Black ancient egyptians rumor origin?

[gridlock1234]

Most of you have probably seen the rumors floating on the Internet that the ancient Egyptians wasn,´t brown or white as is mostly shown on the different documentaries, but where instead i believe the word is afro black and that European scientist have covered/hidden that fact because they don,´t want to admit that there was in fact an ancient African kingdom.

Now from what i understand there is no scientific findings of any kind to support that claim AT ALL.

But where does that rumor originate and what scientific claims do they use to prove their claim and in what way are those claims bogus?

 

[Welshidiot]

I turned up this article from National Geographic: http://ngm.nationalgeographic.com/2008/02/black-pharaohs/robert-draper-text

 

[he_who_is_nobody]

I think the real question here is what you mean by black, brown, and white.

Do you truly believe Egyptians were white (i.e. Caucasian)?

In addition, by brown, do you mean brown like this, or brown like this?

One last thing, do you think this man is black and this man is white?

The reason I bring up these points is that skin color is irrelevant in this discussion. Of course, Egypt was an African kingdom. You have to remember that the Egyptians traded with Mesopotamians and Nubians, thus there was contact with people that looked like this and like this. This would have made Egypt a melting pot of colors as you can see from some of their art.

I think the problem here is that we are looking at a past civilization with our modern lenses. Something that is built into our modern lenses that probably was not in theirs is skin color. Our shared history has been tainted with racism and racist ideas that are hard to over come.

 

[Anachronous Rex]

It's an interesting point of fact that a peoples' physical appearance seems to be strongly influenced by their surroundings, more so than their genetic heritage.

For instance, see Magyars and Turks, both Central Asian peoples (or at least more recently Central Asian then the rest of the Europeans), but functionally identical to the peoples around them. Sure Turks have, on average, slightly darker skin and bigger noses then Greeks, but if I were to line up 10 men of Greek and Turkish origin you would be hard pressed to differentiate between them without additional input. Similarly Hungarians are almost impossible to differentiate from other Eastern European races.

Some of this is due to interbreeding caused by proximity, but not all. I think we can safely assume that Ancient Egyptians probably looked a lot like Modern Egyptians.

 

[Sir Shawn]

Denial that the ancient Egyptians were black Africans?

There seems to be some strong denial on the part of many white folk (both American and European) and even some Westernized modern Egyptians that the early ancient Egyptian came from and looked no different than the black Africans in the areas south of Egypt (like Somalis and Ethiopians). The consensus in mainstream academia confirms that the migrations of people that lead to the creation of ancient Egypt were Afro-Asiatic speakers of Sub Saharan East Africa and Nilo Saharan speaking Africans of the Sahara, who are black Africans.

Some people purposely misinterpret this argument as African Americans actually claiming descent from ancient Egypt, when we are not. We are merely pointing out the fact that a lot of people have been lied to about the true physical appearance of the original ancient Egyptians.

Ancient Egyptian as an African Language, Egypt as an African Culture

Christopher Ehret
Professor of History, African Studies Chair
University of California at Los Angeles

Ancient Egyptian civilization was, in ways and to an extent usually not recognized, fundamentally African. The evidence of both language and culture reveals these African roots.

The origins of Egyptian ethnicity lay in the areas south of Egypt. The ancient Egyptian language belonged to the Afrasian family (also called Afroasiatic or, formerly, Hamito-Semitic). The speakers of the earliest Afrasian languages, according to recent studies, were a set of peoples whose lands between 15,000 and 13,000 B.C. stretched from Nubia in the west to far northern Somalia in the east. They supported themselves by gathering wild grains. The first elements of Egyptian culture were laid down two thousand years later, between 12,000 and 10,000 B.C., when some of these Afrasian communities expanded northward into Egypt, bringing with them a language directly ancestral to ancient Egyptian. They also introduced to Egypt the idea of using wild grains as food.

A new religion came with them as well. Its central tenet explains the often localized origins of later Egyptian gods: the earliest Afrasians were, properly speaking, neither monotheistic nor polytheistic. Instead, each local community, comprising a clan or a group of related clans, had its own distinct deity and centered its religious observances on that deity. This belief system persists today among several Afrasian peoples of far southwest Ethiopia. And as Biblical scholars have shown, Yahweh, god of the ancient Hebrews, an Afrasian people of the Semitic group, was originally also such a deity. The connection of many of Egypt's predynastic gods to particular localities is surely a modified version of this early Afrasian belief. Political unification in the late fourth millennium brought the Egyptian deities together in a new polytheistic system. But their local origins remain amply apparent in the records that have come down to us.

