amor4ce:

[img]http://1.bp..com/-r2cvQQeioWE/Tw96Aror3yI/AAAAAAAACEA/qOqI3W7F8vs/s400/Hebrew+Japanese+alphabets.jpg[/img]

HAHAHA! This is KANA, it comes from CHINESE characters and was only invented around 1200 years ago, and no earlier.

[center][/center]

Dudu_Negro:

Yoruba has been in existence before anything called Saudi.   Lamurudu (Almoravid or Nimrod, whichever you prefer) was the father of the Arabas (Arabs).  Didn't you read Ojukwu's thesis in Oxford?  Even Ojukwu, your lord, . . . talked about Lamurudu and Oduduwa's reign and power.   Beaf, educate this "foolagu". 

If you like, Ojukwu could have claimed the whole of the middle east was an Ijebu market while he was in university. It doesn't stop the hilarity of the fact that the Yoruba on contact with the Europeans didn't even know what Yoruba was.

We have always known ourselves not just by names but by our traditions, customs, values, and identifying with Ile-Ife.

It doesn't stop the hilarity of the fact that the Yoruba on contact with the Europeans didn't even know what Yoruba was.

I remember where this came from, you are feeding off the delusion and eurocentric mind of your fellow "oyinbo-is-correct" compatriot, physics.

How come portuguese knew who yoruba was, but Britain did not?   No need to answer it cause i know you dont have a clue.  Wait for the originator of the agenda to produce an answer to my challenge.


Amor4ce, let me be very honest with you brother.  You and I have spent many times online bringing knowledge on yoruba culture and arts, there are people here that find more gain and security in their eurocentric beliefs.  it's almost a worship and taking an Afrocentric position robs them of this security.   Prime example will be African men married to White women.  In the hands of a White woman, the African submits himself and turn against his own, he feels a sense of belonging in what he falsely calls advanced race.  in doing so he distances from his own and forms a new legion of advanced minds and civilized people schooled in the philosophies of aristotle and plato. . . if white people say Plato was god. . . this African agrees with them, not questioning.  If an African says Oduduwa is god, this African disagrees and read to you what the Plato adherents say about Oduduwa to back his disagreement.  Im not saying Physics is married to white, but hey, I dont know that he is not.

Dudu_Negro:

I remember where this came from, you are feeding off the delusion and eurocentric mind of your fellow "oyinbo-is-correct" compatriot, physics.

How come portuguese knew who yoruba was, but Britain did not?   No need to answer it cause i know you dont have a clue.  Wait for the originator of the agenda to produce an answer to my challenge.

HAHA, because the Portuguese landed in some random area and obviously had to name some group they met there, who later spread the identity with other. Yoruba. By the way, there was no such word whether Yoruba, Yoribo or Yoruba used by the Portugues before the contact with British.

Anyway, this has nothing to do with Yoruba teleportation, technically, socially, politically regressive, Arabian desert stories.

amor4ce:

PhysicsQED, was that the best you could come up with, referring to your perception of delusion and inferiority complex?

If you actually think I couldn't have given a far more sarcastic and caustic response than I did, you're deceiving yourself. I threw you a soft little jab there because you seemed genuinely offended over my laughing.

With all the experiences you have accumulated from birth couldn't you have done better? Is the act of assidiously trying to put down the person of your fellow as against his argument indicative of maturity and wisdom? I started this thread without any intent to put you down as can be seen in the first post. But look at what you have done in return. I aslo did not refer to the Jebusites in this thread. By the way, since you pointed at delusion concerning the Biblical Jebusites, know that in that same Bible is mentioned a man called Caleb who today is cited for demonstrations of faith - his ancestors were originally Kenezzite but he had an inheritance in Israel.

If you re-read some of your posts on this forum, such as your Edo = Edomites stuff, you would understand why it's sometimes hard to take you seriously.

You said that the Ijebu monarchy acknowledges migration from Eastern Chad. I laughed. Then you accused me of inventing history and mocked my "big grammar", which I didn't even care about or get offended at, even if this could actually be perceived as an insult. Then I said that the stuff you were writing about Idu and Edo was nonsense, which it is, and that you have a tendency to write nonsense. Then I apologized if my laughter about the Chadian origin of Ijebu offended you (for that only). And yet you're still trying to start some sort of "internet fight" after I already apologized for an insult, but I'm supposed to believe that I'm the one spoiling for a fight.

