posted                      

quote:

---

Originally posted by zarahan- aka Enrique Cardova:
^And according to even conservative Egyptologist
Yurco, Egyptian writing is a distinctly African
development. He notes the incorporation of Naqadan
symbols and iconography in ancient Egyptian writing.
Recap for the new readers:




Semitic and European alphabets based on significant
Egyptian infuence

"For the rest of the 20th century, at least through the
year 1999, books and articles on the early alphabet took
their cur from the Canaanite evidence. Your local
library has a whole shelf of books containing the theory
that the alphabet was invented in the Levant, around
1700B.C. Yes, it was inspired partly by Egyptian
hieroglyphics (the theory allows), but the inventors
were looking at imported Egyptian scrolls and
artwork...

By 1998, Darnell and others had reached a couple of
dramatic conclusions. First, the two inscriptions are
probably the oldest alphabetic writing yet discovered,
certainly the oldest that can be dated confidently: They
were carved in about 1800 B.C., give or take a century.
More important, the inscriptions can be viewed as
signposts that point directly back to the alphabet's
invention. On the basis of the Wadi el-Hol evidence,
that invention is now assigned to around 2000 B.C. in
Egypt - about three centuries earlier (and in a different
country) than previously thought. "Finds in Egypt Date
Alphabet in Earlier Era.: announced the front-page New
York Times headline of a November 1999 piece
reporting on the work.

The evidence is in the letter shapes, Darnell explains.
Study has confirmed that every letter of the two
inscriptions is copied from some preexisting symbol in
Egyptian rock-writing and/or hieroglyphics. This is
where the inventors and early users of the alphabet
found their letter shapes.

Certain Wadi el-Hol letter shapes suggest a particular
moment in time when that copying occurred. We know
enough about Egyptian rock writing to track the
evolution of its symbols, and several Wadi el-Hol
letters clearly reflect Egyptian symbol forms of the
early, Middle Kingdom, around 2000 B.C. Yet the
Wadi el-Hol writing preserves letter shapes bequeathed
from the alphabet's invention, around 2000 B.C."

"Who were the inventors? Darnell believes they may
have been in the Egyptian army: Semitic mercenaries or
similar, whom the Egyptians would have called Amu
(Asiatics). These peoples were illiterate originally. But
the army that they joined happened to have a vigorous
writing method for themselves. Perhaps the inventors
were junior officers among the Amu, individuals who
had learned some standard Egyptian rock-writing and
were able to work from there. Perhaps, Darnell
theorizes, they got help from Egyptian army scribes,
who sought to improve the foreigner’s organization
with the gift of literacy.

As to who might have carved the two Wadi el-Hol
inscriptions, same answer as above. Not the inventors
themselves, of course, but their
great-great-great-grandnephews, serving in Egypt’s
camel corps. It was the army that did most of the
writing along desert roads."

ENDQUOTE- from:

--David Sacks (2003). Language visible: unraveling the
mystery of the alphabet from A to Z. Random House.
pp. 34-37


========================================
========================================
=====

http://www.nytimes.com/1999/11/14/world/finds-in-egy
pt-date-alphabet-in-earlier-era.html?pagewanted=print
&src=pm





Finds in Egypt Date Alphabet In Earlier Era
By JOHN NOBLE WILFORD
Published: November 14, 1999

On the track of an ancient road in the desert west of the
Nile, where soldiers, couriers and traders once traveled
from Thebes to Abydos, Egyptologists have found
limestone inscriptions that they say are the earliest
known examples of alphabetic writing.

Their discovery is expected to help fix the time and
place for the origin of the alphabet, one of the foremost
innovations of civilization.

Carved in the cliffs of soft stone, the writing, in a
Semitic script with Egyptian influences, has been dated
to somewhere between 1900 and 1800 B.C., two or
three centuries earlier than previously recognized uses
of a nascent alphabet. The first experiments with
alphabet thus appeared to be the work of Semitic people
living deep in Egypt, not in their homelands in the
Syria-Palestine region, as had been thought.

Although the two inscriptions have yet to be translated,
other evidence at the discovery site supports the idea of
the alphabet as an invention by workaday people that
simplified and democratized writing, freeing it from the
elite hands of official scribes. As such, alphabetic
writing was revolutionary in a sense comparable to the
invention of the printing press much later.

Alphabetic writing emerged as a kind of shorthand by
which fewer than 30 symbols, each one representing a
single sound, could be combined to form words for a
wide variety of ideas and things. This eventually
replaced writing systems like Egyptian hieroglyphics in
which hundreds of pictographs, or idea pictures, had to
be mastered.

