Why do Afrocentists try to relate themselves to Egypt rather than claim their real history? (beautiful, country)
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This association with Egypt derives from pure Afrocentric propaganda, but you are honest, and I commend you. This allows for a very honest conversation.
"African" means people from Africa, and in that sense of course the Egyptians were "African", but American Afrocentrists largely have no blood link to Egypt. So you can battle over it all of you want...it is not yours. It belongs to modern Egyptians, who are about 90% genetically identical to the ancients.
It does not belong to white people either...except for the Greco-Roman eras. I have seen some take exception of the depiction of Cleopatra as white. Of course, she was. She was Macedonian with a drop of Persian. All the nonsense about Arsinoe's skull has already been thoroughly debunked, if you care to read through.
American Afrocentrists largely come from West and West-Central Africa. I finally, after many requests, have had someone engage me about a topic in that region. There is a great and long neglected history there that must be re-discovered. We must find out what the books in Djenne, Gao, and Timbuktu tell us. We must record the words of the griots. We must look for more castles of Gao beneath the sands.
Instead, we are arguing about how "black" the Egyptians were, as if it mattered.
I think you may have typo'd here. Do you mean something like: "I wonder why the OP has a problem with our adoration...?"
If that is what you meant, I can answer that. Adoration is not claiming descent, as American Afrocentrists do. Some on this thread have already posted threads in which I have in the past battled Afrocentrists who have claimed that African Americans are directly descended from Egyptians. No white person is doing that (except for the Greco-Roman era).
you did not answer my question. WHY IS IT OK FOR OTHERS TO ADORE THIS ANCIENT NATION BUT YOU PEOPLE HAVE A PROBLEM WITH OUR LOVE FOR ANCIENT EGYPT? HOW IS IT THAT YOU CAN ONLY BE INTERESTED IN A NATION IF YOU HAVE BLOOD TIES?
THERE ARE MANY PEOPLE IN THE WORLD WHO FALSELY CLAIM DESCENT FROM ANCIENT NATIONS AND BIBLICAL STORIES: THE JEW CLAIMING HEBREW LINEAGE AND THE ETHIOPIANS CLAIMING DESCENT FROM KING DAVID AND SOLOMON....BUT I NEVER HEAR ANYONE BERATE THEM LIKE I HEAR FOLK BERATE US OVER ANCIENT KEMET.
something else is fueling your hostilities. i could go on but im just going to say that we can claim descent from Ancient Kemet all we want. its none of your business and there is not one thing you can do about it.
I notice that those africans who actually have a proud civilisation to boast of, like the Yoruba, don't really get into this Egypt stuff.
a while back, I met a Yoruba man and he claimed that his family traced their lineage back to the kings of Ancient Egypt. they certainly do claim AE. the history of Ancient Ghana had ties to AE over 2500 hundred years ago. the Soyinka people were said the be a west African direct tie to AE.
everybody from west African came from east Africa anyway and our Ancestors from Africa came directly from west Africa.
its no ones business why we love Ancient Egypt or choose to identify with that ancient nation in a philosophical way.
I personally think West African and Sub Saharan Africans ( Where alot of Black americans came from) had more to do with Egypt than Anglo Saxon (Where most white Americans came from). Why can't Blacks admire the Egyptians but the Anglo Saxons can admire Latins and Greeks?
Why is this endless debate still going on?
I think it is natural for one to read about and learn from where you descent from and the surrounding regions.
For example i am reading about Portugal, France, and Italy even though my ancestors have nothing to do with those countries.
exactly. I see hate and hostility in the others posts.
Neither West African nor Anglo Saxons had anything to do with Egypt.
We have already addressed this is great detail. I will give you the short version and say that it is not a matter of "admiring." Afrocentrists claim direct decent from Egypt which they do not have.
Because the idea that West Africans came from Egypt is still out here- you yourself believe it.
Virtually no Americans descend from Egypt. The problem is that they are being taught that they do. Again, we are not atalking about a passing interest, but anti-history.
Excellent. I just got done reading Ibn Battuta even though I am not African. Having interst is fine. I tis not what we are talking about here.
what you don't seem to get is that you don't tell us how, what or who to identify with. it does not matter if we have absolutely no descent from Ancient Egypt, we can identify with it all we want and if west Africans tribes identify with AE this gives us more right to do so also because we have ancestry from there.
but anyway, I digress...even though I don't identify with any ancient nation, I will not stop wearing my Ank ear rings! LOL!!!
