So apparently theres a thing going on regarding the Exodus movie opening this weekend where a lot of people are upset that Moses is a white guy. Apparently the protest is that Moses should be a black guy. (I put these terms in quotes because I think racial categorization is the worst kind of psuedoscience but Ill use those terms in this discussion as lazy shortcuts for more careful but lengthy and obfuscating language.) Im astonished that people seriously think that Moses didnt look Semetic like his descendants and the related peoples from the same region. I dont think he was blonde with blue eyes and Nordic features, but I suspect he looked very much like the people who have made civilization in the Levant for 10,000 years. Then I hear that people seriously think that the Egyptian Pharaohs were black. Now, we can have an argument about Moses since nobody really knows what he looked like and we have no physical evidence that he even really existed. But we dont just have pictures of Pharaohs drawn on the walls of their tombs and temples. We have ACTUAL PHARAOHS. They were kind enough to embalm themselves and then create a culture that would keep the mummies intact for 5,000 years so we could look at them and sequence their DNA. There are arguments about how accurate those sequences are but the general consensus seems to be converging on reasonably accurate. And one of the things theyve found is that King Tut shared his genetic heritage with Europeans. That doesnt mean that he was a blonde, blue-eyed Nordic figure, but it means that his genes had been through the sorting and selection process that lightened the skin of his ancestors. It is only reasonable to conclude that they were not black, and probably looked very much like the images they authorized to be created to depict them.
Posted on: Fri, 12 Dec 2014 18:43:49 +0000
Trending Topics
Recently Viewed Topics
© 2015