Film's darker imitation of Christ Black like He. By David O'Reilly Inquirer Staff Writer
He has the beard, the flowing robes, the sandals, and the bloody crown of thorns.
But there is something different about the wanted man who slips stealthily into Jerusalem for Passover in the independent film Color of the Cross, which opens here today.
He is not the tall, light-skinned, blue-eyed, sandy-haired Jesus so favored by Western artists and sculptors of the last thousand years.
Instead, the film portrays him as a man of average height, slightly cross-eyed, with short, wiry hair. And, oh yes: He has a broad nose, full lips, and dark brown skin.
Sneering Roman guards call him "the black Nazarene."
The Jewish high priest, Caiaphas, declares it blasphemy to suppose that a black man could be the messiah.
And Jesus - played by actor-director-writer Jean Claude LaMarre - clutches a black sheep and laments: "If only mankind could embrace that which is different."
The question for this movie, opening locally at the United Artists Cheltenham Square, is similar: Will American audiences embrace that which is different?
The $2.5 million film has none of the high ambition of Mel Gibson's The Passion of the Christ, which became a cultural phenomenon and has grossed more than $600 million in worldwide ticket sales since its 2004 release.
But for all of Gibson's efforts at authenticity - the torn flesh, the actors speaking Aramaic - he cheated on ethnicity when he cast the role of Jesus. Gibson chose actor James Caviezel, a tall, fair-skinned American, whereas the Jesus of history was likely olive-skinned or darker, according to scholars.
The average male living in Palestine 2,000 years ago stood well under 51/2 feet tall, said James Charlesworth, a professor of Middle Eastern studies at Princeton Theological Seminary and an authority on the historical Jesus.
While people of sub-Saharan descent would have been a rarity in Palestine at that time, "Jesus was surely a Semite, which means he would have had medium-dark skin," Charlesworth said yesterday.
LaMarre, who spent his childhood in Haiti, said he was making no claim that the historical Jesus was of African descent, but rather that his was a Jesus of empowerment.
"History shows that a strong people worship God in their own image," he said. "A weak and oppressed people view God in the image of their oppressors - or of the majority.
"I made him unapologetically black. Not light-skinned, not olive. I present him as a colored man," he said, "because I think it's important to the psychic development of black people in this country that the images they receive of their God should be closer to what they look like than not."
That, scholars say, is precisely what white Europeans and Latin Americans and Asians have done with their images of Jesus over the centuries.
"It's kind of a balancing act people do, probably unconsciously," said Edward Cook, a Cincinnati-based translator of the Dead Sea Scrolls. "If you're religious and interested in Christ, it helps to be able to relate to him as someone like yourself, someone who understands you and what you're going through.
"But you can go too far and create a Christ who is exactly like you, and who approves everything you do. You wind up looking down the well of history and seeing your own reflection. So you have to constantly balance the need to have a Jesus you can identify with and the Jesus who is a historical reality."
The Bible never remarks on Jesus' appearance, so scholars say he probably looked no different from most other men of his time and place.
Cook said the best clues can be found in Egyptian burial portraits of the period, which show young adult males as olive-complected, with dark eyes, short hair and short beards.
The apostle Paul suggested that short was the style. It was a disgrace, he wrote, for a man to wear long hair.
In 2001, Richard Neave, a forensic artist at the University of Manchester in England, took a quasi-scientific step toward plumbing the mystery of Jesus' earthly appearance.
Using a first-century male skull found in Israel, Neave used computer modeling, clay and simulated skin to generate the image of a round-faced, slope-shouldered peasant, about 5-foot-1 and weighing 110 pounds.
Neave was emphatic that he in no way claimed to have reconstructed the face of Jesus. That did not stop a BBC documentary from proposing that Neave's diminutive peasant was "the departure point for considering what Jesus would have looked like."
Such an image may rankle some Christians who picture Jesus as imagined by such artists as Leonardo da Vinci, Michelangelo, Rembrandt - or in the mysterious but controversial Shroud of Turin. The last is traditionally thought to be a reverse image of the body and face of Jesus formed on his burial cloth, although recent scientific testing suggests it was a late medieval forgery.
Such images are hard for brown- and black-skinned Americans to avoid, said the Rev. Jeffrey N. Leath, pastor of Mother Bethel A.M.E. Church in South Philadelphia, where distinctly European images of Jesus gaze out from the stained glass windows.
"I'm not critical of the Eurocentric image," Leath said, "but it's unfortunate that it has become predominant in our culture."
LaMarre, the filmmaker, said that he had no problem with white people's imagining Jesus as white, but that he thinks it behooves people of color to "make the same connection between ourselves and the divine."
"There might not be so much black-on-black crime, or drug use, or pregnancy, if we valued our image," he said. "Not just spiritually, but psychologically, I think we connect better with those who look and sound like us."
-------------------------------------------------------------------------------- Contact staff writer David O'Reilly at 215-854-5723 or at doreilly@phillynews.com.
Posts: 2007 | From: Washington State | Registered: Oct 2006
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quote:Originally posted by Evergreen: While people of sub-Saharan descent would have been a rarity in Palestine at that time
Evergreen Writes:
The quote above is the focus of this thread. How accurate is the authors assessment?
Posts: 2007 | From: Washington State | Registered: Oct 2006
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Not very accurate because many Egyptian and Nubian mercenaries lived around that area. Modern day Palestineans even have ''black'' people amongst them but wheather they come from slavery or antiquity is speculation. Lots of Palestineans around Jaffa actually are southern Egyptians and Sudanese people settled there by Muhammed Ali during the 1800's.
Posts: 8675 | From: Tukuler al~Takruri as Ardo since OCT2014 | Registered: Feb 2003
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The AFricans in Palestine are not even large in number and i dont know if any of u have ever been to palestine but there is a larger amount of Ethiopians who have been there for 1000's and 1000's of years and im not talking about Felasha ethiopian Jews.
actually ausar is right alot of the palestinians who live in Jaffa are southern egyptians and there are a few Sudanese during Muhammed Ali.
-------------------- Hikuptah Al-Masri Posts: 526 | From: Aswan Egypt | Registered: Jun 2006
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quote:Originally posted by ausar: Not very accurate because many Egyptian and Nubian mercenaries lived around that area. Modern day Palestineans even have ''black'' people amongst them but wheather they come from slavery or antiquity is speculation. Lots of Palestineans around Jaffa actually are southern Egyptians and Sudanese people settled there by Muhammed Ali during the 1800's.
Interesting.
And great points made, Takruri.
Posts: 26252 | From: Atlanta, Georgia, USA | Registered: Feb 2005
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quote:Originally posted by alTakruri: Why the terminolgy Blacks in Palestine when these dark skinned people are Palestinian citizens just as much as anybody else who migrated there?
Evergreen Writes:
Within the context of my query the term Palestine refers to an archaeological unit defined as a "historical region of southwest Asia at the eastern end of the Mediterranean Sea and roughly coextensive with modern Israel and the West Bank". It has little to do with modern citizenship to any extant nation.
quote:Originally posted by alTakruri: None of the modern Palestinians are any more descended from the ancient Peleset Sea Peoples (Phillistines) than any of the Israelis.
Evergreen Writes:
I never said they were. This comment has no place in this thread. Please address the topic at hand. "people of sub-Saharan descent would have been a rarity in Palestine at that time" of the so-called Christ.
Posts: 2007 | From: Washington State | Registered: Oct 2006
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quote:Originally posted by ausar: Not very accurate because many Egyptian and Nubian mercenaries lived around that area.
Evergreen Writes:
Please provide sources that assess the presence of Egyptians and Nubians ~ 2,000 kya?
quote:Originally posted by ausar: Modern day Palestineans even have ''black'' people amongst them....
Evergreen Writes:
This has no bearing on the question at hand. The above comment is off topic.
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An analysis of crania from Tell-Duweir using multiple discriminant functions. Keita SO.
Historical and archaelogical evidence suggests that the Iron Age biblical city of Lachish had a multinational population of diverse geographical origins. A multivariate analysis of crania, using canonical discriminant functions and metric variables, tends to confirm this. The approach employed stresses that population discriminant analysis studies should be both biologically and statistically legitimate. An ecological interpretation of the data suggests a research design for analyzing the affinities of cranial series. Similarities probably should be assessed in an analytical space containing the widest possible range of variation.
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Of Nubians and Nabateans: Implications of research on neglected dimensions of ancient world history Jesse Benjamin (*)
Journal of Asian and African Studies, Nov 2001 v36 i4 p361(22) Full Text: COPYRIGHT 2001 E.J. Brill
ABSTRACT
The exploration of relations between the Nubians and the Nabateans opens new possibilities concerning the historical and historiographic linkages between ancient East Africa and the ancient Middle East. In large part, such an analysis speaks to the re-mapping of Ancient World relations and the role of anti-colonial historiography in the execution of such a task. Anti-colonial historiography has challenged the presuppositions of the modern political construction of these regions and their interaction. It has done so by posing critical questions concerning the re-reading of existing data and, therefore, the reconstruction of the historical record. The new direction into Nubian/Nabatean relations initiates a broader cultural analysis of the "Old World" in the "Classical Era."
I. Introduction
In this essay, I revisit historical analyses of ancient "East Africa" and the ancient "Middle East," roughly in the years between 500 B.C.E. and 500 C.E. Contrary to the bias of most Western scholarship on this subject, but in accordance with a growing critical scholarship, I suggest that cultural relations between these regions may have been endemic and pervasive. To show this, I suggest new readings of available sources, an expansion of sources currently considered, and the reading together of sources previously separated by disciplinary and/or ideological boundaries. In the cases of both Nabatean and East African cultures, historical and archaeological research tends to focus on debates within the respective regions, but not on global formations and cultural relations between regions. External social relations are rarely considered. My aim is to both provoke and stimulate reconsideration of these perspectives and to, thus, contribute to the decolonization of knowledge.
Historical questions regarding this region usually revolve around the opposed terms: "East Africa" and "the Middle East." These are little more than anachronistic post eighteenth-century Western designations that implicitly posit a pre-existing separation between these realms. More than actual historical events, Walter Rodney has suggested (1981), this sort of colonial historiography reflects the apartheid-style racial complex of the slavery-cum-colonial era in world history. The idea of Africa or "sub-Saharan Africa" being separated from the Middle East or Middle East/North Africa, works at an almost tectonic level in late-modern Western thought (Houston 1926; Mazrui 1986, 1992), based always on a supposed racial distinction between Arab-versus-Black inhabitants, terms which are as sociologically non-discrete as they are imprecise (Cabral 1973:84; Zeleza 1993; Bekerie 1997). In asking questions across this imagined divide, it is difficult not to ponder the contemporary meanings of this ubiquitous and racial "line in the sand."
At its zenith, Nabatean Civilization spanned all or part of contemporary Israel/Palestine, Jordan, Saudi Arabia, Egypt, and Syria, over a duration of more than a thousand years, two to three millennia ago. The core of Nabatean cultural history is usually seen as stretching from the second half of the last millennium B.C., to the first century A.D. After the first century A.D., Nabatea was gradually colonized by the Romans. Later still, it was Christianized and became Byzantine. Investigation of trade routes, evidenced in written records and also often traceable in archaeological and linguistic records, will form the bulk of this review, but the emphasis will be on working beyond the material level, to a broader cultural analysis of the "Old World" in the "Classical Era."