The OP clearly has some sort of agenda. First accusing me of being Afrocentric because I said that modern Egyptians are not only of indigenous(Egyptian) origin but foreign ancestry as well. So I guess I'm an afrocentrist for that one.
The OP keeps asking about "why do Afrocentrists try to relate themselves to Egypt rather than claim their real history". What other posters have been trying to tell him is that Afrocentrists are looking at Egypt from a Pan-African perspective. When Afrocentrists say things like "we built the pyramids", it's not about African Americans being specifically Egyptians, it about African people building the pyramids. It's looking at it more from a broader perspective and not necessarily from a specific ethnicity. Since Egyptians are African people, it would be appropriate to say that. The same logic applies for any other African civilization. When they say we, they are talking about all African people. It's similar to how a European or White person would say "we created the Greek civilization".
Another important thing to note. Since many Afrocentrists are African American, the OP is asking "why don't they claim their own history". Here is where the OP's statement doesn't hold much merit. The reality of it is that Afrocentrists who are African American, cannot point to a specific tribe or country of origin and definitively call it their real history since their knowledge of self was lost during the Atlantic Slave Trade era. So in a sense, you can't really blame them for having that kind of perspective when it comes to what is considered their real African history. Like the other poster has already said, "they are not only proud of West Africa but proud of all of Africa". It's not about Afrocentrists stealing Egyptian history. It's more about acknowledging Egyptians and their culture as being African and seeing Egyptians(and other African people) as being collectively African, despite the ethnic and cultural difference that exist on the continent.
this post here should have cleared everything.
Excellent!!
you did not answer my question. WHY IS IT OK FOR OTHERS TO ADORE THIS ANCIENT NATION BUT YOU PEOPLE HAVE A PROBLEM WITH OUR LOVE FOR ANCIENT EGYPT? HOW IS IT THAT YOU CAN ONLY BE INTERESTED IN A NATION IF YOU HAVE BLOOD TIES?
THERE ARE MANY PEOPLE IN THE WORLD WHO FALSELY CLAIM DESCENT FROM ANCIENT NATIONS AND BIBLICAL STORIES: THE JEW CLAIMING HEBREW LINEAGE AND THE ETHIOPIANS CLAIMING DESCENT FROM KING DAVID AND SOLOMON....BUT I NEVER HEAR ANYONE BERATE THEM LIKE I HEAR FOLK BERATE US OVER ANCIENT KEMET.
something else is fueling your hostilities. i could go on but im just going to say that we can claim descent from Ancient Kemet all we want. its none of your business and there is not one thing you can do about it.
You seem to think that only African-Americans get criticized when they (some of them) claim an implausible line of descent.
Have you ever heard of British Israelism ? It was a somewhat fashionable idea during the 19th century and before and British Israelism claimed loud and clear that the Brits were the descendants of the old Hebrew tribes that were supposedly dispersed after the Assyrian conquest.
A lot of Brits thougth that made a lot of sense and they came up with all kinds of ridiculous justifications for that belief. They'd say that Saxon = Isaac's sons, for example. In any case, british israelism was a ridiculous belief held by some White people and it must have been thouroughly discredited because you surely don't meet lots of people who think it makes any sense nowadays.
Claims of descent can be challenged in a polite and academic manner. Why not ? I think that the claim of the Jews that their ancestors were Judaites (a subset of the Hebrews) hold up well. Reasonable genetic studies say that they're basically half Judaite, for the most part. Not full Judaite but more or less half.
By the way, A LOT of people berate jews over this. It's extremely commonplace for people to say that the Jews are just a bunch of europeans who have nothing to do with the ancient hebrews. That's fine with me and people have the right to doubt and they do. I'll listen to their claim and judge their claims on their merits. I personally don't find the alternative theories about jewish origins convincing but I certainly believe that people have the right to hold those opinions.
Hungarians often claim that they're steppe Asians, related to the Mongols, the Turks, etc.
Genetics challenges that notion. Most likely a small number of steppe Asians conquered them and imposed their language and identity on them. But they're pretty much run of the mill Europeans. It's not offensive to say that.
Personally, I found it very annoying when I used to go to french speaking African forums and I couldn't find any kind of interesting discussion going on in their history subforums, because all they talked about was Egypt. They spoke about mythical, unsupported migrations and linguistics. There was not much research going on. Much time was spent complaining about how the racist rest of the world didn't take their science seriously. I felt annoyed that history minded french speaking West Africans were channelling their efforts into a completely fruitless direction. And I believe it is quite fruitless because a scientific program with shaky foundations is a going to be fruitless.
