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[QUOTE]Originally posted by kenndo: [QB] [QUOTE]Originally posted by A Simple Girl: [qb] [QUOTE]Originally posted by Djehuti: LMAOH[/b] So now you're changing you're tune of Egypt being a white society to a "multiracial" one. You just can't accept it was of one culture and one culture only--AFRICAN. You're theory is also still ludicrous. It would take a LOT of henna to cover the body. Why not just accept the fact that the Egyptians didn't need sunscreen because they are BLACK. The reddish brown or rather mahogany and even chocolate colors painted on men are the actual skin complexions! ------------------------------------------------- Your theory that all Egyptians were black is especially ludicrous. If you knew anything about slavery in ancient Egypt you would know that foreign captives were often used for slaves. And slaves could be freed by any number of ways and become a part of Egyptian society. They could even inherit their masters estates if it was the wish of their master. Or marry a free person and become freed themselves. This would have undoubtedly led to a multi-racial society similar to what you see in America today. [/qb][/QUOTE]maybe i can make more simple for you simple. tim kendall- In the first half of the twentieth century, most European and American scholars identified the Egyptians as "white" and primarily "Near Eastern" in order to remove them from the African cultural sphere and to serve their ignorant and bigoted views that high civilization could only have been created by non-Africans. In the latter twentieth century, Afrocentric scholars indignantly challenged this model, asserting the "blackness" and "African-ness" of the Egyptians. In each case the aim of these scholars was to claim "ownership" of the Egyptians for their own "race" within the context of the modern, primarily American racial debate. In fact, the Egyptians are certainly Africans, but they are neither "white" in the European sense nor "black" in the (central) African. Whether they are "white" or "black" in the American sense will have to remain the personal view of the researcher. The Egyptians really possessed a wide range of skin color and many differing physical characteristics, as did the ancient Nubians. It is therefore interesting to examine the evidence from ancient art for these ancient dwellers of the Nile Valley, for they were probably little different than the present Egyptians and Nubians - and probably no less diverse than we are ourselves. In northern Egypt, as in all of North Africa along the Mediterranean, most people are light-skinned not because Arabs or Europeans settled there but because the indigenous North African Berbers were light-skinned. Northern Egypt, being linked to Asia, also saw from very early times an influx of lighter-skinned, non-African peoples, who settled there, intermingled with the local people or drove them out. From Egyptian history we have clear evidence that northern Egypt was periodically settled by peoples of non-African origin, who invaded from the north or east. For example, during the Second Intermediate period (ca. 1700-1580 BC), all of northern Egypt and much of the eastern Mediterranean and coastal Palestine (modern Israel) was under the control of the so-called Hyksos kings. The word "Hyksos" comes from an Egyptian word meaning "rulers from foreign lands." These people were of Near Eastern origin and maintained their capital Avaris in the Nile Delta. Recent excavations at Avaris (modern Tell ed-Daba'a), have even revealed remains of a palace decorated in the style of those on Crete! This has suggested to the excavator, Dr. Manfred Bietak of the University of Vienna, the strong presence there of Minoan (Cretan) royalty. This palace appears to date to the period soon after the Egyptian king Ahmose drove the Hyksos into Palestine about 1550 BC. It is thought possibly to have belonged to a Minoan princess sent to marry the Egyptian king. Obviously she and her servants from Crete would have been very light-skinned. On the other hand, there were also certainly black-skinned people in the Delta at the same time. Nubian pottery has been found in one area of Tell ed-Daba'a, which strongly suggests that Nubian troops were also living there in large numbers. Black people were probably also living on Crete and mainland Greece at the same time, for at Pylos in Greece black-skinned warriors wearing contemporary Cretan and Mycenaean Greek armor are depicted in the palace frescoes, suggesting that African troops were being used not only by the Egyptian king but also by his European counterparts across the sea. The Book of Exodus reveals that during the time of the 19th Dynasty (ca. 1300-1200 BC), northern