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Kmt The 3 Lands?: Ethnicity vs. Polity
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[QUOTE]Originally posted by Doug M: [QB] [QUOTE]Originally posted by BrandonP: [qb] [QUOTE]Originally posted by Doug M: [qb]Come on DJ. There was no term "Nubia" in ancient times going back to the early dynastic and predynastic. Period. There is no hand waving or arm waving around this. And these terms belie the fact that the Nile Valley part of a larger cultural complex stretching into prehistory involving various groups at various times from the Upper Nile and Sahara. Trying to separate one of these groups from the other when they are all related as "Africans" and part of the same cultural complex is the fundamental problem. The usage of the word "Nubia" for regions along the Nile today 5 to 10 thousand years later is irrelevant to that ancient historical chronology. Therefore, this is absolutely about making a distinction between modern cultures identified by modern geographical terms and ancient cultures using the same geographical terms. [/qb][/QUOTE]I personally have moved away from using the term "Nubian" to refer to Middle Nile peoples prior to the arrival of Nobiin-speakers after the fall of the Kushite kingdom. Modern Nubians obviously have a lot of ancestry from ethnic groups that lived in their current area before, but they're not exactly the same ethnic group. That said, I think there is utility in a term for the Middle Nile region (i.e. the region between the First Cataract and the confluence of the White and Blue Nile). All geographic regions are arbitrary social constructs to one degree or another, but humans can't help but divide and categorize things anyway. [/qb][/QUOTE]The reasons I don't use it come down to the historically racist baggage that goes with it. And that usage still permeates its usage to this day. And my point is that in no other part of Africa are they so desperate to cling to a single term as some sort of special identifier for an ancient group of Africans than in the Nile Valley. They do this nowhere else in the Nile, which ties again to this historical baggage that Egyptology itself is determined to maintain. I get that it is typical standard naming convention to come up with labels for cultural complexes and cultures from antiquity that have no written records. But this is just something else in trying to imply an ethnic, cultural, political or social grouping beyond simple identification of artifacts. Because such an ethnic, cultural, political and social grouping did not exist. Africa is diverse and this applies to all parts of Africa. Just like there were many different cultures on the Lower Nile before unification, there were many different cultures in the Upper Nile into Sudan as well. Lumping certain groups together into some implied political, cultural or social framework based more on ideology than evidence is the part I have a problem with. Just like why is there a "Nubiology" and "Egyptology" to begin with? Is there a Romology? Is there a Greekology? No. There is European history and then within that classical European civilization and within that Roman civilization and then within that various periods within Roman civilization that one can specialize in. Same for Greece. But not in Africa as if they refuse to put the Nile into African history as a specialization within African studies and then Kmt and Kush as further specializations within that and of course beyond that there is the predynastic era Nile, the Paleolithic Nile and Holocene Nile and so forth and so on. But it is all African history not separate little independent islands of history separate from Africa. And sure, some could argue that because they had no language and we don't know for sure how they were organized politically and culturally, the term "Nubia" is a good general umbrella term for all related groups. That kind of makes sense but then the problem becomes that there is no consistent usage of the term especially considering that the history in that region of the Nile between Upper Egypt and Lower Sudan goes back over 20,000 years and features key evolutionary sites of human activity along the Nile. But for some odd reason, they never call that "Nubian". [/QB][/QUOTE]
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