I was starting to worry that the author would omit one of the classic factoids on this topic: that there are more pyramids in what is now Sudan, than there are in what is now Egypt. And not by a small margin! (This is mentioned, pretty far into the article.)
And here is a fact to add to your repertoire of non-factoids!
Factoid, is in fact a fact which is not actually true, but has been so often repeated it is accepted as true!
(https://www.merriam-webster.com/dictionary/factoid)
Unless of course you are referring to the other meaning of factoid, which is the opposite meaning..
I think the opposite meaning of factoid (ie: a small, very specific fact) is actually the more common usage.
I've never heard anyone actually use the original meaning, but frequently hear the "small fact" usage - except to point out the opposite meaning. (I've done some work in question answering, and the "small fact" usage is exclusively the way I've seen it used in that field)
I find that the most common usage is for someone describing what they think is a small, very specific fact, but is in fact just a repetition of an old wives' tale with no veracity whatsoever. So maybe the original definition isn't intentionally used that often, but it does end up being relevant quite a lot!
That’s also the more common usage in my experience, though the -oid suffix (derived from the Greek for “likeness”, cf humanoid/android, spheroid, etc) indicates that the other meaning, “something fact-like but necessarily a fact” is more etymologically correct.
This question of usage has always been a tough one for me, since both senses are well attested and fill niches (though “would-be fact” has a stronger etymological basis). Oh well! I try to enjoy such cases of multivalence.
Meroe is spectacular and virtually no tourists and overall rather safe compared to the other three quadrants of the country. I can recommend that and scuba diving in Port Sudan highly. https://www.robk.com/2013/08/21/sudan-2012/
If the area was more prosperous today, it would have hired many historians and PR to spread its historical significance. Many European cities do this to increase tourism revenue.
I'm guessing it had been prosperous while it was in the middle of the trade route between egypt and punt, and that after some change (broken off trade, or just rerouted via the red sea to cut out the middle man?) lost that envious position.
> The land south of Egypt, beyond the first cataract of the Nile, was known to the ancient world by many names: Ta-Seti, or Land of the Bow, so named because the inhabitants were expert archers; Ta-Nehesi, or Land of Copper;
Oh, is that what Ta-Nehesi Coates is named after? I decided to look, and apparently his name is slightly different, Ta-Nehisi. What's weird just just how often he's miscredited with the wrong name in articles online, whether they be blogs or new agencies (those might be alternate spelling tagging) or book clubs.
As I myself have an uncommon spelling of a fairly common name (with no common variations), I can only imagine how annoying this must be. It's probably self propagating at this point, since anyone that searches for it with the wrong name will find plenty of (wrong) evidence that they guessed right, depending on where their eyes land on the page.
Note that those are specifically the "Egyptological" names. Ancient Egyptian did not write vowels, but it did write several semi-vowels. So those semi-vowels are transcribed as vowels, and the vowel "e" fills in as necessary elsewhere.
it's a transliteration from a language that's not written in latin alphabet. so all of the combinations you mentioned probably mean that historical region (and his name too, like you suspected)
It's worse than that. Ancient Egyptian only wrote consonants. Those are the "Egyptological" transliterations, which converts consonants to vowels and then inserts extra vowels to make them pronounceable to the (mostly British at the time) Egyptologists.
The actual written names are "tꜣ-stj" and "nḥsj". That is, /tʔ stj/ and /nħsj/.
> Most of the top search results and Wikipedia entries tap out on cultures prior to ~5,000-~3,000 B.C.
This is mostly because the evidence that links places to cultures taps out before around 5000BCE. There is of course evidence of large scale settlements prior to that time, but we have little hard evidence about how those map to peoples or cultures, living or extinct, due to lack of artifacts that definitively tie them to a particular culture. After that, we are left with things like projecting population migrations from linguistic evidence.
Perhaps the closest we might find are the remains of 10-30k year old indigenous settlements in Australia, of which we can be fairly confident of at least the set of cultures that produced them.
Joe Rogan had some interesting guys, Graham Hancock & Randall Carlson, that talked about lost civilizations due to asteroid in 10,000 BC. Sounded like there is some controversy around it though, so take it however you'd like.
"Kushi" is still a current slur against black people in Israel and other Hebrew-speaking areas.[1] It's a bit like calling someone a "chinaman." Also, some people point out the sound similarity of קוֹף (monkey) and כושי (Kushite).
I wouldn't say this is accurate. Well, some might use it that way, but as a kid this is the word we were taught for black folk with no harm intended, it's also the name used in the bible--I believe it's originally from the bible.
drorco didn't say no one uses it as a slur, they were relaying their experience having been taught the word means no ill will. I don't really see a reason to try to prove his experience wrong.