II. Origins of the Problem: Contexts of Contemporary Historiographic Research
1. Research on Nabatean History in the Context of Israeli Nation-Building
As a young college student, I had the opportunity to work and study at the Avdat experimental water-harvesting farm, reconstructed on the site of an ancient Nabatean farm in the shadows of the ancient city of Avdat (Oboda), in the central Negev Desert in contemporary Israel. The farm was re-started by Michael Evenari, Leslie Shanan, Naphtali Tadmor, David Mezig and others, in order to demonstrate that low-intensity water harvesting technology in this semi-arid climate was indeed possible, thereby supporting their hypothesis that this is what provided for the subsistence needs of the large cities and farms of Nabatean culture throughout the region more than two millennia ago. (Avdat farm is now a research site attached to the nearby Sde Boqer Desert Research Center of the Ben Gurion University in Beer Sheva.) At the time, my own interests, like those of many local researchers, focused primarily on the implications of low-tech solutions to water-harvesting and farming in the desert and their possible application to desert dwellers in various regions of the world.
One of my arguments at the time was that the emphasis of most Israeli scientists was on applying their "findings" to cultures elsewhere in the world, such as in Africa, but not to the local Bedouin cultures that continued throughout history to practice basic water-harvesting methods, much as were being "rediscovered" by scientists. This had much to do with local politics, which saw attempts to force the resettlement of the entire indigenous Bedouin population into planned urban centers near industrial parks, where it was hoped they would become low-paid laborers, and abandon their cultures. This was due to a combination of factors including Zionist assumptions, and the more widespread and, therefore, readily available myth that pastoralists are detrimental to the environment and/or agricultural civilization (Horowitz 1986; Horowitz and Little 1987). Thus, supposed concern for the environment served to justify mass relocations, which incidentally liberated huge tracts of land for the Israeli Defense Forces to practice war games and build airbases. This illogic went as far as the sad irony of Israel's Society for the Protection of Nature in Israel when they uprooted tens of thousands of fruit trees (demolishing homes, and confiscating livestock) in the process of forced evictions of Bedouin Palestinians from the desert. Over more than fifteen years, Ghazi Falah (1989) has been the most consistent, rigorous, and courageous critics of these practices.
When I studied the ancient history of Nabatean civilization, I found that it was almost always discussed, as was the fashion of the time, as a more or less coherent, corporate body, more or less in isolation from geopolitical events and cultures around it. Certainly, some attention was paid to the trade routes that sustained the Nabatean culture and economy (at least in part), and the fact that these routes connected it to vast and distant realms of the ancient world. There is even an important debate about how important a role trade played in the Nabatean economy as compared to agriculture, water harvesting, pastoralism, and other subsistence activities (Negev 1986). More attention, however, was paid to debates about what sort of corporate body or bodies the Nabateans formed. Were they a "tribe," an "ethnic group," a "federation of tribes," a "kingdom," or an "empire"? Negev (1986), and others have shown that Nabatean cities, surrounded by farms, hidden cisterns, and pasture lands, ranged from Avdat and numerous other cities in Israel's Negev Desert, to the storied and monumental capital city of Petra, carved from the red rock mountains of contemporary southern Jordan, as well as numerous outlying port cities on the Mediterranean, the Red Sea, and even the Persian Gulf.
In short, other than brief allusions to trade connections, and debates about the centrality of trade in the Nabatean economy, scant attention is given to the inter-regional cultural, political, and economic relations which existed between Nabatean cultures and their neighbors in the ancient world. There is at least one good reason for this. Many of the scholars who first worked on Nabatean history or archaeology were actively seeking to counter prevailing myths and assumptions, referred to above, about desert dwellers and pastoralists in general, and in Israel in particular. When Evenari et al. (1982) first proposed that Avdat had been a city of tens of thousands of people, and even more livestock, they were greeted with skepticism by many scholars in Israel and the West (Evenari et al. 1982; Evenari 1989). It was widely accepted that overland trade formed the basis of Nabatean civilization, but this was not seen as sufficient to sustain huge urban settlements with their obvious water (and food) needs in such an arid climate, even in the face of excavations that revealed the extent of settlements and showed evidence of massive landscape alterations.
The low contour bunds (long, snake-like hills of earth), which criss-crossed the environment, were alternately described as religious in nature or mysterious and unexplainable, until the farm experiment at Avdat demonstrated that they were used to collect runoff water into fertile valleys capable of supporting agriculture, both fruit trees and annual cereal crops. The fertile valleys, estimated at about 5 to 10 percent of the Negev Desert's surface area, contained a special soil known locally as "loess," which contained high amounts of clay, thus allowing it to both retain water moisture well, and to attract crucial mineral nutrients due to its isotopic atomic configuration.
This was a most important research intervention on the part of Evenari and his colleagues, working ostensibly to overturn modern Israeli biases about the desert's indigenous peoples in the context of its own, seemingly overlapping, nation-building goals, articulated famously by the new nation's first head of state, David Ben Gurion, in the slogan: "making the desert bloom." Unfortunately, Evenari's insights have been applied only to ancient desert dwellers and not their successors, the Bedouin, who are being forcibly resettled even though they still practice many of the ancient water harvesting and husbandry techniques, which actually preserve these delicate ecosystems. This "oversight" was actually logically consistent if not necessary within the Israeli state's rhetoric, because it was specifically Jewish Israelis and settlers and not indigenous Muslim Bedouin or Palestinians who were intended by the state to "make the desert bloom." My point here is that this racial-state context is partially responsible for the focus on Nabatean culture as a bounded and isolated entity detached from wider events and contacts throughout the ancient world. This admittedly obscure case of the Nabateans is an important illustration of a much wider and well known phenomenon of Western epistemology and science, which, since at least the time of Linneaus, if not Descartes, has sought to divide the world into rigid and hierarchical categorizational units, culminating in the last two centuries in such everyday concepts as "the nation," and "ethnicity" (p'Bitek 1970; Mafeje 1971; Magubane 1971; Pratt 1992; Chatterjee 1993; Dussell 1995).
2. East African Historiography: Reading the International Component Through the Nexus of the Colonial Imaginary
Several years later, I had the further opportunity to live and conduct historical and social research on the coast of Kenya. Here too I came up against the limits of colonial knowledge production and the ways in which this context of history writing generally circumscribed the content and meaning of historical research and writing. This was a context in which Africa was explicitly denied history, from at least Hume and Hegel to the recent, authoritative and much commented upon diatribes of Hugh Trevor-Roper (p'Bitek 1970). Among other things, this was a manner of constructing an oppositional dichotomy whereby Europe possessed history, and then bestowed it upon "non-historical" realms via conquest and/or colonization. However, in the East African case, the Muslim world of Arabia came to occupy a distinctly middle position in this supposedly benevolent process of induction into the world of evolution, progress, and simple being. This was largely because the Portuguese, who were the first Europeans on the East A frican coast, had already encountered Muslim peoples in the Iberian peninsula and North Africa, and specifically because much of Europe had long been trying to circumvent Muslim control of the passages to the "Far East," which is why the "voyages of discovery" were undertaken in the first place. Thus, the "Arab" and Muslim worlds, while "Orientalized" (Said 1978), were still seen as somehow historical, particularly in relation to Africa.
Later, under nineteenth-century British military and naval dominance, and eventually formal British colonial rule in the twentieth century, Western scholars worked overtime to explain away abundant evidence of African cultural and historical achievements. Scholars and administrators alike could not fail to notice the monumental architecture at the coast and its immediate hinterlands throughout the Swahili world and as far south as Great Zimbabwe. When these structures and the cultures to which they were attributed were not ascribed to such implausible factors as aliens from outer space, they were generally explained by various diffusionist theories common to anthropology at that time. These issues have been discussed for Zimbabwe in Kuklick (1991), and for the East African, "Swahili" coast in Allen (1976a, 1976b, 1982, 1983, 1993) and Wilding (1984, 1987), before the recent summary in Pearson (1997). Two of the most famous of these ill-founded theories centered on "Middle Eastern" or "Arab" diffusions, involving in one case Islamic civilizations, and in the other case, the famed Hamitic thesis, both of which have been conclusively negated in recent decades (Du Bois [1946]1965; Moses 1998).
This has made for a complex situation, wherein African history has been consistently denied and explained, away as externally-originated and defined, something which has much to do with the brief hegemony at the coast of Busaidi Omani rule based in Zanzibar, and the later alliance between these ruling Swahili and Arab elites with the new British colonizers. The point for this inquiry, however, is that this over-emphasis of external factors in East African history has not necessarily led to an even exploration of the many world-wide contacts between the East African coast and surrounding areas such as India, Arabia, Ethiopia, Egypt, Indonesia, and elsewhere. Instead, the widespread diffusionism of colonial history has stressed a unidirectional relationship between Africa and the world, with other regions coming to Africa, bringing culture, and often conquering, but never moving in the other direction. Most of this contact is also ascribed to the post-eighth century era, both a denial of too great an antiquity in the region, and a centering of Islamic religion and civilizations, which again are accorded a certain historicity in the Western paradigm.
This has precluded the exploration of bi-directional relations between regions now designated as "African," and regions now designated as "neighboring" by virtue of being defined as Asian, or more specifically Middle Eastern. I suggest that such bi-directional and complex relations between and around Nabatea and Nubia should be explored more thoroughly. We should look at relations between Nabatea (together with its neighbors) and the wider East African coast and hinterland: Egypt, Nubia, Axum, the "Cinnamon coast," and the Azania/Shungwaya/Zanj/Proto-Swahili worlds further south, as well as the somewhat better documented ties with India and further East.
Since the exclusion of East Africa and East African agency has achieved the status of pervasive and hegemonic knowledge, but only since the recent vortex of colonial and imperial relations during the past 160 years, one would expect to find both pre-colonial as well as contemporary anti-colonial scholars making precisely the opposite assumptions and inferences, and indeed one does. In addition to numerous eighteenth- and early nineteenth-century European scholars, see, for example, the general orientations to African relations with and/or presence in Arabia and neighboring realms of present-day Western Asia, in the works of Drucilla Dunjee Houston (1926, 1985), John G. Jackson (1939, 1970, 1985), and W.E.B. DuBois ([1946]1965). In addition, there is an increasing proliferation of more recent works to refer to, including Joseph E. Harris (1971, 1977, 1985), the diverse collection of essays in Ivan Van Sertima (1985), and Ayele Bekerie's (1997) linguistically based reflections on ancient Ethiopia in the world. These works expand the potential scope of contact contexts, and consistently go against the grain by failing to write Africa out of the bounds of potential historical agency.
III. The Grounds for Re-Evaluation: Mapping Ancient World Relations
The ancientness of the historical period under investigation lends itself to a material focus, based on trade and regional/local consumption patterns. This is due largely to our reliance on archaeological evidence. Even linguistic reconstructions and discussions in texts and histories of the era under investigation often refer directly back to the material record for corroboration and cross referencing. And in this regard, there is a good deal of accumulating data to strengthen the case of social and economic contacts and relations over vast amounts of both time and space. Yet, while this focus is a necessary and insightful dimension to this historiography, relatively less work has been conducted in the realms of cultural and social reconstruction for these periods. The cosmological and epistemological implications of such truly global commercial interrelations over so great a period of time remain to be critically engaged. In this brief essay, I will limit myself to sketching some of the known economic and political relations between neighboring and distant regions of the Old World, in the hope that this will be debated, added to, extended, and conjoined with other analyses of related cultural, religious, linguistic, social, and material relations and connections.