I think you got a bit touchy there (it happens to all of us sometimes, though). If I were as touchy as you over these stories of origin, I could also be offended at your habit of repeatedly suggesting that the Edo are descended from Esau - a man who sold his birthright for a bowl of soup, and one of the supreme losers in all of world mythology, history, or religion - in complete disregard of any Edo person's accounts or that of any Edo monarch, but I have yet to show umbrage over your efforts to rewrite the history of the origin of my ethnic group.

I started the topic in response to the views you put forward on this thread and wondered if you would immediately respond - if at all -

I already responded. Afroasiatic languages are a subgroup of the language families of Africa. The fact that they extend into Asia says something about  history.

since you mentioned there that you "had other things to do this week and in the following weeks"

Yeah, I have a life and goals. That's not uncommon.

have you long harboured disdain against me?

Don't start feeling too important on an anonymous message board. I might laff some more, and other readers might mistake you for someone with "delusions of grandeur".

Dudu_Negro:

I remember where this came from, you are feeding off the delusion and eurocentric mind of your fellow "oyinbo-is-correct" compatriot, physics.

I go with evidence and logic, not skin color. "Oyinbo-is-correct" is a warped mentality, but "anyone with my own skin color is always correct" is also a misguided mentality.

Im not saying Physics is married to white, but hey, I dont know that he is not.

lmao

I'm not married and not dating a white girl, but  I gotta admit, this was a pretty funny little jab. A bit below the belt, but funny nonetheless.

Amor4ce and Negro Ntns.

I don't have much interest in responding to this thread beyond what I already have, but I will post something in the next post that should give you my general answer to the opening post of the thread. If you read it carefully, you'll understand that my objection is not really to the claims of certain cultural or linguistic similarities/links between West Africans and other groups elsewhere, but some of the explanations sometimes given for these similarities.

Negro Ntns, I actually don't, in principle, object to the claim of a conquering group migrating from elsewhere an establishing itself over another people, but what I'm skeptical of is the claim that this is always responsible for the underlying culture of that group or their language. If you can eventually prove Canaanite or Egyptian overlords established themselves in central Nigeria and migrated elsewhere, fine. The implications of this are probably obvious to everybody. But I was merely saying that despite what you might think, certain languages are still not "Afroasiatic" in terms of their grouping with other languages. There are whole societies devoted to the study of languages. Why should I believe that the vast majority of linguists can't figure out that Yoruba is closer to Afroasiatic languages than it is to other African languages with very different and unique characteristics and vocabulary (even if they all share some words or characteristics of the language families of the African continent)? It's just skepticism on my part and this thread was addressed "especially" to me, by the OP so I made it a point to explain the reason for my perceptions in detail. It's not some personal effort on my part try to define Yoruba language or culture, like you might seem to think.

I haven't said that the Edo are definitely the descendants of Esau but similar to Elder Negro_Ntns I wanted to ask if you were mulatto, and I decided to refrain. I didn't accuse you of inventing history, rather I referred to your comments and said they and not you reminded me of Naiwu Osahon. Your opinion of some of my comments as nonsense does not bother me as you are not the Omnipotent to whom I submit. I focused on the comments and not the person. If Afro-Asiatic languages extend into African and are a fact, why do you question the suggestions of some that this language sub-group extends into Africa?

Amor4ce and Negro Ntns,

This excerpt from an article I posted in that thread in which I was debating with Rossik, although dealing particularly with the case of the Akan rather than West Africa in general, neatly summarizes the spirit of my approach to the scattered links (and they do exist, that's not really what is in dispute here) between West African cultures and Northeast African cultures, the Sudan, Egypt, or the Levant:

"The search for linguistic similarities occurred mainly in Mrs. Meyerowitz's earlier volumes; in her latest the emphasis is on cultural likenesses, and specifically likenesses in magico-religious institutions. Here again the method has been employed by many diffusionists. But in this case the methodology is more solidly grounded. This is not to say that some of Mrs. Meyerowitz's tabulated comparisons between Carthaginian and Akan deities are not rather tenuous, while her account of North African history is in places marked by somewhat imaginative reinterpretations. One has only to compare her account of the marriage of Juba II to Cleopatra Selene (I958, p. 130 and footnote) with that in K. D. Mathews, Cities in the Sand (1957) to realize the sort of latitude she permits herself. Nevertheless, there are undoubtedly similarities between the institutions of the Akan and those of the Middle East, as Bowdich, Williams, Danquah, and others had already noted. [size=14pt]The diffusionist sees in these resemblances indications of the spread of cultural traits from one area to the other, even in the absence of other information. Moreover, the method of diffusion is usually assumed to be migration rather than contact in the course of trade or other modes of intercourse. Theories of diffusion, whether by migration or other means, explain the existence of cultural similarities only when archaeological or other additional evidence is forthcoming. In the first place, such information is required to establish the direction of diffusion. In default of this, there is as much reason to suppose that' divine kingship ' travelled from West Africa to the Near East as vice versa; or 'totemism' from Ashanti to Carthage. Where such evidence is not available, it may well be that cultural similarities should be related to an underlying uniformity of culture[/size]. As Frankfort has insisted, supporting his point with some telling archaeological evidence, [size=15pt]'resemblances between modern Africans and ancient Egyptians are not always emanations from Egypt' but can often be related to a common cultural substratum[/size] ( 948, p. 348). Nor does this exhaust the possibilities. For example, the phenomenon of 'divine kingship', and I use the concept in the undifferentiated Frazerian sense rather than with the more specific meaning given to it by Frankfort, has been explained in quite different terms by Professor Evans-Pritchard. 'Kingship everywhere and at all times ', he claims, 'has been in some degree a sacred office. Rex est mixta persona precipitate sacerdote.' An institution of this kind requires an explanation which applies to kingship in general, not to certain selected states alone. And it is just such a sociological interpretation that Evans-Pritchard offers: '. . . a king symbolizes a whole society and must not be identified with any part of it. He must be in the society and yet stand outside it and this is only possible if his office is raised to a mystical plane. It is the kingship and not the king who is divine' (Evans-Pritchard, 1948, p. 36). Totemism in its most general form has been the subject of similar hypotheses by Durkheim and Radcliffe-Brown. These are but two of a large number of institutions, such as the levirate, matriliny, and polygamy, the distribution of which it would be most unwise to attempt to explain by diffusionist assumptions, except in some specific instances where positive evidence was available. [size=15pt]We may therefore conclude that while the comparison of customary behaviour is from one angle less hazardous for diffusionist reconstruction than the selection of linguistic similarities in that undoubted and significant likenesses do exist, there may well be alternative and more cogent explanations for the presence of similar religious institutions (such as totemism) or similar systems of descent (such as matriliny) than diffusion by migration or other means from an assumed centre of origin. And these alternatives are too rarely considered by those engaged in ethnohistorical reconstructions.[/size] "

"Ethnohistory and the Akan of Ghana"
Author(s): Jack Goody
Source: Africa: Journal of the International African Institute, Vol. 29, No. 1 (Jan., 1959), pp.67-81
Published by: Cambridge University Press on behalf of the International African Institute
Stable URL: http://www.jstor.org/stable/1157500 .

amor4ce:

I haven't said that the Edo are definitely the descendants of Esau but similar to Elder Negro_Ntns I wanted to ask if you were mulatto, and I decided to refrain.

WTF?

What is wrong with some people?

Disagreement with certain specific claims of cultural and physical diffusion = half-black?

Are you this confused in real life, or would you actually, if debating another person on a historical claim in real life, consider asking if the person was a "mulatto" (which is actually an insult that implies that blacks are the "donkeys" compared to white "horses", though it has been so frequently used that the real meaning is forgotten by most), and upon receiving a confirmation or denial, decide whether what the person was saying had any validity?

I didn't accuse you of inventing history, rather I referred to your comments and said they and not you reminded me of Naiwu Osahon.

"Your comments remind me of the likes of Naiwu Osahon who in my opinion put in lengthy efforts at inventing history eg Edo history"

The comment is there for anybody to read. If I misread the import of the comment, then fine, you didn't make that accusation and that was a misinterpretation on my part. But let's not pretend that this comment couldn't very easily be interpreted in the manner that I did.

why do you question the suggestions of some that this language sub-group extends into Africa?

smh 

I wrote in plain English, and somehow you're not understanding anything I said.




Let me just depart the thread, since this discussion is becoming a waste of time for both of us.

I acknowledge defeat on this issue and I am no longer interested in discussing this with you. Bye.