I didn’t feel like responding before but I’m bored so I will now. cachibatches is basing his belief that Ancient Egyptians were “primarily Caucasoid” on incorrect understanding of genetics. He’s saying this because he thinks that using y-DNA and mtDNA from those studies he posted shows us how much racial admixture the people had. This is completely wrong!!! Genetics doesn’t work that way.
To see how much admixture there is in a population you need to look at autosomal DNA. Not mtDNA and Y-DNA. But not much autosomal studies were done yet on the Ancient Egyptians to get a clear answer.
Most researchers take a multidisciplinary approach to study a population, because more factors are involved than just genetics. Besides looking at DNA, and physical remains of people (which was done by researchers like Sonia Zakrzewski who confirmed that some ancestors of Ancient Egyptians like the group called Badarians, resembled Sudanese and people of the Horn of Africa more than anyone else), scholars also study other things like culture, migration history and language.
Another thing that wasn’t mentioned before is that there are confirmed links of West African ethnic groups to those from the Nile region. Studies of the Hausa people of Nigeria show they are most closely related to Nilo-Saharans (a group that includes Sudanese of the Nile region) than they are to typical West Africans. Their language Hausa is also a member of the great Afro-Asiatic language family (a family that many scholars believe emerged in East Africa, around the Horn) which included ancient Egyptian as well as Semitic languages. Today the Hausa are one of the largest groups in West Africa, and are famous for their medieval city-states like Kano.
The same goes for the Kanuri of Nigeria, who came to be when Kanembu migrants from Chad (related to Sudanese like those of Darfur) settled there. They intermarried with people from the Borno region of Nigeria to form the Kanuri. They both speak a Nilo-Saharan language. Their Kanem-Bornu empire of central, western and parts of northern Africa lasted more than a thousand years. They also had a huge impact on the Hausa.
The Songhay people of Mali, Niger and elsewhere in West Africa also speak a Nilo-Saharan language. The Songhay Empire was one the largest in African history.
So yes, there are West Africans who have a connection to the Sudan, through immigration, but it’s not a direct link to Egyptians obviously. Of course I’m not saying they are descended from Egyptians because that’s foolish, but it’s confirmed that some West African groups are related by ancestry and language and culture (one example: peoples of the Nile valley and West Africa believed in divine kingship and most of their early ancestors inhabited the Saharan zone before it turned to desert) to peoples of that region. Indirect influences exist. Migration from east to west Africa happened all throughout history, making this a complicated issue.
Another thing: Ancient Egyptians and Modern Egyptians are the same people and probably looked the same. There was no population replacement. We find that some ancients were like the “Eurasian Caucasoids” as cachibatches showed, and some were black, and some were mixed. As it was then and today. BUT: there were demographic changes in the population. Egypt experienced a massive population boom in the last few centuries. From the 1880s there was an increase of 600% in 100 years!
link: Egypt - Population
So a good question is if this population boom affected all areas (rural and urban), and Lower Egypt (north) and Upper Egypt (south) equally.... Which brings me to something interesting from one of the links cachibatches shared:
Quote:
“The results of this study point to a genetic structure of the Gurna population similar to that of the Ethiopian one. This population structure has probably been conserved in some other Egyptian populations even though those which have already been analyzed, such as Mansoura, Assiout and Cairo, failed to show the same characteristics. Mansoura, Assiout and Cairo are very big cities with much continuous and current admixture of individuals from several other regions and countries forming great melting pots. Consequently, data from these great conurbations could be somewhat biased. More extensive investigation of the genetic structure of Egyptians from other villages and from Ethiopian and Sudanese populations will be required to complete the understanding of the structuring of the current population from the ancestral East African population.”
So if a population increase affected certain parts of the country and not others, while modern Egyptians are the same as the ancients (which they are!), the actual proportions of different segments of the population may not have increased at the same levels in modern times. Since Egypt was always a heterogenous and mixed population this is important to remember. Big cities of the north may have boomed while those of the south, not as much. (Or maybe the opposite) That’s what the quote above explains. So today we may see some types of people in larger numbers, but this may not have made up the distribution ratio in ancient times. Basically the same people, just different distributions.
Regarding culture, here are some traits of the Ancient Egyptians common to other Africans:
Quote:
“As a number of anthropologist- Egyptologists have argued, the Egyptian kingship displays strong similarities with that of East African cattle cultures. This tradition is now being re-examined by Toby Wilkinson in the light of newly discovered rock drawings in the Upper Egyptian deserts. “
“In addition to the well-known headrests, the dissymmetric horns of oxen (shaping the horns of their oxen) and the [symbolic use of the sceptre] , the Ancient Egyptians shared many features with the cultures of the Nilotic and Cush-itic pastoralists, probably as a result of their Saharo-Nubian roots.....
