There is a sub-category of Neopaganism today called Kemetism, or Egyptian Neopaganism. It is often heavily wrapped up in Black Supremacist or Afrocentrism movements. By analogy to Wicca, the most well-known variety of Neopaganism, which is based on a European pagan legacy (especially Celtic, Greek, Nordo-Germanic, and Roman), Kemetic religion is derived from Egyptian religion almost exclusively (for example, it rarely integrates Mauritanian, Ethiopian, Phoenician, or sub-Saharan religions). Much of Neopaganism is allegorically naturalist and only culturally religious, or vaguely spiritual and quasi-supernaturalist. But unlike this major trend in contemporary Neopaganism, Kemetists are not content to just reimagine an Egyptian pantheon, culture, and ritualism; they also have a chip on their shoulder about deconstructing all modern religion as “secretly” Egyptian. Thus Christianity and Islam are “really” just bastardized, stolen versions of Egyptian pagan mythology—and thus, really, African (in particular, of the most historically advanced ancient civilization in Africa; the African “master race” as it were). This is where the whole religion goes off the rails.
I don’t bother much with Neopaganism, because hardly anyone follows it and it isn’t pulling on the levers of power anywhere in the world, but also because it tends to be relatively harmless—unlike, for example, the world’s most powerful, influential, and dangerous variety of paganism today: Hindu Nationalism. Allegorical varieties of Neopaganism can even be plausible enough to integrate with secular humanism. A science-and-evidence-based allegorical Neopaganism is entirely conceivable. But when Neopagans start to distort history and spread ethnocentrist revisions of historical fact, particularly in areas I’m an expert in and thus can speak with some authority on, I get notably annoyed.
I addressed some examples of this recently on the Dagger Squad, where we critiqued just a sampling of claims from the most famous Kemetic apologist today, Brother Jabari. The whole process reminded me of some common, fundamental lessons in historical methodology I wish all these amateurs would learn and apply, so we could clean up and get rid of all the misinformation they spin on the internet, which often gets conflated with serious Jesus-myth scholarship and thus wrongly used to dismiss it. I’ve summarized some critical thinking tools on this point before (see A Vital Primer on Media Literacy, The Difference Between a Historian and an Apologist, and From Lead Codices to Mummy Gospels: Essential Links on Dubious Tales). I also teach an online course every month on both critical thinking and historical methods for everyone. Here I’ll focus on some basic principles of sound (vs. unsound) historical procedure for ascertaining the truth, particularly regarding antiquity. So my brief critique of Jabari will serve as a launching point for general principles.
Stop Trusting Historians Before 1950
Rule Number One: Never trust anything written before 1950. Indeed never, ever trust anything written in the 19th century. Almost everything from that period is deeply and persistently unreliable (the few exceptions, e.g. the best textual criticism and lexicography of those eras, don’t pertain to any point here; see my old article History before 1950, which I include in Hitler Homer Bible Christ). Unless you verify it independently—either in more modern, peer reviewed (not amateur) scholarship, or directly in the primary evidence.
Which leads to Rule Number Two: Always trace a claim to its earliest evidence. In other words, go to the primary source, which here means the earliest surviving instance or evidence of the claim at hand. Good scholars will bread-crumb you to that with source citations (either to that primary evidence, or to secondary scholarship that in turn cites those primary sources). Good scholars will also have checked the primary evidence to confirm any secondary source they cite has correctly represented it.
Jabari fails at this when he tells us he “found” proof in the “Chronicon Paschale“ that ancient Egyptians worshiped a virgin born Horus who was adored in a manger. He “quotes” his imagined source as saying:
To this day, Egypt has consecrated the pregnancy of a virgin, and the nativity of her son, whom they annually present in a cradle, to the adoration of the people; and when king Ptolemy, three hundred and fifty years before our Christian era, demanded of the priests the significance of this religious ceremony, they told him it was a mystery.
There is actually no such passage in the Chronicon Paschale. And the Chronicon is not an ancient text. Or an Egyptian one. It is a Medieval, European, Christian document. Probably written by white dudes. This “quotation” comes from a book published in 1881 after the death of its author, the amateur quack Logan Mitchell, who had no recorded qualifications of any relevance. So, not even a historian. But also, this is 19th century garbage. Like almost all 19th century work in history is. This “quotation” kept getting repeated and attributed to various sources for decades; no one quoting it seems ever to bother doing what a responsible historian must do: find the original text and confirm the translation and its context. What does the Medieval Christian Chronicon actually say? And what were its sources? Should we even believe a word of it?
Christian apologist Roger Pearce did the responsible thing and checked. What the Chronicon actually says is this:
This sign Jeremiah gave to the priests of Egypt, predicting the future, that their idols would be destroyed by a boy savior born of a virgin, and laid in a manger. For which reason they honor a pregnant virgin goddess and worship an infant in a manger. When king Ptolemy asked why, they told him that they received this secret from the holy prophet handed down by their fathers. [Meaning] the same prophet Jeremiah, before the [first] destruction of the temple.
This story is claiming the existence of an obscure priesthood (of Jewish converts?) in Egypt worshiping a virgin born baby in a manger at the behest of “their” Jewish prophet Jeremiah, foretelling the Christian religion. This story is complete bullshit. Some Medieval Christian made this garbage up, to embarrass the Jews and glorify Christianity. This nonsense about worshiping virgin born babies in mangers might go as far back as the 5th century Christian mythmonger Epiphanius (from his spottily extant Lives of the Prophets). But not beyond. There is no ancient source for this Christian myth—at all, much less among any Egyptian sources, textual or epigraphic. This is simply not an Egyptian story at all. It is also not a story, take note, about Horus or any ancient Egyptian god. It is a Christian fiction, a bogus claim that there were some (possibly even Jews) in Egypt who at the behest of their prophet Jeremiah were honoring a future-coming Jesus Christ. No such thing is or ever was true. It’s bullshit. And anyone who did their homework should know this. After all, had any such story existed in the first three centuries, Christian apologists would have cited it a hundred times! But as we see, they’d never heard of any such thing. So we know no such tale then existed. It’s a Medieval fabrication.
Which leads us to Rule Number Three: Once you have found the earliest surviving source, you must date and contextualize and critically evaluate its evidence. Don’t just be a gullible dupe and believe anything anyone wrote down. Least of all the most unreliable of people in the history of history: Medieval Christian mythmongers. What does this passage in the Chronicon actually say? What sources did it use—does it even cite any? Is this even a trustworthy source? Particularly for foreign cult lore that just happens to conveniently glorify Christianity? Why does it appear nowhere in actual ancient Egyptian material? Why do no earlier sources ever mention any such tall tale? Why should we believe any of it?
Get Your Facts Straight
If you are intent on claiming you know the origin of something, check first. How do you know? For example, the idea that gods have sons, or even that living men were gods, was not unique to Egypt but a global religious idea that so far as we can tell predates all written history. Just because we have more ancient Egyptian texts than of other civilizations does not mean all other civilizations got their ideas from Egypt. Most ideas predate written records altogether; and Egypt will have borrowed from other cultures just as many ideas as other cultures borrowed from Egypt. So “antiquity” is not alone evidence of causal direction. You need something more than that.
Which is Rule Number Four: Always check your facts, and your logic, to make sure your claims actually follow from the evidence that actually exists. An even more important example of failing at this is Jabari’s repeated insistence that Horus is a virgin-born god. Nope. In the most common myths his mother Isis fucks her brother Osiris after endowing him with a magical prosthetic penis that inseminates her. Mary does not fuck Yahweh by riding his magical dildo. So in no way is the one borrowed from the other. To the contrary, Mary’s insemination by angelic magic is deliberately crafted to renounce such vulgar myths. The whole point of having her an untouched virgin who never fucked a thing is to “prove” she is the superior of all these tawdry pagan whores. Because sex is gross. Which is a Jewish idea. Not an Egyptian one. And its precedents don’t come from Egypt (see Virgin Birth: It’s Pagan, Guys. Get Over It.).