''These are the earliest alphabetic inscriptions,
considerably earlier than anyone had thought likely,''
Dr. John Coleman Darnell, an Egyptologist at Yale
University, said last week in an interview about the
discovery.

''They seem to provide us with evidence to tell us when
the alphabet itself was invented, and just how.''

Dr. Darnell and his wife, Deborah, a Ph.D. student in
Egyptology, made the find while conducting a survey of
ancient travel routes in the desert of southern Egypt,
across from the royal city of Thebes and beyond the
pharaohs' tombs in the Valley of the Kings. In the
1993-94 season, they came upon walls of limestone
marked with graffiti at the forlorn Wadi el-Hol, roughly
translated as Gulch of Terror.

Last summer, the Darnells returned to the wadi with
several specialists in early writing. A report on their
findings will be given in Boston on Nov. 22 at a
meeting of the Society of Biblical Literature.

Working in the baking June heat ''about as far out in the
middle of nowhere as I ever want to be,'' Dr. Bruce
Zuckerman, director of the West Semitic Research
Project at the University of Southern California,
assisted the investigation by taking detailed pictures of
the inscriptions for analysis using computerized
photointerpretation techniques. ''This is fresh meat for
the alphabet people,'' he said.

''Because of the early date of the two inscriptions and
the place they were found,'' said Dr. P. Kyle McCarter
Jr., a professor of Near Eastern studies at Johns
Hopkins University. ''it forces us to reconsider a lot of
questions having to do with the early history of the
alphabet. Things I wrote only two years ago I now
consider out of date.''

Dr. Frank M. Cross, an emeritus professor of Near
Eastern languages and culture at Harvard University,
who was not a member of the research team but who
has examined the evidence, judged the inscriptions
''clearly the oldest of alphabetic writing and very
important.'' He said that enough of the symbols in the
inscriptions were identical or similar to later Semitic
alphabetic writing to conclude that ''this belongs to a
single evolution of the alphabet.''

The previously oldest evidence for an alphabet, dated
about 1600 B.C., was found near or in Semitic-speaking
territory, in the Sinai Peninsula and farther north in the
Syria-Palestine region occupied by the ancient
Canaanites. These examples, known as Proto-Sinaitic
and Proto-Canaanite alphabetic inscriptions, were the
basis for scholars' assuming that Semites developed the
alphabet by borrowing and simplifying Egyptian
hieroglyphs, but doing this in their own lands and not in
Egypt itself.

From other, nonalphabetic writing at the site, the
Egyptologists determined that the inscriptions were
made during Egypt's Middle Kingdom in the first two
centuries of the second millennium B.C. And another
discovery in June by the Darnells seemed to establish
the presence of Semitic people at the wadi at the time of
the inscriptions.

Surveying a few hundred yards from the site, the
Darnells found an inscription in nonalphabetic Egyptian
that started with the name of a certain Bebi, who called
himself ''general of the Asiatics.'' This was a term used
for nearly all foreigners, most of whom were Semites,
and many of them served as mercenary soldiers for
Egyptian rulers at a time of raging civil strife or came as
miners and merchants. Another reference to this Bebi
has been found in papyrus records.

''This gives us 99.9 percent certainty,'' Dr. Darnell said
of the conclusion that early alphabetic writing was
developed by Semitic-speaking people in an Egyptian
context. He surmised that scribes in the troops of
mercenaries probably developed the simplified writing
along the lines of a semicursive form of Egyptian
commonly used in the Middle Kingdom in graffiti.
Working with Semitic speakers, the scribes simplified
the pictographs of formal writing and modified the
symbols into an early form of alphabet.

''It was the accidental genius of these Semitic people
who were at first illiterate, living in a very literate
society,'' Dr. McCarter said, interpreting how the
alphabet may have arisen. ''Only a scribe trained over a
lifetime could handle the many different types of signs
in the formal writing. So these people adopted a crude
system of writing within the Egyptian system,
something they could learn in hours, instead of a
lifetime. It was a utilitarian invention for soldiers,
traders, merchants.''

The scholars who have examined the short Wadi el-Hol
inscriptions are having trouble deciphering the
messages, though they think they are close to
understanding some letters and words. ''A few of these
signs just jump out at you, at anyone familiar with
proto-Sinaitic material,'' said Dr. F. W. Dobbs-Allsopp,
who teaches at the Princeton Theological Seminary in
New Jersey and is a specialist in the languages and
history of the Middle East. ''They look just like one
would expect.''

