The African Origin of Ancient Egyptian Civilization

[Thanas]

Yeah sure, no pressure.

[Marcus Aurelius]

I have to say that compared to a scholarly article, your paper is worthless. You say you cited a lot of works, but in fact you did not cite anything at all - a cite should look like:
"ancient egyptians share common traits, these are .......,[1]"
And then you would have another thing below that says:
[1] Person x, Title y, pages X-Y.

As a scholarly article, the lack of in-line citations is a serious but easily fixed problem. I'm wouldn't he presented this as being up to scholarly article standards; the National Gallery of Writing is not a scientific journal.

He has in-line citations, which mostly follow the MLA citation style. You could say that they are improper for this particular article (MLA style is not used in history) or that they are not proper MLA style due to slightly wrong format (see my earlier post), but those are in fact more in the "minor quibble" category than serious flaws for a scholarly article. Experienced writers usually know what citation style to use, but for example in sciences many citation styles are used depending on the publication and it's not at all unheard to get a bounce for using an incorrect citation style for that particular publication, although it is a bit sloppy work. It is not a fatal flaw though; after fixing the citations it may still be accepted.

[Democracy Fanboy]

Linguistics helps us here--the Afro-Asiatic languages are divided into six language families and they include the semitic branch, the berber, and the Egyptian, but not any sub-Saharan peoples.

This is incorrect. Lots of dark-skinned African ethnic groups speak Afrasan languages. In fact pretty much all the ethnic groups that speak Chadic, Omotic, and Cushitic languages are dark-skinned. As for the Berbers, they are actually a pretty diverse group of people as these Tuareg and Siwa Berbers show:


Tuareg Berbers


Siwa Berbers

That's really funny, since I consider at least northern Indians to be white

What's really funny is your double standard. Earlier you insist that Gabrielle Union, Will Smith, and any other African who is chocolate or reddish rather than extremely dark brown is Black, yet you're willing to classify northern Indians of all people as White even though many of them look like this:





Whether or not the people above are White is up to you, but they sure as hell don't look like Swedes.

This is a chart showing the divergence of the human genome, compiled from information by Luigi Luca Cavalli-Sforza. Notice that the maximum divergence between any group is .03%. Notice something very interesting, though. The extremely tall and thin-featured Ethiopians are genetically most closely related to.... The pygmies![/img]

It would be very interesting if Ethiopians were uniformly thin-featured, but the truth is they're diverse in appearance too. In fact many southern Ethiopians don't look terribly different from the Mbuti in terms of facial features.





What makes you think Sforza only sampled thin-featured Ethiopians?

And the archaeological evidence strongly, strongly suggests that in terms of features the Egyptians saw themselves highly distinct from the Nilotic peoples and other so-called "black" ethnic groups in terms of appearance.

Here's how the Egyptians depicted themselves in relationship with neighboring peoples:


The Egyptians' chocolate brown color is lighter than the extremely dark color assigned to the Kushites, I will grant you that, but it's also significantly darker than the Mediterranean Berbers and Semitic Southwest Asians you evidently want the Egyptians to be more closely related to (it's also much darker than Hosni Mubarak, Zahi Hawass, and all those other modern Egyptians of mixed heritage that Eurocentrists insist the ancient Egyptians all looked like).

Interestingly however we DO have one image in which some Kushites are portrayed as having similar skin tones to Egyptians such as Rameses II (your "redhead"):



So much for your appeal to ancient Egyptian art.

I'll use myself as an example:



My facial structure is actually extremely African--very prominent curved cheekbones, sharp tipped but faintly jutting jaw, rather angular forehead. The profile shows a series of sweeping curves from the bottom of the face to the top with very considerable vertical differences and prominences, especially when viewed from the side. Now this is to a certain extent what in "white" terms is considered Slavic, but it also matches very perfectly with the Ethiopian people, I have one picture I could upload on my computer that shows an Ethiopian woman with a face almost identical to mine. Does this make me somehow black? Rather not, though not normal American western European stock, either. On the other hand my genetics are certainly different from many people whose face I share. An extremely strong grouping and series of traits is an indicator, possibly, of some degree of genetic uniqueness. But because the amount of genetic drift in the human population is very small, there are no firm guarantees on appearance anywhere.

