Not been on line much.

The boy has had a temperature for four days now. Not a very high one. He’s got my nasty cold, and it’s affected him worse. Hseems a bit better today, but he’s still warm. I’m taking him to the doctor later.

Both of us being ill has really put a dent in the amount of time I’ve spent on line. I’m on ‘maintenance only’ duty with the blogs, I can’t really get stuck in. I’m thinking of expanding out into the ancient near Eastern cultures like Sumer next, once I’ve finished a few pending projects like ‘Migrations into east Africa’ and others.

Someone posted a pasted block of crap about the Moors being black. The usual stuff; won’t show any images of the Moors, a few outright lies etc. Tried to claim Carleton Coon said the real Berbers were all black, which is bollocks because he has a couple of well know passages describing modern Mediterannoid Berbers as having been in North Africa for about 15,000 years. Very careful selection of the four or so descriptions of Moors (the black tribes, which are historically recorded) and carefully omitting the large numbers (text and art) that describe them as a mixed bag or as Arabs. Also a nice misunderstanding of the medieval use of the word ‘black’ which was commonly used to describe anyone with black hair and a heavy tan.. seen commonly in descriptions of Gypsies in Europe. Particularly ignorant was the description of Kabyles as brown, which was taken to mean ‘black African’. It actually meant a medium tanned skin, black meant a darkly tanned skin.

It also omitted the Canary islanders, who were all native north Africans, who never encountered Europeans before the Spanish arrived. They make up a large portion of the current Canary island population and were described as being tanned with many blondes among their number.

I believe it was from this site.. either the blogger who writes it doesn’t understand much about how medieval Europeans used the words brown and black when describing complexions, or they are deliberately trying to mislead people. There’s a good set of contemporary images of the Moors here, which shows them as mostly like Arabs and modern North Africans with some black moors as a minority.