The symbol for M in the inscriptions, for example, is a
wavy line derived from the hieroglyphic sign for water
and almost identical to the symbol for M in later
Semitic writing. The meaning of some signs is less
certain. The figure of a stick man, with arms raised,
appears to have developed into an H in the alphabet, for
reasons unknown.

Scholars said they could identify shapes of letters that
eventually evolved from the image of an ox head into A
and from a house, which looks more like a 9 here, into
the Semitic B, or bayt. The origins and transitions of A
and B are particularly interesting because the
Egyptian-influenced Semitic alphabet as further
developed by the Phoenicians, latter-day Canaanites,
was passed to the Greeks, probably as early as the 12th
century B.C. and certainly by the 9th century B.C. From
the Greeks the simplified writing system entered
Western culture by the name alphabet, a combination
word for the Greek A and B, alpha and beta.

The only words in the inscriptions the researchers think
they understand are, reading right to left, the title for a
chief in the beginning and a reference to a god at the
end.

If the early date for the inscriptions is correct, this puts
the origins of alphabetic writing well before the
probable time of the biblical story of Joseph being
delivered by his brothers into Egyptian bondage, the
scholars said. The Semites involved in the alphabet
invention would have been part of an earlier population
of alien workers in Egypt.

Although it is still possible that the Semites took the
alphabet idea with them to Egypt, Dr. McCarter of
Johns Hopkins said that the considerable evidence of
Egyptian symbols and the absence of any contemporary
writing of a similar nature anywhere in the
Syria-Palestine lands made this unlikely.

The other earliest primitive writing, the cuneiform
developed by Sumerians in the Tigris and Euphrates
Valley of present-day Iraq, remained entirely
pictographic until about 1400 B.C. The Sumerians are
generally credited with the first invention of writing,
around 3200 B.C., but some recent findings at Abydos
in Egypt suggest a possibly earlier origin there. The
issue is still controversial.

For Dr. Darnell, though, it is exciting enough to learn
that in a forsaken place like Wadi el-Hol, along an old
desert road, people showed they had taken a major step
in written communication. He is returning to the site
next month for further exploration.

========================================
========================================
=======



EGYPTIAN WRITING SYSTEMS IN PLACE BEFORE
MESOPOTAMIAN

Linguistic writing systems and population
movements.
The southern area of the Nile Valley not only produced
advanced material culture and political organization but
also pioneered in the advancement of learning and
communication via writing, contradicting claims of an
outside Mediterranean or Mesopotamian influx
responsible for such developments. In 1998 a German
archaeological team under scholar Günter Dreyer, head
of the German Archaeological Institute, excavated
tombs associated with the Naqada culture and retrieved
hundreds of clay artifacts inscribed with
proto-hieroglyphs, dating to the 33rd century BC.[151]
Of Dreyer's finds, Archaeology Magazine states that
they "...challenge the commonly held belief that early
logographs, pictographic symbols representing a
specific place, object, or quantity, first evolved into
more complex phonetic symbols in
Mesopotamia."[152]

The early examples appear to have been building blocks
for later development into the full complex of
hieroglyphs for inscribing the ancient Egyptian
language,[153] showing a measure of continuity into
the period of the pharaohs. According to Dreyer, these
continuities provide evidence that the writing used later
by Egyptian kingships developed gradually in the native
environment. "Most of them are documents, records of
linen and oil delivered to the King Scorpion, taxes,
short notes, numbers, lists of kings' names, and names
of institutions.. The writing is in the form of line
drawings of animals, plants and mountains and is the
earliest evidence that hieroglyphics used by later-day
Pharaonic dynasties did not rise as phoenix from the
ashes but developed gradually.. Although the Egyptian
writing is in the form of symbols it can be called true
writing because each symbol stands for a consonant and
makes up syllables. In principle Ancient Egyptians were
able to express themselves clearly.."[154] According to
mainstream Egyptologist Kent Weeks, professor of
Egyptology at the American University in Cairo,
Dreyer's data suggests "one of the greatest discoveries
in history of writing and ancient Egyptian culture."[155]

Dreyer has moved beyond his early findings to postulate
that the Egyptians were the first in the world to develop
systematic writing as opposed to the commonly held
view that the Mesopotamians did.[156] Some Egyptian
archaeology authorities appear to support Dreyer's
hypothesis of Egyptian primacy. According to a 1999
statement by one Gaballa Ali Gaballa, secretary-general
of the Egyptian Supreme Council of Antiquities: "The
earliest known Sumerian writings date back to 3000BC
while the German team's find shows that Abydos
inscriptions date to 3400BC. The first Pharaonic
dynasty began in 2920BC with King Menes. The
earliest known writing in Dynasty Zero is much earlier
than the oldest writing discovered in Mesopotamia."
[157]

While scholarly debate and research continues on the
topic[158], but the presence of the ancient writings
from very early times provides yet more evidence
against the notion of a "Dynastic Race" sweeping into
the Nile Valley to give the natives advanced culture like
writing. Rather the evidence indicates the opposite, and
emphasizes the primarily indigenous nature of Egyptian
civilization.

