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For a few years now I've turned my attention on the subject of race more towards the Race & IQ debate than the origins of the Ancient Egyptians which I used to spend a lot of time on this forum discussing. During this period I spent a lot of time trying to debunk the racial claims of J. Philippe Rushton. Recently I came across some Youtube videos where racists can be found denying that the Ancient Egyptians were Black. Some of these racists posted on my Youtube channel defending the research of Rushton.
This got me thinking....
What did Rushton have to say about the Ancient Egyptians?
I decided to do a keyword search on a PDF of the book Race, Evolution and Behavior to see what he had to say. Not too surprisingly he did mention the Ancient Egyptians a few times and the language makes it quite clear that he believed them to be racially distinct from Blacks.
Here are some examples:
Identification of racial variation in man based on differences in morphology and pigmentation is as old as recorded history. As referenced by Loehlin et al. (1975), in 1200 B.C. the Egyptians of the Nineteenth Dynasty painted polychromatic human figures on the walls of their royal tombs depicting peoples of different skin color and hair form: red (Egyptians), yellow (Asiatic and Semitic), black (sub-Saharan African), and white (western and northern European, also shown with blue eyes and blond beards).
Source: Race, Evolution and Behavior p. 91
Hostility and hybridization both characterized ethnic relations among those ancient Middle Eastern groups who affected history—the Egyptians, the Sumerians, the Akkadians, the Israelites, the Hittites, the Persians, and later, the Greeks and the Romans. The nobility and leadership of the varying factions often urged against hybridization. The Bible provides many examples of the Hebrews being enjoined to avoid it. Tribes and nations thought it natural and legitimate to despise, conquer, enslave, and displace each other. Slavery is attested from the very earliest written records among the Sumerians, the Babylonians, and the Egyptians, as well as the Greeks and the Romans. The wall paintings of ancient Egypt, for example, typically depict the gods and pharaohs as larger than life while Negroes and other outlanders were posed as servants and slaves.
Source: Race, Evolution and Behavior p. 96-97
Louis Agassiz (1807-1873), the Swiss naturalist famous for studying fossil fishes, traveled to America in 1846 and was persuaded to stay on as professor of zoology at Harvard, where he founded and directed the Museum of Comparative Zoology. He theorized that the creation of species occurred in discrete geographical centers with minimum variation, a view he later applied to the human situation. Agassiz believed that God had created the races as separate species; the biblical tale of Adam referred only to the origin of Caucasians. For him, mummified remains from Egypt implied that Negroes and Caucasians were as distinct 3,000 years earlier as they were in his day, and since the biblical story of Noah's Ark had been dated only 1,000 years before that, there would not have been time for all the sons of Noah to have developed their distinct attributes. For Agassiz, these included intellectual and moral qualities, with Europeans ranking higher than Amerindians and Orientals, and Africans ranking the lowest. Agassiz lived to become America's leading opponent of the Darwinian revolution.
Source: Race, Evolution and Behavior p. 105
Twenty-one criteria by which a civilization could be judged were set up by J. R. Baker (1974), some of whose work was described in chapter 5. J. R. Baker suggested that in civilized societies, the majority of people complied with most of the requirements set out in Table 6.11. He then proceeded to analyze the historical record to ascertain which races have originated civilizations. His conclusion was that the Caucasoid peoples developed all 21 components of civilization in four independent locations, the Sumerian in the valley of the Tigris and the Euphrates, the Cretan, the Indus Valley, and the ancient Egyptian. The Mongoloids also developed a full civilization in the Sink civilization in China. The Amerindians achieved about half of the 21 components in the Maya society of Guatemala, a little less in the Inca and Aztec societies, but these peoples never invented a written script, the wheel (except possibly in children's toys), the principle of the arch in their architecture, metal working, or money for the exchange of goods. The Negroids and the Australian aborigines achieved virtually none of the criteria of civilization.
Source: Race, Evolution and Behavior p. 141-142
Much disputed also is the contention that the pattern of racial differences in behavior show up historically. Some have suggested that blacks played a significant intellectual role in the civilization of ancient Egypt (Weizmann et al., 1991). Some proponents of Afro-centrism have gone so far as to claim that Aristotle and other geniuses from ancient Greece stole their ideas from black Africa (James, 1992). Flynn (1989) challenged the evidence of history on law abidingness, pointing to the authority-driven criminality of this century in China, Japan, Germany, and Russia. Gabor and Roberts (1990: 343) dismissed the entire effort of examining such data as "idle speculation" with "no place" in the scientific enterprise.
Source: Race, Evolution and Behavior p. 245
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White supremacy and 1) the downplaying of the contributions of those not deemed white and 2) the lumping of various culturally advanced groups who were never deemed white in ancient literature into the "white" category to undermine any evidence that goes against white supremacy, go hand in hand. What is the surprise?
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Baker (1974) isn't so bad on race of Egyptians if you simply take "Aethiopid" out of his "Europoid".
"From predynastic times onwards a principal part of the population of Egypt appears to have been composed of a section of the Aethiopid subrace."
