2,875 views Streamed live on Feb 7, 2023 The pharaohs liked to draw clear boundaries around what they considered ‘Egyptian’, and those ancient perspectives persist in modern Egyptology. The First Cataract of the Nile is generally seen as the boundary is between ancient Egypt and ancient Nubia, but the division is more than just geographical. Grave, objects, and even people are labelled as ‘Nubian’, even if they come from within the limits of pharaonic Egypt. But why do we make such distinctions? And how accurate are they?
This lecture demonstrates the problems that come with such clear divisions and highlights the challenges that arise upon asking new questions of historical, artistic, and archaeological evidence. Traditional boundaries will be blurred, and more nuanced perspectives will be encouraged.
Guest Speaker: Aaron de Souza (PhD Macquarie 2017) is an archaeologist specialising in Nubian material culture of the Second Millennium BCE, and his research takes an object-based approach to the complex inter- and intra-cultural contacts that took place across the greater Nile Valley. He is currently a Lise Meitner Postdoctoral Fellow at the Austrian Archaeological Institute in Vienna, funded by the Austrian Science Fund (FWF), and prior to this he was a Marie Skłodowska-Curie Research Fellow, also at the Austrian Academy of Sciences, funded by the European Commission (2019–2020). Aaron has worked with a number of excavation projects in Egypt, most notably at Tell Edfu, Hierakonpolis, Elephantine, Aswan, Dendara and Helwan, in addition to grant-funded museum-based research projects in Sweden, the UK, the USA, and Italy. He is also a founding editor of the online journal, Interdisciplinary Egyptology, hosted by the University of Vienn
Posted by zarahan aka Enrique Cardova (Member # 15718) on :
Good link. From some writeups I have seen, depending on the era examined. the Nubians and the Egyptians are virtually indistinguishable in the archaeological record. You can't tell who is who. This does not mean the Nubians did not have their own distinct culture but the Egyptians and Nubians are the most closely related people. Naturally this is a reality that some do not want to hear. They want an artificial "splittism" approach, in some academia, and in popular European culture, and in some modern Egyptians with their "anything but black" bogeyman, as if Egyptians sprung up spontaneously like so many frogs or aliens out of the Nile, unrelated to other cultures of the region.
Posted by Yatunde Lisa Bey (Member # 22253) on :
The Hebrews were Nubians? Sash is a belt... lacish reliefs...
" he's wearing a sash which is a Nubian style of dress "
Aaron Desouza
The older child in the Stele Nenu the Nehesy, the older boy is also wearing a belt.
January 12 Raising Children in Ancient Israel Dr. Kristine Garroway
Siege of Lachish (701 BCE) look like Egypto-Nubians like Nenu the Nehesy..
Tarhaka's men and women are 50 or so years later and are Nubian/Nubians...
It's interesting.
Posted by zarahan aka Enrique Cardova (Member # 15718) on :
If in the video he is claiming that Hebrews are Nubians he is way off. Its like the superficial resemblances between Egyptian religion and Judaism and Christianity- thin surface resemblance but when the detail is examined, massive differences emerge. So if the sash is Nubian this does not make the wearer "Nubian." That being said it is clear from the record that the Nubians or Kushites did have distinct interchange with the Hebrews back in the day, depending on the era examined. The interchange was a mixed bag depending on one's perspective. Sometimes bad, as when Zerah the Ethiopian came up against Judah with a huge army plus 300 chariots to kick some azz. Only divine intervention saved the day according to 2 Chron 14: 9-12.
The flip side could be seen in Kushite pharaoh Tirhakah, who did the Hebrews a solid by riding to the rescue of Jerusalem to help king Hezekiah. The presence of a huge Kushite army maneuvering in the region to help the Hebrews must have quickly concentrated Assyrian minds, so that even if they somehow managed to evade or survive divine intervention, they would still have had to contend with the menace of Tirhakah and his boys. They thus took the logical option and made a hasty retreat.