I think what happens is that overtime certain groups have taken "ownership" over the word by using it as a racial slur but originally it just means "someone from Kush". In Hebrew if you take a location and add "I" as a suffix it means someone originating from that place, e.g: "Americai"-> someone from America, "Kushi"-> someone from Kush which is a country occasionally used in the bible to refer to Africa.
I guess in English there are also such words that originally had no use as a slur but later "denominated" to racial slurs.
The reference to Kushi->Kof (monkey) is totally off. Doesn't sound similar at all for my native Hebrew ears.
Look, this is just childish equivocation. A lot of words that are considered offensive also have (or used to have) other, innocuous meanings. What you're doing is like a child saying "Nah-uh, this word just means happy!"
A word is offensive in polite society because a population of people finds it hurtful, or because another population of people uses it in an intentionally hurtful way. Usually it's both. Innocent words can become slurs, and other slurs, over time, can become obscure and lose their power.
For example, the "n-word" in English obviously comes from the Spanish or Portuguese for the color black. Despite that, it's an offensive slur.
The older colloquial term in the English language for Romani people apparently comes from the word "Egyptian." There is no problem with being Egyptian. But many people find this particular word hurtful, and polite society is actively trying to retire it.
Maybe you have personal ideas about what "should" or "shouldn't" be hurtful, but I'm surprised that we don't seem to agree on how people actually use these words in reality. "Kushi" can be a slur even if your grandma's pet name for you was "my little Kushi" and you love that word to death.
The treadmill stops when you actually change public attitudes. African American/Black have been the main terms in American language for 50 years now, with some back and forth between the two, but no further replacement.
Because you prefer “Jamaican”? Or “African American”? Or nothing? I can’t tell what you mean from context.
I don’t think “black” “white” and “brown” can go away as descriptors like “blond” and “redhead”, but maybe someday they will stop being identity categories. America already has large non-native black populations in certain areas (West Africans, Somalis, West Indies, etc.), but I think the country still thinks of Black = African American = descendent of U.S. slaves for now, because the non-native blacks are still mostly focused regionally, like Somalis in Minnesota.
I guess this is another reason for the treadmill: distinctions that were implicit before maybe need to be made explicit as different things become salient.
You said the treadmill stops when you change public attitude, and you imply the terms Black and African American used to refer to black people are acceptable designations for groups of people as of now. I'm making the point that that is completely subjective, as in my case I don't like being referred to as an African American, because I'm not, and black is basically a synonym for "Not african american", yet these are the default terms and you say that there is "no further replacement". My point is that words change meaning all the time, we are not heading into some inevitable singularity where all of these words over here are objectively good in all situations and all of those words are objectively bad in all situations and this will remain so for eternity - language is not that stagnant nor black and white, and for me that is a good thing. It is 100% your personal opinion that you find the terms Black and African American acceptable designations for groups for the foreseeable future, but don't project your personal opinion onto others - I personally look forward to the day where people refer to me as Jamaican and not just "black" or mistakenly, African American, and in the same way there are those who hold the opposite opinion and those who don't want to be generalized at all. That you personally like or dont like a particular label has no bearing on whether or not everyone else agrees with your opinion.
Tl;dr your statement "The [euphemism] treadmill stops when you actually change public attitudes" actually means "The euphemism treadmill stops when you actually change public attitudes in such a way that I am personally comfortable with it's final state", because in reality the treadmill will never stop, someone will always push to keep it going, it's the reason why language shifts and changes over time.
>“Kushi,” or Kushite, became one of several Hebrew vernacular terms for “African” or “a black.” On its own — like shvartze, which is Yiddish — the term is not inherently offensive or derogatory, in the same way the word for “European,” in West African languages, is not at face value an epithet, but merely an implication of outsider status.
>Context, context context. When flashpoints emerge, these words take on a life far beyond being descriptors.
The term כוש as a reference to a place is indeed biblical. And it's quite possible you grew up before it was a slur. But language shifts, and in 2020 using the term כושי (kushi) to refer to a black person is not ok.
Same for the term shvartze in Yiddish, referenced elsewhere in this thread. I grew up with this term in my vocabulary and no harm was meant. But I wouldn't say it today, at least not if I was speaking English otherwise. In a fully Yiddish conversation I'd cut the speaker slack, though, especially if the speaker comes from a relatively secluded community that isn't experiencung the same drift in language the rest of society is.
Point is, context matters. You need to pay attention to how words change over time and how they'll be perceived by your audience.
The Talmud speaks of an Etrog "Hakushi" to describle a black Etrog (Jewish ritual fruit). Not necessarily one that comes from "Kush".
"Kushi" is not more a slur than "Black". That is to say it is NOT a slur, although it CAN be used in a negative fashion when used in a sentence in conjunction with stereotypes associated with the black community. It all depends on the context of what is said.
