So, the anthropology blog breaks 300 hits a day, and blond Egyptians.
Which is pretty respectable. Dienekes seems to get about 900+, and my blog is pretty small compared to his. I admit, a lot of it is a beginners introduction to lost/odd peoples. So far, the Jarawa and Onge have pulled in the most hits overall. Putting in a lot of pictures seems to help pull in the punters too. Quite a few times I come up within the first few sites on google for stuff. How do they work that out, anyway? Who goes where? I mean. I admit, I’m usually going for a magaziney feel to the pages. I compose them the way I do for my own benefit though, so I can keep all my research binges in nice accessible little on line files. My memory isn’t what is was (MS takes it’s toll) so now I actually have to keep notes! The horror of it.
I should have called it ‘anthropology and archaeology’ blog. But anthropology always leads you into archaeology. You need to understand the ancient population movements, so this sends you rooting through old papers on digs. Archaeology is just anthropology with wellies on.
During one of my endless wrangles with afrocentrists, I once said (as a wind up) I could find more images of blond Egyptians than I could of life-like black ones (the sort you could see was meant to look like an individual, not stylised). This came about because I posted a lot of very life-like tomb statues of Egyptians, and they all looked just like modern Egyptians. I could only find a couple that looked lifelike and Negroid, and I really had a good search through Afrocentrist sites looking for them. All their ‘black’ Egyptians are monumental statues in black stone, or representations of Nubians (if you are familiar with the artwork, it get’s easy to spot them), or from the Nubian occupation of Egypt.
So for a giggle I’m going to post all the blond Egyptian images I can find here… this is just too silly for my anthropology blog. These are in no way representative of the normal ancient Egyptian, they mostly seemed to have black and brown hair, and were Semitic Caucasian for the most part (same as modern).
Tomb of Menna
Tomb of Userhat.
Tomb of Khui, 12th dynasty, with a basenji hound.
The tomb of Djehutihotpe, Deirel-Bersha, middle Kingdom.
Hetepheres II
Unknown, provenance uncertain.
There’s a few others around, and I’ll post them as I find them. the normal Afrocentrist reaction to images like these is to scream ‘fake’ because they show them to be wrong, then they start claiming that you often get blond black Africans….
The Afrocentrics would naturally abe confused by the examples you show. What I see are African looking people with what appears to be woolly looking hair that is indeed blonde. I think one has to be cautious in trying to claim some sort of racial classification based on art work in general, though, race is something in general that is non-discrete and results in a lot of double standards. However, what I find interesting is that there are clearly depictions of Africoid people in Egyptian art that also have blonde hair. In fact, many Nubians are depicted with Red or Blonde hair. So when we have a situation where people with the so called “stereotypical black profile” such as many of the Nubians, are depicted with Blonde or Red hair then you have to admit that either the hair is dyed or NE Africa is a place where Blondism occurs naturally amongst non-trans Caucasian people.
Geographically speaking, NE Africa is intermediate between Europe and the Rest of Africa so it is not surprising that insitu evolution would produce people that genetically cluster intermediately between Europe and Africa. This would easily explain why some gene expression also occassionally overlaps European expression as well as African at the same time.
osirion
September 24, 2008
They were Melanesians.
Melanesia (from Greek: μέλας black, νῆσος island) literally means “islands of the black-skinned people”. It is a subregion of Oceania extending from the western side of the West Pacific to the Arafura Sea, north and northeast of Australia.
StudyUp!!!!
August 29, 2009
You still get the odd blond in Nubia; modern Nubians have a lot of Eurasian ancestry in them.
You get the odd naturally blonde and ginger mmummy, with typically Caucasian hair in all ways. This was more a work of irrtation than science. I have some proper hair studies of Egyptians mummies on my main blog.
mathilda37
September 26, 2008
…moro(sp)=moor, then, mora(N)=mulberry, nice color, now, mor/l/tla(letra)=motla(N)=your body, or motley, the stoning sign.
tzopilotl
June 2, 2009
Osirion says they are Nubians with died hair but we know the Egyptians drew Nubians as prognathic. So, yes you can, according to the Egyptian classification system, draw racial inferences from their art.
The ancient Egyptians seem to have been more aware of prognathism than people of today.
Alfred Rosenberg
November 19, 2009