Headrests are known in many African cultures: Cush-itic (for example, Beja, Oromo, Somalia), Nilotic (for example, Nyangatom, Turkan), Bantu (for example,Luba, Cokwe, Kuba), Zande and Dogon (Lam 2003). In the Nyangatom culture, the headrest has a religious significance: it is the material double of his owner, just as the favourite ox is the living double (Tornay 2001, 67). This may shed light on the place and the meaning of the artefact in African cultures. In Ancient Egyptian culture,the headrest became a hieroglyph.”
“They also manufactured a very striking range of combs in ivory; the shape of these is distinctly African and is like the combs used even today by Africans and those of African descent.”
Not to mention there is linguistic evidence of a strong African root to their language:
Quote:
“It is possible from this overview of the data to conclude that the limited conceptual vocabulary shared by the ancestors of contemporary Chadic-speakers (therefore also contemporary Cushi-itic-speakers), contemporary Nilotic-speakers and Ancient Egyptian-speakers suggests that the earliest speakers of the Egyptian language could be located to the south of Upper Egypt (Diakonoff 1998) or, earlier, in the Sahara (Wendorf 2004), where Takács(1999, 47) suggests their ‘long co-existence’ can be found.”
So there’s evidence that the earliest people speaking the ancient Egyptian language were from below Egypt, that is, the region of Sudan.
Another (though very sad) commonality is the practice of female genetic mutilation (called pharaonic circumcision in the case of Ancient Egypt). It is found primarily in sub-Saharan Africa, from west to east Africa. But Egypt has one of the highest cases as this map shows:
So we see that Ancient Egyptians came from a common pastoral society as other northeast Africans like those of Sudan, Kenya and Ethiopia. They also shared similar material culture. In essence, Ancient Egyptians descended from a common pastoral and Saharan group with other Northeastern Africans, then branched off and developed their own unique civilization, with some input from other peoples here and there over time.
Now I wrote this whole post only to balance the claims put out by cachibatches. Egypt was always a mixed society, with black African input just as important as the “Caucasoids” he talks about. No race or group was more significant than the other. At different times and different regions, the people would look different. So what I posted above, added to evidence from other studies showing important Eurasian elements gives us the following full picture:
Quote:
“There is no single ancient Egyptian population to study, but a diversity of local populations. That does not negate the existence of trends, though as yet it is hazardous to identify any particular one. There is, for example, a suggestion of a geographical cline, or chain of variation, running along the Nile valley. It is to be expected simply on the grounds that people tend to marry those from their neighbourhood. In the south of Egypt the population would have been close to, and would have ultimately merged with, that of northern Nubia. One trait was presumably a darkening of skin colour. As one moved north so local populations should, in general, have diverged more from those further south. This ought to mean if all factors worked equally (and they might not have done) that the population of the north-eastern Nile delta merged with that of southern Palestine.”
Bull****, Egypt is a black civilization just like Nubia and and Axum(ethiopia). I dont believe in the hemites bull****. All of Africa was originally a black continent. Forget the Euro centrist degradation of africans- we have plenty of history and civilization to be proud of.
Bull****, Egypt is a black civilization just like Nubia and and Axum(ethiopia). I dont believe in the hemites bull****. All of Africa was originally a black continent. Forget the Euro centrist degradation of africans- we have plenty of history and civilization to be proud of.
Black is a foreign and imposed term on the people and land mass of what is now Africa!
Africa as a concept, like Black does not begin until Roman times. *Before that all peoples on that continent did NOT identify or were not identified as Africans. But the earliest people did live on the continent that we now call Africa. *Proto-Africans if anything. *It is easier not to confuse pre-civilization people from that continent that migrated from modern Africans that evolved from them
African refers to any person from Africa. African indigenous refers to any population originaly native to Africa. Black refers to any peoples that were imposed a racial sterotype by Europeans and did not apply to all indigenous Africans. Berbers may be a back migration from other parts, but are the ancestries of other people such as Ethiopians (along with indigenous ancestry) Khoisan are not classified as Black, but as Colored. Africa itself is a foreign term imposed such that those born before Roman intrusion were not truly African, etc, etc, etc. I know plenty of Indo-Africans that consider themselves African and not Asian.
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