"In their monuments the dynastic Egyptians represented themselves as having a long face, pointed chin with scantly beard, a straight or somewhat aquiline nose, black irises, and a reddish-brown complexion. On the evidence of their mummies it would appear that the head-hair was curly, wavy, or almost straight, and very dark brown or black. Facial and body-hair was scantly apart from the chin tuft of males. The skeletons show that stature was low, and the bones are slight and suggest a rather feeble frame. The skulls stand near the dividing-line between meso-and dolicocranial, with bulging occiput; viewed from on top they appear coffin-shaped or ovoid; supraciliary ridges are poorly developed or absent; the forehead is nearly vertical. The cheeks are narrow, the reliability of their images. There is some tendency towards projection of the face and jaws(mesognathy)."
These are accurate descriptions of what the average ancient Egyptian would have looked like.
Baker also recognised the variation in Egypt itself, structured from a south-north gradient in cephalic index (with more "Negrid" skeletal traits appearing in the south via Nubian mixture):
"The Upper Egyptians had narrower skulls and consequently somewhat lower cranial indices(commonly about 73.5, in comparison with 75.0 or rather more among the Lower Egyptians) and one may condense a very large body of statistically data into a few words by saying that all six criteria by which Egyptian skulls can be distinguished from Negrid ones, the Upper Egyptian skulls approximated at first a little more closely towards the Negrid condition than did those of Lower Egypt."
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quote:Originally posted by Dead: Baker (1974) isn't so bad on race of Egyptians if you simply take "Aethiopid" out of his "Europoid".
So Baker isn't so bad on the race of the Egyptians being Caucasian (Europid) We simply need to take the Ethiopian out of the European, so it's pure
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Mainstream classicists and Egyptologists don't regard the ancient Egyptians to have been 'black':
"Snowden did not include ancient Egyptians in his book Blacks in Antiquity (Cambridge, Mass. 1970), but he later revised his description of the color of the Egyptians’ skin, as Keita might have remarked,in favor of ancient terminologies such as subfuscus (“somewhat dark,” in M. R. Lefkowitz and G. M. Rogers, eds., Black Athena Revisited [Chapel Hill, N.C. 1996]: 113). According to Egyptologist Donald Redford (From Slave to Pharaoh [Baltimore, Md. 2004]: 5–6), the ancient Egyptians perceived themselves “as a russet hue,” Asiatics “of a paler yellowish color,” and Southerners as “chocolate brown or black.” Nubians were Nhsi, “bronzed/burnt,” a term analogous to Greek Αἰθίοψ". (Lefkowitz, 2013)
The ancient Egyptians depicted and described their complexion as lighter than the black Nubians; the Greeks and Romans likewise did not consider the Egyptians black, they did not apply the term Αἰθίοψ [Aethiops] to the Egyptians, but their southern neighbours (i.e. any inhabitant of Sub-Saharan Africa).
Posts: 504 | From: No longer here | Registered: Aug 2014
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quote:Originally posted by Swenet: What's up Morpheus
White supremacy and 1) the downplaying of the contributions of those not deemed white and 2) the lumping of various culturally advanced groups who were never deemed white in ancient literature into the "white" category to undermine any evidence that goes against white supremacy, go hand in hand. What is the surprise?
I thought the same thing. Of course a guy like Rushton and his Pioneer Fund buddies would delimit "Black African" identity to exclude Nile Valley populations. He probably wouldn't consider Mali, Great Zimbabwe, or any other native African state to have been authentically "Black African" (or "Negroid" or whatever he preferred) if he even knew about them. So I wouldn't place much stock in his delusions.
We've all observed that once you cite Egypt as an example of "Black African civilization", they'll move the goalpost of "Blackness" away from indigenous dark-skinned Africans in general (the original sense of the phrase) towards West and Central Africans (or affiliated groups like the Bantu) more specifically. If you really want to mess with them, I'd recommend asking them whether they would call Barack Obama, Halle Berry, or any other "Afro-Diasporan" individuals with lighter skin as "Black" even if they have less exclusively African ancestry than most ancient Egyptians.
Posts: 7069 | From: Fallbrook, CA | Registered: Mar 2004
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Egypt is on the same latitude as Pakistan, North India, Nepal and south China. None of the native ethnic groups in these areas have ever been considered/described as 'black', so why should Egyptians?
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^The people in the regions you mention were dark skinned before people with gene variants that code for light skin entered those regions.
There is every reason to believe that the hue seen on the figures of the Cave of Swimmers in Egypt is what the Ancient Egyptians looked like before such high latitude groups trickled into the Nile Valley.
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Strabo + tun of other ancient Greco-Roman sources liken the skin of Egyptians to North Indians. Not a surprise since they are on the same latitude.
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I've seen many make that argument, but they never demonstrate how they came to the conclusion that the North Indians that were referenced back then should be equated with people who look like, say, Pashtuns? That's a huge assumption.
Posts: 8785 | From: Discovery Channel's Mythbusters | Registered: Dec 2009
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quote:Originally posted by Dead: Ancient Egypt = c. 3100 BC - 646 AD. Those cave paintings are 10,000 years old, and are not relevant. We're talking historical times only.
