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Post by Brandon S. Pilcher on Aug 1, 2024 21:04:29 GMT -5
Just wanted to share some artwork of mine pertaining to ancient Nile Valley and other African history, as well as history and anthropology more broadly... This is my reconstruction of a Bronze Age Kushite spearman from the period between 1750-1550 BC, when the capital of Kush was located at the site of Kerma near the Third Cataract of the Nile ("cataract" being a stretch of rapids). Modern artistic portrayals of Kushite soldiery from this era often show them with leopard-skin loincloths, but it appears that cowhide or leather was the more usual material, although some Kushites also wore linen loincloths like the Egyptians further downriver. The Kushites are also known to have attached beadwork to their clothes during this period. The Kerma period of Kushite history would end with the New Kingdom Egyptian conquest after 1550 BC, but the Kushites would win back their independence with a second capital at Napata further up the Nile around 780 BC.
This is my portrayal of an ancient Egyptian archer. In the Egyptian military, archers could be indigenous Egyptians (aka Kemetians) like this gentleman here or mercenaries hired from the “Land of the Bow” (or what we now call Nubia) further up the Nile. In either case, their bows would have been what are called self bows, or bows made from one piece of wood, before the Hyksos brought in the composite bow (made from multiple pieces of wood) when they invaded northern Egypt from the Middle East around 1700 BC.
The white diagonal straps over this Egyptian archer’s body are referenced from an Old Kingdom tomb relief that probably came from the Giza area, and his basket-like quiver is based on one from the Middle Kingdom uncovered at the site of Deir el-Bahri near modern Luxor. In retrospect, the arrow came out longer than I intended, but I suppose really long arrows could have always existed.
This is my portrait of a man representing the Western Hunter-Gatherers, a population of hunter-gatherers that occupied western Europe between the end of the last ice age 12,000 years ago and the arrival of agriculture 5,000 years ago. Genetic evidence recovered from their remains suggest that, while these people often sported blue eyes, they appear to lack the genetic alleles for lighter skin that are now ubiquitous in Europe, western Asia, and the Mediterranean basin, suggesting that they retained the darker skin tones of the earliest humans who evolved in Africa. Of course, it’s theoretically possible that the Western Hunter-Gatherers had evolved their own set of skin-lightening alleles separate from that of modern Europeans, but no evidence of such convergent evolution has been found yet, so I went with a darker skin tone for my depiction.
That being said, some hunter-gatherer populations who lived at the same time further east in Europe, known as the Eastern Hunter-Gatherers, do appear to have had the alleles for lighter skin of modern Europeans, and it’s likely that these alleles originated in the very far north of Eurasia during the Pleistocene among a third population of people known as the Ancient North Eurasians. At any rate, the hunter-gatherer populations of Europe would find themselves absorbed by immigrating farmers of Anatolian origin who appear to have had Mediterranean pigmentation, thus initiating the Neolithic in Europe. These farmers in turn would absorb nomadic herdsmen from the steppes of western Eurasia who would bring Indo-European languages to the region, and this mixture would produce the modern European populations.
Forty millennia ago, a huntress representing the Upper Paleolithic Aurignacian culture crouches on a ledge overlooking the chilly European steppes where megafauna such as woolly mammoths and rhinoceros roam. In her grip is a spear with a bone point that has been hafted to the shaft with birch tar glue. She might be scouting for game on behalf of her hunting party, or she might be calculating which animals they will single out for an attack! If you’re wondering why she has blue eyes, a paper published in Experimental Dermatology in 2020 reported that, although the West Eurasian genetic alleles for lighter skin would have emerged no earlier than 28-22,000 years ago (and even then would have been restricted to the far east and north of Europe until much later), blue eyes might have emerged earlier, possibly dating back to 42,000 years ago. This would mean that many Upper Paleolithic Europeans would have had both dark skin and blue eyes, a combination of traits that remained widespread in western Europe before the arrival of Neolithic farmers from the region of Turkey around 8-5,000 years ago.