My intents for this thread was to facilitate a healthy discussion on the topic, not to poke jabs at you or any other person nor to display brutal argumentative prowess to see who would cower. However, it seems you misunderstood some of my comments which I won't point out (no need for bad blood) and perhaps I similarly misunderstood some of yours. I found surprising the comment (about "married to a white" from another earlier post and then alluded to "mulatto" to let you know the temptation I was getting and, but did not intend to insult you - my apologies. Yes I do believe all the tirades could have been avoided but there are certain things I don't take kindly to. I'll sum up my position on the topic thus:

From what I have observed over time, many anthropologists (cultural, linguistic and molecular) admit that the Nile valley was the centre of the greatest genetic diversity in humans from which these people spread out all over the world. However, I hardly come across any (except one) of these anthropologists - who are mostly Europeans - that are willing to acknowledge the migration of some peoples back into Africa despite the mounting evidence. This to me is because they find it difficult to reconcile the fact that negroes had accomplished a lot in the past, with our perception today as a byword and a proverb, and they probably work hard at building their confirmation bias by various means including casting aspersions on our own stories. Hence, results of studies including DNA ancestry maps for instance are quite flawed - my opinion.

Let us not give room for negative perceptions like disdain and hate. Reconciliation?

amor4ce:

Reconciliation?

Yeah, sure. Once again, I apologize for my laughing. Didn't really think it'd come off as offensive when I made the comment, but if it had occurred to me, I wouldn't have made the comment. Anyway, peace.

I'm grateful.

Let me use this opportunity to share an experience. A while back I attended the Association of Laboratory Automation's LabAutomation2010 conference in Palm Springs California, during which I may have seen about 5 negro persons. The number of total attendees must have been almost 1,000 or more, and I wondered if there was racial discrimination in the sciences. I mentioned this to an oyinbo person and he said some African Americans tend to form their own organizations due to distrust. Later a Nigerian immigrant reminded me that slaves and their descendants were discriminated for centuries wrt formal education and access to relevant resources but in the last century our people have been coming up though not yet in visibly huge numbers, hence what I saw at that conference. I have wondered if the numbers are reflective of the whole of the US / European bio-pharma industry.

The implication is that we don't have as many relevant research studies and publications to tell our own stories (eg molecular anthropology, other DNA stuff) and challenge the stories that the oyinbo have been feeding us for so long. If we try to do our own basic anthropological studies the reference materials that we may most likely find and use are probably oyinbo-inclined with the attendant risk of self-denial on our part. Our people that travel abroad as education immigrants especially the biotech/molecular biology students are probably culpable as well as seen in their research which again is most likely not relevant to our people - perpetuating oyinbo-inclined research. Many of these immigrants do not want to come back and talk of Nigeria for instance as (almost) hopeless, maybe after seeing the oyinbo wonders and succumbing to lust of the eyes.

Nevertheless, there is time for everything including redemption.

PhysicsQED:

Amor4ce and Negro Ntns,

This excerpt from an article I posted in that thread in which I was debating with Rossik, although dealing particularly with the case of the Akan rather than West Africa in general, neatly summarizes the spirit of my approach to the scattered links (and they do exist, that's not really what is in dispute here) between West African cultures and Northeast African cultures, the Sudan, Egypt, or the Levant:

