Monday, April 8, 2013

Apparently ancient Egyptians appreciated a "generous" female derriere...

The old school liked what it saw- voluptuous one....
Below is an ancient Egyptian poem, citing admiration for "generous" and alluring female curves. The steagpypic figurines below are from the ancient Badarians, a key people that laid the foundation for the dynastic civilization. Anthropological analyses of crania and limb data cluster them more with African popuations further south, than Europeans or Middle Easterners.

Source: Ancient Egyptian Literature—A Book of Readings, Volume II: The New Kingdom, translated by Miriam Lichtheim. The University of California Press, Berkeley, California, 1976. pages 182-193.


'Sister Without Peer'


Look, she is like a star goddess arising
at the beginning of a happy new year;
brilliantly shining, bright skin;
with beautiful eyes for looking,
with sweet lips for speaking;
she has not one phrase too many.
With a long neck and shining breast,
her hair of genuine lapis lazuli;
her arm more brilliant than gold;
her fingers like lotus flowers,
with heavy buttocks and girt waist.


Her legs parade her beauty;
With graceful step she treads the ground,
Captures my heart by her movements.
She causes all men's necks
To turn about to see her;

Joy has he whom she embraces,
He is like the first of men!
When she steps outside she seems
Like that the Sun!


'How well She Knows to Cast the Noose'

How well she knows to cast the noose,
And yet not pay the cattle tax!
She casts the noose on me with her hair,
She captures me with her eye;
She curbs me with her necklace,
She brands me with her seal ring.
She smites me when she shakes her buttocks.

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  WHO WERE THE BADARIANS?  - LOOKING BACK AT THE ANCIENTS....  

The ancient Badarians were quite representative of ancient Egyptians as a whole and showed clear links with tropical Africans to the south. They have been sometimes excluded in studies of the ancient Egyptian population, which shows continuity in its history, not mass influxes of foreigners until the late periods.  Data from modern scholars- quote:

Drag mouse across picture for a larger view..


  "As a result of their facial prognathism, the Badarian sample has been described as forming a morphological cluster with Nubian, Tigrean, and other southern (or \Negroid") groups (Morant, 1935, 1937; Mukherjee et al., 1955; Nutter, 1958, Strouhal, 1971; Angel, 1972; Keita, 1990). Cranial nonmetric trait studies have found this group to be similar to other Egyptians, including much later material (Berry and Berry, 1967, 1972), but also to be significantly different from LPD material (Berry et al., 1967). Similarly, the study of dental nonmetric traits has suggested that the Badarian population is at the centroid of Egyptian dental samples (Irish, 2006), thereby suggesting similarity and hence continuity across Egyptian time periods. From the central location of the Badarian samples in Figure 2, the current study finds the Badarian to be relatively morphologically close to the centroid of all the Egyptian samples. The Badarian have been shown to exhibit greatest morphological similarity with the temporally successive EPD (Table 5).

Finally, the biological distinctiveness of the Badarian from other Egyptian samples has also been demonstrated (Tables 6 and 7). These results suggest that the EDyn do form a distinct morphological pattern. Their overlap with other Egyptian samples (in PC space, Fig. 2) suggests that although their morphology is distinctive, the pattern does overlap with the other time periods. These results therefore do not support the Petrie concept of a \Dynastic race" (Petrie, 1939; Derry, 1956). Instead, the results suggest that the Egyptian state was not the product of mass movement of populations into the Egyptian Nile region, but rather that it was the result of primarily indigenous development combined with prolonged small-scale migration, potentially from trade, military, or other contacts.
This evidence suggests that the process of state formation itself may have been mainly an indigenous process, but that it may have occurred in association with in-migration to the Abydos region of the Nile Valley. This potential in-migration may have occurred particularly during the EDyn and OK. A possible explanation is that the Egyptian state formed through increasing control of trade and raw materials, or due to military actions, potentially associated with the use of the Nile Valley as a corridor for prolonged small scale movements through the desert environment.

--(Sonia R. Zakrzewski. (2007). Population Continuity or Population Change: Formation of the Ancient Egyptian State. AMERICAN JOURNAL OF PHYSICAL ANTHROPOLOGY 132:501-509)

and

"An examination of the distance hierarchies reveals the Badarian series to be more similar to the Teita in both analyses and always more similar to all of the African series than to the Norse and Berg groups (see Tables 3A & 3B and Figure 2). Essentially equal similarity is found with the Zalavar and Dogon series in the 11-variable analysis and with these and the Bushman in the one using 15 variables. The Badarian series clusters with the tropical African groups no matter which algorithm is employed (see Figures 3 and 4).. In none of them did the Badarian sample affiliate with the European series."

--(S.O.Y. Keita. Early Nile Valley Farmers from El-Badari: Aboriginals or "European" Agro-Nostratic Immigrants? Craniometric Affinities Considered With Other Data. JoBlSt, Vol. 36 No. 2, pp. 191-208 (2005)

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Um, 'generous proportions' do not depend on agriculture. Foragers can do quite well, as shown in Africa's ancient Nile Valley...    


  Drag mouse across picture for a more 'generous' view..

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