The Rescue of Jerusalem: The Alliance Between Hebrews and Africans in 701 B.C. Paperback by Henry T. Aubin (2003)
Then of course is the record of Beta Israel Falasha further south in today's Ethiopia but the record also shows Kushites interested in Hebrew religion as seen by the Ethiopian administrator in Acts 8, who was converted to Christianity by Philip the evangelist.
Posted by the lioness, (Member # 17353) on :
The siege of Lachish (ancient city in Israel)701 BCE part of a relief which once decorated the Assyrian king Sennacherib's palace at Nineveh(in Northern Iraq) Several kingdoms in the Levant ceased to pay taxes to the Assyrian king Senncharib. In retribution, he initiated a campaign to re-subjugate the rebelling kingdoms, among them the Kingdom of Judah. After defeating the rebels of Ekron in Philistia, Sennacharib set out to conquer Judah and, on his way to Jerusalem, came across Lachish: the second most important of the Jewish cities.
quote:Originally posted by Yatunde Lisa Bey: Siege of Lachish (701 BCE) look like Egypto-Nubians like Nenu the Nehesy..
Tarhaka's men and women are 50 or so years later and are Nubian/Nubians...
It's interesting.
Posted by the lioness, (Member # 17353) on :
Head of a Kushite Ruler, ca. 716-702 BCE Brooklyn Museum/
Posted by the lioness, (Member # 17353) on :
quote:Originally posted by zarahan aka Enrique Cardova: [QB] If in the video he is claiming that Hebrews are Nubians he is way off.
No, this is Yatunde's theory She shows two separate videos, one about Nubians which makes no mention of ancient Hebrews That is in the OP with the youtube link and the second one a video about ancient Israel with no mention of Nubians/Kushites by Aaron Desouza called "‘Egyptian’ or ‘Nubian’? Towards a more nuanced view of ancient cultural diversity."
If you look at her post, third from the top with the Lachish screen shots that say "Teenager with a belt" at the top is an image of Desouza in his "Egyptian of Nubian" video
But below that in the same post are images from a different unrelated video "Raising Children in Ancient Israel (Kristine Garroway)
^ watch at time 29:50, the topics is "Boys and Belts"
Yatunde is proposing that there is a connection between the Nubian sash/belt as seen in the stele of Nenu the Nehesy (which I posted later) and figures at Lachish of Judeans' garments. This is Yatunde's theory which is not in the OP, she mentions this in the third post, somewhat of a topic change
In the video Kristine Garroway mentions this material in between the men's legs hanging down. She says "his belt has a length hanging down". I don't know if that is a belt but we can see is goes under the garment where you can't see the rest of it. The Assyrians have this same thing here but she doesn't mention it. What she talks about in the video is that the younger boys (top image) don't have this thing but the taller boy in the lower image, looking older does have this as well as a helmet like thing that the adult also has but not the younger boys. She is talking about various details of the Judean children here, age, gender, clothing etc.
Posted by Tazarah (Member # 23365) on :
"The Expositor, Volume 2" by Samuel Cox, page 448 (1881) The Expositor
Firsthand eyewitness account from 7th century Egypt says Israelites, Nubians, Copts (pre-Islamic Egyptians) and Abyssinians (Ethiopians) could not be distinguished from one another.
"A Short History of the Copts and of Their Church" by The Rev. S.C. Malan, M.A., page 72 (1873) D. Nutt
Note, from between the legs of both the Kushites and the Assyrians hangs down some kind of cloth(?) thing. Penis sheath? excess of a belt/sash I'm not sure
Posted by Yatunde Lisa Bey (Member # 22253) on :
Again the panel you are showing lioness is 50 years later not the same as Lacish
Posted by Yatunde Lisa Bey (Member # 22253) on :
quote:Originally posted by Tazarah:
"The Expositor, Volume 2" by Samuel Cox, page 448 (1881) The Expositor
If Zarahan had watched both videos first instead of jumping to a defense, he would have gotten the gist of my post...
Aaron specifically states that nubians wear sashes/belts as seen in Nehesy Nenu pallette.