Egyptian mythology had only one virgin mother goddess: Neith; and the only virgin-born god is her son, Ra. And Neith is not impregnated by some subdeity casting a spell on her on behalf of a Higher God as Gabriel more or less does to Mary, but by her own direct will to create. Mary does not do that. Nor is she a god; her de facto deification would not occur until the Middle Ages, and though by then some role was to be played by co-opting Mother-with-Horus cult worship in Egypt, that was not the only mother-son cult coopted by Christians to lure and appease pagans away from their old cults into the new state-sanctioned one. Every local religion was used to lure local populations. And Jesus was already virgin-born to Mary in Christian mythology centuries before any of that occurred. Which leads to Rule Number Five: Pay attention to relative chronology. Don’t look at later Medieval developments in Christianity and then claim they signify how the whole religion and its core myths began. That’s bullshit history. Don’t do bullshit history.
The fact is, virginally conceived and virginally born gods were such a popular motif all over the Mediterranean when Christianity began that the idea cannot be credited to any single culture. It was by then simply a ubiquitous trope, that Christianity could adapt from everywhere. They would have had no idea where that trope began thousands of years prior; and neither, honestly, do we. They would see the Egyptian models of it as just part of a universal type found in all cultures. Hence as I wrote before:
[It’s true that the] notion that the virgin birth was not a lift from paganism is highly improbable. The idea is obviously a Jewish adaptation of a popular motif in surrounding cultures. There is no other credible explanation for why it ever became important to claim such a thing of Jesus. Just as “our God must be able to do things your God can” led to syncretistic innovation within Judaism (whereby, for example, the Jews suddenly “discovered” their God would resurrect them, at oddly the very same time they learned the Zoroastrian God would), so “our godman must be as awesome as your godmen” had the same effect. Thus, Jesus couldn’t be sexually conceived, because that was gross, and yet he had to be a pre-existent being inserted into a woman’s womb to reify prophecy. A conundrum. But as soon as Jews saw how the pagans solved this problem for their godmen, they would obviously have stolen the very same solution. This is how all ideas and technologies proliferate from one culture to another. “Well if pagan gods can directly create fetuses just with their divine pneuma, then so can ours, damnit!”
And in case it isn’t clear, ancient Egyptian statues showing a toddler on a goddess’s lap are of Horus and Isis, not Ra and Neith—and Horus was not the one born to a virgin; Ra was. It’s especially embarrassing to see someone claiming to be an expert in Egyptian religion not even getting right which Egyptian god was born of a virgin (or else not even correctly identify Egyptian statuary). But it’s a particular failure to not have researched the ubiquitous multicultural fact of virgin mothers that Christianity was lifting from, or the Jewish basis for the forms of it they preferred to emulate—which definitely did not feature the fucking of dildos, but very specifically the repudiation of such things. Their closest actual model was Zeus’s begetting of Perseus by slipping into Danaë’s womb in the guise of a magical fluid; just substitute “Holy Spirit” for “Golden Rain” and “Yahweh” for “Zeus” and you have the baby Jesus tale. The begetting of Horus was absolutely not a parallel they had any interest in replicating (see That Luxor Thing and That Luxor Thing Again).
December 25th Is Neither Egyptian Nor Pagan
I know it is popular to claim Christmas was assigned to December 25 because that was the birthday of every sun god…well, under the sun. But that’s simply false. Search all you might—follow the Five Rules I just enumerated—and you simply won’t find this. There is no ancient evidence that any god, sun-god or otherwise, was born on December 25th. Horus was not born on December 25th. Mithras was not born on December 25th. No god was born on December 25th. So please. Stop saying this.
This obsession with a modern urban legend about December 25th is all the more perplexing given that Christianity never originated with any such idea anyway. The usual bullshit line spun is that because Jesus “was born” on December 25th, and all sun-gods were born on December 25th, therefore “Christianity” was invented as a replicated sun-god cult. Astrotheology for the win! But this is all false. All of it. Not only were there no sun-gods born on December 25th when Christianity began, but the idea that Jesus was born on December 25th didn’t exist when Christianity began. The earliest recorded Christian belief regarding when he was born put his birthday in Spring, not Winter (arising sometime in the second century; the Gospels say nothing on the point). The idea of moving it to December 25 had its origin in fringe Christian numerological speculation in the third century, and didn’t prevail in Christian doctrine until the fourth century. It therefore had nothing to do with the origin of the religion.
When it finally did arise, the notion was based on the convenient “logic” that (a) Jesus must have been conceived on the same calendar date he died (because that just “feels right”) and surely Mary had an absolutely, perfectly, exactly nine-months-to-the-day pregnancy (because she and God are awesome, “so that must be the case, right?”) and if you count inclusively (as then they did) exactly nine-months-to-the-day from the believed calendar date of his death (based on Gospel fabrications having to do with making him conveniently die exactly on a Passover, which is actually historically impossible), guess what date you get on the then-Roman calendar? That’s right. December 25th. There are two reasons we can be certain this is the real reason Christians eventually adopted that date for the birth of Jesus: because this notion started arising before any pagan god was assigned that date of birth; and it is far too improbable that Christians would borrow that date from a pagan god and just by coincidence it’s exactly nine-months-to-the-day after their previously-imagined date of his mythical death-and-conception. Such coincidences sooner suggest intelligent design: that is far more likely the reason for choosing the date than an “accidental” consequence of it.
This is another “Please Check Your Facts” example. If you did actual, competent, responsible research you would find there is no evidence of gods being born on December 25th (Egyptian or otherwise) until Emperor Aurelian late in the third century chose to assign that calendar day to celebrate the birth of his preferred state god Sol Invictus (The Invincible Sun). But that isn’t Egyptian; and it doesn’t predate Christian speculations moving Jesus’s birthday to the same date. Aurelian’s god Sol was a syncretized Etruscan-Syrian cult; and the reason for placing his birth date at December 25 most likely had to do with two converging factors: (a) Aurelian needed a day not already devoted to a holiday on the official state calendar, and the actual Winter Solstice (birthday of the sun), December 21, was already taken (by the pagan “Christmas” feast week of Saturnalia), while December 25 was not; and (b) Aurelian’s new temple to Sol was completed just then and thus was most conveniently dedicated on December 25. Perhaps Aurelian’s move to do this later gave an added incentive to Christians to choose the faction pushing a December 25 date for their god over the previously more popular Spring date, to coopt and eclipse Sol cult as often they did others, but by then we are hell and gone from the origin of Christianity, and nowhere near any Egyptian myth.
Jabari not only fails to learn any of this—because he fact-checks nothing, and just gullibly believes whatever some long-dead white guys told him—but he garbles even the sources he claims to have. Contrary to what he elaborately claims, the late pagan author Macrobius does not date any holy day to December 25, least of all the Winter Solstice, which occurs not on the 25th but on December 21. The Saturnalia, which he wrote a lot about, is many days long and ends before the 25th (it was most typically celebrated from the 17th to the 23rd). When Christianity arose, and even later on when Christians started speculating on a December birthday, there was no holy day on December 25 in either the Roman or the Egyptian calendars (which didn’t align anyway, so “December 25” is a meaningless term in the Egyptian system; such a date simply didn’t even exist in any fixed sense, much less match up with the Julian calendar date of December 25).
In case you were wondering, reconstructed ancient Egyptian holy calendars do exist. What we find on them is that Ra, the actual Egyptian god of the son, was born in August; and Horus (and Osiris, the Egyptian god otherwise most equivalent to Jesus) were not born in any month: their births were in what are called intercalary days, extra days that complete a solar year, which in the Egyptian system were assigned to no month at all—and occur nowhere near December; they filled the calendar in Summer. Which gets us to Rule Number Six: If you want to know if something is true about a given culture at a given time, check the sources of that culture from that time.