Egypt was a land full of Hebrew and Western Asiatic nomad settlers. Proof that the northern Egyptians at that time probably did not look very different from the Hebrews is revealed by the fact that Pharaoh's daughter could take the baby Moses from the basket on the river and bring him up as her own. The Egyptian royal family of Dynasty 19, which came from the Delta, appears in art as light-skinned. Likewise, the rulers of Dynasties 22, 23, and 26, which were of "Libyan" ancestry, were probably also light-skinned like their Berber forbears. By Dynasty 26 (ca. 650-525 B.C.) the Delta had also become a magnet for the Greeks, who began to settle there in large numbers. Herodotus says that King Amasis of Dynasty 26 even had a Greek wife. With the Ptolemies and Romans, more Europeans moved into Egypt, adding an even stronger dose of north Mediterranean genetic influence. As one moves further south along the Nile people become darker in complexion. In Upper Egypt, the people typically are much darker than in northern Egypt. In Nubia, they become darker still, and in the southern Sudan, people are much darker than the Nubians. African-Americans, however, might describe all of these people as "black" (as a label of their claims to ancestry or ethnic affiliation with them). The term "black", however, does not really help us to distinguish these people, for they look quite different from each other. The same ethnic situation that exists today in the Nile Valley seems to have existed in antiquity, for all the same physical features and skin colors visible today in Egypt and Nubia can be found represented in ancient Egyptian and Nubian art. It should be stressed, however, that in no text we have from ancient Egypt is there a suggestion that anyone was judged inferior by the color of his or her skin. While some ancient Egyptian statues and relief images indicate that one segment of the population was fairly light-skinned; other images show Egyptians with very dark brown skin. Most, however, show people with reddish brown skin, which was the Egyptians' conventional mode of coloring themselves in art. In Old Kingdom art, men were normally painted red-brown, while women were normally colored yellow. In later Theban tomb paintings, women are regularly painted red-brown, probably because in the latitude of Thebes people were darker. Based on their depictions of themselves, it is clear that the Egyptians saw themselves as generally darker than the peoples of Asia to their northeast and the peoples of Libya to their northwest, whom they colored white. They also saw themselves as lighter than the peoples of Nubia to their south, whom they traditionally colored dark brown or black. Because Egyptians and Nubians intermingled along the southern Egyptian Nile corridor, the southern population of Egypt naturally was quite dark and many people were perhaps physically indistinguishable from the Nubians. At least as early as the Old Kingdom (ca. 2700-2200 BC), many Nubians had also come into Egypt as hired soldiers and settled there easily. Many intermingled with the Egyptian population throughout the length of the country, since we know that Nubian soldiers were also very early employed by the pharaohs to help them fight their wars in Asia. A number of Egyptian funerary stelae (grave stones) belonging to Nubian warriors are known, and a few reveal that the owners married Egyptian women. Several of the wives of Theban king Mentuhotep II of Dynasty 11 (ca. 2061-2010 BC) are shown with black painted skin, perhaps revealing their southern Egyptian or Nubian origin, while their ladies-in-waiting are shown with yellow painted skin, perhaps suggesting their northern origin. [IMG]http://www.nubianet.org/about/img/1C3_10.jpg[/IMG] By one Egyptian tradition the mother of the founder of Dynasty 12, Amenemhet I (ca. 1991-1962 BC), was said to be a "woman of Ta-Seti" or Lower Nubia, meaning that the dynasty was of partly Nubian origin. In Dynasty 18 (ca. 1550-1307 BC), the kings are known to have had harems of wives from all over the known world; the origins of the great queens, Tiye and Nefertiti, however, remain a subject of controversy. The royal letters found at Tell el-Amarna, ancient Akhetaten, capital of King Akhenaten (ca. 1353-1335 BC), reveal that the pharaoh deployed garrisons of Nubian troops ("men of Kush") in his cities in Asia, such as Sidon and Tyre and Jeruslaem. We can thus be certain that some of these troops fathered children with some of the local women, so that many Canaanites would ultimately have had some African ancestry. Biblical texts (like II Samuel 18: 19-33) also indicate that Kushites lived at the court of King David, that Pharaoh Seshonq I (ca. 945-924 BC) employed Kushite troops in his sack of Jerusalem (ca. 925 BCE), and that the army of Pharaoh Osorkon II (ca. 924-909 BC) in Judah was led by a Kushite general named Zerah. While it is clear that many Egyptians and many of the early Egyptian kings were very dark-skinned (we would say "black"), it would be a mistake to assume that every statue painted pure black was intended to indicate that the owner's skin was literally "black." The color black had other meanings for the Egyptians that it no longer has for us. Black - actually dark grey - was the color of Nile silt and was associated with fertility; thus the Nile Valley and Egypt became the "Black Land" (Kemi or Kemet) after the inundation, just as the desert was the "Red Land" (Djeseret). Because of its associations, black was thus identified with Osiris, the god of fertility, as was the color green. In his images Osiris' skin is often painted black or green. Since Osiris was the god of regeneration (after death) and god of the underworld, and since all people, when they died, believed they would become Osiris, they often commissioned mummy masks of themselves painted with black or green faces. After death a person was even called "Osiris so-and-so." Images of the same people, representing themselves in life, however, are painted with red-brown skin color. If the statues and relief images of Mentuhotep II (ca. 2061-2010 BC) normally represent the king with red-brown skin, one famous statue of him in the Cairo Museum is painted black. Queen Ahmose-Nofretari of Dynasty 18 is always shown black in her role as patron goddess of the Theban cemetery, but when she was shown in her role as queen, she was colored red-brown. In these cases, the black color did not indicate that they had literally "black" skin (which is never really black) but rather the ability to come to life again. Despite this, there is no question that many ancient Egyptians, especially southern Egyptians, had very dark skin, which Americans would call "black." One Egyptian statue in the Louvre shows a man with dark choclatey brown skin, which probably acurately depicts his true skin color. There is also clear evidence that the black skin of Osiris was understood in different ways even in ancient times. By the first century BC, for example, the Greek historian Diodorus reported a legend that Osiris, the mythical first king of Egypt, was really a Nubian and that he had come from the south to colonize Egypt. This tradition would surely have been encouraged by his traditional black skin color. It is also interesting to observe how skin color is treated on the small twin images of King Tutankhamun on one side of the cartouche-shaped box, found in his tomb, now in the Cairo Museum. Here the king is shown twice, squatting like a child sun god with a sun disk on his head. The figures face each other, and they have skin color created by inlays of yellowish stone or glass. The figure on the left is entirely yellow; that on the right has an inlaid black face, while his exposed arm and leg remain yellow. Almost certainly this symbolized the king's imagined day and night aspects as he traveled daily with the sun god in his divine boat in the sky over the earth and through the river of the underworld. Neither of these skin tones represented his real skin color. This was probably accurately indicated by the artists who created his magnificent portrait bust, which shows him as a typical Upper Egyptian boy with reddish-brown skin. The Egyptians recognized that peoples darker and different from themselves - and different from each other - dwelt beyond them to the south. Initially, in Dynasty 11-12 (ca. 2040-1783 BC), it was the Lower Nubian mercenary troops who figure in Egyptian art. These men were shown with black-painted skin but they had features indistinguishable from the Egyptians, who were painted uniformly with red brown skin. As more Egyptian expeditions were sent deeper into Nubia, other peoples began to appear in Egyptian art with more markedly central African features, hairstyles, and characteristics. That Egyptian explorers penetrated the Sudan to a great distance at this period is suggested by the contemporary carved ivory group, preserved in the Egyptian Museum, Cairo, which was used as a child's toy. It represents three pygmy men, which could be made to dance when a string was pulled. To the Egyptians, these people were the "horizon dwellers", who were seen only once in many generations. They were famed among the Egyptians for their dancing, and when any of these people were brought to Egypt, they were made to perform "the dances of the gods." They would no doubt have come from the extreme reaches of the Upper Nile tributaries and the northern Congo area. [/QB][/QUOTE]
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