Face to face with ancient Egyptians
news.harvard.edu
news.harvard.edu
Beautiful art nonetheless. It is mind-blowing how old Egyptian culture is, my mind has never been able to wrap around it. And then the centuries or millennia of settled prehistory before that!
It's the only way I can comprehend these timescales.
During the time that Tutankhamun was reestablishing the ceremonies that his father dissolved, grapes had already been used for winemaking for as long as Tutankhamun's mummy had rested under the sands of Egypt until just recently disturbed.
I also appreciate all the extra detail that can be seen in these and not so much in other mediums, like hairstyles, jewelry, etc.
I'm particularly impressed by the last picture in the article, the technique and detail on that one are outstanding.
case in point: these paintings have such striking similarities with (later) Byzantine icons (frontal representation, oversized eyes, stylistic choices for representing hair etc) there is no doubt they are part of a common cultural space that lasted for millenia and in some limited forms is still alive today.
Pressumably the origins of this style predate Greco-Roman Egypt but who knows when and where it got perfect first.
Historians have long suspected that the authors of Christian holy books were inspired by several other religions. The parallels are so numerous it's hard to ignore (this wikipedia page [1] is a starting point but it's woefully incomplete, especially with respect to Ancient Egpytian religion and Osiris/Horus)
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jesus_in_comparative_mythology...
I mean, Judaism is basically a mashup of Egyptian and Mesopotamian religion while Christianity is that + Buddhism...
Copts with lighter skin are a small minority among Egyptians with lighter skin in general. Not that it matters much, but this is interesting to me from an anthropological standpoint.
The notion posited by other commenters of a lighter Coptic population being more representative of the skin color of the average ancient Egyptian is dubious, though they obviously mixed less with Arabs - those two statements are not mutually exclusive. It’s also worth noting that the average Egyptian is quite ethnically Egyptian. Arabs did not just come in and massively displace Egyptian DNA. For starters there were many more Egyptians than Arabs. People in the West can say that any non-Muslim minority in the Middle East is more representative of the “real” natives of the land because of less mixture with Arabs (e.g. Assyrians). Isn’t that too convenient and somewhat ridiculous of a narrative, given the common bias against Muslims?
>The study stated that "our genetic time transect suggests genetic continuity between the Pre-Ptolemaic, Ptolemaic and Roman populations of Abusir el-Meleq, indicating that foreign rule impacted the [native] population only to a very limited degree at the genetic level."
Those who had portraits made of them when they died, like the Fayum Portraits, tended to be wealthier Egyptians who weren't outside working in the sun as much as the poorer ones.
Also, the Fayum area that "Fayum Portraits" gets its name from is not too far from Cairo, which is in the Northern part of Egypt, where peoples skin color tended to be lighter than those in the far south of Egypt, as you got closer to what was Nubia.
Those African shaped noses didnt break themselves. The recently discovered Egyptian statues and other art that survived for thousands of years submerged in the Mediterranean Sea with African facial features unscathed prove that there is an agenda that continues.
I would be more skeptical of the deception idea if it was isolated and had no precedent. This Euro style global scale racism and forcefed history revision through colonization isn't a component of other major civilizations.
My statement is not controversial. I would expect 7 billion people from diverse backgrounds agree and the billion or so beneficiaries in an echo chamber disagree.
The history of Europeans making false self serving claims across the spectrum of knowledge on the other hands has centuries long established fact and easily proven evidence backing it.
They are literally pointing out that these are portraits of aristocrats, whom it is very well-known would likely be of non-Egyptian, if not mixed, origin at the time they were buried. No one is making a claim that this is what the average Egyptian looked like in the article.
Now if you still think its appropriate to argue that modern Egyptians represent a population replacement demographic, well, you're free to I guess, but I'd wager there weren't enough conquerors to replace the entire or even the majority of the population.
Also, Copts and Amazighe are also African, so "African shaped noses" is sorta weird to say, never mind the prominence of similarly shaped noses to Copts and Amazighe in Ethiopians and adjacent populations in the Horn of Africa. I know "what you mean" but what I mean is that we sorta eliminate a whole lotta physical and cultural differences when we talk about some essential unity of Africa lying in looking some particular way.
Never heard this claim, but it's a weak argument to rest on if we believe it to be true.
Naturally blonde and red haired black people arent that uncommon. Furthermore, if we are being honest, every genetic trait on this planet is represented in a subset of the African population.
Every variation of hair color, eye color, skin color, eye lid, etc...naturally occur among the population.
Yes, they are, which is why every reference to “naturally blonde black people” focusses on one group—Melanesians of the Solomon Islands—as the emblrmatic group, of whom about 5-10% are naturally blonde, which would be an incredibly tiny share of the overall Black population, if they were racially Black in the first place, rather than dark skinned Pacific Islanders.
There are over a billion racially black (by recent sub-Saharan African descent) people in the world. “Literally millions” is tenths of a percent of that population—quite rare.
What the hell, that's not "Ancient Egypt"
-> proceed to show the face of Greeks who lived there for just few decades only right after the Ancient Egyptian civilization collapsed
That's some form of "let's rewrite history a little bit to fit our narrative"
Very disingenuous