Third Day Mythology
Contrary to what Jabari says, there is no evidence that the Christian “third day” resurrection motif was ever connected to the sun or any kind of astrotheology. In fact, there is no astrotheology whatever in early Christianity—the Bible is entirely devoid of it, and based instead on scriptural numerology. Astrotheological ideas might have been coopted into Christianity in the Middle Ages, but that can have no relevance to the origin of the religion or the contents of its New Testament; nor were they uniquely Egyptian (Persian and other systems were just as influential). Even Judaism from which Christianity arose, though it used a lunar calendar (as many agricultural societies then did), and eventually adopted the ancient scientific understanding of a planetary-layered-heaven, was not astrotheological in content. None of its doctrines were based on astrology, constellations, or anything astrophysical. If you want to see what actual evidence of astrotheology looks like, consult the research in ancient Mithraism (which derived from Greco-Persian astrotheology, not Egyptian) in David Ulansey’s The Origins of the Mithraic Mysteries (though with some corrective in Roger Beck’s The Religion of the Mithras Cult in the Roman Empire). There is nothing like this evidence for Judaism or early Christianity.
The notion of a resurrection “on the third day” appears to be based on Ancient Near Eastern concepts surrounding death that predate the written record. Our earliest example of the motif is not Egyptian, but Sumerian: it appears in the ancient tale of the death-and-resurrection of the goddess Inanna, which survives on clay tablets dating at least to the 18th century B.C., which contain a legend that could date as far back as the 40th century B.C. The motif appears all over the place after that, from Greece and Rome to Persia and Egypt. In Jewish lore it appears to have been connected to the time it was thought it took for a corpse to become unrecognizable (see my discussion and quotation of the relevant sources in my chapter on the body of Jesus in The Empty Tomb). But it also coincided with Jewish calendric beliefs regarding the time-span of the new or full moon, where we see the same assumptions governing the assignment of a three-day motif to the death and resurrection of Osiris in Egyptian myth (which assignment can’t be reliably dated much earlier than the Hellenistic era: see Dying-and-Rising Gods: It’s Pagan, Guys. Get Over It.). Both Osiris and Jesus die on the first day of a full moon and rise on its last “full” day. But this does not appear to be because the Christians borrowed the idea from Osiris cult, but simply because both Jesus and Osiris cult set their death-and-resurrection tales around a local lunar holiday (and not, I’d like to point out, a solar holiday—Jabari can’t even maintain a coherent metaphor). Because the Jews had already long before fixed the Passover to the rise of the full moon, and Jesus was conceived as the new Passover sacrifice.
Which gets us to Rule Number Seven: Correlation is not causation. Parallels do not automatically exist because you think they do; and when they do exist, they do not automatically confirm your particular causal hypothesis. If X resembles Y (e.g. Osiris and Jesus died and rose “on a third day”), it may be because X caused Y (Osiris cult inspired Jesus cult), or because Y caused X (Jesus cult inspired Osiris cult), or because a common factor Z separately caused both X and Y (lunar calendars cause third-day motifs, and Egypt and Judea both independently adopted lunar calendars), or because of mere random accident. Because there are billions and billions of facts, accidental “correlations” among them are actually statistically inevitable and guaranteed to be quite numerous. So similarities might belie no causal connection whatever. You need to do a lot more work than just find “similarities” to support any causal hypothesis, much less yours. (See Everything You Need to Know about Coincidences.)
Um…That Was a UFO, Not a Star
Jabari waxes on a lot about how “the star” in the Infancy Narrative of Matthew “must” be a reference to the Dog Star, Sirius (Canis Major), and somehow connected to Orion’s Belt and thus the Pyramids (or some such bizarre nonsense). The Great Pyramids might have some sort of intended stellar alignment (that’s disputed, but not my area). But I can confidently say nothing else he says about this is correct. For one thing, his account seems to garble a bunch of different astronomical facts. He seems to argue that Orion’s belt points “to” the rising of the sun; that’s incorrect. It points to the rising of Sirius, the Dog Star—the brightest star in the Earth sky, which is nowhere near where the sun ever is. You might know that “Dog Days” are when that Dog Star rises each day at the same time as the sun, which is Summer; that coincidence of rising times (not locations) was anciently used to mark the dawn of the Summer season (in more places than just Egypt; Egyptians weren’t the only ones looking at the sky in antiquity). But more off the rails is Jabari’s attempt to connect any of this to the mythology of Matthew (which I should remind you is only the mythology of Matthew—no “star” exists in Mark, Luke, or John; and the actual origin of the “star” motif may be a completely different, secret story that I discuss in OHJ, pp. 195-96, 320-21, 473).
In Matthew the “star” (astera, meaning any light or flame in the sky) is not what we mean in modern English by “a star,” but what we would today call a UFO: an unidentified flying object, that moves and hovers miraculously as suits its divine helmsman (in legend, an angel). This was never even proposed to be an astronomical phenomenon (and all modern attempts to turn it into one are bogus: see astronomer Aaron Adair’s The Star of Bethlehem: A Skeptical View). Moreover, Jabari commits the common mistake of interpreting the Greek phrase “we saw his star in the East” as meaning a star in the East; in fact from context Matthew must mean the observers were in the East when they first spied this UFO—in the West (some translations will say “at its rising,” which is plausible, but context makes that reading unlikely as well). The UFO then flies ahead of them (Westward), vanishes for a spell to evade Herod’s spying eyes, and reappears at just the right time to fly forth and hover over a single town—indeed, over a single barn. There is no comparable story in ancient Egyptian lore. And there is nothing astronomical even imagined to be going on here.
Healing: Myth & Folklore
Jabari tries to argue that Mark’s involvement of “spit” in some of the healing miracles of Jesus proves Mark was stealing ideas from Egypt (Mark 7:33 & Mark 8:23; one of which tales is elaborated in John 9:6). The reason? Egyptian folklore included legends of divine spittle curing wounds. The problem? Jesus never cures any wounds in Mark. At all. Much less with spit. Scholars and layfolk alike often overlook this. But the Gospel Jesus mostly only cures ailments that are commonly psychosomatic and incapable of being proved real (because that’s all that Christian missionaries could “actually” heal in their tent shows as well). The only wound care Jesus is credited with appears in Luke, who was so disturbed by both his sources depicting Peter mutilating a slave and Jesus doing nothing about it that he decided to invent the tale that Jesus fixed it; which fabrication to the story John rejected. And Luke did not imagine Jesus using spit for this.
This leads to Rule Number Eight: Always check if what you think is particular and thus indicative of something, was actually commonplace and thus not indicative of anything. As in this case: using spit to heal wounds was a ubiquitous folk belief, not at all peculiar to Egypt, and almost certainly dates beyond even the existence of Egyptian culture; indeed, evidence of craft medical lore predates even human beings: the earliest indications of culture and craft lore arise in the pre-human species Homo habilis (far, far south of Egypt). Since it is a scientific fact that human saliva assists wound care, it seems quite unlikely that fact hadn’t been discovered long before sentient beings even walked the sands of Egypt. Consequently it will have spread everywhere before Egyptian civilization even had a chance to influence anything.