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Post by Brandon S. Pilcher on Aug 1, 2024 21:06:43 GMT -5
Exactly when prehistoric humans invented the bow and arrow remains shrouded in uncertainty, but the oldest uncovered arrowheads have been found in what is now South Africa and are dated to approximately 70,000 years ago. Outside of Africa, stone arrowheads of Paleolithic age have also been found at Grotte Mandrin in France (where they are dated to around 54,000 years ago) and the Fa Hien Cave in Sri Lanka (48,000 years old), as well as the pieces of a bow found at Mannheim-Vogelstang in Germany (18,000 years old). So while we may not consider bows and arrows to be as iconic a weapon for “cavemen” as spears or clubs, they do in fact go back quite far in our prehistory. By the way, I used a public-domain photo of rhinoceros paintings from the Chauvet Cave in France for the background.
This portrait is inspired by the seeresses (or female shamans) of ancient Germanic religions (Germanic being the ethno-linguistic grouping of European peoples which include the Norse, Goths, Vandals, and Anglo-Saxons). These were women held to be capable of predicting the future and sorcery, and they often acted as diplomats for Germanic communities. It’s possible that later Christian European beliefs about witches evolved from this earlier seeress institution.
A queen of medieval Mali stands on a balcony overlooking her mudbrick palace’s grounds. I love the Malian style of architecture, but damn, those rows of posts they have sticking out of it can be tedious to draw.
The Nile Valley queens Cleopatra of Egypt and Amanirenas of Kush are up against the wrath of the Roman legions! Can our heroines fight their way out of this predicament and defeat one the mightiest armies in the first century BC?
This is of course a fictional “alternate history” scenario I did for the sheer fun of it, but I really like the idea of Cleo and Amani teaming up against Rome. One wonders whether Cleopatra’s Egypt might have held up a little longer with more Kushite support…
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Post by anansi on Aug 2, 2024 5:51:26 GMT -5
You improved a lot I'm digging it, Cleo and Amani tho? I'd rather have as an alternate history she and Boudica, now she kicked ass, also a good team up would be her and Zenobia of Palmyra.
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Post by Brandon S. Pilcher on Aug 2, 2024 6:47:03 GMT -5
You improved a lot I'm digging it, Cleo and Amani tho? I'd rather have as an alternate history she and Boudica, now she kicked ass, also a good team up would be her and Zenobia of Palmyra. I just thought two Nile Valley queens both known for opposing the Romans would be a cool alt-history team-up. Plus, Cleopatra and Amanirenas were more or less contemporaries with one another AFAIK, whereas Boudica and Zenobia were from far later in time.
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Post by Brandon S. Pilcher on Aug 4, 2024 10:10:46 GMT -5
A daring young Egyptian prince must defeat a fire-breathing denwen serpent that has been terrorizing his subjects. His bronze shield is his best protection against the monster’s flaming exhalations, but will it be enough? Although Nile Valley cultures did not regard snakes as always evil as the Abrahamic faiths of the Middle East would, there were still some malevolent serpents in their mythology. The most infamous of these was Apep, the representative of chaos who battled the sun god Ra every night, but another was the fiery denwen that the Egyptian Pyramid Texts mention as having come close to wiping out all the gods before the Pharaoh defeated it. One wonders if that story would eventually influence later myths of fire-breathing dragons…
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Post by Brandon S. Pilcher on Aug 6, 2024 12:22:52 GMT -5
This is my rendition of an Aramean swordsman from the Bronze Age Middle East during the second millennium BC. The Arameans were a branch of the nomadic Ahlamu peoples who roamed the northern Arabian desert between Mesopotamia and the Levant, speaking a Semitic language related to Hebrew and Arabic. The Arameans would eventually coalesce into city-states such as Aram-Damascus before the Assyrians would conquer and displace them, distributing their population throughout the region. This resulted in Aramaic becoming the lingua franca of southwestern Asia and developing its own written alphabet which would evolve into the modern Hebrew and Arabic ones. It is likely that Jesus of Nazareth would have spoken Aramaic in his day-to-day life like other Jews of his time.
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Post by Brandon S. Pilcher on Aug 7, 2024 4:37:46 GMT -5
What began as another session of female figure practice evolved into a rendition of a woman represented in an ancient Egyptian wooden figurine from the Metropolitian Museum of Art in New York City’s collection. The subject is assumed to be of “Nubian” descent (i.e. hailing from the region upriver of Egypt) and probably worked as an attendant for a priestess of the goddess Hathor, possibly dancing or clapping her hands as part of temple or funerary rituals. The woman’s brightly colored skirt is referenced from the figurine, but I added a top because, alas, females nipples aren’t considered safe for work in today’s world.