The following geographical pattern for skin colour had appeared by the Late Neolithic/Early Bronze Age:
For frequency of SLC24A5 (rs1426654) and SLC45A2 (rs16891982) in Europe, over the last 8,000 years see figure two.
But what reason do you have to suppose that the Egyptians had turned significantly lighter than those characters in the Cave of Swimmers by early historical times? They probably wouldn't have possessed the same mutations for lighter skin as West Eurasians (which developed in more northerly latitudes than Egypt by the way).
Posts: 7069 | From: Fallbrook, CA | Registered: Mar 2004
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The Wadi Sura paintings are not irrelevant. All human pale skin today traces back to just a couple of sources outside of Africa and at least one in southern Africa. This means that ALL instances of light(er) skin in Egypt can be understood as a combination of native dark skin phenotypes + non-native phenotypes that had a severe lightening effect.
Since the cave paintings give an idea of what pigment people in the region had 10kya, we know that the claim that the reddish pigment used by Egyptians in their art is somehow outside of the skin pigment range that the AE would have used for modern day Africans, is simply not true.
Remember, there are only a couple of sources of the light skin phenotypes. The rest of the people are dark because they have the ancestral alleles or they are brown skinned because they possess both.
Therefore, there is no such thing as a "red" skinned Egyptian "race" as understood by the Egyptologists and academics you cite.
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The idea all Australian aborigines are dark brown skinned was shown to be false by C. Loring Brace. There is a skin pigmentation cline in Australia, i.e. "skin pigment also lightens toward the south in Australia." (Brace, 2000) Even in old racial typology literature this was recognised. The Australoids in old texts were split into north/south divisions based on the frequency of two subraces: "Carpentarians" and "Murrayians". The latter mostly were concentrated in the southern regions of Australia, and were lighter brown skinned than the "Carpentarians" of the tropical north.
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There was a migration of Indian-like people to Australia ~4kya. There are also native variations in local dark skinned groups due to micro evolution, but I'm not sure that they will ever produce the full-fledged light skin phenotypes under discussion.
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quote:Originally posted by Truthcentric: But what reason do you have to suppose that the Egyptians had turned significantly lighter than those characters in the Cave of Swimmers by early historical times? They probably wouldn't have possessed the same mutations for lighter skin as West Eurasians (which developed in more northerly latitudes than Egypt by the way). [/QB]
Before the Neolithic there was a lack of strong positive selection. This changed with the rapid increase in population sizes and shift from hunter-gatherer to agricultural societies.
So by the late Neolithic - early Bronze Age, strong positive selection would have shaped the geographical pattern/distribution in skin pigmentation across the globe, only excluding a few areas.
Mike111 is asking why Tasmanians remained so dark skinned at that latitude, it can be explained by the fact they were left almost isolated and remained strict hunter-gatherers.
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quote:Originally posted by Swenet: The Wadi Sura paintings are not irrelevant. All human pale skin today traces back to just a couple of sources outside of Africa and at least one in southern Africa. This means that ALL instances of light(er) skin in Egypt can be understood as a combination of native dark skin phenotypes + non-native phenotypes that had a severe lightening effect.
Since the cave paintings give an idea of what pigment people in the region had 10kya, we know that the claim that the reddish pigment used by Egyptians in their art is somehow outside of the skin pigment range that the AE would have used for modern day Africans, is simply not true.
Remember, there are only a couple of sources of the light skin phenotypes. The rest of the people are dark because they have the ancestral alleles or they are brown skinned because they possess both.
Therefore, there is no such thing as a "red" skinned Egyptian "race" as understood by the Egyptologists and academics you cite.
I'm saying they became a lighter brown complexion between the Neolithic and early Bronze Age because of the changes in population size (strong positive selection). At the same time across most the globe - populations adapted to be darker or lighter (depending on their latitude). Ancient Egyptians on average would have resembled North Indians: a light to moderate brown, rather than dark (chocolate) brown/black like Africans in the tropics.
The problem you have with claiming ancient Egyptians on average were that dark as those cave paintings, is that they contrasted themselves to their southern neighbours who were of that black complexion (Nubians).
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Revisit that post again. I'm not saying that dynastic Egyptians necessarily all looked like that. I'm saying that is the context in which their later, dynastic use of reddish pigment, and ethnicity should be understood. If these ancestral Saharans are your starting point, which they should be, you can't arrive at the conclusion that the Egyptians were significantly different from regional groups in the Eastern Sahara. The painted figures in the Cave of Swimmers contextualize their use of reddish pigment 5kya later, in the pharaonic age. There is a context to it, and the underlying meaning isn't that they were tanned, that they had a swarthy complexion or that they were in a clade of their own as your sources are trying to insinuate.
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quote:Originally posted by Truthcentric: But what reason do you have to suppose that the Egyptians had turned significantly lighter than those characters in the Cave of Swimmers by early historical times? They probably wouldn't have possessed the same mutations for lighter skin as West Eurasians (which developed in more northerly latitudes than Egypt by the way).
Before the Neolithic there was a lack of strong positive selection. This changed with the rapid increase in population sizes and shift from hunter-gatherer to agricultural societies.