But actually, the fact in Christian myth that Jabari wants to explain is Jesus’s peculiar use of spit to cure deafness and blindness, which has no medical basis. That idea did exist in Egyptian lore, but so it did in many cultures. But we can adduce a more likely basis for its invention in Mark’s effort to revamp and rewrite the miracles of Moses: Christians adopted the belief that Jesus Christ was in fact Moses’s rock, also known as Miriam’s Well, which brought to the Israelites the water of life (OHJ, pp. 415-18). That the water of life (water literally from that rock, now in the new form of Jesus) would cause the deaf to hear and the blind to see (both metaphors for understanding the gospel) is a rather too obvious literary device. As is the parallel Mark intentionally draws by linking Moses’s tree of healing and Jesus’s healing of the blind man (who at first “sees trees” rather than people; another obvious giveaway). But even as a replication of common medicinal folklore there is nothing peculiarly Egyptian about any of this.
In the same vein, contrary to Jabari’s attempt to argue an Egyptian basis for it, the title “King of Kings” was a global Western phenomena, not unique to Egypt; any connection to Egypt it might ever have had (and there is, I’ll remind you, no evidence of any) would have been long lost hundreds of years before Christianity arose, and thus couldn’t have been salient to its inventors. What we find instead is the far more likely source of that appellation is the Jewish, not Egyptian, background of Christian mythology: the Jews’ Persian overlords famously held the title King of Kings, as attested in the books of Ezra, Ezekiel, and Daniel, and the New Testament constructs its mythology for Jesus out of exactly such scriptures. This is the most likely reason it was adapted to Jesus. Though note this title is not assigned to Jesus in any of his actual “myths”; it’s not in the Gospels, nor in Paul. It first appears in the late first century book of Revelation, a political prophetic text written long after Christianity began—and without any discernible Egyptian influence.
Another example in this category is the trope of the dying-and-rising god, which was all over the West by the time Christianity arose. It was never, so far as we can tell, peculiar to Egypt. As I already noted, the idea could be Sumerian in origin and as old as 4000 B.C. In fact for all we know, it could date back tens of thousands of years, and predate even Egypt as a civilization, its origin wholly unknown. In any event, the trope was everywhere, and in no way peculiarly Egyptian, by the time the first Christians adapted that trope to Judaism. Jabari even makes the peculiar mistake of trying to argue the resurrection of Jesus derives from the tale of Horus being killed by a scorpion as a child and then resurrected (even though Jesus does not die as a child, much less by scorpions) rather than the far more apposite parallel of Osiris being murdered by the Egyptian analog to Satan and resurrected. But far more apposite is the death and resurrection of the Sumerian goddess Inanna, who is actually effectively crucified to gain victory over the death (see OHJ, Chapter 3.1), or the Roman god Romulus, whose story bears a great many parallels to the Jesus myth (see the peer reviewed work of Richard Miller, Resurrection and Reception in Early Christianity). Finally, I won’t even bother debunking Jabari’s attempt to link erections to resurrection beliefs—which really have no connection to penises outside satire.
And Please No More Crank Etymology
And Rule Number Nine: Don’t just believe any etymology someone spurts at you; check real linguistic scholarship first. Crank etymology often operates on the totally bonkers principle that if two words in radically different languages even remotely sound alike, the one must have derived from the other. This is as dumb as thinking all the bald men you ever met must come from the same village in Finland. So no, contra Jabari, the English word “thought” does not derive from the Egyptian god Thoth. Thoth is the Greek bastardization of the actual name Djehuti, which derives from an Afro-Asiatic language; which had no significant influence on the Indo-European. Our word “thought” derives through Germanic thanht, most likely long predating any Greek influence, as multilinguistic cladistics indicate it derived from the Proto-Indo-European word tong thousands of years before Greeks even encountered Egypt, much less Germans. There is simply no connection to Egyptian language, gods, or myth.
Likewise, contrary to Jabari’s fabricated etymology, the name of Mary is actually the English bastardization of the Greek transliteration “Miriam” of the Hebrew name Maryam, the mythically famous name of the sister of Moses (when Christianity arose, one in every four Jewish women had that name). It has no known connection to any Egyptian words or persons. And the city of Paris wasn’t named after any African deities either (nor even the mythical Greek hero of exactly that name, which you might think is a far more likely source for the city’s appellation). It derives, rather, from the name of the Celtic tribe who originally lived there when it was conquered and colonized by the Romans: the Parisii. In fact the city’s actual full name is Lutetia Parisiorum, the word lutetia deriving from the Celtic word luto for marsh or meadow; in other words, “Meadow of the Parisi Tribe.”
Conclusion
Don’t break the Nine Rules:
- Rule Number One: Never trust anything written before 1950.
- Rule Number Two: Always trace a claim to its earliest evidence.
- Rule Number Three: Once you have found the earliest surviving source, you must date and contextualize and critically evaluate its evidence.
- Rule Number Four: Always check your facts, and your logic, to make sure your claims actually follow from the evidence that actually exists.
- Rule Number Five: Pay attention to relative chronology.
- Rule Number Six: If you want to know if something is true about a given culture at a given time, check the sources of that culture from that time.
- Rule Number Seven: Correlation is not causation.
- Rule Number Eight: Always check if what you think is particular and thus indicative of something, was actually commonplace and thus not indicative of anything.
- Rule Number Nine: Don’t just believe any etymology someone spurts at you; check real linguistic scholarship first.
Sound history requires not employing crank methodologies, which often entail abandoning one or more or even all these rules, and acting like a gullible Medieval arm-chair academic instead of a competent, serious, responsible scholar. Yet not much training is needed to simply abide by these rules; so lack of qualifications is not an excuse. Even lay and amateur authors can do this, and should. Especially in the era of fake news.
So much impressive knowledge about many subjects!
I don’t know if you’d like to read or critique this on-topic link about Christmas: https://www.hwalibrary.com/cgi-bin/get/hwa.cgi?action=getbklet&InfoID=1313850170.
“cures ailments that are commonly psychosomatic and incapable of being proved real (because that’s all that Christian missionaries could “actually” heal in their tent shows as well)”: In the bad old days, when I was a Christian, I noticed the “miraculous cures” proved temporary at best and were most often claimed to occur in distant lands and ancient times so they wouldn’t risk falsification. I recall people being told to throw away their glasses because their eyes were miraculously healed. In following days, the “healed” people told me they still couldn’t see well. A mother duped into believing her child’s leukemia was miraculously healed saw a temporary “cure” followed by decline and death. Christians told me they saw a faith healer lengthen people’s defective legs, but when I went to view the same events, nothing special happened at all. So much naivete in this world.
“Don’t just be a gullible dupe and believe anything anyone wrote down.” Not only a brilliant dictum, but so funny I laughed out loud. I wish every Bible printed had a prominent disclaimer on it saying, “Don’t just be a gullible dupe and believe anything anyone wrote down.” In order to be honest, “Don’t just be a gullible dupe and believe anything someone says” should precede every sermon and Sunday school lesson. But honesty is not their guide. One could write a worthy book based upon the same principle.
Incidentally, the vaunted leg-lengthening was a cheap parlor trick I could see through in an instant. Randi or even I could have replicated it easily.
Sadly, I know people caught up in fundamentalism and its attendant science-denialism, right-wing extremism, and sindonology who had potential to think rationally at one time, before they were “saved.” The odds of their leaving the fold seem miniscule. They devote much of their lives to rationalization (apologetics) for what they started believing as children or in an unguarded, emotional moment with an evangelist.
Preach brother! Preach!
I didn’t expect you to call them out for what they are: Black Supremacists and Afrocentrists. I’ve butted heads with these racist assholes many a time and I understand how they think. When you told Brother Garfield that you didn’t understand the motivation behind their claim that Christianity borrowed from Kemetism, I thought you were being naïve. The truth is, in their minds, Christianity represents “whiteness” and Kemetism “blackness”, and they want to show cultural superiority. That’s their motivation.
But I understand you’re frustrated because bs theories like these make your task as a Mythicist even harder. Just continue being the brilliant and objective scholar that you are and eventually more and more scholars and laymen will recognize the merit of your work and what a great thinker you are (in fact, they already know the latter). In fact, I’m sure you already know that many scholars who ridicule the Mythicist position do so not for scholarly reasons.
