New timeline for Ancient Egypt's origin

[tkdguy]

This article definitely belongs here!

 

Link

[L. Marcus]

Neat!

[death tribble]

Now if they can only work out who the Sea People were, everything will be golden.

[Lawnmower Boy]

Now if they can only work out who the Sea People were, everything will be golden.

Uhm, nobody? Or, rather, Egyptians acting as non-state ordered peoples?

 

http://www.griffith.ox.ac.uk/gri/2nibbie.pdf

 

The core of Egyptian state power was in Upper Egypt, specifically at the top of the great S curve at Thebes, where the Nile roughly intercepts the Forty Day Road -the western oasis route up from the Sudan. Lower Egypt was always a disruptive element.

 

But what do we mean by 'Lower Egypt?' From the Iron Age, the vast Nile Delta has been well-controlled and enormously productive, and Greek tourists saw a state centred on the axis from the tip of the fan at modern Cairo down to Alexandria. The role of iron-bladed shovels and iron axes in taming the wild flooding of the Nile should be clear in this.

 

Before the Iron Age, the Delta was surely even wilder than its seaward margins still are today. Pioneering scholar Alessandra Nibbi sometimes took her theories to extremes, but she satisfactorily demonstrated that the aquatic wilderness of islands and turbulent waters that the Ancient Egyptians called the "Great Green" could be identified with the untamed Delta, as well as with the Mediterranean Sea beyond. (In all fairness, it would have been very unclear to Ancient Egyptian seafarers where, exactly, the boundary between the two actually was, and a voyage from Memphis to Beirut through coastal waters might not pass in any very obvious way from one ecological zone to the next.)

 

Now, we also know that the Egyptians had continual problems with "Libyans" and "Asiatics" invading Lower Egypt. The "Sea Peoples" appeared in Egypt in the context of an alliance of "Asiatics, Libyans, and People of the Sea." But consider that the Delta literally stretches from Asia to Libya in the Egyptian imagination. (That is, Egyptian "Libya" is not the distant, modern country, but the desert on the western flank of the Nile, while "Asia" is Sinai and the Levant.) There is winter pasture in the desert on either flank of the great Delta, and summer pasture in the Delta.

 

So we hold with the systems collapse model of the Late Bronze Age Crisis see the People of the Sea as another element (there is an ideological/cosmological rhetoric here to be considered as well, but never mind that for now) within a rising population of non-state peoples living outside Egyptian government in a pastoral economy oriented around seasonal migrations between desert and delta.

[Lord Liaden]

Plainly this was the work of ancient aliens.

[L. Marcus]

Now if they can only work out who the Sea People were, everything will be golden.

That's the best explanation I've heard.

[tkdguy]

Plainly this was the work of ancient aliens.

Let's get that guy on the History Channel to weigh in on this!