Do you have any credentials in forensic anthropology? Have you honestly measured your craniofacial morphology and determined that it falls within the range of Ethiopian crania which you subjected to similarly rigorous analysis? Because it sounds here like you're engaging in subjective eyeball anthropology. What Keita and the other anthropologists cited in the OP have done is actually measure the features of many Egyptian, African, and "Caucasian" skulls and compare their statistically average morphologies. What you're doing is casually glancing at your photograph and saying "Oh, those features look Ethiopian" without actually measuring them.

As it is, they differentiated from Ethiopians (very, very slightly) in such a way that, through other evidence, suggests they probably looked quite a lot like berbers, which is unsurprising, because they shared basically the same climatic conditions.

That said, I merely argued this point for the sake of trying to enlighten you about both the realities and the chimaeras of "race". As Elfdart observed, the chart has been rigged to favour a northeast African association rather than a Northwest African association which seems more likely.

Craniometric comparisons of ancient Egyptians to Northwest Africans ("Berbers") have actually been done:

In the sum, the results obtained further strengthen the results from previous analyses. The affinities between Nazlet Khater, MSA, and Khoisan and Khoisan related groups re-emerges. In addition it is possible to detect a separation between North African and sub-saharan populations, with the Neolithic Saharan population from Hasi el Abiod and the Egyptian Badarian group being closely affiliated with modern Negroid groups. Similarly, the Epipaleolithic populations from Site 117 and Wadi Halfa are also affiliated with sub-Saharan LSA, Iron Age and modern Negroid groups rather than with contemporaneous North African populations such as Taforalt and the Ibero-maurusian.

For that matter, we even have craniometric evidence for a degree of change in the Egyptian population over the course of Egyptian history, consistent with the argument that modern Egyptians are of diverse heritage rather than exclusively Kemetic heritage as many people want to maintain (albeit only because of the stereotype that modern Egyptians are "Mediterranean Caucasoids" rather than any genuine sympathy for their heritage):


---Sonia R. Zakrzewski (2002): Exploring Migration and Population Boundaries in ancient Egypt: A Craniometric Case study

I will conclude with the following extra points: first, the lighter skin seen in present-day North Africans and Southwest Asians is likely of recent European origin, and secondly, "Mediterranean" Southwest Asians living in climates similar to Egypt's do not have tropical Egyptian/African-style limb proportions.

Point 1

The frequency of the SLC24A5 111*A allele outside of Europe is largely accounted for by high frequencies in geographically proximate populations in northern Africa, the Middle East, and Pakistan (ranging from 62% to 100%)...The relatively high frequencies of the derived allele in Central Asian, Middle Eastern, and North Africa seem likely to be due to recent gene flow with European populations.

In other words, the light skin we see in modern North Africa is of recent European origin instead of having evolved in situ in North Africa as you want to believe.

Point 2



As you see from the quotes in the above graphic, the ancient Egyptians' tropical limb proportions are markedly different from their Middle Eastern contemporaries, which bodes poorly for both your desire to identify Egyptians with "Semites" and the popular Eurocentric claim (which to your credit you did not endorse) that ancient Egyptians were descended from prehistoric Middle Eastern invaders.

[Lonestar]

Holy Necro Batman.

Also, lol at posting a picture of Egyptian art explicitly portraying Sub-saharan Africans as not just darker, but a lot darker and claiming that because some of the Cushites have a lighter skin tone(BECAUSE THERE CAN BE NO INTERRACIAL MIXING AM I RITE?) it proves that the Ancient Egyptians were predominatly "black".

[Spoonist]

@Democracy Fanboy
If you had done a search on Egypt on this board you would have noticed that the latest topic on this issue was here:
http://bbs.stardestroyer.net/viewtopic.php?f=5&t=148109
all twelve pages of it.
So if any search would give more than one thread then how come you go and respond in that one? Heck I'd say its most likely that you already had the link.
Thus we can conclude that you come from the same site that V-rex went to to get help almost two years ago.

Some quick advice, first read through those 12 pages I linked above. If you intend to do a similar spree as bigT have done off and on then take heed of his mistakes.

Then make yourself familiar with this board's rules, that would make the potential length of your stay longer.
http://bbs.stardestroyer.net/viewtopic.php?f=8&t=138015


With that taken care of, welcome to the board, be prepared that you so far have posted nothing new so people will be hostile to your lazyness.

[Thanas]

Necro locked.