This was a great article and at times you made me laugh out loud! LMAO
Not all Kemetists are Black Supremacists or Afrocentrists; I only said Kemetism was often associated with them (because it is). I have not examined any links between them and Jabari, for example, so don’t mistake me for having said he is in that camp, or how entangled he may or may not be with those movements.
But the Afrocentrist notion still does not explain this particular obsession. It would be more logical for an Afrocentrist to declare Christianity a late, fraudulent, false religion (which it is), or even a Jewish conspiracy run amok (since anti-Semitism is often rampant among them), and declare Egyptian religion older and purer and truer to their roots. There is no sense in trying to push the implausible thesis that White religions “are really Egyptian.” So some additional motivation must drive that particular “addition” to the Afrocentrist position.
One can trace the idea to the notion of cultural theft (the Black Athena thesis): White people didn’t just steal African bodies, but African culture, ergo “science and math and logic” were also really Egyptian. But science and math and logic are real; it makes sense for an ethnocentrist to claim they invented them first. Christianity is entirely 100% fake. So why one would want to take credit for it baffles me. I can only put it down to “they found the idea promoted by 19th century White guys and then ran with it because it bolstered their cultural theft thesis.” Which is all the more bizarre. Afrocentrists decide to believe and defend a thesis invented by incompetent White guys? Like I said; baffles me.
Agreed, not all Kemetists are Black Supremacists or Afrocentrists. But based on my interactions with many of these black religious groups (which also include the Hebrew Israelites and the Nation of Islam) the likelihood that they are driven by racism is very high. Please note, I’m not referring to individuals who subscribe to Kemetism that don’t associate with a Kemetic camp or movement. I’m referring individuals within these camps or movements, and perhaps not all are racist, but my bet would be that most of them are.
As for Jabari, in the comments section of the video that followed yours on Brother Garfield’s channel, there was a commenter (Armchair Philosopher) who posted the following: “If Richard Carrier was really a “brother”, then more woulda been done to defend him from nasty racist attacks by Jabari and Sa Neter. If the shoe was on the other foot, I bet Dr Carrier wouldn’t stand by and allow his “brothers” to get away using fowl racist language on Garfield in public”. Here is the link to the video https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Rakr9zm0sY8&ab_channel=DaggerSquad; see the sixth comment. I haven’t seen or heard any racist comments myself, but again, based on my interactions with them, the odds that you will say something disagreeable to them and not receive racist attacks, are very slim (sometimes your mere white presence is enough to spark a racist onslaught).
Moreover, you said that the Afrocentrist notion still does not explain this particular obsession (that Christianity borrowed from Kemetism) because it would make more sense to declare Christianity a late, fraudulent, false religion and declare Egyptian religion older and purer and truer to its roots. This may be true, however, people’s motivations don’t always make logical sense. Maybe step out of your scholarly mindset from time to time when analyzing the behavior commoners. IMO, what drives them is “you copied from us”. That’s it. And we are older and better than you. The fact that Christianity is ridiculous is irrelevant to them. I know I haven’t proven anything here; you are free to research this further and come to your own conclusion.
It’s also worth noting that according to Afrocentrists, “African” necessarily means “Black”. However, this is not the case. This is the largest study on ancient Egyptian ancestry (1380 BC – AD 425) to date https://www.nature.com/news/mummy-dna-unravels-ancient-egyptians-ancestry-1.22069, and it found the following: “mummies were closely related to ancient Middle Easterners, hinting that northern Africans might have different genetic roots from people south of the Sahara desert.”
Also: “Both types of genomic material showed that ancient Egyptians shared little DNA with modern sub-Saharan Africans. Instead, their closest relatives were people living during the Neolithic and Bronze ages in an area known as the Levant. Strikingly, the mummies were more closely related to ancient Europeans and Anatolians than to modern Egyptians.”
Moreover, you said that white people stole science, math and logic from the Egyptians. It’s a historical fact that many Ancient Greek philosophers (such as Pythagoras and Eratosthenes?) were educated in Egyptian academies; in what sense do you use the term “stole”? And did the Egyptians also “steal” science, math and logic from older civilizations, such as the Mesopotamians?
But I just remembered that a few days ago you told me that Aristotle was the first full scientist and the proto-scientists were the pre-Socratics, such as Thales. So in what sense did the Egyptians do science?
(1) You haven’t quoted Jabari saying anything racist, so I don’t see your point there.
(2) Saying “people just do illogical things” is basically just repeating what I said. So you are no longer even responding to my point. You are just restating what I said in different words now.
(3) Again you are confusing “Sub-Saharan” with “African” and confusing “Sub-Saharan” with “Black.” Maybe Afrocentrists have encouraged you in these confusions (?), but they are nevertheless confusions. North Africans are Africans. Just as both Germans and Greeks are Europeans. And Middle Easterners also have African DNA. By definition, as all human beings are Africans. It’s just a question of how far back we can claim an ancestor on African soil. And peoples who lived closer to Africa typically have more African DNA.
Thus there is nothing meaningful in the statement “North Africans and Levantine peoples share more DNA.” That’s because they intermarried. Just as Greeks and Germans will have more shared DNA, for the same reason. But that doesn’t make Germans Greeks, or Greeks Germans. And none of this relates to skin color, your last confusion: nothing you cite ever mentions genes for skin pigmentation. There were black Middle Easterners, just as there were black Hindus. So “Middle Eastern” in that context does not mean “not Black.”
(4) I did not say that White people stole science, math and logic from the Egyptians. I said they didn’t. Egyptians never had those things in the relevant sense. Lore and craft knowledge, and arithmetic and folk medicine, are not formalized science, math, and logic. Those were only ever invented by the Greeks. In the whole of human history, no other civilization developed them—independently of diffusion from Greece (directly or through intermediary cultures like the Romans).
(5) What Greeks learned in Egypt is all that lore and craft knowledge, and arithmetic and folk medicine; what they did with that when they got home was invent formal science, mathematics, and logic. Which only ever then made its way to Egypt by being brought back there by the Greeks who invented them.
(6) Like your confusion of “Sub-Saharan” with “African” and “Sub-Saharan” with “Black,” you are succumbing to another common confusion, of “science” in the folk sense of just “things we know or think we know” with “science” as a formal, methodological, empirical field of study. Astronomers who just learn patterns of planetary and stellar movement are craftsmen, not “scientists” in the modern sense, just like folk healers are not “medical doctors” and mere builders are not scientific engineers.
People will colloquially call such people “scientists” in some sort of vague, loose sense, but IMO that is deeply misleading and only causes exactly the confusion you are now falling victim to. Often this confusion is pushed deliberately (e.g. by Christians who want their Medieval predecessors to have been “scientists” in order to avoid admitting that actual scientists vanished under their tenure, replaced by craftsmen and bookworms only barely able to keep repeating much of the actual, real science of yore).
Real scientists employ a formal, empirical, scientific methodology based on testing hypotheses and ruling out false claims by empirical test and observation, and aim to make progress in understanding of the causes of things, and consciously criticize and improve their epistemology and methodology toward that end. See my discussion of the importance and content of this distinction in the first two chapters of my book The Scientist in the Early Roman Empire.
1) I acknowledged that I didn’t see or hear Jabari saying anything racist. I showed you a message from a random person on YT alleging that he did. I thought maybe this would give you grounds to investigate whether he did (tbh, I was also influenced by my passed experience with these groups). But maybe Jabari is a great guy and the allegations against him are false. I would like to publicly apologize if I implied that they are true, as I haven’t seen any evidence that he or Sa Neter used any racist language whatever. I’m a strong supporter of “innocent till proven guilty”.