Language similarities among the Nilotic peoples.
Modern scholarship has moved away from earlier
notions of a "Hamitic" race speaking Hamito-Semitic
languages, and places the Egyptian language in a more
localized context, centered around its general Saharan
and Nilotic roots.(F. Yurco "An Egyptological Review",
1996)[159] Linguistic analysis (Diakanoff 1998) places
most of the origin of the Afro-Asiatic languages wholly
within Africa, primarily in the southeastern Sahara or
adjacent Horn of Africa, with Semitic groupings
straddling the Nile Delta and Sinai.[160]

Other recent research demonstrates several African
languages that share features with Egyptian, such as the
Chadic languages of west and central Africa, the
Cushitic languages of northeast Africa, and the Semitic
languages of Ethiopia and Eritrea.[161] Acceptance of
an African origin for the Afro-Asiatic language
grouping (of which ancient Egyptian is a part) is
widespread among most mainstream scholars.[162]


References

151. ^ Gunter Dreyer, Umm El-Quaab I-Das
pradynastische Konigsgrab U-j and seine fruhen
Schriftzeugnisse (1998)- translation: Umm El-Quaab
I-The Predynastic Royal Tomb U-j and Its Early
Writing-Evidence]; see also Allen, James Paul. 2000.
Middle Egyptian: An Introduction to the Language and
Culture of Hieroglyphs. Cambridge: Cambridge
University Press, pp. 1-20

152. ^ Larkin Mitchell, "Earliest Egyptian Glyphs,"
Archaeology, Volume 52 Number 2, March/April 1999

153. ^ Dreyer, Allen, op. cit

154. ^ Nevine El-Aref, "Did writing originate in
Egypt?" Al-Ahram Weekly: 1 - 7 April 1999, Issue No.
423

155. ^ "Egyptian writing dating to 3300 B.C.
discovered," The Japan Times, December 17, 1998
156. ^ Nevine El-Aref, "Did writing originate in
Egypt?" op. cit

157. ^ Nevine El-Aref, "Did writing originate in
Egypt?" Al-Ahram Weekly: 1 - 7 April 1999, Issue No.
423

158. ^ Larkin, op. cit. Archaelogy..

159. ^ Yurco, op. cit.

160. ^ M.Diakonoff, "THE EARLIEST SEMITIC
SOCIETY LINGUISTIC DATA," Journal of Semitic
Studies, 43,209 (1998)

161. ^ Russell G. Schuh, "The Use and Misuse of
language in the study of African history" (1997), in:
Ufahamu 25(1):36-81

162. ^ "The Afroasiatic Language Phylum: African in
Origin, or Asian?" Daniel F. Mc Call, Current
Anthropology, Vol. 39, No. 1 (Feb., 1998), pp. 139-144


-----------

Egyptian writing distinctly African per conservative
Egyptologist Yurco

"Vestigial traces of the dynastic race theory still
linger in the writings of some scholars, who hint at a
"Mesopotamian stimulus" to Egyptian culture
through writing or other cultural aspects. But it has
now been definitely shown that Mesopotamian
writing arose from clay tokens used in early invoices
for livestock transshipments (Schmandt-Besserat
1992, 1-13, 93-1298, 120-65, 184-99). Later, indeed
scribes in Mesopotamia predominated in the temple
and palace economies; but kings and royalty were
rarely literate. In Egypt, by contrast, writing arose
from the deisre of early chieftains and kings to
commemorate their deeds and accomplishments
(Arnett 1982; Hassan 1983, 1, 7-8; Williams and
Logan 1987, 245-85). Its roots lay in the painted
buffware of Naqada II, whose totemic emblems for
divinities show forms recognizable in later
hieroglyphic script (hoffman 1991, 31, fig. 7; Arnett
1982).

Thus Egyptian and Mesopotamian writing systems
have totally disparate origins. In later Egyptian
Dynastic times literacy extended from the top of
society downward. Egyptian kings and royalty had to
be literacy- in sharp contrast to those in Mesopotamia
- and the bureaucracy that arose around the early
Dynastic rulers encouraged in spread of writing, as
did the religious needs of lower-ranked Egyptians
(Baines 1983; Ray 1986). A scribal class evolved
from the Archaic Period to the Old Kingdom,
basically as account keepers for the elite and as
bureaucrats for the government's taxing and
documentary functions. During all periods the means
of social advancement to the elite was through
literacy (Baines 1983).

