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What you have is Afrocentric malarkey. The Berbers are a mixed race now because of the Arab conquest, but they were more Caucasian looking in ancient times. You can trot out whatever lying Afrocentrist "geneticist" you want, but the depictions of the indigenous north Africans by the ancient Egyptians from the time period is irrefutable:
From left to right: Libyan (Berber), Nubian, Asiatic, Egyptian. This depiction is from 1500 BC.
This was the ancient Egyptians' own race classification system. I don't know for sure what Asiatic means, but my best guess was probably the Phoenicians. The Libyan, which would have been Berber land back then, is depicted in 1,500 BC as having fair skin, delicate facial features and light hair. What is the explanation for this image? Were the ancient Egyptians in on the racist conspiracy 3,500 years ago with Wikipedia and Stormfront?
Afrocentrist theorists make themselves look like fools by trying to hawk such a simplistic and naive Africa=black paradigm. The truth is that the Sahara was virtually impenetrable in ancient times. The harshness of the Sahara would have greatly reduced travel between northern and southern Africa. Back then, southern African would have been populated by what we call blacks today and northern Africa would have been populated by Eurasians.
No one knows what race the ancient Egyptians were for sure and it really doesn't matter. They were probably a mix of some type, but they surely were not black. King Tut's DNA was tested and he was found to have a haplogroup of R1B, which is the same as Czar Nicholas of Russia and John Adams. If the ancient Egyptians, who depicted themselves as reddish brown are not black African, then the Berbers, who were depicted as fair haired and fair skinned, surely are not.
You bash Afrocentrism and yet you have an extreme Eurocentric view point yourself. You can't even acknowledge that the Ancient Egyptians are indigenous people of Africa. Why do you have such a hard time accepting that North African people could possibly be the same race as other African people. You seem to be so obsessed with Blackness. Here is a quick reality check. Not everyone in Africa has the same skin tone!" That goes for all regions(west, north, central, south, and east).
By the way, why do you put so much emphasis on using terms like "Black Africa"? Africa is Africa and it's not really necessary to put a color in front of continent. Lets try this logic with other continents, "Red America, White Europe, Yellow Asia, etc. As you see it sounds silly when you apply it to other places but yet for some reason we apply these silly terms to Africa or even worse by trying to use it as some sort of racial dividing line. Whether what skin complexion the Berbers were doesn't really matter because they are indigenous African people. There is just no getting around that basic fact. Didn't humanity start in Africa? So why would it be so far fetched to believed that North Africans are the same race as West, Central, South, or East Africa when humanities origins all goes back to the so called "Sub-Saharan" or "Black Africa".
As far as your comment about the Sahara being "virtually impenetrable in ancient times" is simply not true. Trans-Saharan trade routes have existed for thousands of years going all the way back to ancient times.
Don't forget there there are indigenous African tribes who have lived in the Sahara for thousands of years. A great example would be the Tuareg people.
I didn't miss your point, I just disagree with you, based on historical facts.
The Greeks called blacks "Aethiops", a term that literally means burned of skin. Such a word clearly shows that the ancient world had a concept of physiology and used it to differentiate various people of the world. We also see this categorization of people based on color in Herodotus' book The Histories. He referred to Africans (North of the Sahara and below it), part of the Persian population, Phoenicians, and some European populations in the Caucasus as "Aethiops". In the Greek world it meant anyone who was black skinned.
They had the same brains you and I do right now. They were not retards, they could distinguish between white and black and did so often! However, the idea of being "Aethiop" back then didn't have the negative connotation it does today, but that is because the super powers back then were generally black, as described by Herodotus. Herodotus' book was written in the 500s B.C. Strabo, Pliny the Elder and many other Europeans up until the 1800s also used the same terminology.
The ancient "Egyptians" called themselves Kemu which means blacks. Some "scholars" say it referred to the soil, but that makes no sense. Why would they call themselves black in relation to dirt. Secondly, when they wrote the word kemu in mtu ntr (what we call hieroglyphics) they used it with the determinate to denote people, not land.
Africa was called Bilad Al Sudan (land of the blacks) by the Arabs. African's also referred to it as Al Sudan, which we see in books like Tarikh al Fattash, written in the 1700s. This particular book chronicles the history of many of the early West African empires, like Ancient Ghana, Songhai etc.
