One interesting site I checked quite a bit as a Christian was the Skeptic’s Annotated Bible. There are many flavours of Christianity, so not every argument applies to every Christian and a number of the arguments are pretty weak or misunderstand/misinterpret passages. However, it actually points out the areas that people might have objections to, which you have to confront if you’re going to have a cohesive theology. Literalists can complain about your science or other arguments, but not so much when you’re just listing what the Bible says. It also invites Christians to respond to challenges and links to sites that do, so you can’t be much fairer than that.
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I was asking about the MakedaQueenofSheba vs. khepra accounts, not saying anything about ancient history.
Honestly, I don’t care much about the cultural origins of the Bible since I don’t really care about the Bible except as being sometimes interesting for its effects on literature and culture. The only bits I can speak with any reliable knowledge about are the Hellenistic bits in the Apocrypha and the Roman bits in the NT. If you’d like to say the god depicted in it is mythological or that the accounts in it are laden with error, you’re preaching to the choir with nobody here I see disagreeing. If you want to ramble about Egyptian influence, I don’t care one way or another, though it really casts a poor light on Egypt.
I’m definitely not going to trod the path of ancient ethnicities since I don’t see how the color of ancient people’s skin matters. It didn’t matter to the various peoples of the various Egyptian periods, nor the ancient Greeks or Romans, and only became some sort of issue millennia after the fact. Modern ideas of race are a late social construct that can’t be meaningfully applied to ancient cultures.
As a separate rat-hole I wish I could resist, the popular images of the Mosaic tablets as double-humped things was a late invention of the High Middle Age - in the earliest depictions during the Roman era through the early Middle Age they were just boring rectangles.
But seriously, what’s up with the multiple accounts?
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When the men wrote the book of Genesis they didn’t use modern scientific taxonomies, so calling a bat a bird wasn’t wrong and there was no idea of a ‘mammal.’ Judging that as an error is just applying an inapplicable criteria to the writers.
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So? I am not clear what that has to do with anything. If you need books about non-mythological things, can’t you simply read about them elsewhere?
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It’s not necessarily proven that one user has multiple accounts in this instance. Perhaps it’s two users who both belong to the same cult?
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I’d guess khepra/MakedaQueenofSheba isn’t in a cult, but is/was an African studies major, most tropes are consistent, esp. the Egypt-obsession. But the way the same peculiarities in diction show up, a distinct approach in replies, and the way the same specific and peculiar views on religion creep in make it look very much like one agent rather than two. Could be wrong, though. If it is the same person they aren’t really sock-puppeting since they participate in different discussions.
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Galileo’s “Letter to the Grand Duchess Christina” (http://www4.ncsu.edu/~kimler/hi322/Galileo-Letter.pdf) is the masterpiece of this form; Wiki has a decent summary of the background and impact. To (loosely) quote him, “the purpose of Scripture is to teach us how to go to heaven, not to teach us how the heavens go”.
It was an attempt at finding a way for the Catholic church to accomodate the increasingly rapid progress of science; it ended up arguably becoming one of the foundational documents of the secular Enlightenment. It is a case of special pleading, though, and the origin of the God of the Gaps argument.
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I think there’s a strong version of this argument that is not true, i.e. the bible doesn’t relate to the physical world or science (it does and it’s often wrong), but the truth value of the passage about bats is that they are unclean, not so much that they are a kind of bird - I’m sure whales, dolphins and penguins could be considered fish where they relate to dietary laws. Likewise, the moon does give light, just not its own.
As you say though, that argument leads to special pleading (or a retreat into irrelevance), so it’s not surprising that many literalists will claim that the bible is merely misunderstood and in fact completely accurate.
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You posted:
“I’m definitely not going to trod the path of ancient ethnicities since I don’t see how the color of ancient people’s skin matters.”
If the ethnicity of Ancient Kemet (Egypt) does not matter, then why do far to many educators and historians in America falsely depict the people of Ancient Kemet as Europeans or Arabs?
Kemet is on the African continent and the people of ancient Kemet were Africans not Europeans or Arabs.
2000 years ago the aboriginal people in America looked nothing like the invading and migrating population we see today in America --samethng for ancient Kemet.
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Either the Bible of Christianity and Tanakh of Judaism are the word of God, a book written by men inspired by God–or simply a mythological book written by anonymous men devoid of devine inspiration.
If the Bible and Tanakh is the word of God, or inspired by God–then that all powerful and all knowing God would know the difference between a bat and bird, the moon and Sun,–and everything about dinosaurs.
However the Bib!e of Christianity and Tanank of Judaism are books written by men attributing it to a Christian or Jewish God respectively. They could only write about what they knew.
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Yes,
Seems reasonable to me.
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The Bible and Tanskh does not say the earth was flat–men interpret passages to say the earth was flat.
Accuracy of science is important if a religious book is claimed to be the word of a all knowing supreme creator god.
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You’d want to read the accounts/arguments of current academics (which I don’t think you’re really fairly describing), I’ve skimmed bits but I’m not an Egyptologist, and don’t really care about the race or ethnicity of ancient peoples. There are things that are interesting about them, but projecting modern cultural conventions on them is among the least interesting or relevant aspects regardless of who does it or how.