Evidence from the East African Coast
The anchors of the economic connections between Nabatea and East Africa were the trades in spices and incense. "Cinnamon" and "Cassia," in particular, were perhaps the most valued commodities during this period, and frankincense and myrrh were two of the most precious of the incenses and, therefore, also among the most lucrative and significant trade commodities of the time. All of these have been shown or persuasively suggested to have passed through the East African region, either originating within its territories, or being transshipped along its coast or through various overland routes, themselves the subject of debate and mystery even today. However, when they are discussed at all, it is almost exclusively in the contexts of their destinations: the Roman Empire and/or Western Asia.
I will limit my discussion here to a few of the major commodities, mentioned above, but numerous others also appear in historical and archaeological records, including ivory (rhino and elephant), tortoise shell, ambergris, balsam, iron, gold, and mangroves. Slavery is too often assumed to be the source of yet another commodity -- humans -- and is frequently described by scholars as an undifferentiated constant throughout much of classical history, oblivious of the various social relations within which it did exist, most all of which did not approximate the later Atlantic chattel slavery in any way. Other commodities, such as coffee, cowry shells, various technologies are much less studied. Cinnamon and cassia are difficult to relate to current sensibilities, first because of their coveted role in this period, and secondly because of the potentially confusing terminology used in ancient times. On the differences between these two varieties of what is today just termed cinnamon, see for example, the sixteenth-c entury text of Garcia da Orta, in Pearson (1996:1-20), as well as Miller (1969 passim), and Allen (1993:5568).
Another reference point in this analysis lies in the issue of comparative geopolitical associations. Where correlations can be made between the fortunes, ascents and declines of vast regions, empires and kingdoms, complex interconnections are partially illuminated. Often these may then be corroborated, contradicted and/or extended by linguistic and archaeological researches, as well as in written documents. I will develop both these points below.
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To be sure, numerous scholars have discussed these regions in ancient historical contexts with intimate awareness of the global geopolitics of the era, but seemingly none more so than J. Innes Miller (1969), in his unprecedented, The Spice Trade of the Roman Empire: 29 B.C. to A.D. 641. This is a work of unparalleled synthesis of ancient materials on this subject, which lays the groundwork for such later classics as Immanuel Wallerstein's (1974), The Modern World System Vol. I., Eric Wolf's (1982) Europe and the People Without History, and Abu-Lughod's (1989), Before European Hegemony, all of which discuss considerably later periods of (capitalist) world history. Several radical new interpretations are developed by the author, which continue to receive too little attention in scholarly discussions. One, in particular, is his "cinnamon hypothesis."
In short, historiographers throughout the ages have known and documented that the beloved cinnamon and cassia of the Mediterranean world originated in "Cinnamon land," also known variously as "The other Barbaria," "Trogodytica," or "Punt," but always indicating the area known today as "the Horn of Africa." However, the opinion that this was the origin of the crops has definitively been shown to be false based on ecological criteria. Allen (1993) has pointed out that ecologically, it cannot be grown in this area. The question has become: by what route did this important commodity reach this transshipment region from South Eastern Asia and the Islands of the Eastern Indian Ocean, contemporary Timor and Indonesia in particular, where it is "now" known to have been cultivable, and widely cultivated throughout antiquity.
The possibility that these spices reached Southern Arabia for transshipment north via India and/or neighboring regions of the subcontinent, seems intuitive but is in fact cast in doubt by its near total absence in contemporaneous literature, ships-logs, travel descriptions, navigation guides, etc. Miller marshals considerable evidence that cinnamon was instead transported directly across the Indian Ocean to Madagascar and the South Eastern African coastline, eventually reaching the fabled entrepot Rhapta, before being further transshipped to "The Cinnamon Coast" just below where the Red Sea meets the Indian Ocean. The trade was carried on in sewn, double outrigger boats known as mtepe, which were found throughout the coast in ancient times and can still be seen in a modem variant, the wooden single or double outrigger maingalawa (ingalawa is the singular of this Swahili word). Miller (1969), and Allen (1993) even further, discuss the nature of secrecy and obfuscation used in trade during these times, in order to protect the sources of commodities, and to keep others at bay in their quests for circumvention. This helps to explain, as Allen (1993) put it, the "massive conspiracy by which all the Mediterranean consumers of cinnamon and cassia were for centuries deceived as to the real source of these products" (p.65).
The mtepe crafts have been shown to concentrate in the Lamu/Pate archipelago (Pins 1959; Allen 1993). This lends further credence to the position of Horton (1990) and Allen (1993), namely that Rhapta, mentioned in the anonymous first century A.D. Periplus of the Erythrean Sea, was in the region of this archipelago or near the mouth of the Tana River, rather than in contemporary central Tanzania, between the Pangani and Rufiji Rivers, as has often been assumed (Miller 1969, for example). On a related note, it is interesting that the outrigger sailing vessels known in Swahili as maingalawa are generally known and/or referred to as deriving from south of Kenya's borders. It is possible that this records a memory of the southern (and Indonesian-African) derived influence of this technology, and/or the fact that it emanated from a southern inception and production point.
While the search for the ruins of Rhapta still continues, Miller (1969) has also suggested, and with some substantial corroboration, that the transshipment from Rhapta and the East Coast of Africa followed several routes. While occasionally the route taken was the coasting trade around the Horn and into the ports of Aromata, Mosyllum, Mundus, Malao, and Avalites, the goods usually reached these entrepot ports via overland routes north from Mogadishu and Mombasa. It is even suggested that the Mombasa/Maji/Avalites route also diverged westward at Maji, to the Nile Valley routes from Juba and Malakal in Central Africa, northward to Egypt and its port, Alexandria.
The first two overland routes (from Mombasa and Mogadishu) would certainly have been in Nabatean hands as soon as they moved northward in the Arabian Peninsula toward various Mediterranean ports. The latter route, much less traversed and less constant over time, would have furnished an alternative route outside of the Nabatean monopoly. Such extensive attempts to circumvent the main trade routes further demonstrate the centrality of Nabatean stewardship of this trade between distant regions of the Ancient World. This is demonstrated by Rome's later annexation of Nabatea under the title, Arabia Petraea (Houston 1926:111-114; Miller 1969), in their efforts to confront the power of Petra as a pivotal entrepot between Africa and China, on the one hand, and the Mediterranean, on the other.
The late James Allen was perhaps the only major scholar of East African history to seriously engage the hypotheses and evidence of Miller. He proposed certain amendments and additions, and generally extended the argument in several directions. This is important because Allen is too often dismissed as a maverick or crank by scholars who have either left his various hypotheses uninvestigated or partially appropriated, even when they seem to warrant further consideration. For example, Pouwels' (1994) review of Allen (1994) is direct in discrediting his scholarship without rigorous engagement, and is a good example of a recalcitrant scholarly adherence to the notion of Islamic diffusion as the basis for Swahili culture and history. Special mention should be made here of the life work of Dr. Richard Wilding (1984a, 1984b, 1985, 1987, 1988, and others), a personal friend and teacher I was fortunate to know. He pursued investigations and theories very much in line with Allen and Miller, not only in his general interest to decolonise East African history, but also in his effort to include pastoral peoples in those histories, especially between the Swahili coast and Ethiopian highlands and lowlands, as well as the Horn, using his research into the archaeology (especially pottery) and cultures of the Oromo people of this region in the context of the Swahili world at large. His unfortunate and untimely death was a serious blow to such reconstructive efforts.
In particular, renewed archaeological interest in these regions and the questions Miller, Wilding, and Allen have raised, might definitively shed light one way or another on the presence and or centrality of these spices in various trade routes between regions. It is more than likely that, given the past in other areas, this potential element of the archaeological record was not looked for or noticed, and a new search for it might reveal that it was there all along. In a related case, for example, the bias toward external influences and the belief in diffusionist origins for urban architecture, together with a bias for urban and stone architecture in general over rural and/or thatch and mud architecture, led decades of archaeologists on the coast of East Africa to ignore both the numerous non-stone houses and the immense deposits of local pottery, which turned out to be complex, diverse, and more important than the thin layer of foreign wares found at each level, but had never been studied. After political de colonization, and amidst a new milieu of research, new questions began to be asked, often yielding innovative results in these fields, and proving beyond a doubt that indigenous architects, houses, and pottery reflected the predominantly indigenous nature of coastal societies throughout the past two millennia. Many scholars have provided breakthrough work in this area, particularly in archaeology, but a review is impossible here. Instructive, however, is the work of George Abungu, centering on the Tana River as a cultural conduit in ancient times between the Swahili world on one side, and further inside the continent on the other (Abungu 1990, 1991, 1994; Abungu and Mutoro 1993).
James Allen was one of the few scholars to discuss the ancient origins of the coveted incenses, frankincense and myrrh, which are often attributed to southern Arabia, but which are also, if not primarily, found in Eastern Africa in the arid regions immediately behind the coastal strip and further inland in what are today Somalia and Kenya, as far south as both banks of the Tana River. Since these latter regions, together with the southern tip of the Arabian peninsula, are the principal regions of incense production, most if not all surrounding Old World societies which used these incenses in their culture and rituals must have had either direct or indirect contact with the regions of origin and production. In addition to the Nabateans, frankincense and myrrh were central to ancient Jewish and Christian societies, in the case of Judaism going back thousands of years before the Common Era as a significant commodity. Incense was also important in the Roman world, and within various African societies as well, alt hough the latter has not, to my knowledge, been widely investigated (but see Bekerie 1997:54).
Of course, it has been pointed out as well that the regions on both shores of the Red Sea, whether at the north or the south, share cultures across this body of water, which in many cases serves as a linkage rather than an obstacle, the earliest known sailing vessels in the world having emerged in this area. The Axumite kingdom is an excellent case in point. Being such an important example of African cultural development, a European myth of external (South Arabian) origins for this culture solidified in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries and has taken on the quality of truth for most scholars even today. In fact, there is little evidence for this other than the powerful pull of ideology, which states that Africa cannot produce culture, civilizations, or history. Bekerie's (1997:31-60) recent summary of both the ideological external school of thought, and those who more recently examine the evidence and conclude otherwise, does much to set the record straight.
Historically, the bodies of water in this region, the contemporary "Red Sea" and "Indian Ocean," were subject (often by outsiders) to a large number of designations, often rather indiscriminately, such as the Tethys Ocean, the Erythrean Sea, the "sea at the end of the world," and so on. I have often questioned why the Indian Ocean should be termed exclusively "Indian," instead of African, for example, or Indo-African, or Afro-Timorese. Like others, I also noticed the unmistakable imprint and legacy of British colonialism in the name we currently inherit. Chandra Richard De Silva (1999) recently published a short essay on this subject and the related problem of other East African historical erasures. His focus on neglected commerce and alternative sources of information complements the work of this essay and further shows the potentially turning tide of anti-colonial historiography.