So, your assertion that the designation of people into categories such as "white and black", is of recent origin, is just untrue.
This new Eurocentric push, to try and promote the idea that the ancient world didn't know color or "race" is nonsense. I personally believe this attempt to declassify race in the ancient world is the Eurocentric thinkers new attempt to lessen the impact of the role Africans played in the past. Africans had a far greater role in the ancient world than they (Eurocentrist) feel comfortable with admitting.
You should also try and find books from the 1700s and 1800s about who the Moors were. Those Europeans clearly made a distinction based on physiology, saying things like "they were black as pitch, and only the whites of their eyes and teeth were distinguishable in their facial features".
So my point still stands. North Africa until about 700 A.D. was overwhelmingly Black. You did have some non native whites that came in, such as Greeks, Romans, and other Europeans. However, in no way were they indigenous and no whites were not present in any real numbers prior to that time. We have to many eye witness accounts to say otherwise, such as the above mentioned books and writers. Then when black amazighs start enslaving whites, in vast numbers into North Africa and even parts of west Africa and east Africa, you start to see the population changing/shifting. The vast majority of them were settled in the North, though you did get some being used as soldiers in the Bagam and Songhai kingdom.
You're right: the absurd and senseless concept of "race" existed in ancient times. It doesn't make this concept any less absurd and senseless, since genetics proves that all "races" mixed a lot since the Neolithic period.
And even if the concept of "races" existed since ancient time, RACISM is a quite recent phenomenon. The idea of "superior races" and "inferior races", and the idea of the necessity to conserve "the purity of the race", are very recent ideas in the overall human history.
I don't think so. Primitive people (Germanics) tend to be racists because they are organized around tribes, they are tribal. Roman Europe, on the other hand, was organized according to Roman Public Law.
You bash Afrocentrism and yet you have an extreme Eurocentric view point yourself. You can't even acknowledge that the Ancient Egyptians are indigenous people of Africa. Why do you have such a hard time accepting that North African people could possibly be the same race as other African people. You seem to be so obsessed with Blackness. Here is a quick reality check. Not everyone in Africa has the same skin tone!" That goes for all regions(west, north, central, south, and east).
By the way, why do you put so much emphasis on using terms like "Black Africa"? Africa is Africa and it's not really necessary to put a color in front of continent. Lets try this logic with other continents, "Red America, White Europe, Yellow Asia, etc. As you see it sounds silly when you apply it to other places but yet for some reason we apply these silly terms to Africa or even worse by trying to use it as some sort of racial dividing line. Whether what skin complexion the Berbers were doesn't really matter because they are indigenous African people. There is just no getting around that basic fact. Didn't humanity start in Africa? So why would it be so far fetched to believed that North Africans are the same race as West, Central, South, or East Africa when humanities origins all goes back to the so called "Sub-Saharan" or "Black Africa".
As far as your comment about the Sahara being "virtually impenetrable in ancient times" is simply not true. Trans-Saharan trade routes have existed for thousands of years going all the way back to ancient times.
Don't forget there there are indigenous African tribes who have lived in the Sahara for thousands of years. A great example would be the Tuareg people.
By the way if you want to label me as Afrocentric for simply saying that "North African people are indeed African" then go right ahead.
I won't acknowledge that North African people could possibly be the same race as southern African people because it is unequivocally false. The North Africans are and were probably a mix, but they are demonstrably not the same group of people as those south of the Sahara. They have tested the DNA history (haplogroups) of people in various areas to track how the groups of people have migrated over the course of history. Haplogroups are classified by a letter-based system. Tutankhamun was found to have an R1b1a2 haplogroup. The R family is the most common haplogroup in Europe. Luke the Evangelist, who lived in the Mediterranean area, was found to have H family haplogroup - also a very common European haplogroup. Given the Ancient Egyptian's darker coloring in the artwork they created depicting the known races at the time, its very possible they were mixed, but there is no way were the exact same people as were found south of the Sahara.