One of the exciting archeological events of the past twenty years was the discovery that the peoples of the steppes and grasslands to the immediate south of Egypt domesticated these cattle, as early as 9000 to 8000 B.C. The societies involved in this momentous development included Afrasians and neighboring peoples whose languages belonged to a second major African language family, Nilo-Saharan (Wendorf, Schild, Close 1984; Wendorf, et al. 1982). The earliest domestic cattle came to Egypt apparently from these southern neighbors, probably before 6000 B.C., not, as we used to think, from the Middle East.......

References Cited:

Ehret, Christopher, Nilo-Saharans and the Saharo-Sahelian Neolithic. In African Archaeology: Food, Metals and Towns. T. Shaw, P Sinclair, B. Andah, and A. Okpoko, eds. pp. 104-125. London: Routledge. 1993

Ehret, Christopher, Reconstructing Proto-Afroasiatic (Proto-Afrasian): Vowels, Tone Consonants, and Vocabulary. Los Angeles: University of California Press, Berkeley. 1995

Wendorf, F., et al., Saharan Exploitation of Plants 8000 Years B.P. Nature 359:721-724. 1982

Wendorf, F., R. Schild, and A. Close, eds. Cattle-Keepers of the Eastern Sahara. Dallas: Southern Methodist University, Department of Anthropology. 1984

link to the entire article

http://wysinger.homestead.com/keita.html

Genetic migrations from Sub Saharan East African into Egypt and across Northern across correlate with the origins and spread of the Afro-Asiactic languages shown by professor Christopher Ehret above. From Luis et al. 2004

(link to study containing the image in title above)

Archaeological evidence simply does not the support the common misconception that Middle Easterners and certainly not Europeans were present or seen in notable numbers during the Pre-Early Dynastic periods:

"The question of the genetic origins of ancient Egyptians, particularly those during the Dynastic period, is relevant to the current study. Modern interpretations of Egyptian state formation propose an indigenous origin of the Dynastic civilization (Hassan, 198. Early Egyptologists considered Upper and Lower Egyptians to be genetically distinct populations, and viewed the Dynastic period as characterized by a conquest of Upper Egypt by the Lower Egyptians. More recent interpretations contend that Egyptians from the south actually expanded into the northern regions during the Dynastic state unification (Hassan, 1988; Savage, 2001), and that the Predynastic populations of Upper and Lower Egypt are morphologically distinct from one another, but not sufficiently distinct to consider either non-indigenous (Zakrzewski, 2007). The Predynastic populations studied here, from Naqada and Badari, are both Upper Egyptian samples, while the Dynastic Egyptian sample (Tarkhan) is from Lower Egypt. The Dynastic Nubian sample is from Upper Nubia (Kerma). Previous analyses of cranial variation found the Badari and Early Predynastic Egyptians to be more similar to other African groups than to Mediterranean or European populations (Keita, 1990; Zakrzewski, 2002). In addition, the Badarians have been described as near the centroid of cranial and dental variation among Predynastic and Dynastic populations studied (Irish, 2006; Zakrzewski, 2007). This suggests that, at least through the Early Dynastic period, the inhabitants of the Nile valley were a continuous population of local origin, and no major migration or replacement events occurred during this time.<i></i>

Studies of cranial morphology also support the use of a Nubian (Kerma) population for a comparison of the Dynastic period, as this group is likely to be more closely genetically related to the early Nile valley inhabitants than would be the Late Dynastic Egyptians, who likely experienced significant mixing with other Mediterranean populations (Zakrzewski, 2002). <i></i>A craniometric study found the Naqada and Kerma populations to be morphologically similar (Keita, 1990). Given these and other prior studies suggesting continuity (Berry et al., 1967; Berry and Berry, 1972), and the lack of archaeological evidence of major migration or population replacement during the Neolithic transition in the Nile valley, we may cautiously interpret the dental health changes over time as primarily due to ecological, subsistence, and demographic changes experienced throughout the Nile valley region."<i></i>

-- AP Starling, JT Stock. (2007). Dental Indicators of Health and Stress in Early Egyptian and Nubian Agriculturalists: A Difficult Transition and Gradual Recovery. AMERICAN JOURNAL OF PHYSICAL ANTHROPOLOGY 134:520-528

 

[Sir Shawn]

Most of you have probably seen the rumors floating on the Internet that the ancient Egyptians wasn,´t brown or white as is mostly shown on the different documentaries, but where instead i believe the word is afro black and that European scientist have covered/hidden that fact because they don,´t want to admit that there was in fact an ancient African kingdom.

