MKGlouisville Wrote:
-------------------------------------------------------
> snip... This was of course a side
> argument, but Rebby felt that this was such an
> important part of my argument that she needed to
> create a thread specifically about this
> relationship. None the less I've provided a
> sufficient amount of evidence indicating that West
> African cultures still have a connection to
> Egypt's antquity, so there.

I created this thread because you had presented some highly questionable “evidence” for connections between Egypt and West Africa, and had failed to respond adequately on the previous thread. I note that you still have not responded adequately to any of these critiques - instead, as each of your items of “evidence” is challenged, you simply trot out another, which turns out to be equally ill-founded.

In particular, you have not responded to Katherine’s masterful debunking of the ridiculous wordlists you copied off the internet. Would you care to comment on that?

This Nok tidbit is more of the same. As Rick points out, even the little write-up from the museum suggests nothing more than one-way diffusion of influence along the trade routes, and a copying of prestigious exotic motifs. A good parallel might be the Roman motifs found in 1st-century Meroe (especially, say, the Roman Baths), which indicate contact without suggesting any kind of common origin or intimate cultural linkage between Rome and Meroe.

I’m dubious, anyway, about the museum’s interpretation of the crook and flail. To me, the “crooked baton” does not look like the Egyptian shepherd’s crook - too short, for one thing, and who would wear a shepherd’s crook on the upper arm? On the other hand, it does look exactly like a billhook machete or knife, which is a widespread high-status object in Subsaharan Africa, and the Nok figure wears it pretty much as I have seen knives worn in rural Sudan. I could not find a good picture of the “hinged flail” on this particular piece, but on the basis of other representations, I think it’s quite possibly a fly whisk - also a common item of royal regalia in Subsaharan Africa. I'd welcome a link to picture that might shed light on this.

In any case, as usual, you’ve cherry-picked one superficial similarity between two monumentally different traditions, and labeled it “evidence”.