The ancient Egyptian writing system was therefore a
distinctly African development, and the evidence for
this does indeed contradict some of the diffusionist
reasoning that grew out of the Aryan Model, as well
as the prominent position ascribed to Mesopotamian
influence."

-- Yurco, F "An Egyptological Review" IN Mary R.
Lefkowitz and Guy MacLean Rogers, Black Athena
Revisited, 1996, Univ of North Carolina Press, p.
62-100

---

Posts: 22234 | From: האם אינכם כילדי הכרית אלי בני ישראל | Registered: Nov 2010  |  IP: Logged | 

posted                      

quote:

---

Originally posted by ausar:
I have replied to you, element.

Anglo_Pyramidologist, it appears you are attempting the classic moving the goal post routine that is typical of many people with a Eurocentric mind set. Its immaterial if most of the literature was comprised orally but that such material exists and shows that African people have a complex philosophical spirtual system. Your very own Celtic/ Norse ancestors wrote most of their Sagas and epics down with the Latin script.
Contrary to you claim of Arabs introducing literacy to Sahelian Africans, they did not write down any of the verses of Sundiata in the 13th century. John Hunwich discovered that many of the Western Africans utilized Arabic but developed their own alaphabets for their own languages. You may be unaware of the coious amounts of literature written in localized Arabic scripts such as Ajami or Mande variants.

Lion, what is wrong with my topic? Don't you feel that its a legitimate one? Doesn't the interior of Africa deserve as much shine as Northern and Eastern Africa? So many people on this forum believe that Bantus or Niger-Congo speaking Africans have nothing in the way of either material or cultural heritage. This is simply not the case. Don't be so dismissive. Archaeology in Africa is poorly funded and glossed over simply because alot of Africans donot take pride in their pre-colonial past.

---

Posts: 3446 | From: U.S. by way of JA by way of Africa | Registered: Jan 2010  |  IP: Logged | 

posted                      

quote:

---

Originally posted by ausar:
[QB] I have replied to you, element.

Anglo_Pyramidologist, it appears you are attempting the classic moving the goal post routine that is typical of many people with a Eurocentric mind set. Its immaterial if most of the literature was comprised orally but that such material exists and shows that African people have a complex philosophical spirtual system. Your very own Celtic/ Norse ancestors wrote most of their Sagas and epics down with the Latin script.

---

Posts: 1575 | From: - | Registered: May 2011  |  IP: Logged | 

posted                      

quote:

---

Originally posted by the l' ass aka piece of sh*t:
Troll Patty you ruined this thread format with your giant picture. Please be careful of picture sizes
(unless you are on some ego trip)

---

Posts: 22234 | From: האם אינכם כילדי הכרית אלי בני ישראל | Registered: Nov 2010  |  IP: Logged | 

posted                      

quote:

---

Originally posted by lamin:
Anglo-P

The roots of Semitic are in East Africa--part of the so-called racist and nonsensicaly concocted "sub-Saharan Africa". See the research of Chris Ehret and Martin Bernal on this. Geez is an ancient African script plus of course MEROITIC--the ancient written language of Kush.

If you say "Indo-European" then what about "Afro-Asiatic" which includes a host of written expansionist languages that began in Africa and crossed over into West Asia.


So there you have it. If you by the nonsensical "sub-Saharan" you get Meroitic and Geez which were written long before the crude and rude Europeans ever used their hands only for crude tools, eating, and their body functions. LOL.

And even when their languages were written down they were simple and baby-talk they they had to be enormously bulked up with sophisticated loan words from Greek and Latin. Any adult talk in ANY of the modern European languages requires using Greek and Latin derived words. LOL.

But then if you take the linguistic history of Africa as a whole then Ancient Egypt takes the cake. Africans were the first to tame fire all the way up to the first written language. Nothing racial here, just sociological.

---

quote:

---

[/qb]

---

Here is a Dogon mask. The mask is used during certain rituals.




This dancing ceremony is called the dhama. There would be many kanaga dancers during this ceremony; they were all members of a secret society called the awa.

This is in the shape of a symbol used by the Tuareg.

http://www.museum.cornell.edu/HFJ/edu/OMNI/Africa/slide2.html

The Tuareg script.




Tamasheq/ Tifinagh script letter "Z", JaZ.