It is totally not resembling "chinaman" in the context of it being used for describing negative stereotypes associated with the term. Though it is also not like "englishman" which is usually used in connotation with positive stereotypes.
Yes, I am aware of the fact that some people are adamant that the word "kushi" is harmless and wonderful, and that black people shouldn't feel hurt when this word is used to disparage them.[1]
You're missing the point spectactularly. Words do not exist in groups of "These are always ok to say" and "Never say these", their meaning depends entirely on context. You should be aware of this considering the main derogatory term for African Americans and other black people is also used as a synonym for "brother" depending on the context it is said. If you're saying that Jewish people should phase out this word because some people use it in a negative way, that's a flawed argument, it's akin to saying we should ban anything that can be used a weapon - meaningless considering anything can be used as a weapon.
Rather than trying to convince people that certain words are always ok or not ok to use, you should give reasons for others to reconsider their usage of the word and prompt them to think of the context before using the word. Then you let them make the choice of when to use it.
Agreed that "Kushi" is a slur in 2020 and should not be used.
Never heard the connection with קוף before, though. Who are these some people that point this out? The linked article does not draw a connection between these two words because they ostensibly sound the same (barely), the only connection is that Yitzhak Yosef used the term כושי and in the same sermon compared black people to monkeys. The conclusion is that he's a racist and uses a comparison that I'm pretty sure is not restricted to a particular language.
According to the Hebrew Bible, a wife of Moses was from Sudan. And there are many references to a "Kingdom of Kush" which is taken to be where modern-day Sudan is. So at least 3500 years ago, we have some evidence of a thriving civilization there.
I think it's fair to say that Kush has never been 'forgotten'--in fact, it's been heavily researched, documented, debated. This article title is a bit clickbait-y, and hinges on the current fad of 'Europeans are all racists and didn't acknowledge/appreciate a Black civilization', which is of course wrong.
This comment undersells the article, imho, which is quite cool. I would have thought it’s some culture war overcorrection but it actually only has one reference to prejudice (about an Egyptologist from the early 1900s) and is mostly about how the Kush kingdoms were actually more than just some Egyptian colony.
Title is clickbaity though of you interpret it literally. Article does not answer “why” it was forgotten.
Yes, Sudan hasn't been totally ignored, but the 3 classical areas of Rome, Greece, and Egypt have gotten a very disproportionate share of work, with France and the Levant/near east as second fiddles. On that scale, I think it's fair to describe Sudan and other outlying areas (like the Caucasus) as effectively ignored.
The article also isn't talking about "Europeans are racist and didn't appreciate black people". It's referencing about how Sudanese archaeology has been plagued by Diffusionism, a formerly dominant school of thought that's come under heavy criticism in the past 40ish years. Some people, myself included, will argue that diffusionism is a product of prejudiced ideologies and worldviews, but that's at least one step removed from what you're suggesting.
The work is in proportion to the amount of documents that are retained today. The reason why Rome and Greece are "popular" is they determined intellectual thought from the fall of the Western Rome until, probably, humanism (some one millennia later) so much of what they wrote down has been retained (or, more accurately, wasn't destroyed).
As an example: we know Carthage was a huge civilisation...until Rome razed it so we have no real idea today what ancient Carthage actually was like apart from that it was significant enough for Rome to burn to the ground.
Also, talking about "Europeans" is indicative of a total misconception of history in the period. Rome was a Mediterranean as much as a European one (north of Rome wasn't Europe as today, it was just a bunch of tribes). Many important figures that, ironically, people today say are examples of an over-emphasis on "Europeans" were Africans. Augustine being the best example, basically founded the theology of the early Church, he was a Roman but he was (in today's terms) also African. In short, trying to read the present back into the future is not smart.
The work of archaeologists is absolutely not in proportion to the amount of surviving documents. Most of my digs have been in places and periods with few to no written records, for example.
As for the comment about Europeans, I was talking about modern academics (particularly of the early through late 20th century). The leading archaeologists of that period primarily came from European and American traditions. I have no idea what Augustine has to do with 20th century academia. Please feel free to enlighten me if there's a connection though.
That wasn't the claim. You should read the reply chain but the point isn't about archaeology but our interpretation of civilization outside Rome and Greece. You wanted to know why these civilizations get that share of work...the reason why is that their thought was more relevant to us (again, most Europeans believed in Aristotelian science until humanism). And, again, these civilizations were more African than European...it is nothing to do with racism (which was the implication).