You are mixing up several issues,possibly on purpose to obfuscate. This thread is about the racial classification of the Berbers. Clearly, anyone from Africa is African in a geographic sense. But that is not what we are talking about. The question is are the Berbers white, black, a mix or something else. Modern day Berbers seem to be a mixture of Arab and Caucasian DNA. There are Berbers who look more Arab and there are others who could pass as Scandinavians. They are obviously not from south of the Sahara. It's obvious where the Arab DNA came from - the conquest of North Africa my the Muslim invaders. The question is where the Caucasian DNA originates. Given the evidence we have from historical times, which I posted, it appears that the Berbers were traditionally a Caucasian people and became less traditionally Caucasian following the Muslim conquest. In fact, the darker complexions in Portugal, Spain, Italy and Greece can be attributed to historical Muslim invasions.
I won't acknowledge that North African people could possibly be the same race as southern African people because it is unequivocally false. The North Africans are and were probably a mix, but they are demonstrably not the same group of people as those south of the Sahara. They have tested the DNA history (haplogroups) of people in various areas to track how the groups of people have migrated over the course of history. Haplogroups are classified by a letter-based system. Tutankhamun was found to have an R1b1a2 haplogroup. The R family is the most common haplogroup in Europe. Luke the Evangelist, who lived in the Mediterranean area, was found to have H family haplogroup - also a very common European haplogroup. Given the Ancient Egyptian's darker coloring in the artwork they created depicting the known races at the time, its very possible they were mixed, but there is no way were the exact same people as were found south of the Sahara.
You are mixing up several issues,possibly on purpose to obfuscate. This thread is about the racial classification of the Berbers. Clearly, anyone from Africa is African in a geographic sense. But that is not what we are talking about. The question is are the Berbers white, black, a mix or something else. Modern day Berbers seem to be a mixture of Arab and Caucasian DNA. There are Berbers who look more Arab and there are others who could pass as Scandinavians. They are obviously not from south of the Sahara. It's obvious where the Arab DNA came from - the conquest of North Africa my the Muslim invaders. The question is where the Caucasian DNA originates. Given the evidence we have from historical times, which I posted, it appears that the Berbers were traditionally a Caucasian people and became less traditionally Caucasian following the Muslim conquest. In fact, the darker complexions in Portugal, Spain, Italy and Greece can be attributed to historical Muslim invasions.
Since you are one of those extreme Eurocentrics, I will break this information to you gently. You seem to be so focused on Berbers(and North Africans in general) as being part of the Caucasion race that somehow separates them from the rest of the so called "Sub-Sahara Africa". I have already addressed why the logic of using terms like "Sub-Saharan" and "Black Africa" are flawed when trying to make some sort of racial dividing line, so we don't need to talk about that again. What needs to be address is the concept of a Caucasion race. Here is the truth behind it. In reality there is no such thing as a Caucasion race! That term was created by a German physician Johann Blumenbach in 1795 to describe light-skinned people from Europe, whom Blumenbach mistakenly thought came from the Caucasus Mountains. He believed the white race originated from that region. He would later go on to include places like North Africa and the Middle East as part of the so called Caucasion race.
Many Eurocentrics would use this concept of a Caucasion race to justify their racial superiority over other ethnic groups like West Africans for example. This term was also used as justification for the Trans-Atlantic Slave Trade of African people". Many felt that excluding North African people, history, and culture from the continent ofAfrica gave justification for the slavery of African people because they thought their superior Caucasion race was introducing them to civilization thus saving the slaves from their primitive culture. Eurocentrics would use the concept of a Caucasion race as a way to separate civilizations like Egypt from African culture. You have to remember that it was extremely taboo at that time to even say that Egypt was in Africa. It would take generations for many Eurocentrics scholars to even acknowledge that Egypt is was an African civilization.
lmao at your haplagroup DNA findings, as if that's the final/ultimate authority on Berber ancestry. I agree that ethnic mixing did come later in history, which also applies to the Arabs as well in regards to the Muslim conquest of North Africa. As far as the Berbers being originally European in ancestry, how could the Indigenous Berber people originate from Europe when the Berbers have arguably been in the Sahara longer than any European Civilization? If anything it would probably be the opposite in that European ancestry originated out of North Africa and not the other way around. You seem to have an very Eurocentric viewpoint but that ok because old habits tend to die hard.
Last edited by gwillyfromphilly; 05-08-2013 at 08:11 PM..
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