In a recent review of Casson's (1989) new translation of the Periplus of the Erythrean Sea, Horton (1990) takes the opportunity to comment again on several of the translation-based debates surrounding the various versions of the Periplus, originally written in Greek. One such debate concerns the dating of the document itself, and is resolved in part by recourse to the geopolitics of the time. Among his proofs that the Periplus was written in the middle of the first century A.D., Horton has shown that the Nabatean King Malichus II, who ruled from A.D. 40 to 70, was indeed the Malichus mentioned in the Periplus as ruling then in Petra. Many had previously argued that the Periplus was penned in the middle of the last century B.C. On Nabatean chronology in general, one might consult Negev's (1982) charts of silver content in coins during different monarchical reigns across the early, middle, and late Nabatean periods, as well as his later work (1986). Of course, the Periplus, like many ancient documents, likely represents an amalgamation of testimonies and accounts that may well span back further than its moment of final documentation, but we see clearly here that this Greek trading guide reflected a well defined set of trading and cultural relationships between extremely distant regions of the ancient world, and certainly between huge stretches of Eastern Africa, Nabatea, and the Mediterranean world.
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Picking up on this issue of geopolitical contextualization for ancient times, we see that the available literature on Nabatean history is, in general, only partially grounded in world events of the time. While Rome is mapped in relation with Nabatea, eventually annexing it after years of impenetrability, this is not so with comparable southern regions such as Axum, Nubia, the Hadramaut, "Arabia," the Swahili coast, and central East African interior, except in rare and limited cases, such as Miller's (1969) study of the spice trade in the Roman era. It should be remembered that Nabatean culture and its imperial reach stretched at their height from port towns on both the Red Sea (Leuke Kome, Suez, or Bernike) and the Persian Gulf (at Gerrha, on the water near the border of present day Saudi Arabia and Qatar), not to mention Rhinocolura (El-Arish), Gaza and Beirut, all on the Mediterranean Sea. (Bernike, or Bernice, is located in southern Egypt by Allen (1993:56), and at Eilat in Negev (1977), and Evenari et al. (1982).) In other words, non-Roman cultures were integrated into ancient commerce (with Rome) through Nabatean facilitation and, therefore, deserve to be considered as well.
Miller points out that frankincense and myrrh, which were so central to Nabatean commerce during the first two of its three major periods (Negev 1986), did not, as Herodotus and Strabo stated, derive from "no other country than Arabia." In fact, "frankincense came also from Africa, and Africa was the main source of myrrh" (Miller 1969:103). Further, we see that Egypt under successive Pharaohs and Dynasties, from 3000 to 1000 B.C., continuously maintained direct and/or indirect ties with the land of Punt, a term amorphously descriptive of much of the land to the south of various Egyptian writers, but perhaps most specifically referring to the modern Somali coast (Miller 1969).
Their sea-going vessels, in both the Mediterranean and the Red Sea, are the earliest known to historians (Miller 1969), and they seem to have set out primarily in search of direct ties to the incense producing lands of later Nabatean commerce. Similarly, during the Nabatean period, more or less the same routes existed, either overland down the Nile from the northern Somali coast and or a predecessor of Rhapta further south, or through some combination of the Red Sea and the Arabian Peninsula routes before reaching Egypt and the Mediterranean. It is clear, therefore, that this trade has formed one of the most ancient and central geopolitical concerns of numerous successive powers throughout the region, all of which were concerned to gain direct or indirect access to the sources of the coveted products, or to monopolize this trade in relations with empires and markets further away.
It seems that Egyptian, Nabatean, Roman, Greek, Parthian, Phoenician, Himyarite, Axumite, Hadrami, Swahili, perhaps Meroitic, and even Indonesian cultures and/or empires were all, at one time or another, if not constantly, centrally concerned about their engagement with this region. It is also clear that the famous continental cross-roads so often postulated in Egypt and Israel by many modem writers, was as much or more rooted further south in the heavy traffic of world commerce around both sides of the Red Sea, and in both directions along the Indian Ocean coast toward Persia and India in one direction, and Azania and Madagascar/Greater Indonesia, in the other. Such a shift in view to the southern end of the Red Sea may be seen in Miller (1969:257), when he quoted Glaser on this matter, and more commonly in the Pan-African scholarship mentioned above. Houston's work, in particular, will be returned to below.
It is not clear how the Himyarites, mentioned for example in Miller (1969:178) as one of the greatest of entrepot societies, are distinguished from the Nabateans, for they seem to have occupied a similar economic and territorial niche at an earlier time. They are also credited with domesticating the camel, which Negev (1986) attributes to the Nabateans, who later became famed horse breeders. Were they symbiotic neighbors working the northern and southern Arabian regions, the same people under different names, overlapping and intermingled peoples, or something else entirely? The matter is further complicated by the fact that Negev (1986), perhaps the primary chronologist of Nabatean culture, has extended the Nabatean period by including proto- and post-Nabatean phases into the cultural sequence, thus, achieving a duration of roughly 1500 years in total, while Evenari et al. (1982:18), for example, maintain a more conservative duration of 800 to 900 years.
Joseph Patrich (1990) has argued that the Nabateans were in fact a state established when Arab traders from Himyaritic regions of southern and central Arabia "imposed their rule on the farmers of Transjordan," the "Ammonites, Moabites, Edomites, Arameans, and even Israelites -- that is, the peasants of Transjordan" (p.38). Looking in the other direction, and certainly more spectacularly, Ehret (1998:275) has just suggested that the Himyarites (Nabateans?) were the governors and establishers of the fabled entrepot of Rhapta which appears in the Periplus -- a profoundly wider trade scope than usually attributed to the Nabateans and/or their allies and partners. However, doubt may be cast upon elements of Ehret's thesis, particularly regarding the direction in which the balances of power might be assumed to have tilted.
Suspicion should first be raised by the fact that his seemingly unsubstantiated hypothesis follows closely the diffusionist Arabian-innovation-and-dominance formulae of the colonial historiography of East Africa critiqued above. Further, Ehret's conjecture is based on testimonies presumably collected second or third hand in the Periplus, which more likely than not reflect the location of the source(s) of the tale more than the actual trade and power relations of the time. In other words, this is probably a northern and peripheral version of events which were in fact centered for millennia to the south. Therefore, while I disagree with the way Ehret suggests a connection here, and the colonial teleology behind it, the idea of such connections is exciting and should be pursued in a more open-ended manner.
One need only look as far as Drusilla Houston (1926, especially pp.128-132), to find a scholar who does not bear such colonial assumptions as she explores the probabilities of cultural contacts between various regions of the ancient world. Not only does she explore the possibilities of the southern Red Sea as the primary locus of ancient world commerce, but some sixty to seventy years before Miller and Allen had seen frankincense and myrrh as African-Arabian products of world significance in trade. Houston has also offered a still unchallenged explication of the Himyarite's origins and importance, in the region of present day Yemen, and referred to Alexander the Great's views on the unparalleled stature of ancient Oman, which she says was "inferior to no country" and "a harbor of the ancient commerce." While she did not question south western Arabia as the production point of the coveted incenses, she did amass some evidence to argue that this area was under Black African control and culture, something which fits well with the fact that African lands were responsible for much of the wealth in this trade.
Returning to Ehret (1998), there is also reason to challenge his declaration that Africa's role in this "classical" era was as provider only of raw materials and that this shows a basis for "underdevelopment" as much as 2000 years or more before commonly accepted by most historians (p.19). First, this is clearly a pot-shot at anti-colonial and underdevelopment discourses, as exemplified by scholar/activist Walter Rodney (1969, 1972). Ehret tries to equalize processes of "underdevelopment" across thousands of years, when earlier trade relations appear to have had little or nothing in common with the European-centered relations of "under-development" and domination in the last 150 to 500 years of capitalist expansion for most parts of Africa. Even Abdul Sheriff (1976, 1987), one of the major historians of unequal economic relations in the history of Africa's East coast, raised doubts about pre-European relations as simply externally dominated.
More significantly, one could argue that the author anachronistically applies to the past, contemporary valuations of manufactured products above those which are "raw" and unprocessed or manufactured, when precisely the opposite may well have then been the case. Trade values for naturally occurring, abundant items in one area may have been worth vastly more than manufactured or artisanal goods from less endowed regions. Here, one might look to various critiques, as for example Frank (1990, 1997), of the luxury versus essentials trade dichotomy maintained by some scholars, such as Wallerstein (1974, 1978).
Interestingly, Miller himself, as Allen (1993) has pointed out, sometimes falls into the colonial bias against African presences in history by looking, in some instances, at Asiatic sources of explanation for phenomena under consideration. For example, he hypothesizes that the Himyarites were perhaps in touch "at an early date with southern India or Ceylon, because when the Queen of Sheba visited King Solomon, she came "with very much gold and precious stones" (Miller 1969:178). While such trade may well have existed, it would be just as easy to imagine African sources not only of spices and incense, but also of gold and precious gems, which are well known to have been mined or excavated in much of central, eastern, and southern Africa, as he himself discusses at length in succeeding pages. However, regarding cinnamon, it is clear that the Indonesian route bearing supplies of the spice across the middle of the Indian Ocean on outrigger canoes, were probably constant throughout hundreds of years of history, from Herodotus and Strabo's times, when they thought it derived from the area of actual transshipment in East Africa, to Pliny's groundbreaking description of the trade as it must have truly existed across the ages (Miller 1969).
Numerous related questions remain, some of which might be raised briefly. Beyond questions of economic relations, which have still only been partially reconstructed, one could also look at the realm of cultural relations. For example, one could look at a proliferation of questions concerning cultural influences between neglected regions of Africa and the ancient "known world." This has much in common with the case of African roots in Greek culture, as explored by numerous scholars over the years, including but not limited to Diop (1960, 1963, 1981), and more recently Bernal (1987, 1991). Similar questions need to be asked concerning the "boundary" regions of all of ancient Africa, especially where it interfaced with what is today Asia (South Arabia). This is particularly the case, as we have seen, as one moves south along this supposed boundary, and into the centers of world commerce of that time.
Little has been done concerning potential African connections in Nabatean art, for example, but (Patrich 1990:126-127) points to potential connections between Nabatean and Nubian painted potteries which were contemporaneous in this period, as well as in the northern reaches of Jerusalem and Jericho. In a map drawn by Negev (1986:2), Leuke Kome, located on the middle Arabian Red Sea coast, is clearly the site of transshipment across the Red Sea - to and from the upper Egyptian/Nubian interior around the area of modern Idfu or Kom Ombo, just north of Aswan. This further strengthens the probability of socioeconomic ties between these regions. Moreover, what might be made of the "clay female figurines, which he [Glueck] considered to be the work of the descendants of the ancient populace of the country," (Negev 1986:38, n.51) and which strike a chord with African fertility and related traditions, well-documented throughout much of the continent? Houston (1926:132) also suggested that we should consider the simila rities between Himyarite and "Rhodesian" geometric patterns in various art forms. In light of recent research, this may not be as improbable as some might have protested. Malcioln (1996) suggests yet another artistic and cultural connection, when he ever so briefly describes the Phoenicians as follows: "People of Tunisia, descendants of Canaan; their relics show their Nubian neighbors on glassware" (p.330, n.2).