That wasn't the claim. I will explain, although you would do just as well to go back and read what I said more closely...again. The point is: many people who are perceived to be part of the European tradition (i.e. Rome/Greece) are not Europeans. So when someone says: Europe has got a disproportionate share of work, these regions are ignored, their civilizations are ignored...this is wrong. Most of these civilizations were mutli-culutural/multi-national, and included Africa (the other big contributor would be the Middle East). Again, attempting to read the current political view onto the past. And the point about Augustine is that he was African, the point about academics who say things like: we are too Euro-centric is that they define Europe in a way that makes no historical sense (unsurprisingly, as they are usually arguing about things in the present, not anything related to history...the concept of Europe itself is not something with a clear historical meaning).
It seems like there might be a misunderstanding of what I wrote. Quoting myself:
> ..the 3 classical areas of Rome, Greece, and Egypt have gotten a very disproportionate share of work...
Greece and Rome (in the sense of the empire) are literally the "classic" in so-called classical archaeology [1]. Egypt is included because it's comparable for this particular case and there's a pretty substantial overlap with "core" classical archaeology.
Again, I've written nothing about whether these areas encompass parts of Africa nor whether they were wholly European. I also haven't implicated racism as the reason for that disproportionate amount of study. The things you're criticizing aren't my views and trying to put words into my mouth isn't appreciated.
north of Rome wasn't Europe as today, it was just a bunch of tribes
This is a mischaracterization in the same class as what's described in the article. Early Rome was just as tribal as the rest of Europe, and Greece has been tribal for almost its entire (ancient) existence. The major difference is that the tribes of Northern Europe seem to have been much less well documented, but they didn't live in isolation. There's ample evidence of trade routes spanning from the Iberian peninsula to the Carpathians, and across the British isles, the Nordic and Baltic states.
The "bunch of tribes" encountered by the Romans was actually a vast Celtic empire, which was itself preceded by other societies such as the Bell Beaker or Corded Ware cultures. But they've largely disappeared from the record because of the written legacy from the Greek and Roman empires.
Well, it's probably fair to say that it's been ignored by the general public, but then so have most really old civilisations; in the popular imagination, there was nothing except Greece, Rome and Egypt until this side of 1 AD.
> hinges on the current fad of 'Europeans are all racists and didn't appreciate a Black civilization', which is of course wrong.
... eh, until last century it was fashionable to attribute it to "just an Egypt copy, basically".
EDIT: On the latter topic, RE the guy who looted the Sudanese pyramids:
> He tried to sell the treasure, but at this time nobody believed that such high quality jewellery could be made in Sub-Saharan Africa.
The stuff he stole ultimately ended up in two German museums for _Egyptian_ artifacts.
In school, we (I'm in the US) spent a whole high school semester on Greece and Rome. In elementary school we had a unit on Mayans/Aztecs/the Inca, and we had a unit on ancient India, but not in high school. For some reason Chinese history was really ignored so I didn't get that until I chose to take a class in college. Since we don't have a national curriculum in the US, I'm sure it's different in different places. I think we know about the Mayans because Americans like to fly to Cancun.
This is a continuation of the 19th century American bias towards Greek classicism as the hallmark of democracy. Conflict with the Ottomans generated a lot of sympathy toward Greece and that was reflected in fads of fashion, architecture, place names, and education.
We studied all the big Eurasian civs...except for Persians. I never understood why the omission. Certainly not cause modern regime given the woke trappings adorning the rest of the curriculum.
It's an extra bummer quite simply because civilizations in the middle interact with more civilizations, and so are a great way to tie together everything else one remembers into a coherent whole.
(Umayyads conquer Sassanids and 100-200 years later have a big only-old-school-military-historicans-think-it-matters one-off battle with the Tang dynasty in like modern Tajikistan or something. What a great flashcard!)
In the popular imagination? The Romans were conquering barbaric tribes that aren't worth talking about in detail, I think. Certainly not civilizations. The actual details of those civilizations seem to be as niche and obscure as knowledge of the Kush.
It's my impression the Gallic Wars were more about building Julius Caesar's personality cult than anything else. Enriching his soldiers so they'd be loyal to him and winning the respect of Roman pyblic (hence the self-aggrandizing book written in Latin, not Greek.)
No, the Persian empire was much, much larger than the Assyrian empire.
The Macedonian empire was technically larger, including Persia, except it was never administrated as a whole and fell into pieces just a few years after coming into existence.
Looking at a strain of thought that seeks to attribute the current differences in outcomes and 'accomplishments' between Africans and Europeans to the inherent qualities of their populations, thereby discarding the possibility that such outcomes could have been different not so long ago, and seeing this strain of thought dominate HN and HN-adjacent communities (in the form of "we should dig into at'uncomfortable questions' and so forth"), I'd say that yes, Kush has largely been forgotten by the general population, even that part of which who likes to call itself 'educated'.