Some people in the past have claimed only the afro soliders captured in the lacish as ethiopian or nubian.
My theory now after Aaron's video is they were all ALL NUBIAN ( egypto) ETHIOPIAN/Hebrews including the women and children why..
WHY!?! Because as Aaron's says styles shift and change. CONTEXT is everything. So a sash/girding of the loins would be slightly different in the Levant as from Nubia/Egypt... but the meaning to that ethnicity is the same.
Posted by Yatunde Lisa Bey (Member # 22253) on :
The older child had curly afro hair,
the naked child with a side lock is egyptian style
this is a mixed group of people... y'all act like you ain't never been nowhere, where diversity is the norm.
Nubian men with straight beards...
Posted by the lioness, (Member # 17353) on :
quote:Originally posted by Yatunde Lisa Bey: The older child had curly afro hair,
the naked child with a side lock is egyptian style
this is a mixed group of people... y'all act like you ain't never been nowhere, where diversity is the norm.
Posted by the lioness, (Member # 17353) on :
Posted by the lioness, (Member # 17353) on :
this thing hanging down between the legs is going under the garment and the Assyrian on the right has one too it does not look that similar in my opinion the Kushite sash thing
This is the other type of Judean at Lachish, they may be the priests but that is a guess but they don't have anything showing like either of these dangling things
Posted by Yatunde Lisa Bey (Member # 22253) on :
quote:Originally posted by the lioness,:
quote:Originally posted by Yatunde Lisa Bey: The older child had curly afro hair,
the naked child with a side lock is egyptian style
If you had watched the video you would have heard the white historian say exactly that... since white ice is colder for yal..
Posted by the lioness, (Member # 17353) on :
.
quote:Originally posted by Yatunde Lisa Bey: If you had watched the video you would have heard the white historian say exactly that... since white ice is colder for yal..
quote: 2023-01-12 Raising Children in Ancient Israel (Kristine Garroway)
Archaeological Research Facility, UC Berkeley
Video: time: 25:50
Cart 2
We Begin then with the image of a family you can see a woman uh and the children in the cart the child held by the woman perhaps his mother is shown naked and with some hair and here's a close-up the close-up shows a curly side-lock. We're looking at the child who is facing the woman and you can see a side-lock of hair we know that the side lock was worn by Egyptian children from the Old Kingdom onwards a wonderful study of Egyptian sidewalks can be found in the book 'Childhood in Ancient Egypt' by Amandine Marshall the French Edition came out in 2013 but the English transition just became translation just became available in 2022. Egyptians also depict the Canaanite children wearing a side-lock. It might be simply then the Egyptian convention to show any child naked and with a side-lock. what is interesting here is that the Neo-Assyrian artists depicted the elite Judean children in the same manner. One wonders whether this attest to the reality of Canaanite and Israelite children perhaps wearing a side-lock as well. If so we might again wonder if the other naked and seemingly bald children in the Lachish relief also has a side-lock not visible from the right side, which is to say, depending on which side they're showing, facing the viewer, perhaps we're missing some side-locks.
The other child in Cart 2 of the child who's seated behind is depicted much differently. This child had on a little tunic and is clearly shown with short curly hair. The tunic is long like the ones worn by females we will see next but other than that no overt gender identification is indicated. If, and I stress, if this is a little girl and the naked infant a little boy then we might see a practice common to many patriarchal societies of letting children be in mixed company until they are older
quote:Originally posted by Yatunde Lisa Bey: The older child had curly afro hair,
the naked child with a side lock is egyptian style
this is a mixed group of people... y'all act like you ain't never been nowhere, where diversity is the norm.