2) I think there’s some confusion here. You said the Afrocentrism notion doesn’t logically explain why they would claim Christianity copied from Kemetism, because Christianity is bullshit. So therefore there must be another reason too, right? What I’m saying is that this is not necessarily true because people’s behavior doesn’t always make logical sense. Many Black religious groups usually just want to show that Whites copied from Blacks, and that alone is a sufficient reason (for them!) to be driven by the Afrocentrism notion. However, I fully acknowledge that I haven’t presented any evidence of this; it’s based on my honest observation.
3) “Again”? I never brought up this point before. I think you’re confusing this thread with another one. Let me restate my position for clarification. Afrocentrists claim that the ancient Egyptians were always Black (I mean Negro Black. I don’t mean just any dark-skinned person. Most people wouldn’t consider dark-skinned Arabs, Black. They are a different race). I’m saying this is not the case and I cite a study that shows that: the ancient Egyptians (from 1380 BC to AD 425) shared little DNA with modern Sub-Saharan Africans – meaning all African countries below the Saharan dessert (yes, modern Sub-Saharans Africans are Black, do I really need to provide evidence for this..?). And the ancient Egyptians were more closely related to Europeans and Anatolians, who were a different race and most certainly not Black.
4) Sorry Richard, but you did say that White people stole science, math and logic from the Egyptians. This is your quote: “White people didn’t just steal African bodies, but African culture, ergo “science and math and logic” were also really Egyptian.”
(I just want to add something here. I think skin pigmentation is a trivial issue. The reason why I’m pushing back on this, however, is that I fear that Science and History will be corrupted and used in the name of SJ. Even if this is happening with small and trivial things, we should still push back, because if we don’t, this may encourage SJWs to corrupt more important and significant issues in Science and History).
5) Thank you for the education.
6) I’m not confusing science in the folk and formal sense. You explained the difference to me on another blog post and I remember it. I always use the term “science” in the formal, method-based sense. I was just asking in what sense YOU were using it.
I’m going to point out another observation here, and I hope it doesn’t offend you. I’ve noticed that specifically in written discussions and debates, you very often lose track of the thread and you’re not as sharp as you are in spoken discussions and debates. I experience loss of sharpness too whenever I don’t sleep well or when my brain is on overload. It happens to the best of us.
That’s not my job. The one who makes the claim bears the burden. You know this. So what’s with this Christian-apologetic-style burden shifting about? What’s your game?
Indeed. Then you agreed with me. Why are we still talking about this?
There is no such thing. I’ve explained this to you maybe three or four times now. What’s up with you?
No. You cited no studies of skin pigmentation. That’s zero studies.
You also didn’t say any of this before. You only spoke of Africans and of Blacks (which in English means all dark-skinned people of African heritage; not some specific sub-set of them). I corrected you. Now you pretend you didn’t say what you did and move the goal posts. And in such a way as to simply agree with my refutation of you, while claiming to correct me. This is bizarre behavior and suggests you have some sort of bias or agenda here, other than simply getting the facts straight.
And in this statement you literally ignore every single thing I’ve said. Why?
OFFS. Please learn how to read. Don’t take words out of context. Basic SAT question here. These are my actual words:
Now. After reading that, is it correct to conclude that “Richard Carrier” said these things, or that Richard Carrier is saying this is what Afrocentrists say?
Think this through before answering.
Ah. Now we discover your bias and motivation. You are a racism apologist. Got it.
Says the guy who just completely got wrong what I said, ignored most of what else I said, and continues to make false statements repeatedly refuted here.
You need an internal system check. Your brain is failing you. See to that.
I am the Armchair Philosopher, whose comment was referenced in the com box in Daggersquad’s Richard Carrier interview, who publicly defended Carrier and called out Garfield for not behaving as a true “brother” ought. If anyone wants to know how Richard Carrier was smeared in a racist way and disgusting way, then I suggest watching the following video; Jabari Responds To Garfield And He Is Very Upset: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=h5qjy9e7Rao&t=3s The whole premise of the video is that Sa Neter and Jabari are upset that Garfield opened up Jabari for criticism by the wuhite man. Somehow, Garfield allegedly broke the Black Code, and Jabari felt especially betrayed and offended as a result. The whole video is replete with racist language, most explicitly when Carrier is frequently denegrated for being a “Tamahu,” a derogatory epithet for wypippo. Don’t take my word for it, watch it. The racial hatred is on full display for those with eyes to see.
Interesting enough, I was watching Daggersquad today, and Richard Carrier was discussed again. Apparently Carrier is doing another follow-up interview with Garfield regarding Jabari’s whack scholarship. One of panel members, Ra Born, vociferously objected to platforming critiques of Jabari’s Kemetism by Carrier, because scholarly bands of wypippo would follow, and this would be used by the full force of the FBI to label Black people as “extremists.” Raborn used the comment section in this very article to substantiate his point. Here is the link (start about 2hr 11min mark): https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=hbVSN6jfXEw The irony is that Ra Born complains about wypippo in Richard Carriers blog comment section, but look at what these “konscious” people say about Carrier in the previously linked Sa Neter com box. The difference is night and day. Don’t believe me. See yourself.
Armchair Philosopher, sorry I dragged you into this, and thank you so much for your comment; I really appreciate it.
You called out racist behavior when no one else or not many did, you voluntarily got involved in this hostile exchange, identified yourself, and provided the evidence.
I appreciate and love people like you.
And it seems that you agree with me about what motivates many of these religious camps.
Anyway, hopefully Richard will debate Jabari and give him a good schooling because these wacky ideas that Jabari is promoting are spreading rapidly.
All the best brother.
You are so antagonistic and hostile. Why can’t we have an friendly discussion about things we don’t agree? Anyway, I’m going to respond one last time and then end this unpleasant exchange.
“That’s not my job. The one who makes the claim bears the burden. You know this. So what’s with this Christian-apologetic-style burden shifting about? What’s your game?”
I did meet my burden of proof, Richard, I said that someone ALLEGED that he launched racist attacks against you. And I showed you the message.
“Indeed. Then you agreed with me. Why are we still talking about this?”
I agreed that the Afrocentrism notion alone isn’t a logical explanation, but you are ignoring the additional point I made here. You know what it is. I won’t bring it up again.
“There is no such thing. I’ve explained this to you maybe three or four times now. What’s up with you?”
Are you really saying that the Negro Black people don’t exist as a distinct racial group? Really? This is how the Oxford Dictionary defines the term “Negro”: A member of a dark-skinned group of peoples originally native to Africa SOUTH of the Sahara” https://www.lexico.com/definition/negro. Apparently my usage of the term was spot on. Or maybe you would you like a more scientific source?
“No. You cited no studies of skin pigmentation. That’s zero studies.”
The study I cited showed that the Ancient Egyptians of that time period were more closely related to Europeans and Anatolians than to Negro Blacks (modern or ancient), which is a different racial group. Skin pigmentation isn’t the defining feature here. Even if the Ancient Egyptians’ skin pigmentation was closer to that of Negro Blacks, that still doesn’t mean that they were more closely related to them than to the Europeans and Anatolians.
“OFFS. Please learn how to read. Don’t take words out of context. Basic SAT question here. These are my actual words:”
So why didn’t you make bold those parts before? Were you deliberately setting up a trap for me? LOL Just kidding! Ok, I fucked up on this point! I misread what you said!
“Ah. Now we discover your bias and motivation. You are a racism apologist. Got it.”
That statement doesn’t make any sense. How does me not wanting SJWs to corrupt History and Science indicate that I’m a racism apologist? Am I having a discussion with a teacher of critical thinker or one of those paranoid SJWs who thinks everything is racist, sexist, and every other negative “ist” and “ism” in the English language? But at least those woke morons aren’t versed in critical thinking, whereas you are, and that’s what scares me: If “wokeness” can do that people like you imagine what it can do to the average person.