So by the late Neolithic - early Bronze Age, strong positive selection would have shaped the geographical pattern/distribution in skin pigmentation across the globe, only excluding a few areas.[/QB]
Wait, so you're saying population increases cause lighter skin? There is the hypothesis that a transition to agriculture led to Vitamin D deficiencies which necessitated lighter skin in northern regions, but I've never seen this put forward for populations much closer to the tropics (you're right that Egypt isn't strictly tropical by latitude, but it's still quite close to the tropical periphery).
And since you keep mentioning artistic contrasts between Egyptians and Kushites, I cannot believe you haven't noticed that Egyptians also portrayed themselves as darker than Middle Easterners (who on the other hand appear much closer to your Northern Indian-like, light to moderate brown ideal): Posts: 7069 | From: Fallbrook, CA | Registered: Mar 2004
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quote:Originally posted by Truthcentric: But what reason do you have to suppose that the Egyptians had turned significantly lighter than those characters in the Cave of Swimmers by early historical times? They probably wouldn't have possessed the same mutations for lighter skin as West Eurasians (which developed in more northerly latitudes than Egypt by the way).
Before the Neolithic there was a lack of strong positive selection. This changed with the rapid increase in population sizes and shift from hunter-gatherer to agricultural societies.
So by the late Neolithic - early Bronze Age, strong positive selection would have shaped the geographical pattern/distribution in skin pigmentation across the globe, only excluding a few areas.
Wait, so you're saying population increases cause lighter skin? There is the hypothesis that a transition to agriculture led to Vitamin D deficiencies which necessitated lighter skin in northern regions, but I've never seen this put forward for populations much closer to the tropics (you're right that Egypt isn't strictly tropical by latitude, but it's still quite close to the tropical periphery).
And since you keep mentioning artistic contrasts between Egyptians and Kushites, I cannot believe you haven't noticed that Egyptians also portrayed themselves as darker than Middle Easterners (who on the other hand appear much closer to your Northern Indian-like, light to moderate brown ideal): [/QB]
The people the Egyptians painted with that reddish pigment in the Middle East are some of the Mitanni, some Syrians, some Philistines and some Keftiu--all presumably strongly admixed with proto-Semitic groups. I'm sure there are some others that can be added, but it clearly doesn't include the West Eurasian groups West Europeans generally think of as swarthy.
quote:Originally posted by Mike111:
Painting of King Amenhotep II from the Tomb of Kenamun
This figure with light skin, red hair and black beard represents the people who roamed the Eastern desert. It belonged to the group of Egyptian enemies because together with other tribes and nations, it always presented the threat of an invading force.
Albinos are just Sooo pathetic! Sorry lioness, Humans can't have BLACK beards "And" RED hair on the HEAD! Btw - that is a CLOTH HEADDRESS "Not" HAIR!
This figure with light skin, black beard and hair ending with tresses, represents the land of Libya. The ancient Egyptian name for the people of Libya was Tjehenu, and the Egyptians often fought against them especially in the area of Lower Egypt
This figure with red hair and a black beard represents the land of Mentiu, located in Asia. Mentiu was one of the 'nine bows of Egypt', the foreign peoples outside Egypt. The ancient Egyptian considered these foreigners as enemies and used their figures in decoration as symbols of Egyptian superiority.
This figure with dark skin, red hair and a black beard represents the land of Mitanni, which was located in Asia, north of today's Syria. The ancient Egyptian name for Mitanni was Naharin, one of the most challenging opponents of Egypt during the New Kingdom.
This figure with black hair and a narrow hair-band represents one tribe from Crete called Menu Minos by the ancient Egyptians. The word for the Minoans appears in many Theban tombs, starting in the time of Queen Hatshepsut and continuing until the Late Period.
This figure with red skin and black hair represents the people from Lower Egypt, called Ta Mehu in ancient Egyptian. The word Mehu was written with the hieroglyphic sign of a papyrus plant, which grew all around the Nile Delta, and was the symbol of Lower Egypt. The figure is depicted without a beard because the Egyptians always shaved and only foreigners had beards.
quote:Originally posted by Truthcentric: Wait, so you're saying population increases cause lighter skin? There is the hypothesis that a transition to agriculture led to Vitamin D deficiencies which necessitated lighter skin in northern regions, but I've never seen this put forward for populations much closer to the tropics (you're right that Egypt isn't strictly tropical by latitude, but it's still quite close to the tropical periphery).
True, a cline by itself does not specify the role of an evolutionary mechanism. The clinal distribution of skin colour could be the result of significant gene flow between high and low latitude populations (at their peripheries), or strong selection along a geographical gradient:
"A cline might result if natural selection favoured a slightly different feature at each point along a geographic gradient. It could also result from gene flow between two groups previously adapted to different environments." (Graves, 2001)
But the San people (Bushmen) being a lot lighter brown skinned at the southern edge of Africa, supports the geographical gradient/selection view, over gene flow.
