Contemporary bust of Cleopatra

The names, as usual, will mostly be changed. The conduct of individual crazies is not the issue, here. What is of interest is how the house chose to react to the craziness.

An anonymous contributer (signing in under a pen name) who we'll call "Neppy" decided to retell history from an "Afrocentric" perspective, taking the usual liberties with the facts. As I entered the thread, long after Neppy's departure, I opened with a few general comments regarding some of the Afrocentric fallacies in general circulation at the time.

Antistoicus
( )
5/21/01 02:17 AM
Re: Cleopatra & the rise of Christianity (1)
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Sigh. This is in response to the post by "Neppy" which started this thread. I have to admit that looking over (part of) the thread, I'm a little concerned by what I have perceived to be a tone of "I've made up my mind, don't try to confuse me with the facts". Somebody has already pointed out extant portraiture (which, by the way, does not portray Cleopatra as being an ideal beauty). I might add, that Egypt has a wealth of well-preserved bodies, sometimes so well-preserved that an appreciable amount of intact DNA remains. To anticipate what I expect will be the next response, we can rest assured that no Euro-centric predecessors altered that DNA to fool posterity; we can't even do that in the 21st century. So, when Anthropologists tell us about the people who lived in Ancient Egypt, they aren't working in a vacuum, and there is more at work than cultural prejudice, in their research results.

That much having been said, with all due respect to previous participants in this discussion, I do feel the need to respond to the Afrocentrist argument that since Egypt is on the African continent, the Ancient Egyptians must have been "African" (ie. Black, in a modern sense). I would begin by pointing out if Alexandria and Lagos lie on the same landmass, the same is equally true of Paris, Athens, Calcutta and Beijing. Shall we conclude that the Chinese are "white", or that the French are Asian on that basis? Or shall we temper our political correctness with a touch of common sense, and accept the blindingly clear reality that very different looking peoples will often live on the same continent? Is Egypt on the African continent? Yes, and so is the Sahara desert, one of the nastiest pieces of real estate north of Antarctica, and very hard to cross without domesticated camels (or semi-domesticated, some would say).

The fallacy in the argument lies in assuming that the Mediterranean played the same role in Ancient Western history that the Atlantic played in modern Euro-American history: a barrier to be overcome, whose presence served to lead to the existence of distinct "races". In reality, travel by water was far easier than travel by land during antiquity, and indeed, even in our own era, in areas where widespread road construction had not yet occured. (Sails do not work on dry land, banditry is more of a problem, etc). The Mediterranean, far from being a race-defining barrier, was a highway that brought nations together.

All that seperates "Europe" from "Asia" is a narrow strait, currently staddled by the city of Istanbul and a few city bridges - certainly no barrier to even primitive shipping. As for Africa and Western Asia - during antiquity one could still walk there, in theory, if one actually wanted to. One could hug the shoreline all of the way there.

In the pre-roman period, we have the conquest by Carthage of what is now Spain, Phoenicia's founding and settlement of that city (Phoenicia, located where Lebanon is now, was in Western Asia, Carthage in North Africa (like Egypt, but further away from Phoenicia). In fact, they (the Phoenicians) are on record as having visited what is now Cornwall (where tin was already being mined) and as having rounded the Southern tip of Africa! Compared to this, a trip across the relatively gentle Mediterranean was a trivial matter. The Greeks, likewise planted colonies around the Mediterranean ... I could go on and on, and already have, I suppose. The point is, that the notion that trans-mediterranean travel was a Roman era novelty is not tenable. Come to think of it, I wouldn't be here typing this rebuttal if it was, as a good portion of my ancestry owes its existence to some of that earlier, pre-roman, colonization.

As for Roman and Post-Roman colonization: Gaul and Iberia saw heavy settlement during the late Imperial period by veterans of North African descent, and the Islamic conquest brought more North African settlers into Spain, and Sicily. Are we to conclude that the Spanish, French and Southern Italians are black?

If I am obsessing, it is only because I am so utterly flabbergasted by the outlandishness of so much of what I have read on this subject. Have some of these people ever met a Moroccan (a good many of whom still speak Hamitic languages, related to Egyptian)? (2) One might speak of indifference to basic standards of evidence and scholarship, and that is bothersome enough. But much of this should be common sense. I am reminded of a sort of mirror-image precursor to this sort of thing, which held that (if you can believe this) that Southern Europeans were extinct, having been altogether replaced with Germans after the fall of Rome. "So", I asked after a lengthy spiel, "you're seriously telling me that the population of Mexico, (3) and that of Sweden, are ethnically indistinguishable?!" Is any of this important in the grand scheme of things? I would maintain that yes, it is, for one simple reason. Willfully ignoring what is before one's very eyes, is an intrinsically unwholesome act. So let's not do that, OK?

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One frustrating, and yet ultimately fortunate fact was that I was working in Lynx, one of the oldest, clunkiest web browsers in existence. I couldn't move text around on the screen, when using the forms on webboards, which made writing responses to posts a difficult process, especially when I would try to quote material from the post I was responding to. A more sensible approach, was to write my replies offline, where I could use the far more graceful pico editor, upload them to one of my webpages, and link from posts I would make on the board (for this purpose), to my replies off the board. As a courtesy to the reader, I would include links back to the board, so he could easily return to the discussion when done.

It worked well. In fact, it worked well in ways that I had not yet forseen. When Stephanie Cass, the board monitor, started playing "censor", the fact that my replies here were off-board meant that at least some of my work wasn't lost. My replies to the posts on the thread follow.

Click here to continue.

(1) I ran out of space, and completed this in a second post, placed online at 3:00 AM on May 21, 2001. The third note that I placed on this thread was a link to the article that this is now attached to. mainly, along with an explanation as to why I was doing things this way. (Editing posts on the boards was a bit of a headache in Lynx).

(2) True, the fact that one language is related to another is no guarantee of a close blood relationship between the peoples who speak them. (Eg. The Mexicans, Bengalis and Swedes all speak Indo-European languages, but are hardly close kin). However, it does create a reasonable presumption of some degree of kinship, in the absence of strong evidence to the contrary, as the contrary scenario described is usual a side effect of past military conquests (eg. the Romans conquer the Iberians, whose descendents, the Spanish then conquer the Aztecs (whose descendents become part of the Mexican population); elsewhere, earlier, Aryan speaking nomads conquer the northern part of the Indian subcontinent). Let us note that Egypt never ruled any part of what is now Morocco, nor did any known Hamitic speaking conqueror ever rule both. So, where would the linguistic similarity come from ?

(3) This same unusual person also claimed that the Spaniards completely depopulated and resettled Mexico. This kind of silliness used to be quite popular. For example, for decades, some years ago, some archaeologists seriously argued that the Mayan glyphs would never be deciphered, because nothing akin to the Rosetta stone could be found, and the Mayans, of course, were extinct. Only one small problem with this argument. The Mayans were far from extinct (in fact, a few million of them were still walking around, in the immediate vicinity of the ruins), and three of their languages were still in use. Oops. Such is the power of preconceived opinions, that field workers failed to notice the very people they were wandering among, for decades, a feat on a par with visiting Amsterdam and not being able to find any Dutch people.