Finally, while many have recently referred to or inferred a "brotherhood" of the religions and cultures of ancient Israel, Nabatea, and other surrounding peoples, more direct African influences in this complex have not yet been satisfactorily investigated. Such questions are spurred on by the recent reversal of position by Negev (1996): "The Nabatean cult centre of Oboda [Avdat] did not, as envisaged by Avi-Yonah and myself in 1958-1959, consist of one temple, but rather comprises three or more shrines, dedicated to different deities" (p.233). Was this "polytheism" perhaps a sign of cultural and economic ties to the south and east of Nabatea -- the centers of African cosmological sphere(s) -- at the heartlands of world commercial traffic?
Assuming that similar, culturally African, pastoralist societies preceded the Nabateans in this region, could this, then, be one of the reasons that more marginal and subjugated groups such as ancient Israel and/or other agricultural neighbors to the north of Nabatea, later formed their distinguishing cults of monotheism? Bekerie's (1997) discussion of the centrality and sacredness of the divine term B'al, in both Ge'ez and Amharic languages (and therefore cultures), shows an important connection to the so-called idol worshippers of "Ba'al," mentioned in the Old Testament and elsewhere, as the predominant religion of Canaan/Palestine (pp. 70-73). There is simply too much evidence to overlook the African cultural basis of much of the ancient world, and even the monotheistic cult, which presumably emerged to distinguish it from the pervasive belief systems, is suggestive of an "African" cultural phenomenon.
Clearly, this is still in the realm of conjecture, and I am not trying to imply that "polytheism" was solely an African attribute -- it is well known to have been common throughout much of the entire ancient world in this period. Except for recent linguistic revelations about Cushitic languages (Greenberg 1973; Ehret 1998), which are considerably ahead of other disciplines in this regard, not enough attention has been paid to the possibility of continental African influences on the surrounding regions in the world, particularly in terms of culture and cosmology. The obvious exception to this Western scientific neglect is seen in various PanAfrican works, and those of Black Jews and Black Hebrews in particular (benJochannan 1983; Malcioln 1996).
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This article is an initial attempt to frame some possible new directions for future inquiry. Some of my suggestions may bear less weight than others, and certainly I may have neglected some relevant literature that could shed sharper light on the questions raised. It is hoped that I have at least demonstrated the wealth of information to be had regarding historical relations between regions which are not only usually considered in isolation from one another, but involving the agency of a region (Africa -- in this case East Africa) which is still generally treated as inert and utterly ahistorical by specialists working from outside the continent. Certainly, this debate mirrors some of the issues rehearsed in the best anti-colonial historiography, and gives us further reason to question the nexus between knowledge production and power. We might even ask how the subjectivity of the West is predicated upon just these sorts of diminutions and erasures of world history, in order to create a lack which only it can fill by its teleological presence.
Recently, Bernal (1991) attempted to join the long tradition of Afro-Diasporic writers (Redkey 1969; Moses 1998), who assaulted the borders and blind spots of the colonial imaginary, causing controversy from many directions. Most interesting for our purposes here is his suggestion of the existence of complex, regional interrelations in this area from a much more ancient period, near or at the very origins of the Neolithic revolution (in East Africa, not Mesopotamia!). In the introduction to his first volume of Black Athena, Bernal suggests that there is evidence, primarily archaeological and linguistic, to suggest that the original Neolithic revolution, centering on the domestication of crops and animals, may have occurred in Africa, on the Ethiopian/Nubian escarpment, linking highland and lowland/riverine cultures. Bernal suggests that the reason that this complex arrived so unexplainedly intact in the Sumerian and Babylonian end of the Fertile Crescent was due to travel by boats along the Indian Ocean coasts. Thus, one discerns a Fertile Circle rather than a Fertile Crescent, starting and ending in Africa, on opposite ends of the Nile. This is far from fully confirmed, as yet, but the fact that archaeology has never been used to investigate such possibilities raises the possibility that such insights have been overlooked in the rush to find Indo-Aryan roots to Western culture, in what is now the Middle East or South Asia.
This powerful and emerging hypothesis, drawing mainly on the insights of linguists, deserves critical investigation of the first order. In addition, the consistent Afro-Diasporic literature of the past two centuries also deserves to be engaged as scholars begin their investigations of these eras, for they generally consulted the classic and antiquarian texts directly, often without the same sort of specific investments in and affinity for the Western colonial sensibilities of eclipse and erasure. I have mentioned Houston, Du Bois and Jackson, but they are just the beginning of a much wider literature, relevant for the reconsideration of Classical historiography.
Relatively recent events in the world system have greatly shaped the questions which have been, and usually still are, asked about history and society in various parts of the world today. It is hoped that this essay will contribute to the process of developing new questions -- questions that might not only yield new insights about hitherto ignored problems, but in the end, might also call into question the very regimes of truth which organize most of the world today. I hope that by rewriting the past, we will rewrite the present as well.
(*.) Department of Sociology. Hobart and William Smith Colleges, Geneva, NY 14456, USA.
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ABUNGU, George and Henry MUTORO
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ALLEN, James de vere
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1993 Swahili Origins: Swahili Culture and the Shungwaya Phenomenon, London: James Curry.
BEKERIE, Ayele
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BEN-JOCHANNAN, Yosef
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BERNAL, Martin
1987 Black Athena: The Afroasiatic Roots of Classical Civilization, vol. 1, The Fabrication of Ancient Greece, 1785-1985. New Brunswick, NJ: Rutgers University Press.
1991 Black Athena: The Afroasiatic Roots of Classical Civilization, vol. 2, The Archaeological and Documentary Evidence. New Brunswick, NJ: Rutgers University Press.
P' BITEK, Okot
1970 African Religions in Western Scholarship. Nairobi: Kenya Literature Bureau.
CABRAL, Amilcar
1973 Return to the Source: Selected Speeches of Amilcar Cabral. New York: Monthly Review Press.
CASSON, Lionel
1989 The Periplus Maris Erythraei. Princeton: Princeton University Press.
CHATTERJEE, Partha
1993 The Nation and its Fragments: Colonial and Postcolonial Histories. Princeton: Princeton University Press.
DE SILVA, Chandra Richard
1999 "Indian Ocean But Not African Sea: The Erasure of East African Commerce From History." Journal of Black Studies 29(5):684-694.
DIOP, Chiekh Anta
1987 Precolonial Black Africa: A Comparative Study of the Political and Social Systems of Europe and Black Africa, From Antiquity to the Formation of Modern States. Brooklyn: Lawrence Hill Books, [orig. published as L'Afrique Noire Precolonial, Paris: Presence Africaine, 1960].
1989 The Cultural Unity of Black Africa: The Domains of Matriarchy and of Patriarchy in Classical Antiquity. London: Karnak House, [orig., published by Presence Africaine, 1963].
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DU BOIS, W.E.B.
1965 The World and Africa: An Inquiry into the Part Which Africa has Played in World History, enlarged edition. New York: International Publishers.
DUSSELL, Enrique
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EHRET, Christopher
1998 An African Classical Age: Eastern and Southern Africa in World History, 1000 B.C. to A.D. 400. Charlottesville: University Press of Virginia.
EVENARI, Michael
1989 The Awakening Desert: The Autobiography of an Israeli Scientist, english ed. Jerusalem: The Magnes Press, Hebrew University.
EVENARI, Michael, Leslie SHANAN and Naphtali TADMOR et al.
1982 The Negev: The Challenge of a Desert, 2d ed. Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press.
FALAH, Ghazi
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FRANK, Andre Gunder
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FREEMAN-Grenville, G.S.P.
1962 The East African Coast: Select Documents from the First to the Earlier Nineteenth Century. Oxford: Oxford University Press.
GREENBERG, Joseph
1973 "African Languages." In Peoples and Cultures of Africa, edited by P. Elliott P. Skinner, New York: Doubleday.
HARRIS, Joseph E.
1971 The African Presence in Asia: Consequences of the East African Slave Trade. Evanston: Northwestern University Press.
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HOROWITZ, Michael
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An analysis of crania from Tell-Duweir using multiple discriminant functions. Keita SO.
Historical and archaelogical evidence suggests that the Iron Age biblical city of Lachish had a multinational population of diverse geographical origins. A multivariate analysis of crania, using canonical discriminant functions and metric variables, tends to confirm this. The approach employed stresses that population discriminant analysis studies should be both biologically and statistically legitimate. An ecological interpretation of the data suggests a research design for analyzing the affinities of cranial series. Similarities probably should be assessed in an analytical space containing the widest possible range of variation.
I recall this; I believe this is from Keita's 1986/87 publication.
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I recall this; I believe this is from Keita's 1986/87 publication. [/QUOTE]
Evergreen Writes:
Indeed. The study was on the Judean city of Lachish circa 750 B.C. The results of the analysis indicate a diverse population with many having affinity with tropical NE Africans. The question is what the biological composition was like 700 years after this period. The archaeological evidence mentioned in the article on Nubia and Nabatea indicate interactions between the "Nubians" that lived along the Red Sea and the ancient people of Palestine. We need research on the biological affinities of the Nabateans during this period to make an accurate assessment.
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posted
Black Folk Here and There Vol. I St. Clair Drake
"Greeks living in Naucratis and the people of varied nations and races in Alexandria were in contact with individuals from the kingdom of Meroe and other parts of Ethiopia..."
Black Folk Here and There Vol. II St. Clair Drake
"In Palestine, the Greeks and Romans were viewed as 'the enemy' defiling sacred soil....There was never a large stratum of people in Judea who were Hellenized or Romanized. Yet, as Encyclopedia Judaic (1971, p. 40)points out in its article on 'Babylonia', during the first century A.D. when Jews in Palestine were being punished for their revolts against Romans, "among Babylonian Jewry was a class of native-born aristocrats, who probably acted like other Parthian nobles...Under these circumstances parts of the Jewish community became involved in the importation and exploitation of 'Zanj'labor in southern Mesopatamia...Some historians emphasize the importance of social **CLASS STRATIFICATION** within the Mesopatamian Jewish community.."
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Interestingly, Miller himself, as Allen (1993) has pointed out, sometimes falls into the colonial bias against African presences in history by looking, in some instances, at Asiatic sources of explanation for phenomena under consideration.
Can't be overemphasized; along the lines of what I made note of in the "Nubiology" thread.
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"Aubin provides the most convincing explanation for the Assyrian retreat from Jerusalem. In doing so, he has unmasked the unconscious racism that has mangled the scholarly understanding of Egypt for more than a century. . . . His insights are of astonishing breadth, originality, and importance." [Prof. Bruce G. Trigger, Professor of Anthropology, McGill University, author of A History of Archeological Thought and Nubia Under the Pharaohs].
From Library Journal
"Aubin argues that the Kushite rescue of Jerusalem from certain annihilation in 701 B.C.E. instigated the Jewish concept of being God's "elect" and was therefore a seminal event in the development of Zionism. Dealing competently with the biblical and historical sources despite what some might see as a lack of formal training in this area (he is a journalist instead of a historian, though he did do graduate work in history at the University of Strasbourg), Aubin asserts that the Kushites black Africans who ruled Egypt at this time saved the city from destruction by the Assyrians. According to Aubin, historians accepted this view until the late 19th century, when colonialism impinged on the European perception of these events; suddenly, the theory that an epidemic weakened the Assyrian army rose to prominence. Aubin asserts that this was one of the most important battles in history; had the Assyrians wiped out Jerusalem, there would have been no Christianity or Islam. Whether or not one accepts his conclusions, this work is a wonderful exercise in historiography." [Recommended for all academic libraries. Clay Williams, Hunter College Library, City University of New York.]