> I'd say that yes, Kush has largely been forgotten by the general population, even that part of which who likes to call itself 'educated'.
The Kingdom of Kush, and the people who came from there are well known to Jews. Moses wife Tziporah was a Midianite (as was Jethro) and he had a second wife from Kush.
Tangentially, it's funny how some brands name themselves after historical or semi-mythological figures. Tziporah sells makeup (as Sephora). Lady Godiva sells expensive chocolates.
Your "see it has been researched" rebuttal is dodging the actual point which is that it has been systematically under-researched and under-appreciated, not that it hasn't been researched at all. Similarly no one is saying all Europeans are racists and you trotting that out is just a straw man. Your proposal that European/American civilization having a major problem now and historically of exploiting and marginalizing the brown world in every single way is "of course wrong" is completely insane and, honestly, an example of exactly the systematic racism you are denying.
>”the current fad of 'Europeans are all racists and didn't appreciate a Black civilization', which is of course wrong."
The leaders of European nations fed and feed their populations large amount of misinformation about who they are and who people outside their borders were. If a monarch was made in the image of and chosen by god, how could the greatest structures in human history not be in Europe? The solution was to whitewash as much as possible.
You see this in the restoration of art for the last few centuries, many brown/black pieces turned white all of sudden. Some claim this was unintentional, but if we look at how Africans have been treated for the past 500± years, that claim seems suspicious and sounds more like ass-covering when the fraud was revealed.
I expect this exposing of fraud to ramp up as automated translation allows us to compare notes between the great civilizations of human history in the near future.
> Kandake Amanitore ruled Nubia at the turning of an era. A powerful queen, feared by her enemies and beloved by her people, she was one of the last great builders of the Kingdom of Kush. Amanitore restored the Land of the Bow to its greatness following a period of turmoil. Her rule was long and her works lasting.
> At least, that is what historians have pieced together. Two millennia and one dead language later, there is little surviving written record of Amanitore in the form of scrolls or other documents. What remains is carved into the very stone of the buildings she left behind.
> The most nebulous aspect of Amanitore's life is who she was before she became queen. Indeed, her personality is a cypher. We can only interpret. One abstract depiction of the kandake shows her mercilessly slaying enemies she has already subjugated. Was it from an actual incident where she ordered the execution of rebels, or propaganda proclaiming her righteous vengeance against those who would be enemies of the state?
> Even then, her actual role as queen is difficult to pin down. Conflicting accounts of her co-ruler Natakamani depict him as either her husband or her son, though thankfully never both. Furthermore, Amanitore succeeded Kandake Amanishakheto, who was either her mother-in-law (if Natakamani was Amanitore's husband), her actual mother (if Natakamani was Amanitore's son), or some other form of relation lost to time.
> The fuzzy details of Amanitore's lineage are less important than the role she held. The title of kandake—or “candace,” as the Romans called it—roughly translates to “queen-mother,” but it did not equate to a regent ruling on behalf of an heir too young to hold power. Instead, the kandakes were independent queens who ruled alone with husband consorts or with kings in a form of co-rulership.
> Amanitore's reign took the latter form, with Natakamani as her equal. There is scant information on any aspect of her life before she became queen (around 1 BCE). Still, monuments always depict both co-rulers as adults, so she was likely in her prime when her rule began. In fact, the depictions of Amanitore and Natakamani deliberately present the two as equivalent, particularly in religious buildings, which was uncommon for the time.
> With Egypt a Roman vassal and Rome on amicable terms with Nubia, no regional conflicts threatened Amanitore's reign. The relatively peaceful time and the collaborative autonomy of co-rulership let Amanitore pursue what would become her legacy—an extended period of building that brought great prosperity to the Meroitic kingdom. Among her works were the construction of Nubian pyramids and tombs, restoration of Amun's temple in Meroe, and infrastructure projects, such as the reservoirs built near the capital.
> Amanitore also rebuilt the temple of Amun at Napata—the same temple that Roman invaders had destroyed just two decades prior. As Amanitore’s name incorporated the name of the god Amun, it is reasonable to assume its restoration was a point of pride for the busy queen. Indeed, her efforts helped revive Jebel Barkal to at least a fraction of its former glory.
> Although the queen enjoyed cordial relations with Rome, the decades-earlier reprisal raids into Egyptian (which is to say, "Roman") territory had recovered bronze statues of Augustus Caesar as spoils of war. An apocryphal tale describes Amanitore burying the decapitated head of one such statue beneath temple stairs in Meroe so Nubians would always walk over the Roman emperor responsible for razing Napata. (It was most likely Kandake Amanirenas, her predecessor, who actually did this.) Whether or not she was actually responsible for its burial, the "Meroe head" of Augustus Caesar was recovered in the early 20th Century—found beneath a flight of temple steps.
