that Nigeria is a vast country, too large for a handful of archaeologists to manage. In addition, the geographical character of the region is extremely complex. Thus for example, the major vegetational zones (especially the thick forests and swamps in the south, and the very desert area to the north), constitute in themselves, distinct obstacles to archaeological field-work.
Another major difficulty has to do with the fact that Nigeria is situated in the humid tropics and as with other humid tropical regions, the soils are acidic and erosion is generally very pronounced. These have adversely affected the preservation of archaeological remains especially fragile items like bones and wooden objects of great time-depth. However, there are still some depositional cases such as deltaic conditions, rock-shelters and caves, where archaeological materials are relatively better preserved. Overall however, the archaeologist working in Nigeria is left with just the imperishables such as stone tools and potsherds and little else in the way of human occupation to analyze, reconstruct and interpret.
The lack and in places paucity of data has tended to encourage unrestrained speculation which in fact largely accounts for some insupportable hypotheses being put forward by many early or pioneer archaeologists, concerning the nature of culture change in Nigeria. One of such hypotheses was that the peopling of the forest region (southern Nigeria and indeed, all of the Guinea zone of West Africa) was a much later development than that of the northern open savanna area. Recent archaeological research has shown that people were already living in south-western Nigeria (specifically Iwo-Eleru) as early as 9000 BC and perhaps earlier at Ugwuelle-Uturu (Okigwe) in south-eastern Nigeria (Shaw and Daniels 1984: 7-100).
Lack of adequate funding and dating facilities has also caused a lag in archaeological research in Nigeria and indeed, all of West Africa. Many sites threatened by construction work such as bridges, roads, houses and dams are not normally rescued because there are no sources of funding. The governments of West African countries have not been supportive enough of archaeological work, partly because both the leaders and the peoples do not recognize the role a sound knowledge of the past can play in nation-building.
There is up to now, no well-equipped dating laboratory either to process charcoal samples or potsherds. The only laboratory in West Africa is in Senegal and it is far from being well equipped. Consequently, it is restricted mostly to processing charcoal samples collected from sites in Senegal. Given this problem, samples collected from archaeological excavations have to be sent abroad for processing. This delays the rate at which archaeological information is put into its proper time perspective.
It seems also that a great deal more time and attention are paid to the later phases of human settlement history than the earlier. Consequently, much more is known of iron age and historic settlements in Nigeria and West Africa as a whole. Some considerable amount of work has been done for these phases in Benin City in Nigeria, Niani in Niger Republic and Jenne-Jeno in Mali, among other places in West Africa. One reason for this interest in the later phase seems to rest in the fact that there is a meeting point between historic settlement archaeology and oral traditions in the region generally and the fact that people can identify much more easily with this phase because it is more recent and by this fact closer to our times.
It is pertinent to note that there is no settlement archaeology tradition(s) in Nigeria up to the early 1980's. Even at places like Ife, Old-Oyo, Benin and Zaria where some relatively limited archaeological work has been carried out, efforts were mainly concentrated on walls (Soper 1981: 61-81; Darling 1984: 498-504; Leggett 1969: 27). In Southern Nigeria, proto-historic settlements were generally composed of mud or sun-dried brick houses. Most if not all these house structures and defensive and/or demarcatory walls have either been destroyed or obliterated by erosion. The tradition(s) of constructing houses with stones in the pre colonial past was well reflected in many parts of Northern Nigeria. In fact, many hill-top settlements in this area of Nigeria were composed of stone houses - a direct response among other things, to opportunities offered by the immediate environment (Netting 1968: 18-28; Denyer 1978: 41-47). Despite the nature of the soil chemistry (acidic soil) stone buildings are still better preserved than mud houses.
Relics of ancient settlements are much fewer in the south than in the north, because of the different building materials as well as techniques of construction which are partly determined by diverse historical experiences among other things. Hill-tops and slopes offer abundant boulders which could be dressed for construction, while in the plains, it is much easier to obtain mud for building houses. For example, the dispersed mode of settlement of the present-day Tiv as opposed to the nucleated rural settlements on the hill-tops and slopes in ancient times, coupled with their shifting agricultural system, as well as the factor of refarming and/or resettlement of former sites by some daughter groups which hived off, from the original stock, make most ancient settlements and recently abandoned sites (made up of sun-dried brick houses) difficult to discover at least in a fairly well preserved state (Sokpo and Mbakighir 1990, Personal Communication).
This preservation problem among others further make the task of establishing stratigraphic sequences a little bit difficult. Nigeria is divisible into zones on the basis of techniques of construction as follows: 1. Mud construction techniques which are very common in most parts of southern Nigeria. 2. Stone construction techniques which are very common in most parts of Northern Nigeria; and 3. Combination of mud and stone construction techniques. This development is common in Tivland, where the ancient houses and protective walls on hill-tops were constructed of stones, while present-day houses in the plains are usually constructed of mud.
Given our experiences in Nigeria, the third category of construction is very useful for generating models. These are models derivable from oral traditional data and ethnographic resources. Such models, if carefully applied to archaeological situations, can greatly fill the gaps in our knowledge of the past of the Nigerian peoples.
CONCLUSION Scientific studies of settlement archaeology of the different parts of Nigeria are be-devilled by a lot of problems ranging in nature from inadequate facilities to fewness of archaeologists on ground. Developments in recent years have however shown that these problems are now being turned into a source of strength by the indigenous archaeologists. Thus for example abundant oral traditional and ethnographic resources in Nigeria are being profitably harnessed. This is with a few to clarifying our understanding of aspects of the people's settlement heritage.
REFERENCES Darling, P. 1984. Archaeology & History In Southern Nigeria: The ancient Linear Earthworks of Benin and Ishan. B. A. R. Series 215. Denyer, S 1978. African traditional architecture. Heinemann, Ibadan. Leggett, H. J. 1969 Former Hill and Inselberg Settlements In the Zaria District. West African Archaeology News-letter. No.11. Mbakighir, N. 1990. Personal Communication. Netting, R. M. 1968. Hill Farmers of Nigeria: Cultural Ecology of the Kofyar of The Jos Plateau, University of Washington, Press Seattle. Ogundele, S. O. 1989. Settlement Archaeology In Tivland: A Preliminary Report. West African Journal of Archaeology. Vol. 19. Ogundele, S.O. 1990. The Use of Ethno-archaeology In Tiv Culture History. African Notes. Vol. 14. Ogundele, S.O. 1994. Notes On Ungwai Settlement Archaeology. Journal of Science Research. Vol. 1. Shaw, T.& Daniells, S. G. H. 1984. Excavations At Iwo-Eleru, Ondo State, Nigeria. West African Journal of Archaeology. Vol.14. Soper, R. 1981. The Walls of Oyo Ile. West African Journal of Archaeology. Vol. 10/11. Sokpo, A. 1990. Personal Communication.
[Note] This is a report sent with a letter of 18th December 1995 from Dr. Ogundele. This report shows the situation of archaeological activities in Nigeria. Appropriate support to the Nigerian archaeologists would inprove the difficult situation.
Department of Archaeology, Okayama University NIIRO Izumi 20th Feb. 1996Posts: 22234 | From: האם אינכם כילדי הכרית אלי בני ישראל | Registered: Nov 2010
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