"The search for linguistic similarities occurred mainly in [size=20pt]Mrs. Meyerowitz's[/size] earlier volumes; in her latest the emphasis is on cultural likenesses, and specifically likenesses in magico-religious institutions. Here again the method has been employed by many diffusionists. But in this case the methodology is more solidly grounded. This is not to say that some of [size=20pt]Mrs. Meyerowitz's[/size] tabulated comparisons between Carthaginian and Akan deities are not rather tenuous, while her account of North African history is in places marked by somewhat imaginative reinterpretations. One has only to compare her account of the marriage of Juba II to Cleopatra Selene (I958, p. 130 and footnote) with that in K. D. Mathews, Cities in the Sand (1957) to realize the sort of latitude she permits herself. Nevertheless, there are undoubtedly similarities between the institutions of the Akan and those of the Middle East, as [size=20pt]Bowdich, Williams[/size], Danquah, and others had already noted. [size=14pt]The diffusionist sees in these resemblances indications of the spread of cultural traits from one area to the other, even in the absence of other information. Moreover, the method of diffusion is usually assumed to be migration rather than contact in the course of trade or other modes of intercourse. Theories of diffusion, whether by migration or other means, explain the existence of cultural similarities only when archaeological or other additional evidence is forthcoming. In the first place, such information is required to establish the direction of diffusion. In default of this, there is as much reason to suppose that' divine kingship ' travelled from West Africa to the Near East as vice versa; or 'totemism' from Ashanti to Carthage. Where such evidence is not available, it may well be that cultural similarities should be related to an underlying uniformity of culture[/size]. As [size=20pt]Frankfort[/size] has insisted, supporting his point with some telling archaeological evidence, [size=15pt]'resemblances between modern Africans and ancient Egyptians are not always emanations from Egypt' but can often be related to a common cultural substratum[/size] ( 948, p. 348). Nor does this exhaust the possibilities. For example, the phenomenon of 'divine kingship', and I use the concept in the undifferentiated [size=20pt]Frazerian[/size] sense rather than with the more specific meaning given to it by [size=20pt]Frankfort[/size], has been explained in quite different terms by [size=20pt]Professor Evans-Pritchard[/size]. 'Kingship everywhere and at all times ', he claims, 'has been in some degree a sacred office. Rex est mixta persona precipitate sacerdote.' An institution of this kind requires an explanation which applies to kingship in general, not to certain selected states alone. And it is just such a sociological interpretation that [size=20pt]Evans-Pritchard[/size] offers: '. . . a king symbolizes a whole society and must not be identified with any part of it. He must be in the society and yet stand outside it and this is only possible if his office is raised to a mystical plane. It is the kingship and not the king who is divine' ([size=20pt]Evans-Pritchard[/size], 1948, p. 36). Totemism in its most general form has been the subject of similar hypotheses by [size=20pt]Durkheim and Radcliffe-Brown[/size]. These are but two of a large number of institutions, such as the levirate, matriliny, and polygamy, the distribution of which it would be most unwise to attempt to explain by diffusionist assumptions, except in some specific instances where positive evidence was available. [size=15pt]We may therefore conclude that while the comparison of customary behaviour is from one angle less hazardous for diffusionist reconstruction than the selection of linguistic similarities in that undoubted and significant likenesses do exist, there may well be alternative and more cogent explanations for the presence of similar religious institutions (such as totemism) or similar systems of descent (such as matriliny) than diffusion by migration or other means from an assumed centre of origin. And these alternatives are too rarely considered by those engaged in ethnohistorical reconstructions.[/size] "

"Ethnohistory and the Akan of Ghana"
Author(s): [size=20pt]Jack Goody[/size]
Source: Africa: Journal of the International African Institute, Vol. 29, No. 1 (Jan., 1959), pp.67-81
Published by: Cambridge University Press on behalf of the International African Institute
Stable URL: http://www.jstor.org/stable/1157500 .

oyinbo names »» code red!!! »» research pockmarked with confirmation bias and lavishly strewn all over with subtle and/or open condescension?

Physics,

I noticed that I was straying away from logical reasoning and my emotions was starting to creep into my responses., this is why I took a break away from the discussions to regain myself.

I read all your responses and I have a question.  Using Afrocentric knowledge and analyses of research, are native Black Africans, acting independent of Eurocentric views, capable of concluding on their own origins and distributions of cultures around the continent?

Another version of Dudu_Negro's question: "Are you ready to accept the implications even if you do not initially like them?"

Even I have recently struggled with the acceptance of something huge but it is for my own good that I embrace it for the purpose of Redemption. The Truth does not need us to be. Rather, we need and have to accept the Truth as the Truth and not our Egos is the reason for our existence.

It seems to me that descendants of the original peoples of the Levant/Sumer/Mesopotamia are represented in Nigeria. For instance, the people of [url=http://dierklange.com/pdf/Kebbi-Assyrien_Anthropos%202009_359-382.pdf]Kebbi are from Assyria[/url], including Nineveh and Assur. They deported the northern kingdom of Israel and other nations but their empire collapsed under Babylonian siege around 600BC after which they migrated to Northwest Nigeria. It was during this period that Israel left the crumbling Assyrian empire and migrated to West Africa, including Southwest Nigeria.

While looking at Yoruba and Edo history and the history of some other Nigerian peoples I observed that no evidence had been put forth of the presence of these peoples prior to 800-900AD and wondered how it seems they suddenly appeared south of the Sahara. My thoughts were that they migrated from the east (Levant/Sumer/Mesopotamia) and settled south of the Sahara at not too long before 800-900AD. The evidence I eventually got for this hypothesis is from the Kebbi-Assyria paper referred to above - they appeared on the scene after leaving the crumbling empire around 600BC.