Only to such folks as racists who keep ignoring me and lying about what I and other sources say.
That’s deserved response.
And here yet again you ignored everything I said, misrepresented all the science, misrepresented everything I said, and asked impertinent questions instead of actually engaging with anything I wrote here.
Until you recognize your behavior here has been reprehensible and anti-rational, and in what ways, I cannot help you. You do not listen. You do not learn. Instead all you do is continually try to bolster your racist delusional worldview with rhetoric, rationalizations, and attempts at emotional manipulation.
That is in violation of my comments policy. You are done here.
“Only to such folks as racists who keep ignoring me and lying about what I and other sources say”.
If you are going to make an accusation, you should at least back it up. Again, how was I being racist? What if I called you a misogynist, and you asked me what evidence I had for my accusation, and I responded by calling you a misogynist again. Would you be okay with that?
Just because I mispresented what you said, it doesn’t mean I was lying, Richard. It wasn’t deliberate, therefore it wasn’t lying (why would I want to make myself look like a fool?). And after I re-read what you said, I recognized my mistake. What else do you want me to do?
And what other sources am I ignoring?
“And here yet again you ignored everything I said, misrepresented all the science, misrepresented everything I said, and asked impertinent questions instead of actually engaging with anything I wrote here.”
I’m pretty sure I responded to every point you made and represented the findings of the study I cited pretty accurately.
“Until you recognize your behavior here has been reprehensible and anti-rational, and in what ways, I cannot help you. You do not listen. You do not learn. Instead all you do is continually try to bolster your racist delusional worldview with rhetoric, rationalizations, and attempts at emotional manipulation.”
Your criticism is unfair. I think I’ve proven ever since I started engaging with your blog that I’m opened to listening and learning. And in what way did I try to bolster my supposed racist delusional worldview?
“That is in violation of my comments policy. You are done here.”
I’m pretty sure you are not going provide any evidence for the policy I supposedly violated.
Not a single thing you just said is true. But as anyone reading this thread can see that for themselves, no further discussion is worthwhile.
Was there ever a consensus among 1st millennium Middle Eastern populations as to what constituted the hard geographical boundaries of what was thought of then as “Egypt” (or did the seemingly constant ebb and flow of conquest and invasion prevent that)?
Of course regime changes changed Egypt from time to time. But it depends on whether you mean just physical (administrative) borders, or culture.
Its borders have been pretty stable for a very, very long time. Egypt became a unified kingdom, and thereafter grew an increasingly homogenized culture (albeit still with many regional differences, somewhere in between the modern U.S. and its varying state cultures and the E.U. and its varying national cultures; but all of unified Egypt enjoyed a common language), around 3100 B.C.
Egypt remained that way until various incursions by Persians, Greeks, Romans, and Arabs (successively) between roughly 550 B.C. and 650 A.D. But even those conquests maintained the physical and cultural and linguistic borders of Egypt, because administrative and geographic realities made that far easier than altering them. I think even modern Egypt largely remains within the physical borders established 5000 years ago.
But Egypt’s culture and dominant language has significantly changed over that time, experiencing influence from invading cultures in proportion to the duration of their occupation. Thus Egypt is far more Arabic in culture now than original Egyptian. And Arabic culture and language is not native African. It’s a foreign invader, in essence a colonial imperial power before the Brits and Europeans.
I would say that original (African) Egyptian culture began to decline in the 400s B.C., as what had been a largely stagnant cultural matrix since the 2000s B.C. started to transform under foreign influences, and most concertedly when imperial force was brought to bear to compel change, which began under the Christians (Religion in Roman Egypt: Assimilation and Resistance) and was completed by the Muslims (The Prophet and the Age of the Caliphates).
Thank you, Richard.
And so, when “Egypt” is mentioned in any biblical text, Proverbs, for example, do we understand its meaning to be administrative or cultural, or does that understanding turn on the specific context in which “Egypt” is used and then one has to drill down deeper to try to understand the meaning within that context?
Unrelated, and assuming the Hebrew-English translation is literal, are you aware of any scholarship into why biblical authors used the terms “up” from or “down” into Egypt to describe their physical location at the time of authorship? Why that very specific orientation?
There would have been no perceived distinction then.
The distinctions that would matter to us would have more to do with what the author thought or knew about Egypt, hence what period or whether they are operating from fact or myth. So the particular state of Egypt meant would depend on when each book was written, who wrote it, and what they intended by mentioning Egypt (i.e. the context).
Is it talking about Pre-Persian Egypt? Pre-Alexander Egypt? Independent Egypt? An imagined mythical past Egypt or an actual current political Egypt? Or a half-baked inaccurate idea of contemporary Egypt? Because the authors also weren’t necessarily all that well informed about Egypt; did they think it was the Egyptian multicultural north, the Nubian south, the Hyksos? Just because we understand the difference doesn’t mean the Biblical authors did.
If they met someone who said they were “from Egypt” or heard tell of some invasion “by Egypt,” they might fill in the blanks with assumptions and prejudices and half-accurate lore. They certainly wouldn’t have had anything like an accurate map “depicting” Egypt. For all they knew everything East and South of Judea might have been “Egypt” (some educated persons would know other countries lay beyond, and roughly by how many days’ travel; but did the authors of each specific book of the Bible?).
As to up/down terminology, that might vary by context. I have not investigated any specific scholarship on it. In general, ancient up/down terminology related to inland/coastward (e.g. “up” means literally up: increasing elevation, which was associated with “away from the sea” or “away from the center of a river valley” etc.). Egypt was predominately a flood plain (especially that part that would be most familiar to Canaanites/Israelites as the civilization and not “the wilderness”), so it would typically be “down to” and “up from” that place.
But geography and topography were not necessarily that well known to any given writer; it’s not like they had topographical maps of the complex geography between central Egypt and Judea. So with the terminology, though it may be understood to a writer as referring to literally “up-hill” and “down-hill” movement, that could have been in their imagination, not in the actual on-the-ground routes or positions involved. You’d have to examine each case independently to discern what is meant, and why, and whether it is imagined or real.
Is history even complete enough to deal with ancient issues? As in having lots of events not written down, or written down and lost later? Archeology and genetics seem to be much better options to solve such very ancient problems.
In case of Egyptian civilization the archeological pattern is clear. Agriculture (near eastern version) was invented in Fertile Crescend v. 1.0, which didn’t include Egypt or Mesopotamia. It is shown in the pictue titled “Area of the fertile crescent, circa 7500 BCE” on Wikipedia
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fertile_Crescent
Somehow in the middle of it you have the oldest building in the world – the Gobekli Teppe temple comprex from over 11 thousands years ago, most likely sill built by hunter-gatherers. The genetic evidence shows that it was in Anatolia where the first farmers were genetically the same as last hunter gatherers, while in some other regions, like Europe, the genes of first farmers were different from the genes of last hunter gatherers.
Then few thousands years later you have Fertile Crescent v. 2.0 – show in the picture “Map showing the larger area including Cyprus”, which means that with time Fertile Crescent increased to include Egypt, Mesopotamia and Cyprus.
In this sense Egypt would be just an extension of preexisting near-eastern agricultural civilization into the territory of Egypt. Farmers and herders have many times population density of hunter gatherers, so they would owerwhelm locals demographically. The genetics of mummies show mostly near eastern origin, with something like 10% black DNA, which is much less black than moden ratios of typical Egyptians, but similar to modern Copts.
https://www.nature.com/articles/ncomms15694
Post-romain increase in black genes might be related to Arabic slave trade via Cairo.