> As with the confusion surrounding Amanitore's ascension, we know very little about the end of her reign. Some estimates put the date of her death at roughly 20 CE. Treasure hunters have long since plundered her tomb in Meroe.
> Despite the many unknown aspects of Amanitore, the extensive building program she left behind inspired later kandakes to expand upon her work, which in turn led to a flourishing of Meroitic culture and fortunes through the Second Century. Archaeologists continue to uncover examples of her influence, including a set of recently unearthed Nubian pyramids built during her reign.
This is such an intellectually impoverished notion of racism. It's mired in 20th-century theory goo.
You can rest assured that racist reasoning ran rampant throughout world history long before someone coined the word "race" or before 18th/19th century political narratives used it in whatever particular ways.
In a child comment you make the case that racism is when some group holds "tribal/identitarian" notions about an "other" group and attributes essential characteristics to them. You say this has existed throughout history and did not begin in modernity.
Ok.
That doesn't actually disagree with the "20th-century theory goo" though. The goo says that colonizing European empires created "new discourses" about race that served an ideological function in their empire-building. That's a far cry from "those people over the mountains there are barbarous."
The notions of "whiteness" and "blackness," as they still function today (against increasingly strong currents of critique) are clearly something different from that. In pre-modern times, a Viking and a Frank wouldn't have seen themselves as having anything in common. But now (anachronistically) they're commonly "white."
It seems like the confusion here--and I see it repeated all over the place--comes from a failure to clarify terms like "race" and "racism."
There's "racism" in the sense of a prejudice against some other-group that we can identify because they look or act different, and they live over there and we live over here. That has probably been around as long as different kinds of people have been encountering each other.
And then there's "racism," the ideological function where European empires constructed whole new ideas about groups of people that previously would not have seen themselves as having anything in common, in the service of expansion, extraction, domination, slavery, etc.
If you think that's all goo, that's fine, but you need to provide a stronger counter-argument. None of the purveyors of the 20th-century goo actually believe that no one hated other-groups before modernity.
I challenge you to go find a description of race based on skin colour in old Roman texts. The colour of someone's skin is barely commented on in them, more of a novelty about the person, and is not described as being related to "race." And yet they had an empire which spanned from North Africa to Northern Europe.
Race as a category was an invention to justify the form of slave trade during the settling of the Americas.
As expressed by sibling comments -- skin color is irrelevant to my point.
If it's not skin color, it's "those people beyond the mountains" or "the river folk to the south" or "the Babylonians" or whatever.
I'm talking about tribal/identitarian discrimination that ascribes essential natures/behaviors to "other" peoples.
This narrowly-defined and elevated notion of racism along the lines of skin color, Atlantic slave trade dynamics, state-building/citizenship discourses of the last few century, scientific racism and all other fashionable targets of criticism is ultimately just that: a narrow subset of a larger human problem.
Edit: downvoting this without a response is pretty much against the guidelines, I am hardly distracting from the conversation here, and the downvote is not a "disagree" button. I put in a lot of effort to showing you why you have a shallow understanding of the topic; I'm open to being wrong.
Xenophobia and racism are completely separate concepts, although xenophobia does underly racism. It's entirely possible to construct a form of race that relies on other qualitative factors than skin color—just look at colourism, which ironically explicitly lays out non-color qualitative identifiers of "dark and light skinned"—hair type, body shape, hyperpigmentation, prevalence of certain genetic disease, whatever. These terms arose from feedback loops where racist capital dictate societal beauty standards and cultural norms. You certainly can't explain phenomena like skin bleaching or the long history of hair straitening with simple xenophobia. But, colourism is just one effect globalized racist capital has produced.
When academics talk about how racism is a problem, they definitely aren't discussing a general form of qualitative, personal discrimination. These racial structures underly our communities, our politics, our identities, here in America our state's use of slave labor in prisons, how our wealth is divided among our citizens, how we construct and discuss trade deals and foreign "charities" such as the Gates foundation, etc. simply put, you cannot discuss racism without discussing how race is embedded in the structures and processes all around us. These dynamics are easier to ignore in ethnically homogenous societies... unless of course you are a minority or immigrant.
Whiteness and blackness as we know it here in America were invented to formalize the structures of slavery here between the 15th and 18th centuries—this took centuries to move from the enslavement and sale of both Africans and indigenous Americans to a codified racial hierarchy, driven by European capital and nearly complete genocide of the indigenous people. I am sure there are similar narratives in the Congo, in Rhodesia, in South Africa, in Brazil, in European involvement in Southeast Asia, in virtually every part of the carribean and West Indies—it's colonialism, baby!