I also disagree with the idea North Indians etc., are lighter skinned through gene flow. That argument only explains some inhabitants of South-East Asia and the Americas as C. Loring Brace shows. The idea for example there was a large movement of pale skinned "Aryans" into India has certainly been falsified.
quote:
And since you keep mentioning artistic contrasts between Egyptians and Kushites, I cannot believe you haven't noticed that Egyptians also portrayed themselves as darker than Middle Easterners (who on the other hand appear much closer to your Northern Indian-like, light to moderate brown ideal): [/QB]
[/quote]
If the average ancient Egyptian was that dark the Great Hymn to Aten would not have bothered to distinguish the (darker) Nubian colour. The Nubians were black, not Egyptians.
quote:Egyptians on average would have resembled North Indians: a light to moderate brown, rather than dark (chocolate) brown/black like Africans in the tropics.
The usual BS from a that degenerate Baker. Who people like Baker with phony pseudo-anthropological chatter.
Dead you don't seem to realise that North Indians migrated into the Sub-Continent from the NORTH. They are not indigenous to North India. The AEs migrated into places like Luxor and Abu Simbel from the SOUTH. This is common knowledge and the brain-dead troll is just not aware of that fact.
The latitude of Central Egypt is 23 degrees N of the Equator. Cuba is is also 23 degrees N. Capetown where all those indigenous Africans live is 33 degrees South. The latitude of Windhoek, Namibia--the land of the Herero people--is 22 degrees.
In any case, do you discount Aristotle's comment that "Too black a hue as an Egyptian or Nubian marks a coward. So too, too white a hue as in the case of women. The best colour is the intermediate colour as you see with lions. Their tawny colour marks for courage".
So is the colour of these AE Royals same as your supposed "light brown North Indians"?
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Obviously Rushton-now late--was an eccentric buffoon of sorts. How else when you stop blac males at the entrance of subway entrances and ask them "How far do you shoot"?
And what should a sane person make of this vaunted paranoid thesis from the same Rushton:"Brains and Penis, you just cannot have both".
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If the average ancient Egyptian was that dark the Great Hymn to Aten would not have bothered to distinguish the (darker) Nubian colour. The Nubians were black, not Egyptians.
I think that the Ancient Egyptian artwork is far more reliable an indicator of their actual skin color than a translation of the Hymn to Aten (which doesn't say anything about Nubian skin color) or the view points of a Classicist like Frank Snowden. The Ancient Egyptians consistently showed themselves to be darker than Asiatics and slightly lighter than Nubians as well as much darker than pale-skinned Libyans.
According to Keita if you want scientific evidence of the Ancient Egyptians' skin color you need to do a histological analysis of mummy skin.
One study did just that. Here is their result:
Skin sections showed particularly good tissue preservation, although cellular outlines were never distinct. Although much of the epidermis had already separated from the dermis, the remaining epidermis often was preserved well (Fig. 1). The basal epithelial cells were packed with melanin as expected for specimens of Negroid origin.
Source: Determination of optimal rehydration, fixation and staining methods for histological and immunohistochemical analysis of mummified soft tissues Biotechnic & Histochemistry 2005, 80(1): 7-13
Posts: 647 | From: Atlanta | Registered: Jan 2009
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Racists are going to lie no matter how much the facts contradict them. That is the point. Egyptology is an institution of white supremacy designed to promote ancient Egypt as a white society no matter what the facts and science say. Even though they admit that ancient Egyptian culture started in the South they claim, like Petrie, that the people were migrants from "west Asia" via the Red sea. So all these non black folks migrated into Southern Egypt and upper Sudan and did not leave a mark and moved into upper Egypt and created this white civilization. That is their logic. No matter what the facts say.
So even now, they go to Egypt and are surrounded by black native Egyptians and they still sit there and pretend the Egyptians looked like them as pale versus the dark natives working with them every day. And they claim "Afrocentrics" are stealing history.....
Perfect example: This guy Vassil Dobrev discovers the tomb of this guy from the old kindgdom named Hau-Nefer. This is from a rather obscure period of the 6th dynasty. And then he uses this discovery as an excuse to do this French funded show with reenactments showing all these pale white Egyptians while all the images in the tomb are dark and all the natives around him doing the excavation are also black.
Actual native Egyptian in the tomb looking EXACTLY like the portraits in the tomb. Guess these so called expert anthropologists didn't notice that huh? Obviously they did, but they know they are lying that is why they posted the pics of the natives along with their reenactments so at leas they can be 'tongue in cheek' about the fact the reenactments are totally fake. http://www.stephanecompoint.com/41,,,4194,fr_FR.html
I notice that the French, just like the others, love to try and be slick and make reconstructions and reenactments of ancient Egyptians that look like themselves. The reenactors for this video they made "Search for the lost pharoah" look exactly like some ancient family line of Dobrev himself and nothing like actual ancient Egyptian portraits or the local upper Egyptians. In fact, they are trying to be consistent with their lies having reenactors that look exactly like their fake Tut reconstruction which looks like the frenchwoman who made it. I am getting like Mike, "damn mulattoes".... Because if they are going to sit there and claim to be close to ancient Egyptians and North Africans as light skinned mulattoes then Europeans are mulattoes then.