National Berber symbol



It makes you wonder what wisdom other masks hold, which Europeans see as useless. Think about this one. Since the have stolen a lot of art and also masks. On which they think of as inferior.

Kanaga Mask in Three Pieces

Dancers perform with Kanaga masks at ceremonies honoring the dead. Rotating their upper bodies from the hips and swinging the masks in wide circles, the dancers imitate Amma, the creator god, who brought all things to life. Their outstretched movements spread the life force throughout the world.





Amma and Amon is only a slit of difference, considering the fact that language is dynamic. And according to the principles of linguistics, the root word is the same; AM.

Oddly Amon (AMEN) means the Hidden one, and the Kanaga masks at ceremonies is for honoring the dead (the Hidden).


http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=r_Sf_lZ9Z70
[/quote]

Posts: 22234 | From: האם אינכם כילדי הכרית אלי בני ישראל | Registered: Nov 2010  |  IP: Logged | 

posted                      

quote:

---

Originally posted by lamin:
Anglo-P

The roots of Semitic are in East Africa--part of the so-called racist and nonsensicaly concocted "sub-Saharan Africa". See the research of Chris Ehret and Martin Bernal on this. Geez is an ancient African script plus of course MEROITIC--the ancient written language of Kush.

If you say "Indo-European" then what about "Afro-Asiatic" which includes a host of written expansionist languages that began in Africa and crossed over into West Asia.


So there you have it. If you by the nonsensical "sub-Saharan" you get Meroitic and Geez which were written long before the crude and rude Europeans ever used their hands only for crude tools, eating, and their body functions. LOL.

And even when their languages were written down they were simple and baby-talk they they had to be enormously bulked up with sophisticated loan words from Greek and Latin. Any adult talk in ANY of the modern European languages requires using Greek and Latin derived words. LOL.

But then if you take the linguistic history of Africa as a whole then Ancient Egypt takes the cake. Africans were the first to tame fire all the way up to the first written language. Nothing racial here, just sociological.

---

Posts: 1575 | From: - | Registered: May 2011  |  IP: Logged | 

posted                      

quote:

---

Originally posted by typeZeiss:
Troll Patrol: have you heard of the existence of "Heru" among the Dogon? I was watching a video about the Dogon recently and I heard the commentator refer to one of the preist as the HIgh Priest of Heru.

On another note, some Eurocentric anthropologist wrote a paper back in the 90s claiming that all the early reports of the Dogon and their knowledge of sirius and their complicated religion are not true. He states this because he did field work among them and couldn't find any trace. He also made the claim that if it were true, the dogon would have been a anomaly, because no other traditional african religion has such a advanced religious system. Such a lie this guy tells or he is ignorant of reality. The Dogon just like EVERY other kingdom in W. Africa i.e. Yoruba, Mende, Temne, Ashante, etc. ALL have secret societies and those sciences are locked up in there. No white man is going to appear in Africa and just be told, oh by the way our secret societies teach a, b, c and d. People get killed for that, you take a oath when you enter these societies. He would have to be initiated which would take a whole lot of time and trust. That was something that original french anthropologist who wrote about the dogon understood. These people (europeans) are so very arrogant at times.

---

No not that, but during field research I have met an older Maroon lady who could tell me about Heru. She happened to be a priestess too. Like in the Dogon, things belong to the mystic supreme. I also have attended rituals where the Bassa Script was used. This too belongs to the mystic supreme.


Furthermore on the Dogon,


The first stream of Western scientists was welcomed by the Dogons, but as soon as the Dogons found out that there was a double moral going on. They stopped passing on their knowledge. This obviously angered some of these folks. lol

Posts: 22234 | From: האם אינכם כילדי הכרית אלי בני ישראל | Registered: Nov 2010  |  IP: Logged | 

posted                      

quote:

---

Originally posted by Anglo_Pyramidologist who have never been to Egypt:

quote:

---

Originally posted by lamin:
Anglo-P

The roots of Semitic are in East Africa--part of the so-called racist and nonsensicaly concocted "sub-Saharan Africa". See the research of Chris Ehret and Martin Bernal on this. Geez is an ancient African script plus of course MEROITIC--the ancient written language of Kush.

If you say "Indo-European" then what about "Afro-Asiatic" which includes a host of written expansionist languages that began in Africa and crossed over into West Asia.


So there you have it. If you by the nonsensical "sub-Saharan" you get Meroitic and Geez which were written long before the crude and rude Europeans ever used their hands only for crude tools, eating, and their body functions. LOL.

