Big Triece wrote:Lord Zentei wrote:There is a considerable difference between saying "Egyptians were mixed with middle easterners" and "Egyptians were a result of an invasion from the North, and not at all African ethnically".
It all boils down to people falsely claiming Egypt's origins from outside of Africa, when that theory has been debunked for over half a century now by countless scholars.
The number of people who have asserted that Egypt "originated" from the Middle East or points north and east of there,
in this thread, can be counted on the thumbs of no hands.
You want to find people who will say
that with a straight face, go argue with the
genuine idiot jackass racists on Stormfront or something. Don't go tilting at windmills in the illusion that they're giant monsters.
You want to know where I thnk Egyptian civilization originated?
Egypt. Where else? It wasn't anywhere on the map before the Egyptians came up with it. I would think that the ancestors of the ancient Egyptians probably came from many places, through the kind of Brownian motion that you get with nomadic tribes of hunter-gatherers; a lot of those places would be nearby on the African continent, while some might be groups that had spent a while in what is now the Levant.
How many? Well, that would depend on a lot of variables like the climate, how easy it was to travel to Egypt from neighboring lands, and so on. Since the drying up of the Sahara would be pushing Saharans into Egypt from the west, the Nile would support travel from the south, while a wide band of desert in the Sinai made travel from the northeast difficult, I would expect that most of the ancient Egyptians would be a cross between Saharans and the peoples of the upper Nile, with some admixture of people from the Levant or even Arabia.
Were they African? They were physically located in Africa, they were the Nth cousins of people living elsewhere in Africa, but on the other hand they lived in a different milieu from much of the rest of Africa, and swiftly developed ties to the Middle Eastern people to the northwest about as strong as any ties to other nations in Africa. Does that mean they were African? Dunno, it depends what you mean by the word.
That's my view.
Now, the only reason I can see why you would have an argument with
me on this matter, as opposed to having it with some big bad scary skinhead monster that only exists in your imagination, is if you have something beyond that to prove. Say, if you want to prove that any cultural and ethnic movement across the Sinai was all one-way, west to east and not east to west, because it would somehow sully the pure 'African-ness' of Egyptian civilization if anyone who lived there had been living in the Levant for umpty generations. Or if you want to prove that the Egyptian civilization isn't
really a native product of Egypt because it was brought in by Nubian conquerors from the south or whatever.
I do not think you would want to prove such things. That would be silly. That would be such a perfect mirror image of the kind of bullshit you
rightly criticize about people saying that the Egyptians came from the Caucasus or were a bunch of Vikings or something equally ridiculous.
So I'd hope you're smarter and more logical than that, that you don't feel a need to impose your own racial pigeonholes on an ancient civilization. Especially not a civilization of such universal renown, one that should be understood on its own terms as an achievement created literally out of mud and rocks by the people who lived there, at that crossroads between the African and Asian continents, not by some group of foreigners from the north or the south or the east or the west.