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Originally posted by kawashkar:

First, Djehuti, I want to tell you is a pleasure to argue with you. And second, that I just post ideas to open the debate and to see how valuable they are, not to prove who is wrong. I accept your arguments, and I hope you accept my intentions are just to debate, not to fight.

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Now, in relation with this:



Above, a seal found on egyptian tomb (Naqada 1863) imported from Mesopotamia, shows a physical link between both regions.

Current knowledge fixes the first known civilizations in Mesopotamia, and it is believe that influenced neighbouring starting civilizations, like Harappa-Mohenho Dahro in India, the Levante, and Egypt.

Influencing does not mean the civilizations that received the influences was not original, but that certain techniques and institutions could serve as a model.

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Please comment this article and references of the following.

Sumerian Influence on Egypt

For the Sumerian region "intelligible written records begin at about 3000 BC. From these, and from archaeological research, it is evident that even at this early period there were large cities with splendid temples and elaborately-planned houses. Stone-carving was well-developed, also metal-working and the fashioning of jewelry. Extensive foreign trade contributed lapis-lazuli from Afghanistan, shells from the Persian Gulf and rare stones such as calcite, obsidian and diorite, none of which are found in southern Mesopotamia. But in the early Dynastic Period there was no unified state of Sumer, unlike Egypt which had become unified by 3200 BC."
- Leonard Cottrell, The Quest for Sumer

In Sumer "the crucial transition from village to city took place in the Early and Middle Uruk periods which, according to radiocarbon dating, probably lasted between 700 and 1,000 years (about 4300-3450 BC)."
"The ancient site of Uruk was occupied for 5,000 years from early in the Ubaid period until the 3rd century AD. In the fourth millennium BC Uruk was the most important city in Mesopotamia and included two major religious centers: Kullaba, where there was a temple of An, the god of the sky, and Eanna, where the Goddess Inanna (later known as Ishtar) was worshipped."
"The earliest known examples of writing are found on clay tablets from Uruk dating to about 3300 BC. Already it was a complete system with more than 700 different signs....The first tablets recorded the transfer of commodities such as grain, beer and livestock or were lists used by scribes learning how to write."

"During the fourth millennium there were major developments in metallurgy." Objects at Nahal Mishmar "were an alloy of copper and arsenic, which was easier to cast and harder than pure copper and was often used before tin bronze in the second millennium BC."
"The first use of the plow in the Near East also dates from the Urik period....Plows, wheels, boats and donkeys were almost certainly in use before the Uruk period" in Northern Europe.

- Michael Roaf, Cultural Atlas of Mesopotamia

"At a period approximately 3,400 years before Christ, a great change took place in Egypt, and the country passed rapidly from a state of Neolithic culture with a complex tribal character to [one of] will-organized monarchy...
"At the same time the art of writing appears, monumental architecture and the arts and crafts develop to an astonishing degree, and all the evidence points to the existence of a luxurious civilization. All this was achieved within a comparatively short period of time, for there appears to be little or no background to these fundamental developments in writing and architecture."

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- Walter B. Emery, Archaic Egypt

The inhabitants of Upper Egypt were on the whole of a smaller, gracile type with long narrow skulls, compared with the taller and more heavily built mesocephalic Lower Egyptians. On monuments, all men have dark curly hair and their bodies are dark red to indicate the heavily sunburnt light-brown skin (brown was absent from the palette of the Egyptian artist). The conventional depiction of the lighter complexion of women was yellow.
"A similar picture of population stability of obtained from an analysis of the Egyptian language, even through the variety of current opinions is as great as in the case of physical anthropology. Connections exist with ancient and modern Semitic languages of western Asia, as well as Cushitic, Berber and Chado-Hamitic languages of Ethiopia, Libya and the western Sudan. These, however, suggest a common origin rather than a superimposition of one language upon another. The prehistoric inhabitants of Egypt and the historic Egyptians therefore spoke the same language in different stages of its development.."

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- Jaromir Malek, In the Shadow of the Pyramids

"...The civilization of the Jemdet Nasr period of Mesopotamia and the archaic period of Egypt are apparently roughly contemporary, but the interesting point is that in Mesopotamia many of the features of civilization appear to have a background, whereas in Egypt they do not. It is on this basis that many authorities consider that Egypt owes her civilization to the people of the Euphrates. There is no doubt that there is a connection, but whether direct or indirect we do not know."