I thought your reference to North Indians was meant to liken Egyptians to people who look like Indo-European groups in the region, but now that I revisit your posts, the skin color map you posted seems to agree with my position that said groups were nowhere near North India; it depicts the latitude their level of skin pigmentation is most adapted to on both sides of the Caspian Sea, in and immediately south of the Eurasian steppes, which agrees with my earlier observation that the original North Indians and Pakistanis had dark skin prior to the inflow of Indo-Aryan speakers and some of the same light skin gene variants that are found in Europeans.
Note also that your map is about predictions. It predicts where different levels of skin pigmentation will be found if groups are allowed to adapt without moving out of the demarcated zones and without outside genetic influences from people outside of said zones. In other words, the map predicts what any given human group will eventually end up looking like in terms of pigmentation levels, if you place them in any of the depicted pigmentation zones. But, as Lamin already pointed out, some groups that joined the pre-existing native regional people during Egypt's formative period came from the south, southwest, the Central Sahara and maybe further west where so-called "Maghrebi Mechtoids" dwelled.
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If you take a closer look at Jablonski et al's predictive map, you'll observe that parts of the Congo Basin have the same predicted skin color as most of Egypt (probably due to the cloud and treetop cover in humid rainforest regions). You know who probably represents the aboriginal inhabitants of the Congo region? The so-called "Pygmy" peoples like the Mbuti or Aka. They are commonly described as less dark than later Bantu-speaking colonists to be sure, but I would dispute that most non-Africans wouldn't consider their skin tone within the "black" range.
For that matter, most of New Guinea (especially the lowlands) and the rest of Melanesia has a similar range of values to Egypt on that predictive map. Now let the photos of lowland New Guineans.
So I guess we should conclude that, in terms of skin tone alone, purely indigenous Egyptians would have most closely matched aboriginal rainforest-dwellers in places like the Congo or New Guinea?
Posts: 7069 | From: Fallbrook, CA | Registered: Mar 2004
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quote:Egyptians on average would have resembled North Indians: a light to moderate brown, rather than dark (chocolate) brown/black like Africans in the tropics.
The usual BS from a that degenerate Baker. Who people like Baker with phony pseudo-anthropological chatter.
Dead you don't seem to realise that North Indians migrated into the Sub-Continent from the NORTH. They are not indigenous to North India. The AEs migrated into places like Luxor and Abu Simbel from the SOUTH. This is common knowledge and the brain-dead troll is just not aware of that fact.
The latitude of Central Egypt is 23 degrees N of the Equator. Cuba is is also 23 degrees N. Capetown where all those indigenous Africans live is 33 degrees South. The latitude of Windhoek, Namibia--the land of the Herero people--is 22 degrees.
In any case, do you discount Aristotle's comment that "Too black a hue as an Egyptian or Nubian marks a coward. So too, too white a hue as in the case of women. The best colour is the intermediate colour as you see with lions. Their tawny colour marks for courage".
So is the colour of these AE Royals same as your supposed "light brown North Indians"?
So the idea North Indians lightened via admixture with northerners is nonsense. Regarding the classical quote, μέλᾱς (melas) has several different meanings, so does λευκός (leukos). They don't strictly translate as black and white; μέλᾱς often is "dark" and λευκός, "light". So these have to be understood in context when applied to pigmentation: "too dark a hue as an Egyptian or Ethiopian" doesn't mean the author of the Physiognomonica (Pseudo-Aristotle) considered the Egyptians to be black.
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quote: Originally posted by Truthcentric: So I guess we should conclude that, in terms of skin tone alone, purely indigenous Egyptians would have most closely matched aboriginal rainforest-dwellers in places like the Congo or New Guinea?
^That's what their model predicts and also what the early holocene Wadi Sura cave walls demonstrate. Obviously, the reddish paint used in Pharaonic times should be looked at as a slight departure from the pigmentation levels of their ancestors, a basic common sense inference that the academics who love to emphasise the "redness" of the Egyptians (which they see as a fundamental racially differentiating feature relative to other Africans in Egyptian artwork), seem frightened by, judging by their refusal to connect the dots between the human figures in Wadi Sura and Pharaonic Egyptian artwork.
Posts: 8785 | From: Discovery Channel's Mythbusters | Registered: Dec 2009
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If the average ancient Egyptian was that dark the Great Hymn to Aten would not have bothered to distinguish the (darker) Nubian colour. The Nubians were black, not Egyptians.
I think that the Ancient Egyptian artwork is far more reliable an indicator of their actual skin color than a translation of the Hymn to Aten (which doesn't say anything about Nubian skin color) or the view points of a Classicist like Frank Snowden. The Ancient Egyptians consistently showed themselves to be darker than Asiatics and slightly lighter than Nubians as well as much darker than pale-skinned Libyans.
According to Keita if you want scientific evidence of the Ancient Egyptians' skin color you need to do a histological analysis of mummy skin.
One study did just that. Here is their result:
Skin sections showed particularly good tissue preservation, although cellular outlines were never distinct. Although much of the epidermis had already separated from the dermis, the remaining epidermis often was preserved well (Fig. 1). The basal epithelial cells were packed with melanin as expected for specimens of Negroid origin.