I'm not sure when you say "mixed" if you are referring to the last sentence of the above transcript but my interpretation is this researcher is not talking about racial ethnicity in any of this section on this mother and children scene and when she says in the last sentence above: "If, and I stress, if this is a little girl and the naked infant a little boy then we might see a practice common to many patriarchal societies of letting children be in mixed company until they are older " she is talking about mixing company of gender until the child is older, in my opinion I'm also not sure that is definitely a sidelock on that child but maybe
Posted by the lioness, (Member # 17353) on :
Posted by the lioness, (Member # 17353) on :
I've looked at at curly haired people of various types anywhere, from Africans to Iranians, Europeans etc Their beards and moustaches don't have the same textures, the beards are less curly if curly at all. That ball shaped beard pattern on these reliefs , it does not look realistic to me, try to find a photo of a real person who has a high degree of curl in their beards
Also, Lachish was located in Israel. If you go south of there you're in Egypt. Beards were not even worn. It's more similar to Persians/Elamites' art
Frieze of the Archers, Susa, Iran
Achaemenid relief with a Persian archer, 6th- 5th century B.C. Persepolis
Some speculate the curls are artificially made but I don't think so. Think it is natural curls but not that tight. I think the hat and gravity are just stretching out that straighter section at the top
But if you look at that beard. I can't find photos of real people that have a high degree of round looking curl like that. Is it artistic stylization or did somebody come in and meticulously curl the beards of all these soldiers with some kind of curling device? I don't know, simiarly the Lachish figures
Posted by Tazarah (Member # 23365) on :
quote:Originally posted by the lioness,: [
I've looked at at curly haired people of various types anywhere, from Africans to Iranians, Europeans etc Their beards and moustaches don't have the same textures, the beards are less curly if curly at all. That ball shaped beard pattern on these reliefs , it does not look realistic to me, try to find a photo of a real person who has a high degree of curl in their beards
Frieze of the Archers, Susa, Iran
Achaemenid relief with a Persian archer, 6th- 5th century B.C. Persepolis
Some speculate the curls are artificially made but I don't think so. Think it is natural curls but not that tight. I think the hat and gravity are just stretching out that straighter section at the top
But if you look at that beard. I can't find photos of real people that have a high degree of round looking curl like that. Is it artistic stylization or did somebody come in and meticulously curl the beards of all these soldiers with some kind of curling device? I don't know, simiarly the Lachish figures
And again... these ancient persians (elamites) were said to be negroid, especially according to examinations performed on their skeletal remains.
There is more than one way to depict people who have a black/negro/"african" phenotype.
One of these sources even goes as far as saying they were "negroid with kinky hair".
"L'Acropole de Suse : d'après les fouilles exécutées en 1884, 1885, 1886, sous les auspices du Musée du Louvre, Volume 1" by Marcel Dieulafoy, page 28 (1890) Librairie Hachette
2,875 views Streamed live on Feb 7, 2023 The pharaohs liked to draw clear boundaries around what they considered ‘Egyptian’, and those ancient perspectives persist in modern Egyptology. The First Cataract of the Nile is generally seen as the boundary is between ancient Egypt and ancient Nubia, but the division is more than just geographical. Grave, objects, and even people are labelled as ‘Nubian’, even if they come from within the limits of pharaonic Egypt. But why do we make such distinctions? And how accurate are they?
This lecture demonstrates the problems that come with such clear divisions and highlights the challenges that arise upon asking new questions of historical, artistic, and archaeological evidence. Traditional boundaries will be blurred, and more nuanced perspectives will be encouraged.
Guest Speaker: Aaron de Souza (PhD Macquarie 2017) is an archaeologist specialising in Nubian material culture of the Second Millennium BCE, and his research takes an object-based approach to the complex inter- and intra-cultural contacts that took place across the greater Nile Valley. He is currently a Lise Meitner Postdoctoral Fellow at the Austrian Archaeological Institute in Vienna, funded by the Austrian Science Fund (FWF), and prior to this he was a Marie Skłodowska-Curie Research Fellow, also at the Austrian Academy of Sciences, funded by the European Commission (2019–2020). Aaron has worked with a number of excavation projects in Egypt, most notably at Tell Edfu, Hierakonpolis, Elephantine, Aswan, Dendara and Helwan, in addition to grant-funded museum-based research projects in Sweden, the UK, the USA, and Italy. He is also a founding editor of the online journal, Interdisciplinary Egyptology, hosted by the University of Vienn
Damn, Yatunde you beat me to it! I've been meaning to post that lecture by Dr. Aaron de Souza but unfortunately I was sick last month. Dr. de Souza has a blog on the subject of his specialty here- The InBetween Blog: A page dedicated to new perspectives on Ancient Nubia. I've even corresponded with him via email a couple of times. I've been following his work because he's done a lot to debunk the fallacy of solid clear division between Egypt and 'Nubia'. Of course his expertise is cultural whereas that of his colleague Dr. Maria Gatto is biological.
