I already discussed this earlier. Egyptian art was always driven by a "canon" of proportion and style that decided how art would be produced for a ritualistic and religious purposes. This was nothing new. The style of Amarna may have been new, but the rule of "official" canon describing how these works were produced was not. As I said, the existence of a handful of statues of Nefertiti does not prove that she was foreign. It is a possibility but not likely. Is is just as likely and even more likely that she was nothing but native Egyptian. All I said is that she did not "have" to look like that and that those other portraits are just as important evidence for how she may have looked as that in Berlin. The point I am making is that ignoring all the "official" portraits in order to focus on a handful that looks Eurasian or speculating about Eurasian ancestry for certain figures in Egyptian history seems to be the norm throughout Egyptian history. It seems to me some people seem more intent on making Egypt some branch of an ancient Eurasian population than indigenous Nile Valley Africans, because they always trump up the Eurasian looking artwork and ignore all the rest. Or if they don't ignore it outright, they still use reconstructions to contradict the ancient artists by portraying ancient Egyptians as Eurasian and not African. Nefertiti is just but one example of this. It seems that having Nefertiti be Eurasian then makes it possible to justify all the Eurasian reconstructions of Tut, because they can claim there was significant Eurasian blood in the late 18th dynasty. However, all of that goes against the actual records and traditions of Egypt, where southern women, dark women, were deemed as the key to legitimacy in Egypt, especially during the 18th dynasty, with Queens called "Great Royal Wives" like Ahmose Nefertari, Tiye and others. That is not speculation that is fact, showing the significant southern orientation of dynastic Egyptian culture. Not to mention that the rise of Amun is said to have also originated with Southern kings, who used Amun as a way of maintaining legitimacy and control over parts of Sudan below the 2nd cataract. While there may have been Eurasian women among the court of the various pharoahs, the Queen mother was always from the South as southern women were seen as a key to legitimacy in Egypt, reflecting the symbolism of Isis as the throne of Egypt and a Southern woman. Therefore, this attempt to overshadow the significant connections between Egypt and the South by inserting some sort of strong Eurasian element into the royal bloodline, totally against the evidence, is what I am against.



Edited 1 time(s). Last edit at 07/22/2007 06:38AM by Doug M.