Cultural Characteristics
Dynastic culture originates as part of the mixture cultures of a vast expansive wetlands area, especially that near the Nile and White Nile rivers.
What makes this first part (two quotes) so interesting is the fact that not only do many researchers think they may have spotted the birthplace of Phaoronic 'Egyptian' culture, but that cultural traits that can be seen in a number of West African groups have also been spotted.
[Sefar Tassili N' Ajjer painting]
Tassili Ajjer painting
[Dogan dance ritual]
the Dogon, the people who thought of Sirius as a triple-star before the West discovered it.
The Tassili n’Ajjer: birthplace of ancient Egypt? <---- http://www.philipcoppens.com/tassili.html The fact that these were shamans was supported by the presence of masks, an instrument often worn by shamans during religious ceremonies. If anyone still was not convinced that these people went “out of their minds” to paint these scenes, McKenna noted the geometric structures that surrounded the shamans, which for McKenna and other specialists was evidence of the trance state that the painters had entered for painting Other researchers, notably Wim Zitman, have identified an astronomic connotation to the various figures. He specifically focuses his attention on the so-called “swimmer”, depicted at Ti-n-Tazarift, and argues that this is in fact the depiction of a constellation. He also argues for a connection between the rock paintings of the Tassili and the origin of the Egyptian civilisation, wondering whether the shamans of the Tassili might not have been the “Followers of Horus” that have been the subject of so much speculation in the past decade by the likes of Robert Bauval and Graham Hancock. Rather than from the mythical Atlantis, might they have come from a region southeast of the Atlas mountains, i.e. the Tassili? ... For Wilkinson, these rock paintings show that pre-Pharaonic Egyptians were not settled flood-plain farmers, but semi-nomadic herders who drove their cattle in between the lush riverbanks and the drier grasslands. He also identified that several of these paintings were located around ancient trade routes. For a “semi-nomadic people”, it is by no means a long stretch of the imagination to argue that they trekked throughout the savannah, from east to west and backwards. And thus, in Pre-dynastic Egypt, Egypt and the Tassili were more than likely “one”. ... Though the Tassili paintings are by far the best known, they are not the only area where such paintings can be found. Nearby areas such as Acacus and Messak have revealed similar rock paintings. It confirms that the Tassili was not an isolated incident, but part of a larger whole. ... For Wilkinson, the rock paintings in southern Egypt provide proof that it is there that we should look for the “Genesis of the Pharaohs” (the title of his book). For Zitman, the origin of ancient Egypt can be found in a culture and area that stretches into the Tassili, where there is the pose painted on a cliff face in Sefar that would later adorn the front walls of several Egyptian temples. And that cannot be a coincidence. Furthermore, it also coincides with what Lhote wrote: “The most common profile suggested that of Ethiopians, and it was almost certainly from the east that these great waves of pastoralist immigrants came who invaded not only the Tassili but much of the Sahara.” - Philip Coppens, Investigative Journalist [link] <---- http://www.philipcoppens.com/tassili.html Examination of certain rock paintings in the Tassili-N'Ajjer suggests the presence of proto-Fulani cultural traits in the region by at least the fourth millennium B.C. Tassili-N'Ajjer in Algeria is one of the most famous North African sites of rock painting. Scholars specializing in Fulani culture believe that some of the imagery depicts rituals that are still practiced by contemporary Fulani people. At the Tin Tazarift site, for instance, historian Amadou Hampate Ba recognized a scene of the lotori ceremony, a celebration of the ox's aquatic origin. In a finger motif, Ba detected an allusion to the myth of the hand of the first Fulani herdsman, Kikala. At Tin Felki, Ba recognized a hexagonal carnelian jewel as related to the Agades cross, a fertility charm still used by Fulani women. Rock Art Paintings [link] <--- http://www.jamtan.com/jamtan/fulani.cfm?chap=1&linksPage=164 [Western Desert of Egypt picture] The period when sub-Saharan Africa was most influential in Egypt was a time when neither Egypt, as we understand it culturally, nor the Sahara, as we understand it geographically, existed. Populations and cultures now found south of the desert roamed far to the north. The culture of Upper Egypt, which became dynastic Egyptian civilization, could fairly be called a Sudanese transplant. Egypt rapidly found a method of disciplining the river, the land, and the people to transform the country into a titanic garden. Egypt rapidly developed detailed cultural forms that dwarfed its forebears in urbanity and elaboration. Thus, when new details arrived, they were rapidly adapted to the vast cultural superstructure already present. On the other hand, pharaonic culture was so bound to its place near the Nile that its huge, interlocked religious, administrative, and formal structures could not be readily transferred to relatively mobile cultures of the desert, savanna, and forest. The influence of the mature pharaonic civilizations of Egypt and Kush was almost confined to their sophisticated trade goods and some significant elements of technology. Nevertheless, the religious substratum of Egypt and Kush was so similar to that of many cultures in southern Sudan today that it remains possible that fundamental elements derived from the two high cultures to the north live on. Egypt and Sub-Saharan Africa: Their Interaction <-- http://www.homestead.com/wysinger/sub-saharan.html, Encyclopedia of Precolonial Africa, by Joseph O. Vogel, AltaMira Press, Walnut Creek, California (1997), pp. 465-472 Quote: The discoveries at Nabta Playa