The evidence from other places also shows similar pattern of first farmers expanding from their homeland into other terittories. Eurpe has a series of “Old Europe” farming cultures, most famous being Vinca culture. These cultures date to over six thousands years ago, being older than Egyptian civilization and than farming in Egypt. They have high level of male G2 and H2 DNA, which are rare today in Europe.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Vin%C4%8Da_culture
Farmers went as far north as Denmark, Ireland and South Sweden. The most visible omission was Russia and East Baltics. Event today Russians much less DNA descending from first farmers than typical Europeans, while Baltic people have the most remaining native-european (hunther gatherer) autosomal DNA of all Europeans. Male native european Y-DNA (I2) is also very popular in Balkans, but in the mountains (eg, Dinaric Moutains), not in the valleys.
It was also the invasion of male haplogroup R1a from the terittory of modern Russia, that decisively ended the demographics popularity of male G2 haplogroup in Europe (with female mtDNA from farmers remaining).
So Egyptian farming looks to have the same pattern of strar like the Southern European one – extension of preexisting farming from Fertile Crescent 1.0, though later one, and without the farmers loosing to external invaders in a way that would cause a big genetic change (just taking the role of ruling class). This includes both the invasion from the north as well as from the south.
Interesting facts:
Ankhenaten had R1b male Y-DNA – the most popular Wstern European haplogroup and K mitochondrial DNA – popular among Ashknenazi Jews, Kurds and Druzes. His official Yuya carried G2 male halplogroup (the original farmer one!)
https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCOg79Dw3ZHFt5y4NcyEMm9A/videos
R1b male haplogroup is one of the most invasive – the southernmost range of its dominance includes Lake Chad. The most famous person with the orignal farmer G2 haplogroup was Joseph Stalin. Ancient Romans had more first farmer DNA than modern Italians, especially modern northern Italians. Sardinina may be a remanant of such genes.
It depends on what you mean. The problem is not people claiming not to know things for want of data. The main problem is people claiming to know things despite the lack of data. So it is precisely the lack of records that is the problem with modern Kemetism: they make claims far beyond what any evidence can support. But in addition to that, we also have many instances where records are good enough to even outright conclude their claims are false.
So it depends on which specific claims you mean.
-:-
On agriculture: Yes; the specific map you mean is here. Agriculture predates even Mesopotamian civilization, much less Egyptian. Early Anatolian culture would be the most ancient agricultural group had any of its culture meaningfully survived. We know very little about it, alas. Writing only begins c. 3400 B.C., though now we are in Mesopotamia (Egypt would not develop writing until centuries later).
-:-
On genetics: You may be confusing the word “African” with “Sub-Saharan African.” Ancient Libyans and Mauretanians, for example, are still Africans; just not Sub-Saharan Africans (where most African Americans come from, owing to the slave trade focusing on the Gold Coast region). “Middle East” and “Near East” actually are inclusive of Egypt, so these terms are often obscuring here. See again (you cited it but I don’t think you actually read it): Ancient Egyptian Mummy Genomes Suggest an Increase of Sub-Saharan African Ancestry in Post-Roman Periods.
That African DNA would appear in the Levantine and Canaanite/Phoenician populations (and thence enter Europe) thousands of years before even the unification of Egypt in 3100 B.C. is not at all surprising. Common ancestry between Europeans and ancient Egyptians (esp. Tutankhamun) goes back to around 9000 B.C. and thus predates even the rise of agriculture.
That doesn’t help us determine anything as to what we moderns mean by “race,” which actually doesn’t exist; everyone on Earth is a mutt. And everyone is African, ultimately. So Africans will always share DNA with non-Africans. And North Africa mixed extensively (far more than Sub-Saharan Africa) with Northern and Eastern populations, loooooong before any civilization arose there.
So this is largely useless data. Culture is not genetics, and what is distinctive about Egypt is its culture, not “what kind of Africans” they were.
This does put the kaibosh on Black Supremacism just as it does White Supremacism. There is no such thing as “White people” as a race any more than “Black people” as a race (those categories are actually a product of modern racist culture). There are related gene pools with telltale skin color variations. But claiming, for example, that Egyptian means Nigerian is as wrong as claiming German means Greek (or even more absurdly, Persian; the original “homeland” of the supposed “Aryan” peoples).
So when you say “the genetics of mummies show mostly near eastern origin, with something like 10% black DNA,” that’s a racist myth. There is no such thing as “black” DNA. There can be genes for dark skin pigmentation, but that will account for less than 1% of anyone’s DNA; and that isn’t what any of the studies you are referring to have anything to do with (no one has been able to test enough DNA to determine, for example, Tut’s skin pigmentation). Lots of dark skinned Africans are not Sub-Saharan.
Moreover, genetic links between Egyptians and Canaanites will be two-way: after all, we are all African, so obviously Semites and Africans will share DNA. And Egyptians frequently conquered and intermarried with neighboring groups, thus spreading African DNA again, even before Egypt was a nation but especially thereafter. And vice versa (e.g. the Hyksos conquest). So there isn’t any intelligible sense in which Europeans can claim Egyptians were Europeans any more than Egyptians can claim Europeans are Egyptians. It’s all the same nonsense.
Hey Richard, I was watching Sa Neter this evening and Jabari wants to step up to debate you on the Egyptian origins of Christianity, even if you are a “Tamahu” whiteboi racist (according to Jabari’s recent incendiary statements on YT).
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=QDBmNePYVX4 Sa Neter and Jabari are talkin’ about paying you and flyin’ you out for a public spectacle. They’re chomping at the bit for a piece of you. Beware however, Jabari is playing the martyr saying this could be dangerous for him and you may be putting a “target” on his back. I hope you debate Jabari, even if it’s just on YT. Jabari is gonna be be totally embarrassed when you do some mental juijitsu on him and expose his cheap tricks. They make lack of melanated skin and racial scapegoating such an issue, I don’t know if you can stick to the scholarship without getting dragged into the pig pen and get dirtied up. Jabari totally picked the wrong question to argue and he set the bar for scholarship soooooo low. He’s about to violate every common-sense rule of methodology you enumerated in this article. Hopefully we can get a Some Problems with Modern Kemetic Mythology Part 2, at least, no? Jabari has made so many inflammatory public statements about you and your work since the initial Daggersquad interview that some sort of response is justified (and will surely be entertaining. This sh*t is like a kayfabe professional wrestling storyline. Jabari wants to be the baby face and bring the cheap heat while making you out to be the heal.
Well, I won’t be “flying” anywhere anytime soon. But yes, there has been outreach, and I’ve communicated my appearance fee rate (which is publicly available on my booking page). So far everyone has balked at my price, even though it is actually absurdly low.
I am not particularly concerned either way. The kind of reaction they are generating is so embarrassing to them I hardly need enter the fray; they are burying themselves without my help. And every time some arrogant fool thinks they can get over on me with irrational tactics they only end up making things worse for themselves, by literally turning themselves into the poster boys for my every pertinent point. So there isn’t really anything I need do at this point. If they fund a debate, it will go badly for them. If they don’t fund a debate, they’ll just keep talking, digging themselves deeper, requiring no followup from any sane person.
Congratulations, Dr Carrier. I was pleasantly surprised to see that this 2-year-old beef has been resurrected. Looking forward to the debate with Jabari. Just wondering how this debate finally got set up after such a long time? They initially balked at your appearance fees, so I thought this debate would never happen. I would also like to know how you plan on handling Jabari when he makes racist comments? Thanks for going into the lion’s den. It’s a public service and a rare opportunity for people outside of the Conscious Community to get a look inside afrocentric brain rot.
I’ll probably ignore all baiting, racist or otherwise. In a debate, irrelevant remarks are designed to burn your clock. I am too experienced to fall for that. I will stick to the topic. And if he does not, I’ll call attention to the tactic. And then get back onto topic.
As for how it finally happened, an investor came forward willing to fund it.