His presentation wasn't bad, though I wish he would've gone into a little more detail. For example, how in the predynastic decisively Egyptian pottery like the Tasian and Badarian show typical Nubian features like the black-topped wear, or that certain styles of clothing like kilts with animal tails or aprons attached, hairstyles like afros, braids and twists, plaited beards etc. Even religious or ritual items like animal totems, cattle cults, incense burners, staves or ritual sticks.
Also, even though bio-anthropology is not his expertise, Dr. de Souza could have done a better job showing the difference in appearance between Egyptians and Nubians as portrayed by the Egyptians themselves showing that this difference is mainly that of complexion but not so much other features.
Egyptian spearmen
Nubian bowmen Posted by Yatunde Lisa Bey (Member # 22253) on :
Actual royal examples of red sashes survive from the New Kingdom. There were three different types of sashes found in the tomb of Tutankhamun; undecorated simple, tapestry woven, and ‘Amarna-style’ (G. Vogelsang-Eastwood, Tutankhamun’s Wardrobe, 59). One of the ‘Amarna’ sashes is largely intact (JE 62647) and preserves a linen tapestry woven central panel with pairs of streamers extending from each side. Although they are woven with several colors, the decorated sashes are predominantly red.
quote:Also almost entirely red is the so-called ‘Rameses girdle.’ This incredibly well executed textile has been interpreted as a scarf, a jacket, or a belt, but has been recently reinterpreted (by G. Vogelsang-Eastwood) as an example of one of these long, looped sashes. It is delicately embroidered with ankh signs and originally displayed a finely executed line of text (now completely destroyed) that included the names and titles of Ramses III.
Tut's belt
quote:Why was the looped sash so prevalent in Ramesside royal tombs, and why did its usage increase in frequency over time? What meaning did this exclusively kingly attribute hold that made it so appropriate for a funerary context, especially since in other contexts (such as on temple walls) it was often worn in scenes of battle, slaughter, and violent action? What about it made the looped sash desirable for the princes to imitate in their costume?
An example from the movie 10 Commandments of a priest
quote:According to Rabbinical literature, Midrash and Maimonides, the sash was 32 cubits long and 2, 3 or 4 fingers wide. At this length, it would have to have been wound around the body several times. Theories differ as to how this was accomplished: some say it was wound around the waist only, while others say it was wound around the waist and over the shoulders, crossing over the heart In any event, the ends would have been tied and allowed to hang down in front
Posted by Djehuti (Member # 6698) on :
^ Yes Nubians were stylistically distinguished by the red sash either with the shoulder strap or just a sash falling from the belt like the Nubian bowmen I posted. However the red sash should be distinguished from the red tyeti (sacred ties) worn by priestesses and identified as the belt of Aset/Isis which was presented by pharaohs like the Ramses pic you posted as well as worn.
The tyet symbolized welfare or maintenance and it was believed to bring protection to whomever or whatever it was tied to.
Posted by Djehuti (Member # 6698) on :
Getting back to the topic Dr. de Souza brought up an excellent point that there are many hallmarks of "Nubian" culture that were also shared by Egyptians such as pottery for example. Nubians are associated with calciform black burnish ware pottery with a variety of beaker and flask like and shapes especially red ware with black tops. The problem is that these are the same types associated with predynastic Egyptian cultures like the Tasian and Badarian.
So can anyone tell which pottery is 'Nubian' and which is 'Egyptian'?