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Post by anansi on Aug 7, 2024 6:53:27 GMT -5
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Post by Brandon S. Pilcher on Aug 7, 2024 7:32:03 GMT -5
Noted. Anyway, here's a throwback to a piece I did a couple of years ago: In Greek mythology, Andromeda was a princess of Aethiopia (which at the time usually referred, not to the region of modern Ethiopia, but to the kingdom of Kush in what is now northern Sudan) whom, according to her boastful mother Queen Cassiopeia, was more beautiful than the Nereid sea nymphs who accompanied Poseidon. To punish the queen for her hubris, the sea god sent the monster Cetus to terrorize the Aethiopian coast. Only by sacrificing Andromeda to Cetus’s appetite could the Aethiopians enjoy any respite.
Thankfully for Andromeda, the Greek demigod Perseus came over to slay the monster the moment it was about to eat her. Afterward, Perseus and Andromeda married, had seven sons and two daughters, and founded the city-state of Mycenae.
For this portrayal, I based Cetus’s appearance on Livyatan melvelli, a cousin of the modern sperm whale which prowled the seas during the Miocene epoch between 10 and 9 million years ago. Since the name of Cetus is related to our modern word “cetacean”, I figured a whale would make the most logical base for his design.
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Post by Brandon S. Pilcher on Aug 8, 2024 18:11:39 GMT -5
Memnon, warrior king of Aethiopia, leads his army charging into battle on the hot sands of the eastern Sahara Desert! Although the character of Memnon comes from Homeric poetry, the version of him you see here is based on his portrayal in the Total War game franchise, specifically its entries Troy: A Total War Saga and the “Dynasties” update for Total War: Pharaoh. In the former game, he leads a traveling horde of Aethiopian warriors fighting the Achaeans on behalf of Troy, whereas in the latter he heads the Napata faction. I love playing as him in both games, even if his faction is far from the most powerful in either game.
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Post by Brandon S. Pilcher on Aug 8, 2024 23:48:18 GMT -5
Another throwback tonight... Over eight thousand years ago in northeastern Africa, this Neolithic Egyptian couple is gazing upon the fertile floodplains of the Nile River Valley from the high plains beyond. Back in those days, the Sahara of North Africa would have been a grassy savanna teeming with wildlife and nomadic peoples instead of the barren desert we know today. Once the land began to dry up between 4000 and 3000 BC, some of the people who had roamed it would have fled to the Nile and begun cultivating its banks, leading to the Egyptian and Kushite civilizations of historic times.
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Post by Brandon S. Pilcher on Aug 9, 2024 10:42:22 GMT -5
This is a colored-pencil portrait of the Kushite king Shabaka (r. 705-690 BC), who was the second in his dynasty to rule over the Egyptian stretch of the Nile Valley after his brother Piye conquered it. I referenced his facial features from a sphinx’s head representing him that is on display at the Egyptian Museum in Cairo.
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Post by Brandon S. Pilcher on Aug 9, 2024 12:09:58 GMT -5
Has anyone here read about Population Y? They're a ghost population thought to have contributed ancestry to both Australasian and Native American peoples, with Native South Americans showing the most Pop. Y ancestry among the latter. It's possible this population's presence in the Americas predates that of Native Americans proper. Anyway, a couple of artworks I've done of Population Y people: (The latter artwork pairs up a Population Y woman with a Paleo-Native American man >11 kya.)
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Post by Brandon S. Pilcher on Aug 10, 2024 3:58:41 GMT -5
These two lovebirds represent two different prehistoric cultures that collided in Europe between 7000 and 5000 BC. The man comes from a culture of Neolithic farmers who arrived in the subcontinent from the Anatolian peninsula (now Turkey) whereas the woman is from one of the hunter-gatherer populations that had already established themselves in western Europe at the time. Although the farmers would come to dominate Europe during the Neolithic due to their larger population, they would absorb enough of the indigenous hunter-gatherers that, by around six millennia ago, between 20 and 30 percent of their ancestry would be of hunter-gatherer origin.
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Post by Brandon S. Pilcher on Aug 11, 2024 1:53:53 GMT -5
A trio of miniature artist's mannequins which I converted into African warriors. From left to right, they are a Kushite archer, an Egyptian spearman, and a prehistoric huntress.
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