Negro Ntns, Africans are entirely capable of deciding their own origins and the distributions of cultures around the continent independent of others. But I think you're getting a bit too hung up on terminology. I noticed your use of the phrase "Congo classification" in one of your responses earlier.

Igbo, Edo, and Yoruba were at one time called "Western Sudanic Langauges", and the so-called "Kwa" group was claimed to be a subgroup of the "Western Sudanic" language group. The terminology changed from "Western Sudanic" (a geographical area) to "Niger-Congo" on the premise that the "Western Sudanic" languages were part of a larger super group which included Bantu languages. Some other linguists have also suggested that these "Western Sudanic" languages are, on the contrary, actually part of a larger super group or "macro phylum" called Niger-Saharan on the premise that the so-called "Nilo-Saharan" languages (rather than the "Bantu" languages) and the "Western Sudanic"/"Niger-Congo" languages formed a larger super group. 

I personally think "Western Sudanic" was a more accurate label, but now that the terminology was changed (by Joseph Greenberg), I don't see what is gained by reverting back to "Western Sudanic".

Afro-asiatic is a name for a group of related languages, not a cultural group. That there are some shared cultural elements between the speakers of these languages is understandable.

If "Niger-Congo" or "Western Sudanic" languages were at one time closer to "Afro-asiatic" languages (and other language groups, as well) than they are today, as would obviously be the case, then there are going to be some shared remnants of that common origin in the languages and cultures of both groups. That's all I'm saying. I don't need to read the patently ridiculous articles of Dierk Lange or the works of hyperdiffusionist historians or linguists to reach the conclusion that "foundational" (with respect to ethnic groups and communities) migrations into West Africa from elsewhere in Africa probably happened much much earlier than the hyperdiffusionists would find acceptable for their theories.

What I would like to see is much more convincing evidence than just what Odudoye has written (and I have now read his book (Words and Meaning in Yoruba Religion: Linguistic Connections in Yoruba, Ancient Egyptian & Semitic)). I think if you're serious about this, you and like-minded people (like Odudoye) should get together and compose a real tome on this, arguing over hundreds of pages for your viewpoints, and promoting the theory seriously in academic circles so that it is open to criticism or review by other researchers, whether these researchers are Yoruba, Hebrew, Egyptian, German, or from elsewhere.

http://dierklange.com/index.php?option=com_content&task=view&id=15&Itemid=32r

2011 "Origin of the Yoruba and the 'Lost Tribes of Israel ", Anthropos 106, 1 (2011), 579-595.

"WHC: Let's talk about Martin Bernal. His Black Athena has raised quite a controversy.4 What do you think?

Ehret: Well, Martin Bernal has done fine work. There's really nothing the matter with it. His grandfather was Alan Gardner, a famous and important Egyptologist. He went into other things, but has always been, at heart, an Egyptologist. He knows his Egyptian materials very, very well. And as he started looking at these materials, he became interested in the history of literature dealing with Greek-Egyptian connection. He saw that, as you moved into the 19th century, histories became increasingly distant from what the Greeks themselves said about their Egyptian connections. People imagined that Greece had this wonderful sort of Enlightenment before the Enlightenment. In many senses this wasn't wrong; the Greeks really had tremendous breakthroughs in thinking. But they didn't come up with all of this in isolation. We can't ignore, for instance, Euclid saying that he stayed in Egypt and, after he returned, wrote the Geometry.

A whole bunch of people in the Classics departments have made their careers - and they deeply feel this - the wonder of the Ancient Greeks. They get great joy and happiness from doing this. If you make any connection between Africa and what the Greeks were doing, our Western upbringing can come back to surface in a way people don't realize is taking place.

They don't realize it because they feel they have eliminated racism from their thinking. They're sure that Africans, given different circumstances, would have been just as advanced as everyone else. They don't realize that, actually, Africans were just as advanced. They have, maybe, more continent to move into; they have less dense population and only some areas move into urbanization. Societies develop more oral literature, so they don't have the written documentation—people choose alternative modes to develop their history. And then there's the thought of Egypt was this place that got great but then just stopped, stagnated. And that's not a correct reading of history either. The New Kingdom was doing things that were far different from the Old and Middle periods. Now, beyond the New Kingdom, nobody pays much attention. I want to fix up Civilizations of Africa to go into 7th century Egypt. There are important things, new things, happening there.

