Ben says:
North Africans don't want anything to do with a pan-African identity. Why is ancient Egypt a "African genesis"? It's in North Africa.
It is only sub-saharan africans or african-americans (of partial west african roots) who cling to pan-Africanism (all politicalized). This is because no civilization like Egypt came south of the sahara, so there is an inferiority complex. Secondly North Africans have more 'caucasian' features like smooth hair and thin nose which african-american males especially fap over. Laughable nonsense. Actually the "African genesis" of ancient
Egypt has its location in the south, not the north, as even mary
Lefkowitz noted years ago. The genesis is African.
And there is little "inferiority complex" among most Africans
or disaporan Africans these days. Such is old news from 40 years
ago- the Martin Luther King/1960s/1970s era. All that is passe.
Today's Africans who have been exposed to modern data note the
African genesis, and also note that the beginnings are in Africa
not Europe or the "Middle East." They now know that things are
established on the basis of hard data and credible scholarship
not "Pan Africanism." Pan-Africanism is old news, petering out
in the late 1970s. Who for example these days is pushing Nkrumahaism
save some marginal diehards? People have long since moved on.
Most controversy these days is due to Eurocentric/Arabized denial,
minimization, and distortion of the scientific data. That denial and
distortion provokes a strong counter-response- and that's where most
controversy is- not in any kind of "complex."
As for causasian' features, this too is laughably out of date.
Africans with a modicum of accurate info now know that Africans are the
most genetically and phenotypically diverse population on earth, without
needing any "Kakazoids" or "race mix" to explain why. Narrow noses for
example are native to Africa without needing any outsiders. Informed Africans
and African Americans no longer buy into or accept bogus white race narratives
that held sway into the 1970s and early 1980s.
----------------------------------- -------------
Its amusing that we have Yurco and Keita claiming there was a barrier around Egypt preventing Middle-Easteners or Europeans moving there in large numbers before Achaemenid and Ptolemaic Egypt, but suddenly around 500 BC large numbers suddenly wandered in... what was preventing them before 500 BC? ^^Your statement is laughably bogus. Yurco and Keita never claimed
"there was a barrier around Egypt preventing Middle-Easterners or Europeans
moving there." This is sheer distortion without any basis in reality- another
bogus strawman to "refute."
So what ever mainstream source you look at, Egypt was a melting pot by at least 1800 - 1600 BC. Actually few with any credibility deny that Egypt had other
immigration from the "Middle East." To say anyone is "denying"
this is yet another bogus strawman. Of course there were Hyskos, etc.
The key point of conflict is not that there was such movement, but the
African genesis and development before the influx of outsiders, and the
primary African character that slowly changed as said outsiders like the
Hyskos gained ascendancy. They did eventually in some late eras and
later periods sampling studies shows untypical Egyptian datasets as
already noted above (Zakrewski 2004).
Some scholarly databases contain samples that are not
typically Egyptian, represented as typical. QUOTE:
"Most dramatically, the results also indicate that the
Egyptian series from Howells global data set are morphologically
distinct from the Predynastic and Eatly Dynastic Nile Valley
samples (especially in cranial vault shape and height), and
thus show that this sample cannot be considered to be a typical
Egyptian series" --Zakrewski, S. (2004) "Intra-population and temporal variation in
ancient Egyptian crania."
I believe we can easily extend the 'melting pot' back to the late or even mid 3rd millenium BC in Egypt. Larry Angel (1972) labeled a cranial series "Levantine"/"East Mediterranean" from Dynasty VII? (2181 BC). Here's also what Snowden says: 'There was also a mixed black-white element in the Egyptian population as early as the middle of the third millenium BC.' Actually based on Angel, then Greece was a melting pit for
Angel (1972) noted that 14% of skeletal samples from early
Neolithic Greece displayed apparently Negroid traits, in contrast
to later periods. And in fact, Angel 1972 specifically notes the
affinity pattern between ancient Egyptians and sub-Saharans as have
other investigators. QUOTE:
"This affinity pattern between ancient Egyptians and sub-Saharans has also been noticed by
several other investigators (Angel 1972; Berry and Berry 1967, 1972; Keita 1995) and has been
recently reinforced by the study of Brace et al. (2005), which clearly shows that
the cranial morphology of prehistoric and recent northeast African populations is
linked to sub-Saharan populations (Niger-Congo populations). These results support
the hypothesis that some of the Paleolithic–early Holocene populations from
northeast Africa were probably descendents of sub-Saharan ancestral populations."-Ricaut 2008 Cranial Discrete traits..
Re Snowden, Snowden was/is a classicist, not an anthropologist or archaeologist,
or African historian. He is old news in the field, circa the 1970s,
and on some counts these days-inaccurate news in the field. Not surprisingly,
the bulk of the article you cite has to do with depictions of blacks in Greece
and Rome (citing people like Herodotus) having little to do with Egypt, or the
archaeo/anthropology of Egypt. Snowden clearly lacks expertise in this area.
Even his work on blacks in antiquity claiming there was little Greco-Roman
color prejudice is dated and has been effectively debunked by modern scholars
who show a strong streak of racism or proto-racism in Greece and Rome.
See Benjamin Issacs recent book debunking Snowden- Benjamin Isaac. 2006.
The Invention of Racism in Classical Antiquity.
NORTH AFRICA INCLUDES MORE THAN JUST THE COAST NEAR THE MEDITERRANEAN