Every single aspect of the development of racism was ultimately driven by European capital. When countries "decolonialized" the west simply replaced formal state oppression with oppression through trade deals and proxy wars, which could not take course without European capital and violence. Make no mistake, European wealth is racist blood money.
This attitude of "oh the form of racism I learned about on Mister Roger's Neighborhood is just xenophobia with a different name" is just completely ignorant of the past 150-200 years of analysis of race and racism. I recommend these books if you have any serious inclination of discussing race:
* "Black Reconstruction" and "the souls of black folk", by WEB du Bois.
* "Settlers: The Mythology of the White Proletariat from Mayflower to Modern" by J. Sakai
* Toni Morrison's "the origin of others" directly addresses your attitude towards racism—after all, though racism is distinct from xenophobia, xenophobia is necessary for racism.
* "Color Stories: Black Woman and Colorism in the 21st century (intersections of race, ethnicity, and culture)" by JeffriAnne Wilder.
* "redefining race: Asian american panethnicity and shifting ethnic boundaries" by Dina Okamato.
* "Marxism and the National and Colonial Question" by Joseph Stalin. Note, I am not a Stalin fan, but he's a decent essayist and laid out an excellent argument for separating the concepts of state sovereignty and nationhood, which is basically a collective recognition of being part of a shared people. You see this in the "union" part of the soviet union and the 56 nations of China, though this is frequently disingenuously translated as "ethnic groups".
* building off the above book, "The Nine Nations of North America" is a must read. This was written by Joel Garreau.
* "the color complex: the politics of skin color in a new millennium." by Kathy Russell
This is also neglecting vast swathes of racial dynamics across central and South America, Asia, Australia and Polynesia—you really can fill up entire libraries with how racism is distinct (materially, culturally, subjectively) from xenophobia and manifests through labor exploitation and capital transfer.
Nothing really semantic I guess, it's just papering over the processes that keep poor places poor and delaying these people from acquiring real equity and protection from the west.
You do realize that slavery, racism and every despicable thing imaginable was the normal state of humanity for 99.999% of our 200,000+ year history? How many languages have names for a group of people based on some common attribute of that people, far before the 17th/18th century? A lot.
Human beings definitely did and still do very awful things. But that word race, as we understand it today, isn't really the thing they used to justify it.
The question is whether "race" as we understand it today was understood that way then. And it wasn't. Not that we can see.
19th century pseudo-anthropology and earlier built up a whole concept of race which essentially defined humanity into subspecies. There was Negroid, Caucasoid, Mongoloid, etc. and these were then attached to specific supposedly scientifically defined traits that went far beyond the colour of skin or shape of eye. That is what is generally meant by race, _still_. And it turns out this is complete and total bunk. There's more genetic diversity and difference within Africa between "blacks" than there is between non-Africans and Africans. So the category of race is of absolutely no use except as a historical or ethno-linguistic-cultural designation, and there as well, it's a pretty crappy one. What do Kenyans and West Africans and African Americans have in common other than skin colour? Very little -- not linguistically, not genetically, and not much culturally, either, but they do share a history of being categorized together as "black" by Europeans.
By saying "people always did this" you're ignoring a very specific meaning of race that has been used to justify, and still is, some pretty stupid _specifically_ awful crap. By calling "race" into question, we try to deal with that crap.
Yes, humanity has always used difference as a way of justifying oppression. But this specific kind of imagined difference, it's important to analyze because it's a very _modern_ designation, without a scientific basis, and it had a very specific purpose, and still does for people who like to peddle pseudo-scientific superiority theories around it.
Herodotus narrates the Athenians promising that they would never betray the Spartans because they are the same race ("homaimos" → "same blood").
I don't know off the top of my head whether the Romans widely knew of the Histories, but it certainly undercuts your claim that these broader categorizations are a recent invention. The Athenians and Spartans clearly recognized a racial idea broader than the cultures of their individual polities.
What does that have to do with this conversation? Agreeing on the meaning of words is necessary for basic discourse. It's not like distinguishing race and ethnicity is a redefinition during the course of conversation.
If you don't accept the distinction of course you're going to be blind to dependent concepts. That's just a basic failure of communication.
Ethnicity and race are distinct concepts. Come out of your bubble, the world is not US. It is an important distinction to understand what is really going on in the world.
I make very arbitrary example. Lets take Poles and Russians. Both usually pale skinned, slavish people. Still they have such huge cultural and historical differences that they could not by any change form a single political entity.
Still there could be individuals among them that could argue that darker skinned people who are descendants of their nationals are not really Polish, Russian because of their skin color.
These people are racists. The people who argue that Poles are not Russians are not racists. These are just rational persons.
It sounds really deep, but there doesn't seem to be any truth to it? Wikipedia mentions internal problems and conquest by a neighboring kingdom: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kingdom_of_Kush
I don't understand why make up stories when there are more than enough material with the colonial history.