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- Walter B. Emergy

"The influence of Uruk even reached as far west as Egypt in the Naqada II (or Gerzean) period contemporary with the Late Uruk and Jemdet Nasr periods [about 3100-2900 BC]...Lugged and spouted jars were characteristic of Late Uruk pottery. Cylinder seals also first appeared in Egypt at that time. Some were imports from the east, but others had been made locally and used Mesopotamian or Iranian motifs."
"Late Predynastic (before about 2920 BC) art from Egypt also showed some influence from Mesopotamia. In particular, carved ivory knife handles and slate palettes contained Mesopotamian motifs, even thought the objects themselves were typically Egyptian."

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- Michael Roaf, Cultural Atlas of Mesopotamia

"There are certain elements in Egypt's Early Dynastic Period which seem to betray unmistakable Sumerian influence. Egyptian hieroglyphic writing may be one. Another is the so-called 'paneled-facade' type of architecture found in Egyptian tombs from the First to the Third Dynasties (3200 to 2800 B.C.)."
"...The most remarkable evidence of cultural connection is that shown in the architecture of the Early Dynastic tombs of Egypt and Mesopotamian seal-impressions showing almost exactly similar buildings."

- Leonard Cottrell, The Quest for Sumer

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And this

Mesopotamian influences on early Egypt

In pre- dynastic times, before the early kings of the freshly united Egypt seem to have closed the borders for some time, traders from the Nile Delta had sustained many direct and/or indirect contacts with Mesopotamia and other regions of the ancient Near East .

Michael A. Hoffmann, an archaeologist who specialized in prehistoric Egypt, described these contacts as “a vast super- exchange network that revolved around symbolically prestigious, exotic goods increasingly in demand by the emergent social and political elite from Egypt to India”. The evidence for this long- distance trade includes, for instance, Mesopotamian cylinder seals and Afghan lapis lazuli found in early Egyptian tombs[23].

The Nile dwellers of old imported not only such physical items but also ideas: one example is the elaborate manufacturing process for the so- called “Egyptian faience”, a glazed ceramic and forerunner of glass which they produced in great quantities to imitate lapis lazuli, the vividly blue mineral with abundant small golden specks in its depth which occurs only in Afghanistan and was therefore rare and expensive.

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This mineral and its imitation were a natural symbol for the deep blue and star- speckled sky and thus had great magical and religious value, despite their lack of practical uses that could not be handled with regular pottery. Faience represents our species’ first known attempt to synthesize a material to match specific properties; it appeared around 4,000 BCE in Mesopotamia, long before the Egyptians copied the rather complicated process to start their own industry[24].

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Similarly, some scholars believe that the idea of building step pyramids originated with the Mesopotamian ziggurats and diffused to Egypt, together with the fashion to structure walls of sacred enclosures with niches between protruding bastions. A prominent example of this borrowed style is the wall around the step pyramid complex of the Third Dynasty king Djoser in Saqqara.

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Another item of early Mesopotamian influence on Egypt seems to be the concept of writing. The Egyptians did not copy any details of this Sumerian invention but re- invented it from scratch for their different language, their different writing materials, and their different aesthetic and religious purposes.

The Sumerians had developed their system for prosaic accounting purposes before they or their successors began to view numbers as divine whereas the Egyptians gave from the very start strong religious and symbolic significance to their writing signs. This included the numerals, as we saw in the creation story these tell. The Egyptian hieroglyphs were above all sacred writing, deemed to be “the god’s words”[25] and endowed with magical power.

Despite these important differences, Hoffman held that

“the two ideas that a standardized picture may be used as a symbol to convey a specific word and that words which cannot be pictured may be conveyed phonetically by the rebus principle”[26]

had clearly been invented earlier in Sumer, with continuous finds covering millennia of their gradual organic development[27] whereas hieroglyphic writing in Egypt appeared suddenly and evolved very quickly into its almost final form.

Theoretically, the Egyptians could have come up with these ideas independently, despite the almost complete absence of proto- hieroglyphs on the potsherds and other objects where one would expect to find them. However, if the pharaohs had not been so thoroughly robbed of their treasures, a patent attorney for the Sumerians would probably be able to convince an impartial court that the Egyptians owed royalties for the essential notion of writing to her clients.