2,700 Years Ago a Black Army Fought to Save the Nation of Israel Book Reviewed by Robert Fikes Jr.
quote:Originally posted by Supercar: [QUOTE]There is talk of Kushite military presence in the Levant ca. 701 BC; does this not count...
Evergreen Writes:
Indeed it counts. But there is a gap in the anthropological record of some 700 plus years before the supposed birth of Christ. As researchers we have to close the gap.
Posts: 2007 | From: Washington State | Registered: Oct 2006
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[QUOTE]There is talk of Kushite military presence in the Levant ca. 701 BC; does this not count...
Evergreen Writes:
Indeed it counts. But there is a gap in the anthropological record of some 700 plus years before the supposed birth of Christ. As researchers we have to close the gap.
...and the answer may lie in the Nabatean complex; the 'anthropological record' as you've just described is interesting in that, this is supposed to be a period in a region, where relatively adequate record-keeping had already been established. Are you referring to 'material' [as in artifacts, tools, etc], bio-anthropological record, or both?
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[QUOTE] Are you referring to 'material' [as in artifacts, tools, etc], bio-anthropological record, or both?
Evergreen Writes:
Both. Is anyone aware of bio-anthropology studies on the Nabatean kingdom?
You'll have a hard time locating such on the internet, other than perhaps public libraries and 'subscription-basis' online sources.
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THE FORMATION OF A SOUTHERN RED SEASCAPE IN THE LATE PREHISTORIC PERIOD
"By the third to second millennia BC the predominant tool type that was present along the Tihama littoral consisted of geometric microliths made of obsidian which have also been found on sites of the same period along the coasts of Djibouti and Eritrea in the Horn of Africa. While this tool tradition is MUCH MORE ANCIENT elsewhere IN AFRICA, it appears millennia later on the opposing littorals of the southern Red Sea. Furthermore sourcing analysis of the obsidian recovered on late prehistoric sites of the Tihamah littoral has revealed that much of this obsidian most probably originated across the Red Sea in the Horn of Africva rather than from sources in highland Yemen."
SEA PORT TO PUNT: NEW EVIDENCE FROM MARSA GAWASIS, RED SEA (EGYPT)
"Exotic ceramics included fragments of vessels from the Yemen Tihama, the region of Aden and possibly Eritrea, suggesting that in the early to mid-2nd millennium BC the Egyptians had maritime contacts with both Arabian and African regions of the Red Sea."
Evergreen Writes:
Hence the original Bedouin or Beja consisted of the Cushitic people that occupied the two shores of the Red Sea. This is interesting in light of recent genetic information on the Bedouin from Jordan.
Evergreen Posts:
Isolates in a corridor of migrations: a high-resolution analysis of Y-chromosome variation in Jordan.
Flores et al.
A high-resolution, Y-chromosome analysis using 46 binary markers has been carried out in two Jordan populations, one from the metropolitan area of Amman and the other from the Dead Sea, an area geographically isolated. Comparisons with neighboring populations showed that whereas the sample from Amman did not significantly differ from their Levantine neighbors, the Dead Sea sample clearly behaved as a genetic outlier in the region. Its high R1*-M173 frequency (40%) has until now only been found in northern Cameroonian samples. This contrasts with the comparatively low presence of J representatives (9%), which is the modal clade in Middle Eastern populations, including Amman. The Dead Sea sample also showed a high presence of E3b3a-M34 lineages (31%), which is only comparable to that found in Ethiopians. Although ancient and recent ties with sub-Saharan and eastern Africans cannot be discarded, it seems that isolation, strong drift, and/or founder effects are responsible for the anomalous Y-chromosome pool of this population. These results demonstrate that, at a fine scale, the smooth, continental clines detected for several Y-chromosome markers are often disrupted by genetically divergent populations.
Posts: 2007 | From: Washington State | Registered: Oct 2006
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THE FORMATION OF A SOUTHERN RED SEASCAPE IN THE LATE PREHISTORIC PERIOD
"By the third to second millennia BC the predominant tool type that was present along the Tihama littoral consisted of geometric microliths made of obsidian which have also been found on sites of the same period along the coasts of Djibouti and Eritrea in the Horn of Africa. While this tool tradition is MUCH MORE ANCIENT elsewhere IN AFRICA, it appears millennia later on the opposing littorals of the southern Red Sea. Furthermore sourcing analysis of the obsidian recovered on late prehistoric sites of the Tihamah littoral has revealed that much of this obsidian most probably originated across the Red Sea in the Horn of Africva rather than from sources in highland Yemen."
SEA PORT TO PUNT: NEW EVIDENCE FROM MARSA GAWASIS, RED SEA (EGYPT)
"Exotic ceramics included fragments of vessels from the Yemen Tihama, the region of Aden and possibly Eritrea, suggesting that in the early to mid-2nd millennium BC the Egyptians had maritime contacts with both Arabian and African regions of the Red Sea."
Evergreen Writes:
Hence the original Bedouin or Beja consisted of the Cushitic people that occupied the two shores of the Red Sea. This is interesting in light of recent genetic information on the Bedouin from Jordan.
I am aware of the case of Tihama complex in Yemen, as I had exchanges with another poster on the issues pertaining to it. The same with the said DNA samples from Jordan. However, how do you know that these folks were "Cushitic"? There are Semitic speakers in the African Horn as well. Moreover, the specific 'whereabouts' of "Punt" is still not resolved, other than that it likely lay south of Egypt, and possibly encompassed an African region neighboring the Red Sea [i.e. East Africa]. Some scholars make 'guesses' as to where it might have been located, based on traded items like Frankincense, while ignoring other traded goods.
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quote:Originally posted by Supercar: [QUOTE] However, how do you know that these folks were "Cushitic"? There are Semitic speakers in the African Horn as well.
Evergreen Writes:
You are correct, I don't know that they were Cushitic speakers. This is my best estimate based upon my understanding of the archaeological, linguistic and genetic record. It is possible that they were Semetic speakers. However, I am not an advocate of the theory that Semitic arose in NE Africa. I believe it arose in southern Palestine and Northern Egypt. I believe it spread to the Horn of Africa. Yemen is a strange case, deserving of further research. It is odd that we find evidence of African migrations to Yemen over 6,000 years ago, yet the Yemenis have the lowest levels of haplogroup E among any of the Middle Eastern populations (~10%).
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However, I am not an advocate of the theory that Semitic arose in NE Africa. I believe it arose in southern Palestine and Northern Egypt. I believe it spread to the Horn of Africa.
Interesting. What makes you believe this, and that those spoken in the African Horn derive from those in the North, rather than the other way around?
quote:Evergreen: Yemen is a strange case, deserving of further research. It is odd that we find evidence of African migrations to Yemen over 6,000 years ago, yet the Yemenis have the lowest levels of haplogroup E among any of the Middle Eastern populations (~10%).
With respect to the Tihama complex, this wouldn't be surprising within the context approached by Edward Keall, as posted herein: Tihama cultural complexPosts: 5964 | Registered: Jan 2005
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quote:Originally posted by Supercar: [QUOTE]Interesting. What makes you believe this, and that those spoken in the African Horn derive from those in the North, rather than the other way around?
Evergreen Writes:
Getting tired. Let's pick this up later.
Evergreen Posts:
Steven Brandt (Department of Anthropology, University of Florida) and Juris Zarins (Department of Anthropology, Southwest Missouri State University): Traditional models argue that the origin of Semitic-speaking peoples that are tied closely to Mesopotamian cultures that arose following the original settlements of the lower Mesopotamian alluvium, around 5500 BC. Drawing upon recent archaeological, linguistic and genetic data, this paper suggests an alternative model in which early Neolithic Afro-Asiatic speaking nomadic pastoralists from Northeastern Africa were the first to introduce pre-Semitic languages and an African form of nomadic pastoralism to Arabia and the Near East. Implications of this model for the importance of pastoral nomadism in clarifying issues related to the socio-economic prehistory and history of these regions are discussed.
Juris Zarins (Department of Anthropology, Southwest Missouri State University) and Steven Brandt (Department of Anthropology, University of Florida): The Eastern Desert of Egypt. A case study for the spread of Semitic-speaking pastoral peoples (cancelled):
In a previous presentation we argued that a complex, two-pronged development resulted in the creation of pastoral nomads in Arabia. One of these arose which was closely related to the Fertile Crescent. As the result of animal domestication by 6000 BC, groups began to herd ovicaprids in areas adjacent to the Crescent, especially in northern Arabia, southern Levant and the Sinai. The second developmental wave may have originated in the Horn of Africa. The domestication of bovids and specialized sheep led to pastoral groups developing in southwest Arabia, perhaps as early as 6000 BC as well. Recent genetic evidence tends to buttress already known archaeological and rock art data for such assumptions. The concomitant issue of Semitic language origins can also be re-examined in light of recent linguistic-genetic modeling proposed by a number of researchers. An examination of the Eastern Desert of Egypt can perhaps shed light on this problem as well. By the late Old Kingdom, hieroglyphic records suggest that at least two major pastoral, linguistic-ethnic groups developed in the Eastern Desert. The first group, as traditional Semitic speakers, may have originated in the northern areas of Sinai, the southern Levant and Arabian Midian. These groups would include the ‘3M and/or IWN.TYW / ST.TYW / MNTW N SWT. From the Horn of Africa area ranging into the southern Eastern Desert we see the arrival of the ?Cushitic MD3 and BK / BKK / B3KT. For the subsequent Middle Kingdom, a well defined regional characterization develops perhaps enhanced by the cordon sanitaire maintained by the Egyptians along the Wadi Hammamat
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Interesting. What makes you believe this, and that those spoken in the African Horn derive from those in the North, rather than the other way around?
Evergreen Writes:
Getting tired. Let's pick this up later.
Sure, why not. However, in the meantime, this...
quote: Evergreen Posts:
Steven Brandt (Department of Anthropology, University of Florida) and Juris Zarins (Department of Anthropology, Southwest Missouri State University): Traditional models argue that the origin of Semitic-speaking peoples that are tied closely to Mesopotamian cultures that arose following the original settlements of the lower Mesopotamian alluvium, around 5500 BC. Drawing upon recent archaeological, linguistic and genetic data, this paper suggests an alternative model in which early Neolithic Afro-Asiatic speaking nomadic pastoralists from Northeastern Africa were the first to introduce pre-Semitic languages and an African form of nomadic pastoralism to Arabia and the Near East. Implications of this model for the importance of pastoral nomadism in clarifying issues related to the socio-economic prehistory and history of these regions are discussed.
...seems to be in agreement with this:
Brandt, Steven. University of Florida and Juris Zarins, Southwest Missouri State University.
An African Origin for Semitic-Speaking Peoples? Archeological, Genetic and Linguistic Perspectives.