Source: Determination of optimal rehydration, fixation and staining methods for histological and immunohistochemical analysis of mummified soft tissues Biotechnic & Histochemistry 2005, 80(1): 7-13 [/QB]
All that tells us is that ancient Egyptians were not leukoderms which no one has ever claimed.
"Moving on to softer tissues than bone, one histological study on Egyptian mummies (Mekota and Vermehren 2005) noted in passing that the skin cells were packed with melanin (the pigment that determines human skin color) as expected for people “of Negroid [African] origin”, although they neither specified the exact density nor went into depth." - African Origin of the Ancient Egyptians (this is an essay Truthcentric wrote which I think he submitted to his university as a course module)
"Packed with melanin" is rather ambiguous. People at subtropical latitude have considerable levels of melanin, but are not dark brown/black.
Posts: 504 | From: No longer here | Registered: Aug 2014
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quote: Originally posted by Truthcentric: So I guess we should conclude that, in terms of skin tone alone, purely indigenous Egyptians would have most closely matched aboriginal rainforest-dwellers in places like the Congo or New Guinea?
^That's what their model predicts and also what the early holocene Wadi Sura cave walls demonstrate. Obviously, the reddish paint used in Pharaonic times should be looked at as a slight departure from the pigmentation levels of their ancestors, a basic common sense inference that the academics who love to emphasise the "redness" of the Egyptians (which they see as a fundamental racially differentiating feature relative to other Africans in Egyptian artwork), seem frightened by, judging by their refusal to connect the dots between the human figures in Wadi Sura and Pharaonic Egyptian artwork.
With regards to the "slight departure" comment, I would add that ancient painters anywhere in the world would have possessed less varied palettes than guys like me who have modern Photoshop's color picker, in keeping with their material limitations. I don't know if the Wadi Sura figures were painted with the exact same materials as their dynastic Egyptian counterparts, but it wouldn't surprise me if there might have been subtle variations in the red ocher they used that gave different tones. And that's not taking into account issues with paint preservation, or how photographs render those paintings (e.g. it wouldn't surprise me if Wadi Sura paintings were less likely to have their lighting "improved" than dynastic Egyptian ones, since not everyone might perceive a familial affinity between these cultures).
Posts: 7069 | From: Fallbrook, CA | Registered: Mar 2004
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I thought your reference to North Indians was meant to liken Egyptians to people who look like Indo-European groups in the region, but now that I revisit your posts, the skin color map you posted seems to agree with my position that said groups were nowhere near North India; it depicts the latitude their level of skin pigmentation is most adapted to on both sides of the Caspian Sea, in and immediately south of the Eurasian steppes, which agrees with my earlier observation that the original North Indians and Pakistanis had dark skin prior to the inflow of Indo-Aryan speakers and some of the same light skin gene variants that are found in Europeans.
Note also that your map is about predictions. It predicts where different levels of skin pigmentation will be found if groups are allowed to adapt without moving out of the demarcated zones and without outside genetic influences from people outside of said zones. In other words, the map predicts what any given human group will eventually end up looking like in terms of pigmentation levels, if you place them in any of the depicted pigmentation zones. But, as Lamin already pointed out, some groups that joined the pre-existing native regional people during Egypt's formative period came from the south, southwest, the Central Sahara and maybe further west where so-called "Maghrebi Mechtoids" dwelled.
quote:Originally posted by the lioness,: [QB]
Those movie images above being laughed at, e.g. the guy under "vile degenerates" I regard to be accurate for Lower Egyptians. Middle and Upper Egyptians (on average) would have been darker, a more moderate brown, grading into dark brown at the extreme south in Egypt, bordering Nubia.
I don't see any racism with those movie portrayals, they would be fine for Lower Egyptians at least.
Posts: 504 | From: No longer here | Registered: Aug 2014
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posted
Why would that guy fall in the brown zone when he's not brown? He has the same level of pigmentation as the people who fall under the ecological regime that the map assigns to Turkey, Greece and Iberia. Does he look brown to you?
Posts: 8785 | From: Discovery Channel's Mythbusters | Registered: Dec 2009
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quote:Originally posted by tropicals redacted: Dead sez
quote: Mainstream classicists and Egyptologists don't regard the ancient Egyptians to have been 'black':
I say crap.
BTW, specifically, your Lefkowitz quote certainly DOES NOT help prove your point. Actually.
Do you know what I'm saying?
Can you show a source saying ancient Egyptians were black/dark brown? This is not said in either classics or Egyptology.
Posts: 504 | From: No longer here | Registered: Aug 2014
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quote:Originally posted by Swenet: Why would that guy fall in the brown zone when he's not brown? He has the same level of pigmentation as the people who fall under the ecological regime that the map assigns to Turkey, Greece and Iberia. Does he look brown to you?
"As to the physical characteristics of the ancient Egyptians, both iconographie and written evidence differentiated between the physical traits of Egyptians and the populations south of Egypt. The art of ancient Egypt frequently painted Egyptian men as reddish brown, women as yellow, and people to the south as black. Ancient Egyptians, like their modern descendants, varied in complexion from a light Mediterranean type, to a light brown in Middle Egypt, to a darker brown in southern Egypt. (Snowden, 1997)
I would only substitute "light Mediterranean type" with "light brown" and "light brown in Middle Egypt" with "moderate brown". Yurco (1989) basically agrees. The "Mediterranean type", olive skin would perhaps be found though on the northern coast in places like Alexandria.