And even when their languages were written down they were simple and baby-talk they they had to be enormously bulked up with sophisticated loan words from Greek and Latin. Any adult talk in ANY of the modern European languages requires using Greek and Latin derived words. LOL.

But then if you take the linguistic history of Africa as a whole then Ancient Egypt takes the cake. Africans were the first to tame fire all the way up to the first written language. Nothing racial here, just sociological.

---

Afro-Asiatic originated in Asia, it is of Caucasoid origin. Recent research places its origins around the Levant.

Negroid = Niger–Congo languages...

---

LOOOOOL AT THIS DIMWITTED WHITE BOY. It has nothing to do with the caucasus region! And the Levant shows a dispersal! LOOOOOL





The Oriental Institute, University of Chicago

THE AFROASIATIC LANGUAGES

Afroasiatic languages are a group of related languages spoken by various communities from a large area in West African centered around Lake Chad (Chadic), all the way across North Africa (Berber) into Egypt (Egyptian), Ethiopia, and Somalia, and down the Great Rift Valley to the foot of Mt. Kilimanjaro (Cushitic / Omotic).


Crossing over into Western Asia (Semitic), they are also spoken in the Middle East through Palestine and Syria, down around the Arabian Peninsula into Yemen and Oman, and up into Iraq.


This huge area encompasses and enormous variety of people who have shared over many thousands of years a common linguistic bond, the nature of which can be discovered only by careful investigation and comparison of the respective languages.


http://www.ethnologue.com/show_family.asp?subid=262-16


http://www.ethnologue.com/show_family.asp?subid=1737-16


http://www.ethnologue.com/show_family.asp?subid=1732-16


Ancient Egyptian civilization was, in ways and to an extent usually not recognized, fundamentally African. The evidence of both language and culture reveals these African roots.

The origins of Egyptian ethnicity lay in the areas south of Egypt. The ancient Egyptian language belonged to the Afrasian family (also called Afroasiatic or, formerly, Hamito-Semitic). The speakers of the earliest Afrasian languages, according to recent studies, were a set of peoples whose lands between 15,000 and 13,000 B.C. stretched from Nubia in the west to far northern Somalia in the east. They supported themselves by gathering wild grains. The first elements of Egyptian culture were laid down two thousand years later, between 12,000 and 10,000 B.C., when some of these Afrasian communities expanded northward into Egypt, bringing with them a language directly ancestral to ancient Egyptian. They also introduced to Egypt the idea of using wild grains as food.

A new religion came with them as well. Its central tenet explains the often localized origins of later Egyptian gods: the earliest Afrasians were, properly speaking, neither monotheistic nor polytheistic. Instead, each local community, comprising a clan or a group of related clans, had its own distinct deity and centered its religious observances on that deity. This belief system persists today among several Afrasian peoples of far southwest Ethiopia. And as Biblical scholars have shown, Yahweh, god of the ancient Hebrews, an Afrasian people of the Semitic group, was originally also such a deity. The connection of many of Egypt's predynastic gods to particular localities is surely a modified version of this early Afrasian belief. Political unification in the late fourth millennium brought the Egyptian deities together in a new polytheistic system. But their local origins remain amply apparent in the records that have come down to us.

During the long era between about 10,000 and 6000 B.C., new kinds of southern influences diffused into Egypt. During these millennia, the Sahara had a wetter climate than it has today, with grassland or steppes in many areas that are now almost absolute desert. New wild animals, most notably the cow, spread widely in the eastern Sahara in this period.

One of the exciting archeological events of the past twenty years was the discovery that the peoples of the steppes and grasslands to the immediate south of Egypt domesticated these cattle, as early as 9000 to 8000 B.C. The societies involved in this momentous development included Afrasians and neighboring peoples whose languages belonged to a second major African language family, Nilo-Saharan (Wendorf, Schild, Close 1984; Wendorf, et al. 1982). The earliest domestic cattle came to Egypt apparently from these southern neighbors, probably before 6000 B.C., not, as we used to think, from the Middle East.

One major technological advance, pottery-making, was also initiated as early as 9000 B.C. by the Nilo-Saharans and Afrasians who lived to the south of Egypt. Soon thereafter, pots spread to Egyptian sites, almost 2,000 years before the first pottery was made in the Middle East.

Very late in the same span of time, the cultivating of crops began in Egypt. Since most of Egypt belonged then to the Mediterranean climatic zone, many of the new food plants came from areas of similar climate in the Middle East. Two domestic animals of Middle Eastern origin, the sheep and the goat, also entered northeastern Africa from the north during this era.