suggest the possibility of a previously unrecognized relationship between the Neolithic people living along the Nile and pastoralists in the adjacent Sahara which may have contributed to the rise of social complexity in ancient Egypt. This complexity, as expressed by different levels of authority within the society, forms the basis for the structure of both the Neolithic society at Nabta and the Old Kingdom of Egypt. It was this authority at Nabta which made possible the planned arrangement of their villages, the excavation of large, deep wells, and the construction of complex stone structures made of large, shaped and unshaped stones. There are other Nabta features which are shared by the two areas, but which appear suddenly and without evident local antecedents in the late Predynastic and early Old Kingdom in the Nile Valley. These include the role of cattle to express differences of wealth, power and authority, the emphasis on cattle in religious beliefs, and the use of astronomical knowledge and devices to predict solar events. Many of these features have a prior and long history of development at Nabta. Late Neolithic megalithic structures at Nabta Playa <-- http://www.comp-archaeology.org/WendorfSAA98.html In his Genesis of the Pharaohs, Toby Wilkinson shines new light on the Predynastic by demonstrating that the majority of rock drawings in the Eastern Desert of Upper Egypt date to Naqada I (c. 4000–3500 BC). Since the petroglyphs depict wild African fauna, hunters with bows and dogs, and men herding cattle, it is clear that the now nearly lifeless region up to 100 km east of the Nile between Quft and Hierakonpolis was at this time a well-watered, well-populated, game-rich savanna. That the rock artists were not mere isolated pastoralists but also part-time Nile dwellers is evident because their works commonly include boats. This implies that the artists probably moved from river to range in seasonal cycles. Because of this, and the fact that so many of the drawings echo subjects in later Egyptian art, Wilkinson makes a compelling case that the rock artists were the ancestors of the dynastic Egyptians. His conclusion: “the heavy reliance of these people on herding and hunting rather than agriculture suggests that their roots — and indeed the roots of Egyptian civilization — lay not so much along the Nile but in the pre-arid Sahara.” Genesis of the Pharaohs: Genesis of the ‘Ka’ and Crowns? <-- http://www.homestead.com/wysinger/crown.html "This sub-Saharan culture is likely to be the predecessor of the Egyptians." - Source <--- http://hej3.as.utexas.edu/~www/wheel/africa/nabta_01.htm Also see: Ancient Egyptian as an African Language, Egypt as an African Culture <--- http://www.forumcityusa.com/viewtopic.php?t=319&mforum=africa Ancient Egyptian civilization was, in ways and to an extent usually not recognized, fundamentally African. The evidence of both language and culture reveals these African roots. The origins of Egyptian ethnicity lay in the areas south of Egypt. The ancient Egyptian language belonged to the Afrasian family (also called Afroasiatic or, formerly, Hamito-Semitic). The speakers of the earliest Afrasian languages, according to recent studies, were a set of peoples whose lands between 15,000 and 13,000 B.C. stretched from Nubia in the west to far northern Somalia in the east. They supported themselves by gathering wild grains. The first elements of Egyptian culture were laid down two thousand years later, between 12,000 and 10,000 B.C., when some of these Afrasian communities expanded northward into Egypt, bringing with them a language directly ancestral to ancient Egyptian. They also introduced to Egypt the idea of using wild grains as food. A new religion came with them as well. Its central tenet explains the often localized origins of later Egyptian gods: the earliest Afrasians were, properly speaking, neither monotheistic nor polytheistic. Instead, each local community, comprising a clan or a group of related clans, had its own distinct deity and centered its religious observances on that deity. This belief system persists today among several Afrasian peoples of far southwest Ethiopia. And as Biblical scholars have shown, Yahweh, god of the ancient Hebrews, an Afrasian people of the Semitic group, was originally also such a deity. The connection of many of Egypt's predynastic gods to particular localities is surely a modified version of this early Afrasian belief. Political unification in the late fourth millennium brought the Egyptian deities together in a new polytheistic system. But their local origins remain amply apparent in the records that have come down to us. During the long era between about 10,000 and 6000 B.C., new kinds of southern influences diffused into Egypt. During these millennia, the Sahara had a wetter climate than it has today, with grassland or steppes in many areas that are now almost absolute desert. New wild animals, most notably the cow, spread widely in the eastern Sahara in this period. Christopher Ehret Professor of History, African Studies Chair University of California at Los Angeles Demographics and the origins of the state
The origins of the ancient Egyptian state and its formation have received
much attention through analysis of mortuary contexts, skeletal material, and
trade. Genetic diversity was analyzed by studying craniometric variation within
a series of six time-successive Egyptian populations in order to investigate the
evidence for migration over the period of the development of social hierarchy
and the Egyptian state. Craniometric variation, based upon 16 measurements, was
assessed through principal components analysis, discriminant function analysis,
and Mahalanobis D2 matrix computation. Spatial and temporal relationships were
assessed by Mantel and Partial Mantel tests. The results indicate overall
population continuity over the Predynastic and early Dynastic, and high levels
of genetic heterogeneity, thereby suggesting that state formation occurred as a
mainly indigenous process.