The origins of Semitic - speaking peoples have traditionally been linked to Near Eastern cultures that first occupied the lower Mesopotamian alluvium prior to 4000 BC. Drawing upon recent archeological, linguistic and genetic data, this paper develops an alternative model which suggests that Neolithic Afro-Asiatic speaking nomadic pastoralists from North-eastern Africa were the first to introduce “proto-Semitic” languages and an African form of nomadic pastoralism to Arabia, perhaps from multiple dispersal points along the Red Sea and Sinai. Implications of this model for clarifying long-standing issues related to the later prehistory and history of Northeastern Africa and Arabia are discussed.
posted
My only problem with this is that people are superimposing the North American modern view/perspective on race on an alien environment. Ancient people refered to ethnicity in most case as opposed to what we frequenly use today as the American crapeau mess that frequently went against democracy!
The Biblical reference of Moses description aparently does not negate modern framers form portraying him differently. Close to a third of modern Palestinians have African ancestry but in the Arab world, the implication are vastly different in expressions of community and kinship. Yes, there are prejudices in all climes! Al-Jahiz and his 'Superiority of the Black.....'is so controversal that thesubject addresses certian sociological implication of human ignorance in a so called egaletaarian utopia!
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quote:Originally posted by yazid904: My only problem with this is that people are superimposing the North American modern view/perspective on race on an alien environment.
Evergreen Writes:
What methodology do you purpose we use to successfully communicate a scientific approach to biological anthropology? Having a common and consistent standard is the only method I am aware of. You claim that ancient people refered to other people by ethnicity. Do you have evidence that supports the universal understanding and application of the concept of ethnicity in the ancient world? Many did not even have a concept for humans as distinct from animals or the "spirit" world.
Posts: 2007 | From: Washington State | Registered: Oct 2006
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Steven Brandt (Department of Anthropology, University of Florida) and Juris Zarins (Department of Anthropology, Southwest Missouri State University): Traditional models argue that the origin of Semitic-speaking peoples that are tied closely to Mesopotamian cultures that arose following the original settlements of the lower Mesopotamian alluvium, around 5500 BC. Drawing upon recent archaeological, linguistic and genetic data, this paper suggests an alternative model in which early Neolithic Afro-Asiatic speaking nomadic pastoralists from Northeastern Africa were the first to introduce pre-Semitic languages and an African form of nomadic pastoralism to Arabia and the Near East. Implications of this model for the importance of pastoral nomadism in clarifying issues related to the socio-economic prehistory and history of these regions are discussed.
...seems to be in agreement with this:
Brandt, Steven. University of Florida and Juris Zarins, Southwest Missouri State University.
An African Origin for Semitic-Speaking Peoples? Archeological, Genetic and Linguistic Perspectives.
The origins of Semitic - speaking peoples have traditionally been linked to Near Eastern cultures that first occupied the lower Mesopotamian alluvium prior to 4000 BC. Drawing upon recent archeological, linguistic and genetic data, this paper develops an alternative model which suggests that Neolithic Afro-Asiatic speaking nomadic pastoralists from North-eastern Africa were the first to introduce “proto-Semitic” languages and an African form of nomadic pastoralism to Arabia, perhaps from multiple dispersal points along the Red Sea and Sinai. Implications of this model for clarifying long-standing issues related to the later prehistory and history of Northeastern Africa and Arabia are discussed.
What I understand from this piece, is the African origin of 'proto-Semitic' languages. Hence, it is understandable that language structural similarities between Ethio-Semitic languages and those in "Southwest Asia", stem from a common African Afrasan precusor. The authors seem to be arguing for development of Semitic languages from an African proto-Semitic language, which "spread along the Red Sea" and perhaps the corridor [where Sinai happens to be] from the Nile Valley to the Levant. This would make sense, given that Semitic languages of the said regions are distinct yet related to one another.
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quote:Originally posted by Supercar: [QUOTE]What I understand from this piece, is the African origin of 'proto-Semitic' languages. Hence, it is understandable that language structural similarities between Ethio-Semitic languages and those in "Southwest Asia", stem from a common African Afrasan precusor. The authors seem to be arguing for development of Semitic languages from an African proto-Semitic language, which "spread along the Red Sea" and perhaps the corridor [where Sinai happens to be] from the Nile Valley to the Levant. This would make sense, given that Semitic languages of the said regions are distinct yet related to one another.
Evergreen Writes:
Two problems with the East African origin of Semitic theory as espoused above.
1) Neither Zarins or Brandt are specialists in Semitic or Afro-Asiatic or even lingustics. They are arcaeologists. This does not prove the theory incorrect, but certainly warrants enhanced scrutiny.
2) Proto-Semitic has a full agropastoral vocabulary. This is inconsistent with an Ethiopian origin in that the archaeological evidence indicates agropastoral economies spread from the Sudanese Neolithic to the Horn via the Red Sea Hills and the Blue Nile.
Posts: 2007 | From: Washington State | Registered: Oct 2006
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Two problems with the East African origin of Semitic theory as espoused above.
1) Neither Zarins or Brandt are specialists in Semitic or Afro-Asiatic or even lingustics. They are arcaeologists. This does not prove the theory incorrect, but certainly warrants enhanced scrutiny.
But that didn't stop you from citing them. As for the point that they are not "linguists", what can be said of this, is that their assessment is consistent with "linguists" like Ehret. Ehret too argues for "proto-Semitic" origins in Africa, not "Near East". This correlates well with the upper Paleolithic movement of people along the Nile Valley into the Levant, prior to the farming revolution over there.
2) Proto-Semitic has a full agropastoral vocabulary. This is inconsistent with an Ethiopian origin in that the archaeological evidence indicates agropastoral economies spread from the Sudanese Neolithic to the Horn via the Red Sea Hills and the Blue Nile. [/QB][/QUOTE]
Posts: 5964 | Registered: Jan 2005
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Two problems with the East African origin of Semitic theory as espoused above.
1) Neither Zarins or Brandt are specialists in Semitic or Afro-Asiatic or even lingustics. They are arcaeologists. This does not prove the theory incorrect, but certainly warrants enhanced scrutiny.
But that didn't stop you from citing them. As for the point that they are not "linguists", what can be said of this, is that their assessment is consistent with "linguists" like Ehret. Ehret too argues for "proto-Semitic" origins in Africa, not "Near East". This correlates well with the upper Paleolithic movement of people along the Nile Valley into the Levant, prior to the farming revolution over there, as supported by genetics and archeology.
quote:Evergreen:
2) Proto-Semitic has a full agropastoral vocabulary. This is inconsistent with an Ethiopian origin in that the archaeological evidence indicates agropastoral economies spread from the Sudanese Neolithic to the Horn via the Red Sea Hills and the Blue Nile.
What source is there for this, and are you suggesting that the African Horn had no mixed "economy" of agro-pastoralism prior to or during the existence of "Proto-Semitic" over there? Or are you altogether suggesting that there was no "proto-Semitic" language in the African Horn, from which the Semitic languages distinct to that region developed?
Another thing that you might be overlooking, is that there are no Semitic languages spoken in either Egypt or Sudan today, that can be considered to be exclusively distinct to these regions. This isn't the case in the African Horn.
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quote:Originally posted by Supercar: [QUOTE]But that didn't stop you from citing them...
Evergreen Writes:
Never through the baby out with the bathwater : )
quote:Originally posted by Supercar: [QUOTE] Ehret too argues for "proto-Semitic" origins in Africa, not "Near East". ...
Evergreen Writes:
As far as I am aware Ehret argues that proto-Afro-Asiatic originates in the Horn of Africa and spread to the Near East during the early Holocene. Are you confusing proto-Afro-Asiatic and proto-Semitic?
Posts: 2007 | From: Washington State | Registered: Oct 2006
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quote:Originally posted by Supercar: [QUOTE]What source is there for this....
Diakonoff The Earliest Semitic Society Journal of Semitic Studies 43/2:209-219 1998
Now what is your source to the contrary?
quote:Originally posted by Supercar: [QUOTE]and are you suggesting that the African Horn had no mixed "economy" of agro-pastoralism prior to or during the existence of "Proto-Semitic" ....
Evergreen Writes:
Yes, if by agro-pastoralism one means domestic plants and animals.
quote:Originally posted by Supercar: [QUOTE] Or are you altogether suggesting that there was no "proto-Semitic" language in the African Horn...
Evergreen Writes:
I am suggesting juts that.
quote:Originally posted by Supercar: [QUOTE]Another thing that you might be overlooking, is that there are no Semitic languages spoken in either Egypt or Sudan today...
Evergreen Writes:
Nor is Ancient Egyptian. And?
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As far as I am aware Ehret argues that proto-Afro-Asiatic originates in the Horn of Africa and spread to the Near East during the early Holocene. Are you confusing proto-Afro-Asiatic and proto-Semitic?
Nope. I realize that proto-Afrasan is the equivalent of pre-proto-Semitic. I've pointed this out time and again, and even dedicated a thread to it.
From Ehret...
WHC: How does a small group of Semites coming in from Africa transform the language of a region in which they are a minority?
Ehret: One of the archaeological possibilities is a group called the Mushabaeans. This group moves in on another group that's Middle Eastern. Out of this, you get the Natufian people. Now, we can see in the archaeology that people were using wild grains the Middle East very early, back into the late glacial age, about 18,000 years ago. But they were just using these seeds as they were. At the same time, in this northeastern corner of Africa, another people ¬ the Mushabaeans? ¬ are using grindstones along the Nile, grinding the tubers of sedges. Somewhere along the way, they began to grind grain as well. Now, it's in the Mushabian period that grindstones come into the Middle East.
Conceivably, with a fuller utilization of grains, they're making bread. We can reconstruct a word for "flatbread," like Ethiopian injira. This is before proto-Semitic divided into Ethiopian and ancient Egyptian languages. So, maybe, the grindstone increases how fully you use the land. This is the kind of thing we need to see more evidence for. We need to get people arguing about this.
And by the way: we can reconstruct the word for "grindstone" back to the earliest stage of Afrasan. Even the Omati have it. And there are a lot of common words for using grasses and seeds.
Note: that in the highlighted piece, perhaps Ehret meant to say Proto-Afrasan(?)
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quote:Originally posted by Supercar: What source is there for this....
Diakonoff The Earliest Semitic Society Journal of Semitic Studies 43/2:209-219 1998
Now what is your source to the contrary?
What, you don't recall what exactly you read from it. What ever happened to the idea of "citing" pieces from the publication?
quote:Evergreen:
quote:Originally posted by Supercar: Another thing that you might be overlooking, is that there are no Semitic languages spoken in either Egypt or Sudan today...
Evergreen Writes:
Nor is Ancient Egyptian. And?
What do you mean by 'and'? Ancient Egyptian is still spoken in Egypt, in the form of Coptic and mixed in with Egyptian Arabic. It hasn't totally disappeared. Other than this Arabic, I know of no other Semitic languages spoken in Egypt, or Sudan for that matter. I however, have heard of Ethio-Semitic languages, none of which are spoken in "southwest Asia". Are implying that these didn't develop from proto-Semitic, but from established Semitic "languages" from the "Near East"?
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quote:Originally posted by Supercar: [QUOTE]Nope. I realize that proto-Afrasan is the equivalent of pre-proto-Semitic. I've pointed this out time and again, and even dedicated a thread to it.
Evergreen Writes:
Good, then you also must realize that there is no evidence of proto-Semitic being spoken in the Horn of Africa.
Posts: 2007 | From: Washington State | Registered: Oct 2006
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quote:Originally posted by Supercar: [QUOTE]What, you don't recall what exactly you read from it. What ever happened to the idea of "citing" pieces from the publication?