But several notable early Egyptian crops came from Sudanic agriculture, independently invented between 7500 and 6000 B.C. by the Nilo-Saharan peoples (Ehret 1993:104-125). One such cultivated crop was the edible gourd. The botanical evidence is confirmed in this case by linguistics: Egyptian bdt, or "bed of gourds" (Late Egyptian bdt, "gourd; cucumber"), is a borrowing of the Nilo-Saharan word *bud, "edible gourd." Other early Egyptian crops of Sudanic origin included watermelons and castor beans. (To learn more on how historians use linguistic evidence, see note at end of this article.)

Between about 5000 and 3000 B.C. a new era of southern cultural influences took shape. Increasing aridity pushed more of the human population of the eastern Sahara into areas with good access to the waters of the Nile, and along the Nile the bottomlands were for the first time cleared and farmed. The Egyptian stretches of the river came to form the northern edge of a newly emergent Middle Nile Culture Area, which extended far south up the river, well into the middle of modern-day Sudan. Peoples speaking languages of the Eastern Sahelian branch of the Nilo-Saharan family inhabited the heartland of this region.

From the Middle Nile, Egypt gained new items of livelihood between 5000 and 3000 B.C. One of these was a kind of cattle pen: its Egyptian name, s3 (earlier *sr), can be derived from the Eastern Sahelian term *sar. Egyptian pg3, "bowl," (presumably from earlier pgr), a borrowing of Nilo-Saharan *poKur, "wooden bowl or trough," reveals still another adoption in material culture that most probably belongs to this era.

One key feature of classical Egyptian political culture, usually assumed to have begun in Egypt, also shows strong links to the southern influences of this period. We refer here to a particular kind of sacral chiefship that entailed, in its earliest versions, the sending of servants into the afterlife along with the deceased chief. The deep roots and wide occurrence of this custom among peoples who spoke Eastern Sahelian languages strongly imply that sacral chiefship began not as a specifically Egyptian invention, but instead as a widely shared development of the Middle Nile Culture Area.

After about 3500 B.C., however, Egypt would have started to take on a new role vis-a-vis the Middle Nile region, simply because of its greater concentration of population. Growing pressures on land and resources soon enhanced and transformed the political powers of sacral chiefs. Unification followed, and the local deities of predynastic times became gods in a new polytheism, while sacral chiefs gave way to a divine king. At the same time, Egypt passed from the wings to center stage in the unfolding human drama of northeastern Africa.

A Note on the Use of Linguistic Evidence for History

Languages provide a powerful set of tools for probing the cultural history of the peoples who spoke them. Determining the relationships between particular languages, such as the languages of the Afrasian or the Nilo-Saharan family, gives us an outline history of the societies that spoke those languages in the past. And because each word in a language has its own individual history, the vocabulary of every language forms a huge archive of documents. If we can trace a particular word back to the common ancestor language of a language family, then we know that the item of culture connoted by the word was known to the people who spoke the ancestral tongue. If the word underwent a meaning change between then and now, a corresponding change must have taken place in the cultural idea or practice referred to by the word. In contrast, if a word was borrowed from another language, it attests to a thing or development that passed from the one culture to the other. The English borrowing, for example, of castle, duke, parliament, and many other political and legal terms from Old Norman French are evidence of a Norman period of rule in England, a fact confirmed by documents.


References Cited:

Ehret, Christopher, Nilo-Saharans and the Saharo-Sahelian Neolithic. In African Archaeology: Food, Metals and Towns. T. Shaw, P Sinclair, B. Andah, and A. Okpoko, eds. pp. 104-125. London: Routledge. 1993

Ehret, Christopher, Reconstructing Proto-Afroasiatic (Proto-Afrasian): Vowels, Tone Consonants, and Vocabulary. Los Angeles: University of California Press, Berkeley. 1995

Wendorf, F., et al., Saharan Exploitation of Plants 8000 Years B.P. Nature 359:721-724. 1982

Wendorf, F., R. Schild, and A. Close, eds. Cattle-Keepers of the Eastern Sahara. Dallas: Southern Methodist University, Department of Anthropology. 1984

Posts: 22234 | From: האם אינכם כילדי הכרית אלי בני ישראל | Registered: Nov 2010  |  IP: Logged | 

posted                      

^ Hooray, you've busted the idiot in another one of the many lies he repeats often!

quote:

---

Originally posted by ausar:

Disproving the Eurocentrics about Africa and Africans...

---

Is something we do ALL THE DAMN TIME in this forum. This should be the end of this thread.

Posts: 26238 | From: Atlanta, Georgia, USA | Registered: Feb 2005  |  IP: Logged |