Anyway: the idea of all this Egyptian influence on Greece is threatening to people who fear that it challenges Greek uniqueness and originality. I don't think it does at all. After all, human societies invent new patterns through encounter with other societies. What Greeks achieved is all the richer if we understand that they were grappling with ideas from Egypt, Mesopotamia, and elsewhere.

And then you have a very different reaction from Afrocentrists. Some Afrocentrists are really out there, far beyond left field. Martin and I don't mind that they use our work, as long as they are grounded in the evidence. But Classicists say, well, Bernal is just an Afrocentrist. And he isn't. He's someone who's got real evidence, and who's got a valid critique of European scholarly understanding of Greece over the last century and a half or so. Of course, some of the people he criticizes are among the founding fathers of Classics.

But, yeah, it does look like the Middle Kingdom did have a big impact on the Mediterranean. Maybe there wasn't a circum-Aegean conquest from Egypt, but there was a cultural impact that was later remembered. I think basically Martin has really enriched things.

Now, as for the linguistic materials: some Greek words are going to turn out to be early borrowings. I want to get together with Martin on this issue. There are definitely word borrowings from Egypt into Greece, and there's certainly a lot vocabulary that comes from ancient Semitic languages. "

http://worldhistoryconnected.press.illinois.edu/2.1/ehret.html






"WHC: How would you reconstruct the religious beliefs from linguistic evidence?

Ehret: The case of this oldest word for God in Niger-Congo is instructive. This word for God was nyambe. The ­amb was the verb. The ­e was a suffix you needed in order to make the verb into a noun. The category of noun, the singular/plural marker, was the ny-. In the Ashanti kingdom, it was nyame. In the kingdom of Kongo, it was zambe. These were sound changes, but it was the same word. Now, ny- signified a category for animals and things that don't fit into any other category. So we have here is a word that means "the beginner of things." Literally, God is the origin of things. The verb it comes from tells us these people already had the creator god concept.

Other terms for God come later. You get a term which means "the one who arranges and puts everything in order" in eastern Africa. In some languages, the word for God is the same word as for "potter"; the idea is of someone who molds human beings out of clay. It sounds like the Biblical story, though there's no historical connection.

Something that we don't have as well pinned down linguistically, but it seems to be across the area, is a second level of spirit, a spirit who had a territorial region of authority: some sort of lesser spirit, but not God. That particular spirit may originally have been associated with a particular watershed or with the source of a particular stream. Sometimes, though not always, this idea exists in an area where there aren't so many streams.

The third and most important level was the level of the ancestors. They were the people you had to show respect for. They were the people you might go to for help. God is distant. When Catholicism comes in, the ancestors may be viewed as saints. They were, in some sense, intermediaries. But they weren't only intermediaries. They had their own power. You had to pay respect to them and conduct rites to them, both communally and individually.

19

WHC: You describe two other groups. One of them is the Afrasans. Can you talk about them for a moment?

Ehret: These are people who have been called Afro-Asiatic and also Afrasian. I'm saying "Afrasan" because I'm trying to get "Asia" out. There is still this idea that the Afro-Asiatic family had to come out of Asia. Once you realize that it's an African family with one little Asian offshoot, well, that itself is a very important lesson for world historians.

We actually have DNA evidence which fits very well with an intrusion of people from northwestern African into southwestern Asia. The Y-chromosome markers, associated with the male, fade out as you go deeper into the Middle East.

Another thing about the Afrasans: their religious beliefs. Anciently, each local group had its own supreme deity. This is called "henotheism." In this kind of religion, you have your own god to whom you show your allegiance. But you realize that other groups have their own deities. The fact that they have deities different from yours doesn't mean their deities don't exist.

This kind of belief still exists. It's fading, maybe on its last legs, in southeastern Ethiopia, among people of the Omati group. They descend from the earliest split in the Semitic family. Way up in the mountains, they have this henotheism. They have a deity of their clan, or their small group of closely related clans. They have their priest-chief who has to see to the rites of that deity.

We see the same kind of thing in ancient Egypt. If we go to there, we discover that the Egyptian gods began as local gods. With Egyptian unification, we move from this henotheism to polytheism. To unify Egypt, after all, you have to co-opt the loyalty of local groups and recognize their gods. We have no direct evidence, but it's certainly implied by the things we learn about the gods in the written records we do have.

20

WHC: You seem to be suggesting that the Semitic monotheism ­ Jewish, Christian and Islamic monotheism ­ descends from African models. Is that fair?

