Arcadia Discussion Zone

Greg Taylor over at The Daily Grail has posted an article this morning on Bauval's next book titled Black Genesis due to be published in the Spring of 2010. (Patience is a virtue etc)

A brief description from TDG:
In short, and in Robert Bauval's own words, the aim of Black Genesis "is to prove that the origins of ancient Egypt comes from black African prehistoric cultures...what we thought was original to the pyramid builders, was in fact practiced by a prehistoric black African culture in the Sahara, thousands of years before."

There is a very good YouTube interview embedded in the article with Bauval talking about the background to the book.

http://www.dailygrail.com/news/robert-bauval-black-genesis

I don't think they were black Africans. I think they were the Vedics of the Indian region who had moved down to Northeast Africa. The only reason Bauval said they were black was because of some cave drawings where they were depicted more of a dark reddish brown than black. Africans were dark black. Bauval really screwed up this time. The Egyptian religion is clearly derived from the Vedic religion. Rama is too similar to Ra. Notice the time period being referred to, about 6000 BC, is exactly the same time as a similar culture existed in India.

Genetic evidence shows native Egyptians as primarily Mediterranean. The men in the linked pictures are of primarily Egyptian ancestry
(http://st-takla.org/Gallery/Coptic-Holy-Synod/Holy-Synod_Al-Magma3-Al-Kokaddas_01_.html), as they are Christians, and the children of a Muslim must remain Muslim according to Shariah. (Since these are Copts, some Greek ancestry is unlikely, though not impossible)

While there were a few ancient Egyptians with racial and cultural ties to India, this was due to the relations between Egypt and Mitanni, which was ruled by an Indo-European dynasty. The Egyptians themselves are/were more closely akin to the other North African peoples, both culturally/linguistically and genetically.

Ra was the sun god, whose name is connected with the word 'ri', meaning 'day'. Surya was the Vedic sun god, not Rama.
Vedic and Sanskrit, being Indo-European languages, function somewhat poorly in a purely consonantal script. Egyptian, like Hebrew and Arabic, being an Afro-Asiatic language, functioned quite well in a purely consonantal script.

Be Well,
Bob Griffin

Nice hats. Look like they have very round pompadours. I can accept that the AE came from Africa rather than the Indus Valley. Where they came from is of no great importance to me, just the mysteries of the pyramids.

The Egyptians seem to have come to view the pyramids as having been built by the order of an Egyptian tyrant. His name became somewhat garbled by the time of the Coptic version of the tradition (unfortunately I don't have time to locate this information).

Be Well,
Bob Griffin

Seems to me there are two camps.

Bauval seems to want to palliate the Afrocentrists, who call Egypt a "black only" civilization. (Which is bad enough, but then they want to claim all other civilizations, such as the Indus Valley one, the Yellow River one, and the Mesopotamian one as all being derivatives, thus, I guess, proving blacks brought civilization to everyone else.)

Of course, Afrocentrism is itself a reaction to a lot of the BS 19th century Egyptology, that inevitably denied black people could have built the pyramids, and had some type of European colonists building them instead.

The truth is Egypt has always been a mixing bowl at the NE tip of Africa, right next to the Levant. Even in Phaoronic times there had already been a mixing of African blacks, Mycenaens, and Middle Eastern Semites. Although the paint has worn off most of the statuary and paintings, we see in the few remaining intact ones many people were reddish-brown, neither white nor black.

The point being too, the Egyptian civilization probably is the result of culture mixing, as well. Racists of all stripes don't seem to like that.

Yeah, I joined a couple Egypt groups a while ago and there really are a lot of black people latching onto the African origin thing. It's like they figure that if the early Egyptians were black it means that modern American Negroes are pyramid building geniuses or something. Doubtful many of the American slaves came from the same line as the Saharans who migrated to the lower Nile anyway. They have the same color skin, that's about the only connection. Do I go around bragging about the the great Caucasian civilizations, like I personally built those cities? Not more than once or twice a month.

And those would be?

(given that the Greeks and Mesopotamians were not Caucasian; the post-Mycenaean Greeks were people who were displaced by the Caucasians and went south, btw, "Doreans", around 1100 BC a tad later that the whole Troy stuff)

Really that whole race thing is a bit out of hand. Not that it matters, but, I suspect that the Pyramid builders do not share much DNA with the Sub-Saharan West African natives who were wrongly brought into the new world as slaves. If you believe most of the iconography in Egypt and in places like the Minoan Crete, you'll see that there were people of mixed "races" with the rulers not having sub Saharan African features. However, I suspect that a lot of darker skinned folk were used as the actual workforce in the pyramid building and some of the did make it into "power" positions in that civilization...

Weren't the Romans Caucasians? I don't know, just asking.

Partly... Let's say that in 200 BC, they were a mix of Romans (Greek colonists), Egyptians, and some Caucasians. Their traditional tale about the establishment of Rome (Romus, Romulus and the she-wolf) makes them descendants of the Trojans (who were of the same kind as the post Mycenaean Greeks) . Caucasians were: -goths (Ostrogoths, Visigoths), the Norse tribes (giving rice to the Normans) the Franks, the Slavs, the Arabs and the East Indians. (But with a lot of intermixing with the original populations.)

There was a documented movement of people from and around the Caucasus mountain area westward and southward, that started at about 1150 BC and probably triggered by a decrease in local resources and an increase in coagulation of tribes eastward of them (see: Moguls) that had territorial ambitions. So it was “Go west (and south) young man (and lady)” for these folk back then.

The term “Caucasian” to describe white people was an inception of Johann Friedrich Blumenbach, an anthropometrist who based on cranial size, used it to describe people of “Aryan” (i.e. white European), “Semite” (i.e. Jewish) and “Hemite” (i.e. Arab) origin. Unfortunately, the term, got coined in a matter that it unfortunately describes any person with light skin these days…

Guys, hi.

This Friday I interview Robert for an hour on television (40 million viewers - EEK!) - Gardiners World. What would you like me to ask him?

Andrew

I'd be curious to find out what's his reaction to Picknett and Prince's Stargate Conspiracy, where he and many of what could be called the "Alternative Egyptology" school (i.e. the "Sphinx and Pyramids are 10,000 years old, school"), get a deep drubbing.

Seeker, hi. Hey, that's a good one. I had dinner with Lynn last week, so really, I should have thought of that one.

Cheers,

Andrew