Somebody get perk a tampon, okay?
So what do we have here? While the overwhelming historical evidence is that of a greek/semetic Cleopatra, some folks still want to make her part black to ease some thing inside them, or soothe the PC whiners.
On one side we have researchers who CANNOT tell by the dimensions of King Tut's skull if he was part black, yet we have another who looks at a dubious PICTURE of a long LOST skull claimed to be of Cleopatra's sister, and can tell EXACTLY what racial mix she was???
Come on, folks. Time to see his for what it is: Racial appeasement.
This Wiki article sums this all up nicely as it describes the ludicrous controversy over the race of Ancient Egyptians:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ancient_Egyptian_race_controversy
The part on King Tut:
Supporters of Afrocentrism have claimed that Tutankhamun was black, and have protested that attempted reconstructions of Tutankhamun's facial features (as depicted on the cover of National Geographic Magazine) have represented the king as “too white”.[48]
Forensic artists and physical anthropologists from Egypt, France, and the United States independently created busts of Tutankhamun, using a CT-scan of the skull. Biological anthropologist Susan Anton, the leader of the American team, said that the race of the skull was “hard to call”. She stated that the shape of the cranial cavity indicated an African, while the nose opening suggested narrow nostrils, which is usually considered to be a European characteristic. The skull was thus concluded to be that of a North African.[49] Other experts have pointed out that neither skull shapes nor nasal openings are a reliable indication of race.[50]
Although modern technology can reconstruct Tutankhamun's facial structure with a high degree of accuracy based on CT data from his mummy,[51][52] determining his skin tone and eye color is impossible. The clay model was therefore given a flesh coloring which according to the artist was based on an "average shade of modern Egyptians."[53]
Terry Garcia, National Geographic's executive vice president for mission programs, said, in response to some of those protesting against the Tutankhamun reconstruction:
The big variable is skin tone. North Africans, we know today, had a range of skin tones, from light to dark. In this case, we selected a medium skin tone, and we say, quite up front, 'This is midrange.' We will never know for sure what his exact skin tone was or the color of his eyes with 100% certainty. ... Maybe in the future, people will come to a different conclusion.
And the part on Cleopatra:
Cleopatra's race and skin colour have also caused frequent debate as described in an article from The Baltimore Sun.[5] There is also an article titled: Was Cleopatra Black? from Ebony magazine,[6] and an article about Afrocentrism from the St. Louis Post-Dispatch that mentions the question, too.[7] Scholars generally suggest a light olive skin colour for Cleopatra, based on the facts that her Macedonian family had intermingled with the Persian aristocracy of the time, that her mother is not absolutely known for certain,[59] and that her paternal grandmother is not known for certain.[60] Afrocentric assertions of Cleopatra's blackness have, however, continued.
The question was the subject of an heated exchange between Mary Lefkowitz, who has referred in her articles a debate she had with one of her students about the question whether Cleopatra was black, and Molefi Kete Asante, Professor of African American Studies at Temple University. As a response to Not Out of Africa by Lefkowitz, Asante wrote an article, entitled Race in Antiquity: Truly Out of Africa, in which he emphasizes that he "can say without a doubt that Afrocentrists do not spend time arguing that either Socrates or Cleopatra were black."[61]
In 2009, a BBC documentary speculated that Arsinoe IV, the half-sister of Cleopatra VII, may have been part African, and then further speculated that Cleopatra’s mother and thus Cleopatra herself might also have been part African. This was based largely on the claims of Hilke Thür of the Austrian Academy of Sciences, who in the 1990s had examined a headless skeleton of a female child in a 20 BC tomb in Ephesus (modern Turkey) together with the old notes and photographs of the now-missing skull.[62][63] Arsinoe IV and Cleopatra VII, shared the same father (Ptolemy XII Auletes) but had different mothers.
And you post a lone and widely disputed
speculation as fact??? You think it trumps my argument?
Now, if they CANNOT tell with any certainty what racial mix Tut was, how are they doing so with this picture of a long lost dubious skull claimed to be that of Cleopatra's sister?
So what are we left with? The fact that Ancient Egyptians were NEITHER white NOR black. Nor were they Arab. What they were, does NOT exist today.
Again, from Seti I's tomb wall:
Left to right
Libyan, Nubian, Asiatic, Egyptian.
We are also left with the
fact that Cleopatra was MAINLY Greek and Egyptian, and would have been light olive skinned. The overwhelming evidence points to this fact.
Oh, and Perk, take a fucking Midol before answering, okay?
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