Roxana Cooper Wrote:
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> All evidence indicates that ancient Egyptians
> looked like modern Egyptians,
> who btw show a range of skin tones.

No population on earth, except those who have been
relatively isolated from other people, have maintained
the same overall look and features over the last 3 to
5,000 years in any given place. Of course in places
like Europe and Asia, features are not marked mainly by
things like skin color, but in North Africa, it is one
of the things that has varied over time.

>It is
> difficult to see why Nefertiti,
> Nefertari, etc. would have been depicted
> pinky-beige except that they *were*
> pinky-beige.

Actually there are images of Nefertiti and Nefertari that are brown also.
The point being that artwork does not always reflect reality, whether it
is the extremely idealized images of dynastic Egyptians, brown, black, pink
or tan or the idealized images of the Greeks, or any other culture for that
matter. These artworks are more or less a "general" idea of how a group of
people looked at themselves and a "general" description of their features.
No art captures the warts, wrinkles and other "abnormalities" in "real" life
humans. Therefore a reconstruction does not have to look like any particular
image because many of these images dont look alike in the first place. So
she didn't "have" to look like the Berlin bust no more than she "had" to look
like any other bust that depicted her.

> On the other hand it is certain that
> some Egyptians were descended
> from Nubian immigrants and quite dark skinned. The
> AEs clearly considered
> themselves distinct both from sub-saharan Africans
> and light skinned Levantines.

What is a Nubian? There were no 'Nubians' in dynastic Egypt.
That term as a reference to an ethnic group came after dynastic Egypt
ceased to exist. The ancient Egyptians were Africans who mainly originated
in Africa among other Africans to the South and West. Therefore dark skin
had everything to do with them being Africans and descended from Africans
and nothing to do with "Nubians". At least, unless you are trying to say
that "Nubians" are true Africans whereas the Egyptians were not, which is
still incorrect. The populations and cultures that originated
Nile Valley civilization were mainly found in Upper Egypt and Modern Sudan
and it is very unlikely that these people were any thing other than medium to
dark brown Africans in places like Nabta Playa, Old Kerma, Wadi Howar, Nubt
(Naqada) and so forth. All of these cultures led to the development of
dynastic Egypt and are sites of things like the first evidence of settlements
along the Nile, the first evidence of cattle domestication, the first
evidence of pottery, the first evidence of cultivation and so on. All of
this evidence gets older as you go south, reflecting that human populations
get older as you go south, as the Nile is the direct link between the ancestral
birth place of human beings in Kenya and Ethiopia and Egypt. The Egyptians
themselves recognized this in many ways, biology, culturally and politically.
THerefore, modern attempts to separate Egypt from its place in Africa as some
"special" development separate and distinct from the cultures that preceded it,
is more of a modern political and social theory than any sort of scientific fact.
They were all part of a Nile Valley complex of civilizations and cultures
in the same way that the peoples and cultures along the Tigris and Euphrates are part
of the Mesopotamian complex of civilization and culture.

[www.nubianet.org]

>
> There is plentiful evidence of Classical
> Greece's cultural influence in Europe,
> however there is very little supporting an
> Egyptian influence in sub-Saharan
> Africa outside of Nubia and Kush. Personally I
> don't 'identify' with the AE,
> I am simply fascinated by them.

Classical Greece was dead and gone by the time this influence
reached the rest of Europe. Therefore, Greece is not "Nordic" or
NorthWestern European. In fact, Greece and its classical culture
owes more to its geography along the Mediterranean, as a crossroads
of ancient cultures, more than being in Europe. However, that still
does not mean Greece isn't in Europe just because most Europeans were
not as advanced as the Greeks in the times of the Greeks. The same
goes for Egypt. Just because many other cultures in Africa (or in the
world period) were not as advanced as Egypt does not make Egypt not
in Africa. Geography does not change based on cultural sophistication.







Edited 3 time(s). Last edit at 07/18/2007 08:59PM by Doug M.