Evergreen Writes:
This is called shifting the goal line. Your initial request was that provide my source. I did so. Now you request that I cite from this source. This could go on forever. In the meantime you have not accomadated my basic request - what is your source that provides contrary evidence?
quote:Originally posted by Supercar: [QUOTE] Are implying that these didn't develop from proto-Semitic, but from established Semitic "languages" from the "Near East"?
Evergreen Writes:
Nope, never made that claim.
Posts: 2007 | From: Washington State | Registered: Oct 2006
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Nope. I realize that proto-Afrasan is the equivalent of pre-proto-Semitic. I've pointed this out time and again, and even dedicated a thread to it.
Evergreen Writes:
Good, then you also must realize that there is no evidence of proto-Semitic being spoken in the Horn of Africa.
Of course, there is evidence that it has been spoken in the region. You haven't addressed then, from what the Ethio-Semitic languages developed, if not "proto-Semitic".
quote:Originally posted by Evergreen:
quote:Originally posted by Supercar:
What, you don't recall what exactly you read from it. What ever happened to the idea of "citing" pieces from the publication?
Evergreen Writes:
This is called shifting the goal line. Your initial request was that provide my source. I did so. Now you request that I cite from this source. This could go on forever. In the meantime you have not accomadated my basic request - what is your source that provides contrary evidence?
Okay, let me make myself explicit. Provide a "citation" that supports your claim. I'm not denying or accepting it; I'm questioning it, and hence, not sure why you are asking me to provide to the contrary or what not.
quote:Evergreen:
quote:Originally posted by Supercar: Are implying that these didn't develop from proto-Semitic, but from established Semitic "languages" from the "Near East"?
Evergreen Writes:
Nope, never made that claim.
Well then, are you suggesting that it developed from "proto-Semitic" in the "Near East", but not in Ethiopia? If so, this would contradict your earlier stance...
quote:Evergreen:
quote:Originally posted by Supercar:
Or are you altogether suggesting that there was no "proto-Semitic" language in the African Horn...
Evergreen Writes:
I am suggesting juts that
Explain yourself, if you would please. Posts: 5964 | Registered: Jan 2005
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quote:Originally posted by Supercar: [QUOTE]Provide a "citation" that supports your claim. I'm not denying or accepting it; I'm questioning it...
Evergreen Quotes:
Diakonoff The Earliest Semitic Society Journal of Semitic Studies 43/2:209-219 1998
"Of working implements, only two prove to be CAA (COMMON AFRASIAN): *ma-nga 'sickle'...and *mar- 'hoe'..."
"The term *mar does exist in the sense of 'hoe' also in Sumerian, but, since it is attested in Semitic, Kushitic, Egyptian and Chadic, it is CERTAINLY borrowed into Sumerian from Semitic, not vice versa."
"Referring to the presence of a term for 'sickle', one should not conclude that CAA was the language of an agricultural population. The sickle was already known to the highly developed Mesolithic Natufian culture of Palestine(c. tenth millennium BCE), and the still more ancient cultures in the Nile Valley. "
"With regard to locating the origin of Proto-Semitic, a nearly complete absence of all the most important CS (COMMON SEMITIC)cultural terms in the African branches of the Afrasian linguistic macrofamily comples me to abandon my former conjectured location of it somewhere in Africa."
"It is quite evident that the cultural ties between Proto-Semitic and the African branches of the Afrasian macrofamily must have been severed at a very early date indeed. However, the grammatical structure of CS (especially in the verb) is obviously close to that of Common Berbero-Libyan (CBL), as well as to Bedauye....The same grammatical isoglosses are somewhat more feebly felt between Semitic and (the other?) Kushitic languages."
"As possible homelands for them I would propose the following: FIRST, the region between Palestine and the Nile Delta, where I suggest the homeland of the Semitic languages should be located..."
"The original homeland of the Egyptian branch of Afrasian should probably be sought, naturally, in the Nile Valley; not to the north of present-day Upper Egypt, however, but rather to the south - in the region of the so-called el-Kab culture."
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"Referring to the presence of a term for 'sickle', one should not conclude that CAA was the language of an agricultural population. The sickle was already known to the highly developed Mesolithic Natufian culture of Palestine(c. tenth millennium BCE), and the still more ancient cultures in the Nile Valley. "
"As possible homelands for them I would propose the following: FIRST, the region between Palestine and the Nile Delta, where I suggest the homeland of the Semitic languages should be located..."
Evergreen Quotes:
ON THE ANTIQUITY OF AGRICULTURE IN ETHIOPIA Ehret 1979
"In addition, accumulating archaeological evidence for the emergence of intensive grass collecting at the end of the Pleistocene provides us with a context into which the domestication of grains must be fitted, for it was as later particular specializations of these kinds of collecting practices that grain cultivation first arose. Intensive grass collecting may have been invented just once in the western half of the Old World. Its earliest known manifestations are at 13,000 B.C. and earlier in the Nile Valley in Lower Nubia, at that time an area with a Mediterranean winter rainfall regime. The Red Sea hills region to the east of the Nile, similar then in climate, would have been well suited to intensive grass collection and so may actually have been central, and Nubia peripheral, to the development. But as yet we have evidence only for the Nile Valley, and the Red Sea hills remain virtually unknown archaeologically."
"By the middle of the thirteenth millennium B.C. intensive grass collecting was starting to be established across North Africa by the spread of the Ibero-Maurusian (Oranian) tradition; and , as recent work by J.D. Clark is beginning to reveal, subsistence utilization of grasses appears to be of equal antiquity in the northern fringes of the Ethiopian highlands. Then between approximately 10,000 and 9,000 B.C. intensive grass collection appeared suddenly in Palestine with the establishment of the Natufian culture and after 9,000 B.C. begins to turn up in the archaeology of the Iranian fringe of Mesopatamia....Natufian does have typological similarities with materials from some northern Nile sites, and so again has apparent northeast African connections."
Posts: 2007 | From: Washington State | Registered: Oct 2006
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posted
I would be wary of any publication that cites Ayele Bekerie as a serious source.
-------------------- "Oh the sons of Ethiopia; observe with care; the country called Ethiopia is, first, your mother; second, your throne; third, your wife; fourth, your child; fifth, your grave." - Ras Alula Aba Nega. Posts: 1024 | Registered: Jun 2006
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quote:Originally posted by Yom: I would be wary of any publication that cites Ayele Bekerie as a serious source.
Evergreen Writes:
I am wary of every source, which is why I apply my intelligence to separate the wheat from the chaff.
Do you have any value to add on this thread?
I just added some value. The publication that you posted above that made reference to Ayele Bekerie many times is probably not that useful.
This claim, for instance:
In fact, there is little evidence for this other than the powerful pull of ideology, which states that Africa cannot produce culture, civilizations, or history. Bekerie's (1997:31-60) recent summary of both the ideological external school of thought, and those who more recently examine the evidence and conclude otherwise, does much to set the record straight.
is not particularly true, as Ayele's work does little to show the indigeneity of certain Ethiopian traits, as he bases most of his work on flawed assumptions and pseudoscience.
Posts: 1024 | Registered: Jun 2006
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Diakonoff The Earliest Semitic Society Journal of Semitic Studies 43/2:209-219 1998
"Of working implements, only two prove to be CAA (COMMON AFRASIAN): *ma-nga 'sickle'...and *mar- 'hoe'..."
"The term *mar does exist in the sense of 'hoe' also in Sumerian, but, since it is attested in Semitic, Kushitic, Egyptian and Chadic, it is CERTAINLY borrowed into Sumerian from Semitic, not vice versa."
The fact that this 'agro'-suggestive term is common in Afrasan, doesn't strengthen the notion that proto-Semitic originated in "southwest Asia", and that Ethio-Semitic languages come from this.
quote: "Referring to the presence of a term for 'sickle', one should not conclude that CAA was the language of an agricultural population.
The sickle was already known to the highly developed Mesolithic Natufian culture of Palestine(c. tenth millennium BCE), and the still more ancient cultures in the Nile Valley. "
What does the author then suggest the sickle was meant for; unskinning animals perhaps?
quote: "With regard to locating the origin of Proto-Semitic, a nearly complete absence of all the most important CS (COMMON SEMITIC)cultural terms in the African branches of the Afrasian linguistic macrofamily comples me to abandon my former conjectured location of it somewhere in Africa."
Apparently this isn't the case in Ethio-Semitic languages, which are African branches of Afrasan. If they didn't have "CS" cultural terms; why then group them with Semitic languages?
quote: "It is quite evident that the cultural ties between Proto-Semitic and the African branches of the Afrasian macrofamily must have been severed at a very early date indeed. However, the [b]grammatical structure of CS (especially in the verb) is obviously close to that of Common Berbero-Libyan (CBL), as well as to Bedauye....The same grammatical isoglosses are somewhat more feebly felt between Semitic and (the other?) Kushitic languages."
That makes sense; I've demonstrated this in my "Semitic: Afrasan or not?" thread via grammatical comparisons between Beja [considered a distant relative of Cushitic], Arabic [Semitic], Kabyle ["Berber"], and Dahalo [South Cushitic]. This lends support that "Semitic" is a branch of Afrasan.
quote: "As possible homelands for them I would propose the following: FIRST, the region between Palestine and the Nile Delta, where I suggest the homeland of the Semitic languages should be located..."
Obviously Semitic languages don't share every "common" cultural term with the Afrasan macrofamily; if they did, then perhaps there would have been no need to place them into a separate branch of the macrofamily. This may well also be the rationale for suggesting that 'Semitic' derived from an 'intermediary' Afrasan language(s), between proto-Afrasan and the established Semitic languages; hence, resort to "proto-Semitic". I still fail to see, how this suggests that Ethio-Semitic languages derive from "Southwest Asia", especially when none exist therein. Today, Ethiopia is one region where a multitude of, but obvously related, Semitic languages are spoken, that are unique to that region. To me, it makes sense that Ethio-Semitic languages derive from "Proto-Semitic" within the region itself, and not from Semitic languages developed in the so-called southwest Asia. I haven't seen anything to date to suggest otherwise.
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quote:Originally posted by Supercar: [QUOTE]The fact that this 'agro'-suggestive term is common in Afrasan, doesn't strengthen the notion that proto-Semitic originated in "southwest Asia", and that Ethio-Semitic languages come from this.
Evergreen Writes:
Indeed, but I find it odd that you made no comment on the issue of least moves and greatest diversity found in Semitic Afro-Asiatic. You also neglected to comment on the fact that Semitic is akin to Beja and Berber, but not the Cushitic languages found in the Horn of Africa? By the way, do you believe that the Semitic spoken in Ethiopia and the Semitic spoken in SW Asia are related? Also, do you believe that Afro-Asiatic spread into Asia with Y-Chromsome E3b carrying East Africans prior to the domestication of plants and animals? What do you make of the fact that haplogroup E makes up less than 10% of the Yemeni gene pool?
Posts: 2007 | From: Washington State | Registered: Oct 2006
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quote:Originally posted by Supercar: [QUOTE]What does the author then suggest the sickle was meant for; unskinning animals perhaps?
Evergreen Writes:
You are aware of the fact that most archaeologists define agriculture as the event domestication versus the processes involved in delayed-response cultivation?
Posts: 2007 | From: Washington State | Registered: Oct 2006
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