Ehret: Yeah, actually it is. Look at the first commandment: "Thou shalt have no other gods before me." It's not like the Muslim creed, which is "There is no God but God." It's doesn't say "there is no god but Yahweh, and Moses is his prophet." It is an admittance that there are other gods. It is an example of henotheism. And the Hebrew tribes are like the Omati clan groups. The tribes are clans writ larger. Like the Omati clans, they track their ancestry back ten or fifteen generations to a common ancestor. And these common ancestors were twelve brothers. (Actually, there are thirteen. They have to turn two of them, Ephraim and Manasseh, into half tribes, because thirteen wasn't a good number. I always loved that. There are really thirteen tribes, but you have to combine two of them).

The Canaanite cities have an alternative Semitic structure: polytheism. There's Astarte and Baal and the various gods that you'll find in South Arabia. So it looks like in the early Semitic world, you have two coexisting religions. You have polytheism among the ones who are really more urbanized. Then you have henotheistic groups.

What I see here is that earlier Middle Eastern polytheism is influencing Semitic religion. After all, the early Semites were just a few Africans arriving to find a lot of other people already in the area. So they're going to have to accommodate. Some groups, maybe ones who live in peripheries, in areas with lower population densities, may be able to impose the henotheistic religion they arrived with.

21

WHC: How does a small group of Semites coming in from Africa transform the language of a region in which they are a minority?

Ehret: One of the archaeological possibilities is a group called the Mushabaeans. This group moves in on another group that's Middle Eastern. Out of this, you get the Natufian people. Now, we can see in the archaeology that people were using wild grains the Middle East very early, back into the late glacial age, about 18,000 years ago. But they were just using these seeds as they were. At the same time, in this northeastern corner of Africa, another people ­ the Mushabaeans? ­ are using grindstones along the Nile, grinding the tubers of sedges. Somewhere along the way, they began to grind grain as well. Now, it's in the Mushabian period that grindstones come into the Middle East.

Conceivably, with a fuller utilization of grains, they're making bread. We can reconstruct a word for "flatbread," like Ethiopian injira. This is before proto-Semitic divided into Ethiopian and ancient Egyptian languages. So, maybe, the grindstone increases how fully you use the land. This is the kind of thing we need to see more evidence for. We need to get people arguing about this.

And by the way: we can reconstruct the word for "grindstone" back to the earliest stage of Afrasan. Even the Omati have it. And there are a lot of common words for using grasses and seeds."



http://worldhistoryconnected.press.illinois.edu/2.1/ehret.html




@ Negro Ntns, I also noticed that you started a thread in the culture section which touches on something that's tangentially relevant to this thread:

https://www.nairaland.com/874750/afrocentric-examination-greek-philosophy-stolen#10230553

I suggest reading the work of the work of Martin Bernal to see how he defends vigorously the basic tenets of certain Afrocentric scholars against certain Eurocentric distortions of world history.

Here's a link to Bernal's extremely interesting criticism of Mary Lefkowitz's book Not Out of Africa

http://bmcr.brynmawr.edu/1996/96.04.05.html

And here's a link to his website on Black Athena:

http://www.blackathena.com/outline.php

http://www.blackathena.com/response.php

I hope he completes any other planned volumes before his time is up.

Actually, I see that he has already published the third volume of the series. I'll have to read that at some point.

If Hausa is classified as afroasiatic language due Islamic influence and borrowed of Arabic,then why Nubian isn't classified as Afroasiatic?.
Why Kanuri never been classified as Afroasiatic despite heavily borrowing Arabic words,and more Islamic than Hausa?.
If Hausa is classified as afroasiatic language because of Islamic influence then why is Fulani was never been labeled as afroasiatic language.?

There over 150 Chadic languages,and hausa is one of them,Warji,sokoto,Bolewa,ouledemewa ,zumayawa,Mandaraawa,Bura,and most of northern Cameroon and southern Republic of chad languages are classified in chadic branch.
Some of chadic speaker aren't Muslims neither Christian,but they still speak an afroasiatic languages.

Chadic is by far the oldest branch of Afroasiatic ,with more than 150 different languages in that branch alone ,or more than half of all recorded afroasiatic languages belong to chadic branch.
The most stunning things about all chadic speakers is their y-chromosome R1b-v88 DNA marker.Almost all members of chadic group sharing high velocity of that Euro-Asiatic DNA.
These news discovered made by Cruciani allele and Hasan changed the way we seeing Africans.Infact it made chadic speakers the important of all afroasiatic speakers.