I don’t believe in divine inspiration. Those works were written by people. But if you want to point out problems with the account there are much more interesting and persuasive critiques than sniping about their taxonomies given that they weren’t written for the modern era’s taxa. The Bible mentions Egyptians using coins centuries before coinage existed, put camels in a story in a time before they existed, and on and on. There’s a huge swath of objectively wrong information in there that’s a stronger criticism than slagging the writers for their use of their culture’s taxonomies (which is understandable and more forgivable).
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DNA research has come a long way. It is now possible to prove that ancient Egypt was a melting pot which included eastern Africans, yes, but was more heavily northern (Saharan) African and what we now think of as Arab or Middle Eastern. I forget which Pharaoh united Upper (Nubian) Egypt with Lower (Arabic/Saharan) Egypt, but the power and the genetics remained largely near the mouth of the Nile in Lower Egypt.
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Traditionally the unification was credited to Menes. Unfortunately no mention of him appears on any discovered artifacts that date to prior to the 19th Dynasty.1 Most details regarding his life come from much later, during the late dynastic period, by which point a number of most likely false stories had grown up around him as a sort of semi-legendary cultural hero.
That said, Menes probably was an actual pharoah, and modern scholarship largely agrees that he was most likely the same person as Narmer, the first pharaoh of the First Dynasty. Though there is a minority position that holds that he was actually Narmer’s successor, Hor-Aha.
1. This is not entirely surprising. “Menes” is a nebty name, and those were not commonly used until well after the two kingdoms had been unified. All archaelogical artifacts that we have that date to the early dynastic period use serekh names instead.
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I’m not sure it mattered to them in the same way it matters and has become so important today. Race is a modern construct and the attempt to whitewash history is a modern, racist project, built to tear down anything other than the capitalist, Euro-centric world view. We need to understand that it wasn’t just white people who moved history, but we also need to understand that people understood identity and hierarchy in different ways prior to the modern era…
That’s my answer anyway.
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Kemet is on the African continent–and the ancient people who lived in Kemet were Africans, not Arabs or Europeans.
What DNA research?
Done by who?
Verified by who?
The double crown worn by pharaohs of Kemet symbolize the unification and origin of Africa-Kemet/Anu (Egypt/Ethiopia). Arabs or Europeans did not rule or have anything to do with the 31 plus dynasties of Ancient Kemet, covering some 10,000 years, including the pre-dynastic era.
Ethiopia is the seat and origin of the Kemetic dynasties–and almost all of Africa was once considered Kemet. As late as the 19th and early 20th century the south Atlantic Ocean was called the Ethiopian Ocean.
The Nile River the world’s longest, is a odd river, in that it flows from south to north. Because of this fact–upper Kemet was designated the south (Ethiopia, Kenya, Sudan) etc.–and lower Kemet was designated the north, (Egypt, Libya ) etc.
Africans in ancient Kemet consisted of different skin colors–but they were Africans not Arabs or Europeans.
The ethnicity of ancient Kemet was debated by the top scholars in the world on two different occasions in the 1970’s–the debate ended when two African scholars dominated the debate and silenced those who were claiming the ethnicity of ancient Kemet was Arab or European.
One of them, Cheikh Anta Diop was not only a historian, but a chemist, anthropologist, spoke multiple languages and a physicist. He developed the melanin dosage test. When he tested the first mummies they proved to be consistent with the same melanin concentration of Africans.
When the Arabs got the results they barred him and other African anthropologist’s from testing anymore mummies.
Anwar Sadat used to describe himself as the last and real pharoah because his ancestry was Aftican–he was assassinated by Arabs.
Arabs misrepresent themselves as Egyptians, they are descended from invaders who migrated to Africa well after the end of the 31 plus Kemetic dynasties. They misrepresent what the pyramids were built for and how they were built.
The pyramids were not built to store grain or built to house the bodies of dead pharaohs.
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Well it’s good to know that the genetic ethnicity of the entirety of the continent of Africa was determined by two guys without axes to grind in the 1970s. /s
In reality, the genetics on that continent are the most diverse anywhere in the world. On average any 100 people from the same current-political-boundaries country in Africa will have more divergent DNA signatures than any 100 people from 100 different countries ranging from Peru to Ireland to China.
You’re proud of your African heritage for short-sighted reasons. Lots of better reasons exist.
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The topic has been researched and debated long since the 70s. History’s never settled with finality, since there’s always the possibility of new evidence about the past changing our understanding, and there’s been a metric Jesus-ton of research on ancient peoples since the 70s. The 70s was the dark ages before genetic analysis was even possible. A casual googling suggests that quite a lot’s been discovered since then:
Even were the population of Egypt to have been completely populated by people who looked like sub-saharan Africans, drawing any conclusions from that by dragging in modern cultural conventions of race is counterproductive, since it empowers and reinforces the toxic and ignorant modern concepts of race. Being proud of your heritage is great if that’s your thing, but check the results of people misidentifying heritage with race - major troubles follow that path.
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Life originated in Africa, you are not stating anything new.
All stages of human development are found in Africa and nowhere else.
The oldest near complete skeletal remains of human ancestors are found in East Africa.
Inter-ethnic cultural diversity is different from what most people improperly refer to as races?
What is your definition of genetic ethnicity?
Are you trying to make the claim that the ancient Kemetic dynasties were Arab or Europeans?
Arabs and Europeans had nothing to do with any of the 31 plus African-Kemetic dynasties.
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