At this point in time it's pretty well noted by many modern scholars that there was in fact a racialized agenda by early colonial scholars (which even persisted into the later half of the 20th century) to "De-Africanize" or "white wash" many advanced ancient African civilizations from Zimbabwe, Timbuktu, Mali, Nubia and yes of course ancient Egypt. Most of these scholars asserted that these civilizations and their accomplishments were masterminded by non African (non black) invaders into the continent. Read these comments by leading bio-geneticist S.O.Y Keita:

"The living peoples of the African continent are diverse in facial characteristics, stature, skin color, hair form, genetics, and other characteristics. No one set of characteristics is more African than another. Variability is also found in "sub-Saharan" Africa, to which the word "Africa" is sometimes erroneously restricted. There is a problem with definitions. Sometimes Africa is defined using cultural factors, like language, that exclude developments that clearly arose in Africa. For example, sometimes even the Horn of Africa (Somalia, Ethiopia, Eritrea) is excluded because of geography and language and the fact that some of its peoples have narrow noses and faces.

However, the Horn is at the same latitude as Nigeria, and its languages are African. The latitude of 15 degree passes through Timbuktu, surely in "sub-Saharan Africa," as well as Khartoum in Sudan; both are north of the Horn. Another false idea is that supra-Saharan and Saharan Africa were peopled after the emergence of "Europeans" or Near Easterners by populations coming from outside Africa. Hence, the ancient Egyptians in some writings have been de-Africanized. These ideas, which limit the definition of Africa and Africans, are rooted in racism and earlier, erroneous "scientific" approaches."</U><i></i> (S. Keita, "The Diversity of Indigenous Africans," in Egypt in Africa, Theodore Clenko, Editor (1996), pp. 104-105.

Only within the last quarter century has there been a real concentrated effort by mainstream scholars to rectify these blatant lies regarding African history. This is why there are now a plethora of irrefutable studies (ranging from anthropology, genetics, linguistics and cultural analysis) proving this perceived "Afrocentric" assertion to be the truth. None the less there has stark resistance by many in the West who absolutely refuse to acknowledge the validity of these facts and instead wish to pigeon hole people who adhere to these findings as "Afrocentric", which is essentially dishonest on their parts.

Now from what i understand there is no scientific findings of any kind to support that claim AT ALL.

That is absolutely false to say to the least. In fact it is quite the opposite. There is absolutely no scientific evidence to support that the original ancient Egyptians did not come from and look like various Africans further south in interior Africa:

"There is now a sufficient body of evidence from modern studies of skeletal remains to indicate that <U>the ancient Egyptians, especially southern Egyptians, exhibited physical characteristics that are within the range of variation for ancient and modern indigenous peoples of the Sahara and tropical Africa.. In general, the inhabitants of Upper Egypt and Nubia had the greatest biological affinity to people of the Sahara and more southerly areas." (Nancy C. Lovell, " Egyptians, physical anthropology of," in Encyclopedia of the Archaeology of Ancient Egypt, ed. Kathryn A. Bard and Steven Blake Shubert, ( London and New York: Routledge, 1999) pp 328-332)

and

"must be placed in the context of hypotheses informed by archaeological, linguistic, geographic and other data. In such contexts, the physical anthropological evidence indicates that early Nile Valley populations can be identified as part of an African lineage, but exhibiting local variation. This variation represents the short and long term effects of evolutionary forces, such as gene flow, genetic drift, and natural selection, influenced by culture and geography." ("Nancy C. Lovell, " Egyptians, physical anthropology of," in Encyclopedia of the Archaeology of Ancient Egypt, ed. Kathryn A. Bard and Steven Blake Shubert, ( London and New York: Routledge, 1999). pp 328-332)

Below is a source that goes more in dept in specifying which specific black African populations that the ancient Egyptians most closely resembled:

"Analysis of crania is the traditional approach to assessing ancient population origins, relationships, and diversity. In studies based on anatomical traits and measurements of crania, similarities have been found between Nile Valley crania from 30,000, 20,000 and 12,000 years ago and various African remains from more recent times (see Thoma 1984; Brauer and Rimbach 1990; Angel and Kelley 1986; Keita 1993). Studies of crania from southern predynastic Egypt, from the formative period (4000-3100 B.C.), show them usually to be more similar to the crania of ancient Nubians, Kushites, Saharans, or modern groups from the Horn of Africa than to those of dynastic northern Egyptians or ancient or modern southern Europeans." (S. O. Y and A.J. Boyce, "The Geographical Origins and Population Relationships of Early Ancient Egyptians", in Egypt in Africa, Theodore Celenko (ed), Indiana University Press, 1996, pp. 20-33)

But where does that rumor originate and what scientific claims do they use to prove their claim and in what way are those claims bogus?

