Absolutely. But those are foreigners, what about the Egyptians themselves? They weren't just some "in between" group between "black" Africans and "yellow" Asiatics. The populations had to come from somewhere and most of the earliest populations came from the South and West, meaning they weren't much different from other Africans in the area and shared many features in common with them. I do not think that the iconography of jet "blacK" nubians starting suddenly at Egypt's southern border is an accurate portayal either. The portayals of jet black Africans as nehesu did not start until the time the Egyptians started extending much farther south into Sudan, where there are undoubtedly very dark populations of Africans. This would mainly have been in the 18th dynasty. Kush did not start at Aswan and therefore, when you see Egyptians depicting Kushites, they aren't depicting people who inhabited the regions from Aswan to the second cataract. Kush was much further south than that. It is not valid to geography or anthropology to claim that these jet black Africans from below the 2nd and third cataract in Sudan were typical of the Sudanese Africans around Aswan, who would have been much closer to Egyptians in appearance than anyone else. This area running across Aswan to Nabta playa in the West and Nubt (Naqada) in the north was a very important place in the development of ancient Egyptian culture and to say that these people were drastically different from each other, as different as some southern Sudanese are from Northern Sudanese, is not accurate at all.

"African" Egyptians from around Edfu:



From: [www.euratlas.com]





Edited 1 time(s). Last edit at 07/21/2007 03:37PM by Doug M.