And I regard that man to be light brown.
Also this is a pretty good write up on the movie controversy:>
quote:Originally posted by Dead: I would only substitute "light Mediterranean type" with "light brown" and "light brown in Middle Egypt" with "moderate brown". Yurco (1989) basically agrees. The "Mediterranean type", olive skin would perhaps be found though on the northern coast in places like Alexandria.
Whether that's true might not even matter as much as you think. Revisit my earlier posts. Whatever deviations you find from the Wadi Sura types are exactly that: deviations. They are non-native additions to the earlier phenotypes that can be seen in the Wadi Sura caves. Also, in the predynastic, the "predynastic physical type" found at Naqada and types related to it, are found all over Egypt, including in the north. The way I see it, the sailors depicted on the predynastic linen Gebelein cloth exemplify what this predynastic type would have looked like, pigmentation wise:
So, it needs to be made clear that any such lighter types, assuming they were numerous enough in the north to be mention-worthy in discussion such as this one, need to be understood as the result of contact with people that came from elsewhere, and so they wouldn't be as physically representative of the proto-Egyptians as the southern Egyptians, and even the lower Nubians were. The latter remained mostly unchanged (morphometrically speaking) from this proto-Egyptian type, even more so than Upper Egyptians (even Samuel Morton concedes that the Napatan royal skeletal remains still resembled the proto-Egyptians as late as ~1000BC, when other studies tell us that Upper Egyptians had changed and were already starting to look more and more like contemporary Lower Egyptians and Berbers).
If that's the context in which you place that Snowden citation, then we're in agreement.
Posts: 8785 | From: Discovery Channel's Mythbusters | Registered: Dec 2009
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quote:So the idea North Indians lightened via admixture with northerners is nonsense. Regarding the classical quote, μέλᾱς (melas) has several different meanings, so does λευκός (leukos). They don't strictly translate as black and white; μέλᾱς often is "dark" and λευκός, "light". So these have to be understood in context when applied to pigmentation: "too dark a hue as an Egyptian or Ethiopian" doesn't mean the author of the Physiognomonica (Pseudo-Aristotle) considered the Egyptians to be black.
A totally unintelligent response to the post in question. Given that North Indians are phenotypically close to neighbours such as Iranians, Afghans, North Pakistanis, etc., it is safe to conjecture that North Indians branched out from the same environmental node as the others mentioned. This would mean that they originally migrated from further North.
Re the Aristotle citation: The logic of the quote seems to escape you. This was comparative colour analysis which stated that the best colour was the one between the the 2 extremes of black and white. I mean, how much blacker can you get than "black" itself. In fact the Greek word "melas" is strongest world in the Greek language for that colour.
Furthermore, Aristotle--or his note-taking student--could have made the same point if "Egyptian" was left out of the comparative observation. But the fact that it was included and placed side by side with "Ethiopian" meant that both Egyptian and Ethiopian(Nubian] were equally black. That is, both groups represented the "extremes of blackness" just as women represented the extremes of whiteness, according to Aristotle. Do you follow the logic here? If not,then either of 2 things: either you are a low-IQ fool or someone so totally brainwashed in Eurocentric anthropology[ I mean , who the heck quotes a pseudoscientist like Baker?]that you are incapable of thinking freely, logically, and critically.
Posts: 5492 | Registered: Nov 2004
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quote:Originally posted by lamin: Furthermore, Aristotle--or his note-taking student--could have made the same point if "Egyptian" was left out of the comparative observation. But the fact that it was included and placed side by side with "Ethiopian" meant that both Egyptian and Ethiopian(Nubian] were equally black. That is, both groups represented the "extremes of blackness" just as women represented the extremes of whiteness, according to Aristotle. Do you follow the logic here? If not,then either of 2 things: either you are a low-IQ fool or someone so totally brainwashed in Eurocentric anthropology[ I mean , who the heck quotes a pseudoscientist like Baker?]that you are incapable of thinking freely, logically, and critically.
I agree quotes like those show that ancient Greeks perceive a common affinity between Egyptians and Nubians, even if they recognized subtle differences in skin tone. Interpret "melanchroes" however you want (it's not like "black" or its Spanish form "negro" were literally accurate descriptors for dark brown skin either), you can't deny they're grouping Egyptians and Nubians together as darker-skinned peoples (and in another quote, peoples with curlier hair relative to Greeks).
I've always felt "Aethiopian" might have been used for the very darkest Africans, since it literally meant "burnt faces" (as if evoking burnt wood). For example, a Greek might have called this lady an "Aethiopian":
But maybe not this one:
So it wouldn't have been synonymous with the later "Negroid" taxon, but a reference to a certain very dark shade of skin. But I suspect it was largely a national designator for the kingdom of Kush, as seen in Herodotus et al.
Posts: 7069 | From: Fallbrook, CA | Registered: Mar 2004
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