- Zakrzewski et al 2007
Thus, demographic information points to the autocthronous origins of Dynastic Km.t.
Physical Characteristics
sample populations available from northern Egypt from before the 1st Dynasty(Merimda, Maadi and Wadi Digla) turn out to be significantly different from sample populations from early Palestine and Byblos, suggesting a lack of common ancestors over a long time. If there was a south-north cline of variation along the Nile Valley it did not, from this limited evidence, continue smoothly on into Palestine. The limb-length proportions of males from the Egyptian sites group them with Africans
- Ancient Egypt Anatomy of a Civilisation(Paperback) by Barry Kemp (Author) Publisher: Routledge; 2 edition (December 12, 2005)
p.54
homogeneity was thought to be suggestive of population continuity. Similarly, the potential Egyptian continuity extends across time (as evidenced by affinities among the three predynastic, five of seven dynastic, and two or perhaps three Roman period samples) and space (as indicated by the mostly random distribution of points denoting Upper and Lower Egyptians).
...
However, as it stands, the lone Greek Egyptian (GEG) sample from Lower Egypt significantly differs from all but the small Roman-period Kharga sample (Table 4). In fact, it was shown to be a major outlier that is divergent from all others (Figs. 2, 3, 5). The Greek Egyptians exhibit the lowest frequencies of UM1 cusp 5, three-rooted UM2, fivecusped LM2, and two-rooted LM2, along with a high incidence of UM3 absence, among others (Table 2). This trait combination is reminiscent of that in Europeans and western Asians (Turner, 1985a; Turner and Markowitz, 1990; Roler, 1992; Lipschultz, 1996; Irish, 1998a). Thus, if the present heterogeneous sample is at all representative of peoples during Ptolemaic times, it may suggest some measure of foreign admixture, at least in Lower Egypt near Saqqara and Manfalut. Another possibility is that the sample consists of actual Greeks. Although their total number was probably low (Peacock, 2000), Greek administrators and others were present in Lower Egypt. Future comparisons to actual Greek specimens will help verify this possibility.
- Who Were the Ancient Egyptians? Dental Affinities Among Neolithic Through Postdynastic Peoples, Irish et. al. 2006
The nature of the body plan was also investigated by comparing the intermembral, brachial, and crural indices for these samples with values obtained from the literature. No significant differences were found in either index through time for either sex. The raw values in Table 6 suggest that Egyptians had the “super-Negroid” body plan described by Robins (1983). The values for the brachial and crural indices show that the distal segments of each limb are longer relative to the proximal segments than in many “African” populations (data from Aiello and Dean, 1990). This pattern is supported by Figure 7 (a plot of population mean femoral and tibial lengths; data from Ruff, 1994), which indicates that the Egyptians generally have tropical body plans. Of the Egyptian samples, only the Badarian and Early Dynastic period populations have shorter tibiae than predicted from femoral length. Despite these differences, all samples lie relatively clustered together as compared to the other populations.
- Variation in Ancient Egyptian Stature and Body Proportions, Zakrzewski et. al. 2003
Dynastic Km.t-nwt was physically and spiritually a Sudanic/Nile Valley creation and people.
(link to Paleo entry)
(link to page with additional info on phenetic affinities)
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