Since the early Egyptians were so receptive to influences from abroad, including ideas connected with religious symbolism, it would have been surprising if they had not also developed some parallel to the number mysticism for which the Mesopotamians and the Hebrews became so renowned because more of their writings about it survived.

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And pictures

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

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Originally posted by Djehuti:
...Sure thing, but your way of 'debating' can be somewhat annoying. At least you have not resorted to name-calling so while I can't say communicating with you has been a 'pleasure', I do respect you regardless.

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Actually, civilization arose with the Neolithic 'revolution' which was agriculture. There may have been trade or contact during predynastic times, but actual urbanization begins with agriculture.... The above source only confirms mere contact with Mesopotamia via trade through the Levant.

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Posts: 413 | Registered: Sep 2006  |  IP: Logged | 

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Originally posted by Tee85:
Why don't yall get togehter and write some books for the children to study on the REAL Egypt??

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Posts: 7069 | From: Fallbrook, CA | Registered: Mar 2004  |  IP: Logged | 

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Originally posted by Underpants Man:

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Originally posted by Tee85:
Why don't yall get togehter and write some books for the children to study on the REAL Egypt??

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Yeah, or we could make TV shows, movies, computer games, or informational websites. I seriously think we should be more aggressive in countering this whitewash of Kemet.

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Posts: 3423 | From: the jungle - when y'all stop playing games, call me. | Registered: Jul 2006  |  IP: Logged | 

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Originally posted by kawashkar:

Well, regardless my outdated sources, I believe you are right. And also I like the fact you don't reject the idea of a network of contact between neolithical peoples across long distances. The evidence you show about the influences from Sudan, Ethiopia and perhaps, Somalia, seem very logical to me. Ethiopia, for example, is another center of ancient civilization that, somehow, was forgotten by standard schollarship for too long.

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The fact that current archeology fix the first civilizations in Mesopotamia needs to be explained. Civilization just mean a complex culture that build cities. There are quite a lot of complex cultures that never build cities, and that are not considered civilizations because of that, but they have lots of inventions, sofisticated languages and complex believes that are amazing. Samples?: Polynesians, Inuits, Mapuches, Zulues, Mongols.

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To start a civilization thousands of years have to pass when people live simple lifes, building the roots of what is going to happen later. That's true for West Asia and for Egypt.

And for the matter of who invented writing, it is very likely Egyptians invented it by themselves. Why not? Writing was invented several times by different peoples. The only thing that was invented only once it was the alphabet, which -curiously enough- may have originated in Egypt.

Regards,

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

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As a egyptian i have talked to many egyptians from all over egypt south to the north and i am disappointed to say this but the majority of them deny the egyptians were africans because that would hint to them being african and they dont want to be african i have lived in many arab countrys Yemen,saudi arabia,Oman,Iraq and they all look down on black africans they use the term abed in arabic and it has two different meanings one for an arab the other one for a black african even with in my family because of there ignorance and there racial bigotry. In my village in Aswan there are many beja they are a bedouin tribe and they remind me of the ancient egyptians more than my own saeedi masri people not saying that the beja are not my people but they are considered as blacks not the same as we so called people of the Arab Republic of Egypt. I have been studing ancient egypt ever since i was a boy i use to go to Cairo with my grandfather and we use to stop at alot of the ancient sites especially the Great Pyramids my grandfather use to tell me that our Kingdom was Great and vast stretching from northern Egypt to Northern Ethiopia & Israel i dont really know even till this day how my grandfather had so much knowledge of ancient egypt when he never went to school he was just a peasant felleheen farmer but he had alot of knowledge of Ancient Egypt. I have kept studing till know and i have come to the conclusion that my egyptian ancestors were africans similiar in appearance to the Sudanese Eritreans Ethiopians Somalians Africans of AFrica i think that we egyptians now a days have so much admixtures Turks Greeks Arabs Europeans but we still have the ancient egyptian blood which i would say is the African blood so i am african People of Masri are African and there is no denying it there is to much evidence pointing my identity to the Africans of Africa. Even my socalled Semitic culture is derived from the African Negro culture. There is no way u can Explain the Negro Ancient Egyptian World by the socalled Semitic World. The Semitic World as we concieve of it today is too recent to Explain Ancient Egypt.

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its true
this sadens me.

Posts: 229 | From: Atlanta | Registered: Jul 2007  |  IP: Logged |