These "rumors" have been known since the times of Napoleon first exhibitions to Egypt. The reason why there was a blatant cover up of the facts, was vested interest. That vested interest at that time (height of the slave trade) was essentially to de-humanize black Africans to support the pseudo-scientific racial politics of the time to help justify their enslavement.

 

[Sir Shawn]

In terms of the cultural affinities of the ancient Egyptians, they also group with other more southerly black African populations.

"The evidence also points to linkages to other northeast African peoples, not coincidentally approximating the modern range of languages closely related to Egyptian in the Afro-Asiatic group (formerly called Hamito-Semetic). These linguistic similarities place ancient Egyptian in a close relationship with languages spoken today as far west as Chad, and as far south as Somalia. Archaeological evidence also strongly supports an African origin. A widespread northeastern African cultural assemblage, including distinctive multiple barbed harpoons and pottery decorated with dotted wavy line patterns, appears during the early Neolithic (also known as the Aqualithic, a reference to the mild climate of the Sahara at this time).

Saharan and Sudanese rock art from this time resembles early Egyptian iconography. Strong connections
between Nubian (Sudanese) and Egyptian material culture continue in later Neolithic Badarian culture of Upper
Egypt. Similarities include black-topped wares, vessels with characteristic ripple-burnished surfaces, a special tulip-shaped vessel with incised and white-filled decoration, palettes, and harpoons...

Other ancient Egyptian practices show strong similarities to modern African cultures including divine kingship, the
use of headrests, body art, circumcision, and male coming-of-age rituals, all suggesting an African substratum or foundation for Egyptian civilization.

Source: Donald Redford (2001) The Oxford encyclopedia of ancient Egypt, Volume 3. Oxford University Press. p. 28

The OP noted that some people are now disputing the casting of Middle Eastern or "Arabanized" looking individuals portraying the ancient Egyptians in many National Geographic and History channel reenactments. Now while I do not dispute that people from the those regions certainly migrated to and became an integral part of ancient Egyptian civilization, there is no mainstream biological nor cultural evidence in existence which supports their presence during Pre-Dynastic times. Instead those lines of evidence only indicate a mixture of Sub Saharan East Africans (people from the Horn of Africa) and the Nilotic populations of the ancient Sahara (both are black). This once again is according to the facts not assumption.

 

[australopithecus]

I've merged the two threads as there's no need to two on the same subject.

 

[Sir Shawn]

I turned up this article from National Geographic: http://ngm.nationalgeographic.com/2008/02/black-pharaohs/robert-draper-text

There was also a blog on the National Geographic website about this very subject. One of the questions most repeated throughout that discussion (which was the most active blog entry in it's short history according to another editor) that the editors would/could not answer is what were the ancient Egyptians prior to the 25th Dynasty if not "black"? If there are consistent findings through both biological and cultural analysis of this relationship that the ancient Egyptians (Upper Egyptians especially) and Nubians were have been essentially the same biologically since Pre-Dynastic times then logically wouldn't that make the ancient Egyptians "black" just like the Nubians?

 

[whatsinitforme]

WHy must the conversation always turn back to color. Makes me sad.

 

[tuxbox]

WHy must the conversation always turn back to color. Makes me sad.

In this case, righting history would be a good reason.

 

[g0dh4x]

I think the real question here is what you mean by black, brown, and white.

Do you truly believe Egyptians were white (i.e. Caucasian)?

In addition, by brown, do you mean brown like this, or brown like this?

One last thing, do you think this man is black and this man is white?

The reason I bring up these points is that skin color is irrelevant in this discussion. Of course, Egypt was an African kingdom. You have to remember that the Egyptians traded with Mesopotamians and Nubians, thus there was contact with people that looked like this and like this. This would have made Egypt a melting pot of colors as you can see from some of their art.

I think the problem here is that we are looking at a past civilization with our modern lenses. Something that is built into our modern lenses that probably was not in theirs is skin color. Our shared history has been tainted with racism and racist ideas that are hard to over come.

What this guy said.