One of the most frustrating aspects of these liberationist counter-narratives is the pretense that whoever conquered or succeeded certain civilizations/cultures, did so by a unique application of force.
Roughly: 'our people were good and peaceful until evil warlike invaders with wholly-different human motivations wiped us out.'
We should aim to fix injustices in the world. But building false narratives of differential demonization will only recreate problems in the long run.
People spin history to try and enhance the prestige of groups they identify with. Even when their group identities don’t really make sense in contexts that existed thousands of years ago and thousands of miles away. For instance, “were the ancient Egyptians black?” is a deep rabbit hole.
Nas was ahead of the times. I can't believe that these lyrics are from 2003. Always inspiring to hear them.
These lyrics bring home the point that so much of culture is historical narrative. I was reading Scale by Geoffrey West who is a particle physicist. Every 5-10 pages West brings up Plato/Aristotle. This was baffling to me till it dawned on that Greek history is the author's historical narrative, his cultural identity. Erase someone's history, erase their identity and you crush their progress. Give them a glorious past and they feel predestined to greatness. I believe good things will come from resurrecting the history of African Civilizations.
"Where is your history? How did the man wipe out your history?" - Malcolm X [1]
Plato isn't the best philosopher of all time because he is white and male. The Enlightenment is open and inclusive. Plato used to be a slave and elevated a woman to the highest philosophical position in the Symposium.
I don't think the quote in the OP is talking about Plato's works or conduct, but how Plato figures into a modern person's, Geoffrey West's, relationship to history. In that context, I don't understand the relevance of your comment.
I'd be really interested to hear more about the literature of ancient Kush or Timbuktu -- what language it was written in, what kind of scholarly tradition it had. My education covered (at least superficially) Europe, Egypt, the Levant, Mesopotamia, India, and East Asia, but Africa south of the Sahara is a big blank spot...
So I went and looked it up on Wikipedia, and it turns out that Kush had an alphabetic script. Many inscriptions remain but little of the language (Meroitic) has been decoded. Although they would have had access to paper as a result of contact with Egypt and the Hellenistic world, there's no indication that any books written in Meroitic have survived.
It's pretty common for archeology to be scanty when a civilization doesn't leave behind any writings to study. If you want to be remembered you gotta write stuff down, and do so in a way that survives the ages.
It also helps to be closer to the modern era. Complaints that the Greek and Roman empires are better known seem a bit silly when you consider that they were in their peak closer to the present day than they were to Kush.
It's not writing that's well understood. There's no parallel texts like the Rosetta Stone. Also, Meroitic isn't closely related to any other language we have knowledge of. As a result, we can read a few names and little else.
I think that wraps around to the issue one of the other comments raised, which is the contention that less effort has been put into this area compared to, say, the civilizations whose languages are represented on the Rosetta Stone. Who's to say that there isn't one for Kush, buried in some undiscovered site? Or, what about using ML to investigate similarities in construction and form between the languages conveyed in Meroitic and other languages?
There's a reply to sentiments like yours in the first few paragraphs of the article.
> For years, European and American historians and archaeologists viewed ancient Kush through the lens of their own prejudices and that of the times. In the early 20th century, the Harvard Egyptologist George Reisner, on viewing the ruins of the Nubian settlement of Kerma, declared the site an Egyptian outpost. “The native negroid race had never developed either its trade or any industry worthy of mention, and owed their cultural position to the Egyptian immigrants and to the imported Egyptian civilization,” he wrote in an October 1918 bulletin for Boston’s Museum of Fine Arts. It wasn’t until mid-century that sustained excavation and archaeology revealed the truth: Kerma, which dated to as early as 3000 B.C., was the first capital of a powerful indigenous kingdom that expanded to encompass the land between the first cataract of the Nile in the north and the fourth cataract in the south. The kingdom rivaled and at times overtook Egypt. This first Kushite kingdom traded in ivory, gold, bronze, ebony and slaves with neighboring states such as Egypt and ancient Punt, along the Red Sea to the east, and it became famous for its blue glazed pottery and finely polished, tulip-shaped red-brown ceramics.
Also, "looted"? How does one loot civilization? Did the West "loot" paper from China?
Well... there is borrowing between civilizations. One might suspect that either Egypt developed pyramids, or Kush did, and the other borrowed the idea. The word "looting" doesn't fit, though, because if Kush borrowed the idea from Egypt, Egypt still had the idea - they didn't lose it. And Kush built their own pyramids; they didn't take Egyptian pyramids and move them south.
In the same way, we don't say that Rome looted Greek civilization, though they borrowed quite a bit.
This one seems to be on YouTube: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=X75COneJ4w8&list=PL6mz4AK-lT...